Welcome

Welcome to the 2024 Heritage Ohio Annual Conference. Our opening address will be delivered by Chief Billy Friend of the Wyandotte Nation.

Story Maps for Historical & Architectural References

The National Register of Historic Places: Making the Case for Significance: Assessing Historic Integrity & Comparative Analysis

Join Ohio’s National Register staff Mary Rody and Barb Powers to learn helpful guidance for preparing complete nominations for all types of properties. The session will engage the audience in an interactive discussion covering two essential components for successful National Register nominations – determining the character-defining features establishing historic integrity to convey a property’s significance and providing a meaningful comparison to similar properties to evaluate significance. Session will be useful to anyone, whether you are a beginner or experienced professional, who wants to nominate a property to the National Register.

Understanding Retail Trends

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The Return of the Wyandot Mission Church

Built in 1824 in Upper Sandusky, the Wyandot Mission Church was the first Methodist Mission in America to Native Americans. The church was used by the Wyandot Tribe until 1843 when the tribe was forced from Ohio by the federal government during Indian Removal. After falling into disrepair, the church was restored in 1889. Additional renovations were done in 1983. Members of the John Stewart UMC, about a mile away from the mission church, coordinate use of the site and open it to the public for visitation throughout the summer months. In 2019, the church was returned to the Wyandot Tribe. This session will look at the history of the history of the church, the historic return of the site to the tribe, and will reflect on the event and what it has meant to both parties.

Tour: Newark Arcade

Get a sneak peek of the historic Newark Arcade before it opens. This tour is designed for a general audience. TICKET REQUIRED.

Downtown Newark Infrastructure Tour

The National Register of Historic Places: Creating & Amending National Register Historic Districts

Join State Historic Preservation Office National Register staff to learn about preparing nominations for historic districts and how to use these nominations to promote and benefit your community. Historic District nominations are often the most efficient and comprehensive approach to nominating properties to the National Register but can be considered overwhelming and cost prohibitive. Audience engagement will cover the essentials for preparing successful nominations including how to identify defensible boundaries, determining the period of significance, preparing a focused historic context, and tips for creating maps, photographs, and other support materials. Plus, guidance will be shared about how to amend existing National Register district nominations to expand or decrease boundaries, change the period of significance, and add new areas of significance.

The Path to UNESCO

Telling Your Growth Story with Urality

Showing the value of your downtown redevelopment program, whether it’s through the lens of job creation, vacancies, or investment, can be cumbersome and time consuming. At the same time, Main Street Managers are tasked with maintaining their programs while being the go-to resource in their community for many different interests. In an effort to ease the burden on Main Street Managers, Heritage Ohio has partnered with Urality and its Unified product offering; a first of its kind district management tool focused on understanding your place data through the lens of economic development. Unified supports data collection, communication, and AI powered insights to turn numbers in a spreadsheet into a powerful narrative to quantify the work of your downtown revitalization programs. Join us to learn more about the pilot program that is underway in Lorain County.

Debunking the Parking MYTH with Facts

Parking is almost always the number one PERCEIVED issue within downtowns. These perceptions are creating less walkable or pedestrian friendly corridors. In order to help provide statistical data on utilization and guidance on increased efficiency, a detailed assessment must be prepared. This process is a downtown parking evaluation. This lecture will deep dive into how to perform a parking evaluation, review utilization, and integrate consumer technology into the review process. Participants who attend this lecture will be provided with strategies, a framework, and a defined process for conducting this review. Also, a series of graphic materials and templates will be reviewed and made available for use by all participants. This will allow everyone to table the parking perception problems head-on with numbers and figures, not just ideas.

Infill Guidelines in Over-The-Rhine

Cincinnati’s Over the Rhine neighborhood is a state and national treasure, containing the largest collection of 19th Century Italianate architecture in the country. Once threatened with demolition by neglect, this neighborhood has become a shining example pf preservation, but its not without its challenges. 50% of its historic fabric has been lost since 1930. Despite this, investment and rehabilitation continue to pour into the neighborhood, many times in the form of new, infill construction. While historic conservation guidelines have been in place for decades, guidelines for infill construction had been somewhat loose and vague, given that prior to its recent renaissance, most of the investment was in rehabilitation. As more buildings get rehabilitated, development, in the form of robust infill of existing vacant lots has surged. Neighborhood stakeholders undertook an arduous 8-year process to develop thorough, comprehensive, and VISUAL guidelines to help steer appropriate infill development. This session will explore the good, bad and the ugly of this process, and present often contrasting viewpoints about the effectiveness and appropriateness of specific guidelines that are designed to influence new infill development.

