What I Do Currently
Since January 27, 2025, I have been a Historic Preservation Technical Specialist with the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation & Historic Preservation (the State Historic Preservation Office/SHPO). I primarily review applications for the New York State Historic Homeownership Rehabilitation Credit, a 20% state income tax credit for qualified rehabilitation expenses on historic owner-occupied homes, but I also review for state grants programs.
In February 2025 I joined Albany Pride Hockey, an adult amateur ice hockey (beer league) team that maintains a welcoming playing environment for gay and transgender hockey players. I usually play left wing but can also play right.
Also in February 2025, I joined the Colonie Town Band, a community concert band owned by the Town of Colonie, New York, playing alto saxophone.
Beginnings
I lived in suburban Boston, Massachusetts for eight years before my family moved to my mother’s homeland of Morgan County, West Virginia, where I graduated from Berkeley Springs High School in 2017.
My paternal ancestors were Jews from Vilnius, Lithuania; Lutsk, Ukraine; Pinsk, Belarus; and other places in the Russian Empire. They came through Ellis Island in the early 20th century and settled in Brooklyn. My maternal ancestors, surnames Hott, Hatt, or Hutt, settled in the lower Shenandoah Valley in Virginia in the early 19th century and were descended from the Anabaptist martyr Hans Hut, mentioned in the book Martyr’s Mirror (the Amish Second Bible).
Architecture History
From a young age, I would have some dream that took place in some distinctive house, then sketch it out the next day. As a teenager, I found real estate listing photos of an unusual 1980s Tudor-revival-ish house my grandfather had owned in the Poconos of Pennsylvania, and my nostalgia for childhood visits to that house led me to think in depth about its sense of place and its character-defining features. Though it wasn’t historic, it led me to contemplate the senses of place created by other types of built environments, especially historic, and especially in my own town of Berkeley Springs, WV.
At first I wanted to study architecture, but in 2014 and 2016 I attended the summer high school residency program at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, where I learned about the ongoing preservation of the house and the major stabilization undertaken around 2000. Thinking about preserving historic architecture this way led me to pay more attention to my hometown of Berkeley Springs, where much of the former grand Victorian architecture had been demolished or allowed to decay. Up to that point, I had thought I hated the idea of studying history, but that gave me the connection I needed to gain an interest in the stories those places can tell.
After an unhappy first year of college in the Urban & Regional Studies program at Cornell University, I found the Historic Preservation/Public History program at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia and transferred in, quickly realizing it was the right place for me. I graduated in May 2022 with my B.A. in History and an Art minor. I then attended the Historic Preservation program at the University of Vermont and received my M.S. in Historic Preservation in January 2024. Through mid-late 2024, I worked as an architectural historian with the archaeology and cultural resource management firm of R.C. Goodwin & Associates, Inc. in Frederick, Maryland, primarily working on Section 106 surveys, before moving back up North.
Between January 2020 and January 2025, mostly during my college studies, I served as a historic landmarks commissioner in my hometown of Berkeley Springs, West Virginia. Between Summer 2019 and Winter 2022, I interned at an architecture studio in Winchester, Virginia, where I drafted construction plans for historic rehabilitation projects receiving tax credits.
Music
I grew up in an intensely musical household – both of my parents perform, with bands and solo. I began piano lessons in preschool, and I commandeered my mother’s tape recorder and produced an entire bin of tapes of me either playing my lesson music on the family piano or singing improvisationally with a few friends.
When my family moved to West Virginia, my sister and I began singing in a nondenominational community choir, which I continued until it folded when I was in high school. I started concert band in middle school, choosing saxophone because my mother had played it in school (and because it was the only wind instrument I could get any sound from). In high school I joined marching band, then a (now-defunct) community concert band, where I played with musicians ranging from other teenagers to octogenarians.
I enjoyed marching band in high school so much that I promised myself I would continue in marching band through my undergraduate studies, a promise I kept successfully except for the 2020 season due to COVID-19. One of my roommates at Shepherd University was involved in founding the Xi Alpha Chapter of the Kappa Kappa Psi Honorary Band Fraternity, and I was initiated the next semester as a senior. I now hold life membership in the fraternity.
I never considered becoming a music major in college because music has always been a stress-relieving activity with which I can forget about my other worries, even (and especially) when it is challenging, and I never wanted to spoil that by making it my full-time career.
Sports
I have always liked running, and I ran cross country and track & field through middle school, but my enjoyment of it was limited at the time by not understanding my own body and consequently not improving my performance, usually having the worst scores on the team. Once I started in marching band, this filled the team-activity role for me well enough that I didn’t continue in cross country or track, though I still ran individually.
After starting grad school in Vermont where marching band hardly exists, I began ice skating and playing pick-up hockey (stick & puck) and intramural rec hockey, as well as a variant of ice hockey called broomball that is popular at northern schools. When in Vermont, do as the Vermonters do. This interest in ice hockey has only grown, and I don’t intend to stop playing.
I usually don’t follow professional sports, and I barely follow the NHL (though I do closely follow the Wheeling Nailers of the ECHL). Similarly, I barely know what music is popular on the Billboard charts. My enjoyment of many things hinges on not paying attention to the most extremely commercialized versions of them and instead focusing my energy on the domains where I’m personally and directly involved.