Recognized for his blog EndangeredDurham.com, an innovative and effective vehicle for educating the public about the fragile historic built environment and for creating an inventory and archive of historic structures, both lost and extant.
About the Award
Each year, Preservation North Carolina presents the Gertrude S. Carraway Awards of Merit to individuals and organizations that have demonstrated an outstanding commitment to promoting historic preservation.
The awards have been given since 1975 and are named for the late Dr. Gertrude Carraway of New Bern, a leader in the successful effort to reconstruct the state's colonial capitol, Tryon Palace, in New Bern.
Endangered Durham was started by Gary Kueber in August 2006 to accomplish two goals:
1) to educate the public regarding the landscape/architectural history of Durham, thereby making the public aware of the fragility of the historic built environment, and
2) to create a modern architectural inventory of structures in Durham, both lost and extant.
Traditional architectural inventories suffer from high cost of production and publication, their inherent static description of a changing landscape, and formats that, due to publishing constraints, tend towards either dense publicly-funded records, or consumer oriented coffee-table books. Gary chose to start Endangered Durham in the form of a blog, due to the ease of publishing information, the quality of existing blog templates, the cost (free,) and accessibility.
Four years, 1,088 posts, 5,850 user comments, and 5,446 pictures of Durham later, Gary has created a highly detailed and extremely granular architectural history of Durham that has garnered him multiple awards and helped to galvanize a preservation ethic in the under-35 age cohort. The work to gather information is ongoing, and Gary continues to publish extensive textual and photographic history of individual buildings 3-5 days a week.
For his considerable contribution to Durham’s architectural archives as well as his impact on public awareness and sensitivity to historic architecture, I am pleased to present this Gertrude S. Carraway Award to Gary Kueber.
