Latest news with #Preservation
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
St. Paul is renaming two city parks to reflect sacred Dakota heritage
The City of St. Paul will rename a park and a nature preserve to reflect their Dakota heritage. On Wednesday, the St. Paul City Council voted unanimously to adopt recommendations to rename Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary and Indian Mounds Regional Park. Effective immediately, Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary will become Waḳaƞ Ṭípi and Indian Mounds Regional Park will become Wic̣aḣapi. The landscape making up the two sites will also be renamed to Imniżaska. The change was made based on recommendations from the state's Tribal Historic Preservation Offices and Dakota leaders, according to the announcement. 'We exist, first and foremost, because of our Dakota community, and we stand here today as a promise to honor that legacy and protect these ancestral homelands,' Mayor Melvin Carter said in a statement. 'Our facilitation of these place name changes is more than a ceremonial renaming – it's an affirmation of our shared values and a promise to walk forward together with respect and commitment to restoring truth.' 'Being able to support the Tribes in this effort to not only rename but also redesignate these places from parks to a cultural landscape is a huge step toward bringing broader community respect and awareness to these culturally important places in St. Paul,' Maggie Lorenz, Executive Director of Waḳaƞ Ṭípi Awaƞyaƞkapi, said in a statement. The change will be reflected in physical signage across both sites in coming months, according to the announcement. The signage at Waḳaƞ Ṭípi will also include variations on the name in order to 'honor the diversity of Dakota ways of knowing and speaking.'
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
City Council approves Community Preservation Committee grants
WESTFIELD — The City Council on May 15 unanimously approved all of the Community Preservation Committee grants before it on recommendations from the Finance committee, with some discussion on taking another look at the Community Preservation Act in Westfield. In discussing the recommendation from the Finance Committee to approve the Community Preservation grant of $500,000 for the rehabilitation and modernization of the existing skate park located in Amelia Park, Councilor Ralph Figy said the request came through the Community Development office. He said the skate park is on a piece of dedicated park land assigned to the Parks & Recreation Department. The city has been approved by the state for a federal Land & Water Conservation Grant for $800,000, which Figy said is not final yet but looking good and surviving through the process. He said a skate park advocacy group is trying to raise $25,000 for the park, which has been estimated to cost $1.6 million. 'If for some reason the grant from the feds doesn't come through, this money will not be spent but sent back to the undesignated account for CPA for further work on how to fund this project,' Figy said, adding that after approving the grants on the agenda and a pending grant for the Athenaeum, it will leave $1.4 million in CPA undesignated funds. Councilor Rick Sullivan, a member of the Finance Committee, said if the LWC grant doesn't come through the Community Preservation grant will revert back to CPA funds. Councilor Karen Fanion said as liaison to the CPC, she attended the meeting where the grant was awarded. She said it is an appropriate use for recreational funds, and the park will be for all wheel sports, including bikes, rollerblades, skateboards, scooters and wheelchairs. 'It would be a really good use of appropriate funds for a community that often has children saying there's nothing to do here,' said Councilor Kristen Mello, adding that she would also like to have the city engineer's approval due to its location near the Little River. Also approved was $90,000 for the Amelia Park Memorial Garden, which is a part of the Amelia Park Arena. Sullivan said the request came through the Amelia Park Arena General Manager Billy Fellows for work that will be done in the center of Amelia Park for drainage, to pull up the sod and put in new piping. Sullivan noted that the Memorial Garden sits on city property, as does the Boys & Girls Club and Children's Museum. If it ceases to operate, it would revert back to the city. He said in the past, the Memorial Garden has been maintained by the arena through donations and operations, and has not required contributions from the city. There will be an access plan where gates would be open to the general public to go in and use and take a walk around, and the arena is looking to create recreational opportunities for more active public use. 'They used to do musical concerts there, but it's now unusable, all soggy in there, not safe underfoot,' Sullivan said. The council also approved $6,000 for a custom display case to display historical whips recently obtained through the Historical Commission and donated to the Westfield Athenaeum. Councilor and Finance Committee member Brent Bean said a local business will create the display case. 