2020 Louise du Pont Crowninshield Award: Mary Means
Channel: National Trust for Historic Preservation
Date: 2020-11-19

During her time as an employee of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the 1970s, Mary Means conceived of the Main Street project, a three-town, three-year pilot project led by the first main street managers—Clark Schoettle, Tom Moriarty, and Scott Gerloff— in Galesburg, Illinois; Madison, Indiana; and, Hot Springs, South Dakota, respectively. Mary’s groundbreaking project had the bold mission of demonstrating economic development within the context of historic preservation. 

The original, three-town pilot project has evolved into Main Street America, an expansive and powerful program of the nonprofit National Main Street Center, Inc., that has helped revitalize older and historic commercial districts for 40 years. Today Main Street America is a network of more than 1,600 neighborhoods and communities, rural and urban, who share both a commitment to place and to building stronger communities through preservation-based economic development. Means’ remarkable, visionary work for our nation’s Main Streets arguably helped lay the groundwork for other contemporary movements, including new urbanism and smart growth, and has been credited with helping save the Federal Historic Tax Credit on more than one occasion.

Mary continued her work to expand historic preservation’s practical connections to communities through her firm, Mary Means + Associates, where she earned a reputation for blending strategic thinking, effective community engagement, and market-based reasoning to create visionary plans that motivated action and increased clients’ capacity. Her focus on heritage development and community revitalization has convinced legislators that heritage tourism is economic development that provides jobs while enhancing quality of life and preserving places that matter.

The 2020 Louise du Pont Crowninshield Award was presented at PastForward Online 2020.