Mark This! Podcast: Episode 34, Historic Preservation Center
Heather Dotchel, Senior Director, Corporate Communications
Susan Liston, Senior Vice President, Performance Excellence
Matthew Webber, Director of Capital Programs
Richard Smith, Historic Preservation Center Manager
It is time to Mark This!, a podcast in which we peel back the corporate curtain to reveal the cool and innovative people, programs and projects that are happening all over Aramark's varied lines of business. I'm Heather Dotchel. As a member of Aramark's Communications team, I see it here, amazing things that are happening across our company every day. These remarkable initiatives happen because we have remarkable people behind them. Building opportunity, building innovation, and building community. Aramark Destinations is leading the development of a new historic preservation center, centrally located to support renovation projects at Bryce Cannon, Grand Canyon North Rim, and other public lands. As a first of its kind facility in the National Park Service Concessioner space, this 4,000 square foot facility equipped with advanced carpentry tools serves as a hub to train carpenters, painters, masonry experts, and historians.
Susan Liston, Senior Vice President for Performance Excellence with Aramark Destinations and Matthew Webber, Director of Capital Programs for the same are with us today to talk about the grand opening of the center on May 6th of this year, and about Aramark's commitment to preserving and enhancing the many national park lodges it operates. Additionally, we are joined by Richard Smith, manager of the Historic Preservation Center.
Welcome to the podcast to all three of you. Let's start with Susan. Can you give our audience a snapshot of you?
Good afternoon, Heather. Yes, I would love to do that. And thank you for inviting us to join the podcast. I certainly appreciate being included in this title of being cool and innovative. So I had the privilege of joining Aramark about 13 years ago. My anniversary is coming up in July, and I wasn't even aware at the time that Aramark had a destinations division and we had these extremely interesting opportunities to support public lands in being a concession or to the National Park Service, to the Forest Service and other federal and state agencies.
I had a long history, over 15 years with Marriott Corporation, so have that background in hospitality and particularly in the sales function. So when I joined Aramark, I led our growth division for many years. And I guess you could say it is karma when a salesperson is given the opportunity to operate what they sold. And that is really the vision of the commitment that we made to our clients with the Park Service and other national and state contracts that we have to build this center. And I'm very pleased that now we're on the other side of it and can start to execute upon our commitments.
Matthew, what is your history with Aramark?
So thanks for having us as well. My background is in architecture and in the beginning of my Aramark days I had designed a dorm complex for a small university in Pittsburgh and the project manager was an Aramark employee. And the project went really well, so she recruited me to come and work for Aramark and I spent my initial 15 years and I was a national director of capital investment with engineering solutions within our facilities division. And after that time I left Aramark for a few years to spend time with my kids and my family because I was extensively traveling across the country.
And then after my kids went off to college, I had an opportunity to come back with Aramark, and because I enjoyed working at Aramark so much, came back, and then when my initial 15 years at Aramark, I had towards the end of it, I was working with Susan on some growth opportunities. And when I came back, she and the Destinations team was creating a new group called Performance Excellence and I was anxious to join that team. And I came over to Destinations a little over a year ago and leading our capital projects for our Destinations Team, master planning and the Historic Preservation Center and assisting with the growth in facilities operations as well.
All right, so Richard, what is your role with the Historic Preservation Center?
Mostly I am the carpenter or woodworker, preserving or reconstructing windows, ash doors, siding, that kind of thing. I've been doing that my entire life for the most part. Started off logging with my father, come from a long line of loggers and got involved in Illinois building doors for the state historic sites, the capitol building, courthouses, that kind of thing, and running a business runs a guy ragged trying to make payroll every month. And I finally decided, "Hey, I got to get out of this."
So I went out west to try my hand at being a parkie working in the parks and I thought, "Oh, I like this." And ended up getting the job on the South Rim doing historic preservation. And I spent eight years there helping those folks get their buildings up to snuff. And Matt offered me a position here and I was very impressed with the idea and concept of this HPC. It's doing a lot of great things for our nation's parks. That's the way I look at it. I mean, we are changing our nation's parks for the better by what we're doing, the asset, the building assets, keeping those doors and windows and siding, making those buildings look good. Very excited about that. I live for woodworking. I really do.