'The whips that they have can't be properly displayed — the idea is to make the public see and enjoy them,' said Mello. 'I want to thank the donors. They actually took the money out of their pockets to preserve these whips,' agreed Councilor James Adams. Last approved was $2,000 to complete a regional archeological study of the Hampden-Hampshire Canal for listing on the National Historic Registry. 'My fifth or sixth grade history project was on the Westfield Canal - so I'm very happy about this,' said Councilor Bridget Matthews-Kane. 'I am going to vote for this, but the [Community Preservation funds] can't just be looked at as a maintenance account for these different projects. It's supposed to be for housing, historical, land preservation and recreation,' said Sullivan before the vote. He said designated funds are set aside for each category, and the undesignated funds get spent on these projects. 'Nothing has gone towards housing at all and very little for land preservation; mostly recreational and historical,' Sullivan added. 'I've always been an advocate for land, which is what it was for. Here's my worry a little bit — with our taxes going up, so do our CPA funds. I pay $1,000 a year for it — that's just me. I think we're using it for a lot of different things. With our taxes going up, so will CPA be going up,' said Adams. 'I've heard people aren't always on board. If it's owned by the city, I'm always for it. But if it's a private club; people have come to me to say why am I spending my taxes on a private club,' Adams added. 'People are coming to me to say many things we're spending on, but this particular vote is about $2,000 to finish up the canal thing. We make mistakes bigger than that,' said Mello. 'I approached the chair of the Finance Committee with the exact situation, and he was going to look into his committee discussing that,' said Councilor Cindy Harris. Read the original article on MassLive.
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Billy Woods' New Album Explores What We Fear and Why
On a late spring afternoon (that doesn't feel like April), Prospect Heights' Leland Eating and Drinking House is pretty empty. Four people are sitting at tables in the upscale cafe, chatting over a playlist of early '00s hits from artists like Ashanti. Eventually, Billy Woods arrives wearing a Black jacket, black shirt, and jeans. He says he's feeling under the weather after several European show dates. Crosscontinental tours are becoming common fare for Woods, the Brooklyn-based rapper boasting one of rap's elite pens. He's been rapping since the '00s, but caught a stride with early '10s albums like, becoming a darling of underground rap heads and steadily elevating his penmanship on recent projects like Church (with Messiah Musik), Maps (with Kenny Segal), Aethiopes (fully produced by Preservation), as well as his duo with partner-in-rhyme ELUCID, which releases under the name Armand Hammer. The two collaborated on 2021's Haram with The Alchemist and We Sell Diabetic Test Strips in 2023. More from Rolling Stone The Best of SXSW Day Two: Billy Woods, Jack's Mannequin, Man/Woman/Chainsaw, and More billy woods' 'Maps' is the Kind of Album That's Designed to Get You Lost Billy Woods' 'Sauvage' Evokes the Unease of Living in 2022 New York Now he's set to release Golliwog, his first solo project in five years. Over a sandwich and chips, Woods tells me about the new project that he's meticulously crafted over the last several years. Initially, the plan was to work on a new Armand Hammer project, but ELUCID was working on his album Revelator, freeing Woods up to pursue his first solo project since 2019's Terror Management. He utilized his ever-growing network to procure beats, prioritizing production that gave off the vibe of a horror movie score. Sometimes, like with the Conductor Williams-produced 'Star87,' he found something in a beat pack that fit his preference. Other times, like on 'All These Worlds Are Yours,' he says he worked with producer DJ Haram to turn an 'ethereal' Shabaka Hutchings beat that reminded him of a rainforest into 'nanobots just flying in and eating this rainforest up.' Other Golliwog production credits include the Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant of Atmosphere, and Steel Tipped Dove. 'I knew it was my first multiple producer product in a long time,' he says. 'I knew that I had more connections than ever before. So, I tried to cast a wide net.' He made 22 songs for the 18-track album, eschewing his normal 'tunnel vision' writing process to take his time and write an average of just one or two songs per month. 