Ohio & Federal Historic Preservation Tax Credits

Learn about the application and competitive scoring process used to evaluate applications for the Ohio Historic Preservation Tax Credit program. Lisa Brownell from the Ohio Department of Development will review all scoring measures and explain funding pools, application review timing, and program requirements. Lisa will also review the Pipeline Initiative, which provides grants and technical assistance to prepare properties for tax credit. In addition, this session will also review the application for federal historic preservation tax credits, where you will learn how to perfect your submissions, including what is involved in submitting a complete/reviewable application to the State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service. Mariangela Pfister from the State Historic Preservation Office will explain best practices and considerations when completing the federal and state Historic Preservation Certification Application documents to help better ensure your rehabilitation will be reviewable and will meet the U.S. Secretary of Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation. Tips will be offered on submission requirements, efficiently navigating the application review process, and complete successful rehabilitation projects. There will also be an overview of the electronic submission process.

Low-Cost High-Impact Events

Getting the Right People at the Table: Building Teams to Succeed at Downtown Revitalization

Fire Protection & Life Safety for Historic Preservation & Adaptive Re-Use

This presentation is an overview of the building codes and standards applicable to historic preservation and adaptive reuse projects, including an overview of alternative approaches to building, fire, and life safety code compliance. The program also includes two case studies based on two Ohio projects as examples of two tools available to design professionals to demonstrate compliance using an alternative approach to compliance.

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Tour: Newark & Octagon Earthworks

Tour the UNESCO-recognized Newark & Octagon Earthworks with Brad Lepper & Jen Aultman. TICKET REQUIRED.

Incentives for Successful Historic Rehabilitation Projects

Beyond historic preservation tax credits, what other financial tools are available to finance projects? Such incentives are more important than ever with credit markets tightening in the current inflationary high interest rate environment. In this session, we will take an in-depth look at the power of combining available incentives, with a primary focus on New Markets Tax Credits (NMTCs), Opportunity Zones, tax increment financing (TIF), property tax abatements, TMUD, and PACE financing. We will also discuss such practical experiences as considerations related to retaining vs. syndicating federal historic tax credits (HTC), closing HTC and NMTC syndication transactions, obtaining bridge financing, and choosing a good team of consultants to complete HTC projects. By presenting examples of actual deal structuring for some great historic properties, this session shows you how these and other programs work, how they can function together, and how you can work with the government agencies, investors, lenders, accountants, attorneys, and preservation consultants who can bring these incentives to your project. Note: our session is intended for those with a basic knowledge of project development. A significant amount of time is made available for questions so that participants can apply what they have learned.

Expanding the Boundaries of Downtown

Think the borders of your community's downtown are written in stone? Think again. Learn about two projects happening in Newark that are expanding the boundaries of the downtown.

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Tour: The Home Building Association Company Building

Take a hardhat tour of the renovation project at The Home Building Association Company Building in downtown Newark. One of only eight banks designed by noted American architect Louis Sullivan, it is both a national treasure and a treasured piece of Central Ohio’s heritage. Through the years, the Sullivan Building was also home to a butcher shop, a jewelry store and eventually an ice cream parlor. With each new tenant the interior was altered, but the building’s historic and architectural significance never changed. In 1973, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. TICKET REQUIRED

Vendor Reception

Grab a drink and a bite to eat at our evening Vendor Reception. Visit with our vendors and network with fellow professionals from around the state.

Legacy Circle Reception - Hosted by GBX Group

Thank you to our Legacy Circle Supporters for investing in the mission of Heritage Ohio. This reception is hosted by GBX Group and sponsored by Marous Brothers Construction. TICKET REQUIRED.

Main Street Networking

Sponsored by OHM Advisors.

African-American Resources & The National Register

Join Diamond Crowder, State Historic Preservation Office staff, to learn about underrepresented communities and the National Register. Diamond will discuss the importance of nominating African American sites to the National Register of Historic Places and share new and exciting projects that Diamond has underway. Learn about new National Register nominations addressing race relations and civil rights, African American women, Green Book properties, black churches, and postwar housing subdivisions. In addition, Diamond will engage the audience in ways to build public awareness about nominating African American historic sites to the National Register of Historic Places.

