Preservation people are my people
By Peggy Nolan
As the Madison Trust celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, we’re featuring the people who made the Madison Trust what it is today. Erica Fox Gehrig shaped the Madison Trust’s walking tours with an emphasis on facts and deep architectural knowledge. The tours’ ongoing success is Erica’s legacy.
What prompted your interest in historic preservation?
I traveled a lot as a kid, and I was drawn to chateaus and castles and big houses in general. I remember going to Milwaukee in second grade and taking pictures of all the big houses with my little Instamatic camera. I was attracted to beautiful architecture.
I also grew up in an architecturally significant house, not significant because it was designed by an architect per se, but significant enough that I recognized how spaces affect people. It was filled with history, and it was built by my great grandparents. I feel like the walls held a lot, and that was in my bones.
Also, my mom was very involved in historic Madison preservation, and she sent me to a girls’ camp owned and designed by a Taliesin apprentice, so architecture was on the menu all the time. She’s my guiding star for that.
I was an English major for undergrad, and then after graduation I went up to Minneapolis and took a class in historic preservation. I was kind of casting about, trying to figure out what I’d do with my life. That class is where I found out that historic preservation was a thing, that you can appreciate buildings, but you can also learn about them and save them. I moved down to Chicago and got a master’s in historic preservation from the School of the Art Institute. We were the first class of that program. Chicago is, in my mind, the best architectural textbook you could have. It really turned me toward cities and turn-of-the-last-century architecture. I probably should have been an architectural historian rather than a historic preservationist because I’m more interested in the stories, the way a building looks, walking into it and trying to figure out is this original woodwork, was this door always here? I like the clues. I like figuring out the architectural clues more than I like mixing mortar. The science part was not my thing.
You played a big role in developing the Trust’s walking tours. Did you have experience from your previous employment?
My first job through the graduate program was as an intern and then assistant director of a historic house museum called Pleasant Home, which is a building by George Washington Maher in Oak Park, Illinois. I learned the house museum world and about giving tours there with volunteer docents and trying to get the true stories versus hearsay and made-up things.
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Then I went to work for the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF), which is now called the Chicago Architecture Center, and that was all about tours. They do boat tours on the Chicago River and walking tours. They had 500 volunteer docents, and my job was to schedule them. I never gave the tours, but I was there for the docents’ training, which was highly academic. It was a six-week, college-level course on architecture so they could talk about it with facts. I worked there for three years and then left to stay at home with my first child.
When I moved up to Madison, I had two little girls, and I needed to keep my brain going. I found out about the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation through my college friend Julie Aulik, who was at Taliesin at the time. Samantha Crownover was just finishing being the president (see Sam’s interview here). They accepted me with open arms.
The Trust at the time was doing house tours, which are quite difficult. You need the time, you need the owner, etc. Joe Lusson and Barb Essock were working on a State Street tour, and I kind of barged in and took over with the idea that the tours would be like CAF tours in that all the docents are trained in some dictionary of architecture so they know the terms and where stuff comes from and that we present facts and talk about the people a little bit. My idea was people are going to learn whether they expect to or not, and my other thing was there would be no ghosts and no gangsters. What helped was they were using the National Register of Historic Places nomination for State Street so all the research was done. And all the tours after that started with those nominations, so somebody had already legitimately identified the buildings, their dates, etc. I developed several of the early tours and did all the docent training. We would have at least a two-night session with slides of buildings, and we’d talk about columns, the birth of the skyscraper and the difference in how buildings were made.
There wasn’t a script per se, but there were bullet points so docents could bring their own perspective to it. I was just having fun being a volunteer and taking my little kids to State Street to hang up posters about the tours.
When we started the State Street tour, our mantra was “look up” because the first floor of a building changes over 150 years. But the second and third floors are key to what the building looked like originally. It’s where you can tell if it’s Italianate or Art Deco or whatever the case may be. My thesis in grad school was that social history is best understood by being in a place.
We did some lectures along the way, too. One was called Midcentury and Martinis. And we did a dive bar crawl. I was the person coordinating the speaker, moving the chairs and bringing in the slide screen (bought at a garage sale).
What are you most proud of when you look back on your contributions to the tours?
That they’re still around. That people came. You know, it was hard work. We had paper brochures, and I figured out an in-kind donation to pay for that. I had my stepsister do the graphics for free. We were just trying to get the word out. Madison has always been more of a convention-pushing town than a tourism town. So we could let ourselves be known to the convention and visitors bureau, but we pretty much had to do publicity ourselves. I’m just proud that we put out a good product backed by facts, with no ghosts and no gangsters.
What’s your current role with the Trust?
I served on the board for more than 10 years. Now I’m a donor, supporter and attendee at Trust events. Preservation people are my people. I’ve stepped in at the last minute sometimes with the tours, but my primary focus now is my role as owner of Madison Food Explorers.
As the Trust celebrates its 50th anniversary, what are your thoughts on the role the Trust plays in Madison and the value it provides?
We’ve still got a lot of work to do. The role of the Trust has always been advocacy, and it just needs to be louder. Madisonians need to be reminded to get involved, attend meetings. I was on the Landmarks Commission for over 10 years, and it was the people who showed up who made a difference.
I still think historic preservation is the underling to land conservation. People understand saving acres of land, but because buildings are so wrapped up in their worth, they’re always in danger of being replaced by something else. And that’s not to say they shouldn’t be. But not all of them should be. Writer and activist Jane Jacobs said we need the little buildings and the big buildings next to each other to tell the whole story.
People still don’t understand the difference between local historic districts and national districts and what you can do or not do with your building, so we still have work to do. The tours get people into neighborhoods and get them thinking.
I still beat the drum. When new people move into my neighborhood, I’m like, this is a national register historic district, here are the benefits, have you applied for tax credits? I’m still spreading the word as best I can. I talk about architecture on my food tours, and my website has historic preservation information.