And I believe big time in this HPC center, the concept that we're achieving in Aramark is certainly serious about this. And that's to me even more serious myself on what we can accomplish.
What a great mission and a great project. So Susan, what was the genesis of this Historic Preservation Center? What was the initial goal for the center? What is the greater purpose for it in the context of Aramark Destinations?
That's a great question, Heather. And as Matt alluded to in his intro, our new president and CEO Sasha Day had a tremendous vision for creating this new department called Performance Excellence. It's very unique in terms of Aramark, but we were able to centralize some critical hard skills and functions that were needed in our business to have that leadership support and have subject matter experts supporting our line level associates and our general managers in the field. About a year ago, Performance Excellence was started. I was asked to lead that new department and we have four critical pillars in there. One is our sustainability commitment, and we have a Director of Sustainability, her name's Hallie Gaddis, and then Matt Webber's role in Director of Capital Programs. All of our construction projects, our capital planning, master planning. We also have a director of facility operations for all of our commitments around asset management and how we maintain and support our properties in terms of maintenance.
And that's where we have overlap now into historic preservation. So it really sits in our capital programs and all of the very detailed construction projects we have in place. And then just ongoing maintenance because you have specific requirements when you're dealing with these buildings that are, some of them over a hundred years old. And then our fourth pillar is around our contract compliance. And so Heather, this really ties into the genesis of the Historic Preservation Center. So not only did we have, first of all, foundationally contract commitments to our clients to preserve these buildings and be caretakers of them, but we also had the need to maintain them over time. So we thought, "What better way to do this if we brought it in-house," versus contracting out where there was less control in terms of quality and building the pipeline for the skilled trades that are required.
So the beauty of this is that we actually own the land, and I think Matt is going to go into that a little bit more and how this was built and developed. But we own the property and it can run separately from any contract commitment. We can actually do work for our own clients for Aramark in other divisions and for cities and towns and federal and state agencies. So we're really agnostic in terms of who we can support. However, our primary goal is to support the Aramark commitments and there's a lot of work. Rick will cover that and what he and his team are doing. We're not doing this just for the next two to three years, but this is a commitment that Aramark is making for generations to come. You'll hear the National Park Service say that they are in the forever business and we're truly a part of that mission and very happy to support it.
The independence of the center is really interesting. I wasn't aware of that. And it makes it much more impactful in some ways in that you can really deploy those resources where they're needed most. You talked about Matt leading this project. So Matt, let's talk about this project a bit. You developed the construction project management team for the center, I believe. Tell us about building the center itself please.
Yeah, Heather. So Susan and I discussed the project and it was derived from a written idea and the idea that it should be centrally located in our destination's Red Canyon property, which is basically a confluence, in the middle of confluence of three national parks, including two parks that are managed by our team, Grand Canyon North Rim and Bryce Canyon. And it's a great property because obviously we own the property and there's availability of land and infrastructure as well as employee housing right there.
So with the idea and the location picked out, we went on a design-build process. I did a lot of research on woodshops and woodshops specific to historic preservation. And with that information we outlined the programmatic aspects, scope and the size of the building to determine that a metal building was the most appropriate for this use and flexibility and location of the Historic Preservation Center. So after we got the programming and the scope outlined, we worked to really get all the building components ready for construction. And as we were doing that, we hired Rick who assisted with the equipment specifications layout and with his experience how the shop should ultimately be laid out for proper operations. And Rick was the expert we needed to finalize the plan, which is specific to sequence of preservation process within a shop, which is an operation today.
All right, so that seems like a good segue there. You're talking a bit about Rick. Can you talk to us about the team that's at the center?
Sure. So we knew we needed a highly experienced expert to manage the Historic Preservation Center, and it was a difficult process to find that person. And we had dozens of interviews and resumes come across our desk. And we actually hired Rick by chance. I was in a meeting with the National Park Service for Grand Canyon projects, and I had mentioned that we were hiring for this position and we were having difficulty finding the right person. And Patricia Dahlin, who's the National Park Service's historic architect for Grand Canyon, actually made the introduction with me and Rick. So from that introduction, we interviewed Rick and he was the perfect fit and happy to bring him on board. And then we hired a second carpenter to assist Rick, his name's Jeffrey Huffman, and they are off and running, managing the Historic Preservation Center and producing assets to be placed within the Grand Canyon North Rim Park.
