Justice 101: Philly Saves: Adaptive Reuse of Sites of Memory and Trauma

Name: Justice 101: Philly Saves: Adaptive Reuse of Sites of Memory and Trauma
Start: 2026-05-21T17:30:00-04:00
End: 2026-05-21T19:30:00-04:00
Location: 2027 Fairmount Ave, Philadelphia, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 19130

Schedule

Thu May 21 2026 at 05:30 pm to 07:30 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

2027 Fairmount Ave, Philadelphia, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 19130 | Philadelphia, PA

As America marks 250 years of independence, Philly Saves asks how we steward the physical legacy of our democracy, including prisons, churches, burial grounds, homes, shopping centers, and factories and how these sites can be reclaimed as spaces of civic dialogue, healing, and community life.
Philadelphia is a city layered with history: stories of freedom and democracy alongside legacies of incarceration, displacement, and injustice. Many of the physical spaces that carry these memories are deteriorating or at risk of being lost. How should these sites and their memories be preserved and how can they be reclaimed, adapted, and reimagined as places of civic dialogue, cultural vitality, and community gathering. What stories do we tell?
We’ll be joined by Michael Coard, J.D. (Criminal Defense Attorney; Founding Member, Avenging the Ancestors Coalition), Kathryn Ott Lovell (President and CEO, Philadelphia Visitor Center Corporation), and Paul Steinke (Executive Director, Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia) to examine the practice of adaptive reuse and how it has transformed historic structures and landscapes of trauma into spaces that serve new public purposes while honoring their past. Moderated by Kerry Sautner, Ed.D. (President and CEO, Eastern State). It seeks to answer the question: How do we preserve memory while creating new meaning?