Outdoor Recreation & Experiential Tourism

Pick Your Plan

The Single Family Tax Credit Program

The Ohio Housing Finance Agency’s Single Family Tax Credit program leverages public-private partnerships to increase the inventory of affordable, single-family housing for Ohio’s growing workforce. The program encourages the development of single-family housing opportunities, through either new construction or rehabilitation, by providing a tax credit to encourage investment in the project.

Nature as Living History

Has your historical site thought about its outdoors as an extension of the collections? Maybe your organization has a historically significant tree planted by the founder or by staff in honor of an institutional milestone. Or, you may want to mark an anniversary by planting a tree or garden but no one on staff has a horticulture background. Participants will learn more about arboreta and how they act as a tree museum that provides beauty, education and plant knowledge including: * The value in accessioning and conserving the surrounding environment * How to plant for longevity with horticulture recommendations * The relationship between plants and historic buildings * Significant trees and propagating them for your collection

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Symbolism in Cemeteries

Join Krista Horrocks of the State Historic Preservation Office (and the Ohio History Connection’s resident cemetery expert) to learn the language of gravestones. Ever wonder what the mysterious symbols on old gravestones mean? Krista will help us decipher them and give us a window into historical ideas about death and the afterlife.

Corporate Site Selection & Quality of Place

For many companies choosing where to locate a facility, the cost of doing business and economic development incentives at a site are only part of the equation. With the challenge of recruiting a high-quality workforce, many corporate site location projects also measure the quality of place of a region. Regions with affordable housing, vibrant Downtowns, walkable communities, parks, and greenspace are attractive to a wide range of the workforce of the future. The Montrose Group has created a Quality of Place index that can be part of their corporate site location process. Regions such as Newark, Ohio are working to address their quality of place through a redevelopment of their Downtown with the historic Newark Arcade at the center of that effort. Leaders from the Montrose Group will provide an outline of how their Quality of Place index works and Newark Development Partners will provide an overview of the vision and public and private sector funding that has turned that vision into a reality at the Newark Arcade during their panel presentation at the Heritage Ohio Annual Conference.

“Pay Me Now or Pay Me ‘much more’ Later”: Helpful Hints for Maintaining Historic Buildings

We’ve all heard the term and have faced the issue of “demolition by neglect” in our communities. As structures age, building materials begin to fail. Mortar crumbles, paint coatings fail and leaks develop in roofs. In fact, ALL building materials have a life span, but in some cases that life span can be extended with proper maintenance or unfortunately fail prematurely with lack of or improper maintenance. This session will focus on some typical problems faced by commercial buildings in a downtown setting focusing on why some of these common problems happen and offer some telltale signs that should alert building owners of impending severe problems.

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Tour: Newark Arcade: Industry Professionals Tour

Tour the historic Newark Arcade weeks before its grand opening! This tour will also explore the scope of the project, its financing, and challenges encountered during the rehabilitation of the building. This tour is designed for industry professionals, but anyone is welcome to attend. Ticket Required.

Workshop: Surveying Home & Workplaces: Conducting a Community Survey Using the Ohio Historic Inventory

Learn tips for conducting survey of residential neighborhoods and downtown commercial districts. After an introduction to the Ohio Historic Inventory, attendees will venture out into downtown Newark and will practice surveying and documenting historic buildings in the central business district.

Tour: Dawes Arboretum

Take a guided tour of the historic Dawes Arboretum. Explore the grounds to experience the extraordinary collection of trees, beautiful gardens and distinctive natural areas. Visitors can enjoy miles of walking trails or explore the grounds on our auto-tour. By the time The Dawes Arboretum was founded in 1929, over 50,000 trees had been planted and the grounds had doubled in size to 293 acres. Beman and Bertie Dawes created The Arboretum as a private foundation: “To encourage the planting of forest and ornamental trees… to give pleasure to the public and education to the youth.” The Dawes Arboretum's collections include over 5300 different types of plants (taxa) with more than 15,400 plants on grounds. TICKET REQUIRED. Self-transportation to site.

Utilizing Substitute Materials in Historic Preservation Projects

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The Shifting Landscape of Advocacy in Ohio

Republican Gene Krebs and Democrat Sean Logan, both former Ohio House members, discuss the shifting landscape of policy advocacy in Ohio, the forces involved and how to best approach your local elected officials, using the time-tested techniques plus new approaches. With decades of experience and hard knocks, these two friends discuss how to advocate, and then open up the floor to listen to the problems advocates are encountering in their communities, and offer expert opinions.

Getting Your Community from "Eww" to "Ooo"