If you’re a Fred Harvey fan, click on this link.

It takes a LONG time to load, because it’s a 191-page masters thesis, fully illustrated, from the historical preservation program at Penn. But it is well worth your while.

It suggests a way to save the at-risk Harvey House properties, and to link all the locations with Harvey heritage, using a novel interpretation of the “National Heritage Area” program of the National Park Service.

I feel bad for the author, Patrick Kidd, who points out in his footnotes that my book came out just as he was finishing this–so he was unable to fix all the mistakes he made (or repeated) by relying on the other sources available to him during much of his thesis preparation. But I urge you to overlook any historical errors and focus on his contagious passion for Fred Harvey and the Harvey House heritage–and his very intriguing idea of creating a preservation plan for all the Southwest Harvey locations. He says it is possible to use the “National Heritage Area” program of the National Park Service to make sure the buildings are registered not only individually as historically significant, but together as historically significant.

He believes this might be a new way to get funding to save the buildings that still exist but are in danger, but also to help the buildings that are doing just fine–La Fonda, La Posada–cooperate more with each other to share the Harvey heritage.

It’s food for thought, and I hope his ideas get some traction. Certainly, we here at One Nation Under Fred are all for anything that helps preserve the Harvey heritage.

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