So with that said, there is planned strategic growth for the Historic Preservation Center as well. In the future, we're looking as we grow and service other locations outside of Grand Canyon North Rim, we're looking to hire additional carpenters, masons, we'd like to do apprenticeships there with cooperation with National Park Service, National Center for Cultural Resources, potentially local trade schools so that we can train young personnel to really go into this field because there's not a lot of training centers across the country for this type of service. We'd like to provide training and develop preservation shops within our other parks as well with some of our carpenters that are already at those parks. And also, like you said, train personnel to go to those parks and provide preservation services.
Rick, you touched upon it in your introduction, but I'd like to ask you to get into more detail about how long you've been restoring historical sites, how you first got into this work, particular projects that are near and dear. It's really fascinating stuff.
Yeah, I like woodworking. Like I said, I come from a family of loggers and working in the hardwood industry and always liked making things out of hardwood, oak, walnut, that kind of thing. And when I was in high school, I got the Golden Hammer Award two years in a row for woodworking in the industrial art shop. And then I started to logging with my father for about 10 years and a friend of mine, and I did woodworking out of my own personal shop just doing odd jobs and furniture and things like that. And a friend of mine had a large project where they needed some doors at the state capitol building there in Illinois. And as it turned out, there was 55 doors and they were highly ornate. And it was also a lapsing fund project, which meant that you had to get the work done, and at that time it was four and a half months. And we had to build 55 of these highly ornate doors in a short period of time. So I had to scramble.
So I kind of got in it faster than expected and I was kind of plunged into it, I guess you might say, in having to complete this project. And then after I got that done, I got a lot of recognition from the local architects and historic architects there in central Illinois from the Abraham Lincoln area where there's a lot of historic buildings associated with Abraham Lincoln. And I just kept getting calls and calls. I built up my shop, had six or eight people working at different times doing historic preservation. So we did a lot of research, a lot of meetings with different architects, learning as much as I could. I was only 28, 29 years old at the time. And then as a business owner, you end up working 80 hours a week for 30 years and you just learn a lot of stuff.
But yeah, the Abraham Lincoln work we did at Lincoln's home, the state capitol building, the Governor's Mansion, all those, they're all dear to me. The Frank Lloyd Wright house that we rented, we spent a year on that building that was as fun as a woodworking job could be, that's for sure. And then the work I did over at the South Rim, I really, really liked that. And I liked the idea of coming over to the North Rim. We would hear over on the South Rim, you would hear about the North Rim in need of some repairs and it's like, I want to get over there and help. And when Matt offered me this position and that, like I said, the idea that he had behind this HPC center, it really intrigued me. It was like, "This is going to help the nation's parks." And I like that idea. I really, really do.
So I'd like to ask you about some of the tools that you use, whether it's machines or hand tools or you reference AutoCAD. Can you tell us a bit more about these?
In the historic preservation building in kind, which means you use the same species of wood and you create the same profiles, construction techniques, the joints that they used a hundred years ago when they built this. So the tools we use, there's hand tools and we use those quite often, but typically the machine's like a shaper for shaping the profile on the edge of the wood. And then there's the ends of the wood and we have what they call a single end tenoner and that produces the profile on the end of the board that connects to the profile on the edge of a board for when you're building a sash or a door or something. And we bought a state-of-the-art single end tenoner here, and we got shaper for shaping the profiles and we got power feeder to push the material through at a consistent even feed rate so you get perfect profile. Table saws, we use those.
Rick, if I can interrupt too, the examples that Rick showed us at our grand opening event the first week of May were quite impressive. It's this tongue-in-groove work that looks like a puzzle piece really, if you're not familiar with this work that they do, especially on window sashes. It is so intricate and fits perfectly together. And Rick not only uses AutoCAD, but he also does hand sketches, which are amazing. You can see his artistic brain at work. And then to bring it from concept to actually working with the wood and the completion phase is quite amazing.
So what is AutoCAD? For those of us who are not in the know.
AutoCAD is simply a computer-aided drafting tool. Years ago, we used to draw by hand with a T-square and a triangle, and AutoCAD allows you to draw much more in detail. And with AutoCAD you could zoom in to very intricate part of the door and you could also have the whole door drawn and then you could zoom into a little part that shows the joinery and stuff. AutoCAD's been around a long time and not everybody uses it, but the architects all use it, but not all woodworkers use it. I use it primarily for creating shop drawings and then also when you're building a new door, a new style of door that you might not have built before, you can draw it in AutoCAD first, and it's almost like every project is better the second time you build it. Well, in AutoCAD, you can build it on paper the first time so that when you go out to build it in the shop, you already understand it because you draw every single line one at a time.
Oh, that makes sense. Do you have a favorite wood that you'd like to work with, Rick?
I have woods I don't like working with, and that would be hard maple and hickory. I've never liked those two woods.
They're hard, brittle, they don't shape well. But the sugar pine that we use out here is not something that I used a lot back in Illinois because in Illinois a lot of the items were walnut or mahogany. But out here on this historic work, the doors and windows on the national park assets are primarily white pine, and it's a joy to work with. I mean, it is a pure joy to work with. It shapes well. It's fairly lightweight. So yeah, I guess the answer to the question would be, yeah, the white pine is nice.
All right, sounds good. Restore, preserve, replace. How is that decision made?
When it comes to deciding whether a door or a window or a piece of siding needs to be restored or replaced, restoring it is we save the fabric and if possible, it'd be great if we could always save the historic fabric, but sometimes the use of lifespan of that piece of fabric is no longer better and has to be replaced. And the NHPA, National Historic Preservation Act, section 106 has a book that is very extensive, goes into great detail on how the, the items that we use to consider, whether it's replaced or restored, we use that book quite a lot. But ultimately the decision does lay, when it comes to the parks, it does lay with the NPS historic architect. So we submit for review by them, our recommendation on what to do, and then they ultimately approve it or offer a different alternative, a different suggestion.
And we always try to accommodate them. They tell us, "Do more to restore this particular historic fabric." Or they agree with us and say, "Yeah, that historic fabric is rotted beyond salvage, so replace it." And that we do in kind. Again, we use the same material, same profiles, that kind of thing. Like a door or a window, some parts like the sides of a door or the sides of a window, if those are bad, you're pretty much obligated to replace the whole darn thing. Whereas if there's a mutton, like you could replace a mutton on a window and preserve all the historic fabric other than the one part you replace. So we do a combination of both.
Let's talk a bit more about your role as a teacher, Rick.
I like training the young folks or younger people, or it doesn't necessarily have to be younger people. I like training people how to do this work. I remember when I was quite young, in my early twenties, I went to a shop and asked an old boy, "How did you do this?" And he told me, he says, "This isn't school and I'm not a teacher." And that has stuck in my brain for 40 years that I never liked that, and I have made it a direction of mine is to train as many people as I can.
And over on the South Rim, we started doing training classes for our people and then would invite the NPS folks, and then pretty soon our training classes got so large and so many NPS folks were showing up. They were just impressed with what we did and they wanted to learn how to do it. So we put on a lot of training classes, and I do enjoy that part of my job in training people how to do things because it's really not as hard, as people might think it is once you learn some of the basic techniques for doing this type of work.
Just to add, there's no qualification base or specific training that you had to have previously. It's more on interest, the more interested you are in woodworking and historic preservation and enthusiastic about it, that's the type of people we would like to provide apprenticeships to, whether they're in high school or like Richard said, they're young, or we have currently interest by some of our carpenters and tradespeople at our national parks who are interested in going through training as well. So it would be purely based on that person's interest to learn this trade.
Susan, I'm going to turn back to you for a wrap up.
We're just so honored and pleased that Aramark as a corporation is supporting this and allowing us to do this work because as Rick said, first of all, it's exciting and it's doing the right thing for our nation's historic assets, and for a company like ours to be a part of it, we couldn't be more thrilled. So I'm very excited that you gave us this opportunity, Heather, to share what we're doing at Historic Preservation Center.
Well, it has truly been my pleasure. Want to know more about the Historic Preservation Center? Visit our newsroom on Aramark.com to access more information. Thank you, Susan, Matt and Rick for joining us. And thanks to our listeners of Mark This!