'This is the first record [in a while] where it was up to me how fast I was going to move,' he says. Several artists feature on the project, including Backwoodz mates ELUCID, Cavalier, as well as Mascara, Despot, and Yolanda Watson. Golliwog reexplores a story he wrote as a child about an evil Golliwog. Woods says he's always been fascinated by horror story collections, citing Mariana Enríquez's Things We Lost in the Fire and Stephen King's Cat's Eye — the latter threads together short stories with a cat who finds themselves in every story. In his new work, Woods casts the racist, rag-doll-like caricature known as a Golliwog as the connecting overseer of the project. Though dark, searing production permeates the album, he says there's no overarching theme or thesis, with each song unfurling a unique terror. 'Misery,' the project's first single, depicts a toxic infatuation with a married woman, which takes a vampiric swerve at the end: 'Ragged holes in my throat, but I love to see those lips shiny with blood,' Woods rhymes. 'BLK ZMBY' sounds like a pessimistic depiction of African people from slaveship to a tool of capitalism. On 'Born Alone,' over doleful piano, Woods portrays the precarity of life in the streets, where he wears clean socks just in case calamity strikes — we don't often consider our fashion choices as commentary on impending death. On 'Cold Sweat,' he plunges us into a nightmare where the 'hallway was barely lit, air thick with dread / it's a room full of record execs on the other end and you dancin' on the desk.' Throughout Golliwog, horror is at the beholder's behest. Some people find vampires horrific, while others have trepidation about young Black artists dancing for boardrooms of white record executives. Songs like 'All These Worlds Are Yours' utilize pitched-down voices for ghoulish effect, but laid-bare bars like, 'today I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my home / the drone flew real low, no rush, real slow' from 'All These Worlds Are Yours' jar a listener despite his intentionally flat delivery. Woods says moments like that demonstrate his straightforwardness as a songwriter, which belies the popular conception that he's an 'abstract' lyricist. 'I think it can be an easy take at times,' he says. 'It's just funny that that will be a thing that people hang their hats on. Because some of the stuff is very straightforward. And I also do a lot of storytelling in my music as compared to lots of [rappers] — even those who I like — who haven't done a linear story in their music in five or 10 years.' He references the story he tells on 'BLK XMAS' with Bruiser Wolf, where neighbors get evicted and residents parse through their left-behind belongings; there's no layered double-meaning, just a story including the lamentation, 'How you gon' put folks out a week before Christmas — and they got kids? Them people sick in the head, it's sickenin'.' He rhymes about headless dolls in a pile of junk; in this horror story, the toys aren't supernatural, they're a sobering glimpse of a treacherous rental market. On Golliwog, systems often play the boogieman. 'I think a lot of horror is social commentary [on] what people are scared of,' Woods says. He gives an example of Rosemary's Baby, which is about 'an evil cult manipulating this woman to have their baby,' but also speaks to a woman being stripped of her humanity in a misogynistic society. He also references Toni Morrison's Beloved. Reductively, it's about a haunted house, but more aptly, it's a portrait of slavery. 'I think that when something is well written enough or hits enough different points of social commentary, people try to move it out of that [horror] space and it becomes a thriller or whatever, which is fine,' Woods resolves. 'But all of these [works of art] ultimately are about the same sorts of things.' And though Golliwog's sonic universe is a fantastic netherworld, Woods occasionally makes a real-life cameo to address some things. On 'Make No Mistake,' he sarcastically raps, 'When they say it's off beat, that's how I know I got them on skates,' referencing a common criticism of his unconventional delivery, which often prioritizes inflection and emphasis over earworm melodies. He jokes that the criticism reminds him of coming to America from Zimbabwe in 1989 and being told he was 'trying to be white' for raising his hand in school. Woods sees both close-minded kids and rap detractors as potential peer pressure he knows better than to feed into. 'Having already dealt with those ideas when I was a little kid, I don't pay them any mind now,' he says. 'Now [my] fan base has grown in a bigger position and people want to be like, 'You just talking. It's offbeat…' I'm not concerned. I've been doing this a long time. If you don't like it, you don't like it.' But to Woods' satisfaction, many enjoy the music that he and his Backwoodz studios peers have created over the years. He says he's 'so happy and proud' of what the label has become. 'Sometimes I think about it, I'm like, 'Damn, okay.' At this point, [we're] one of the indie rap labels that you could be like, 'Yeah, they do interesting shit, man.' Not even rap. We put out an experimental jazz record last year,' he says, referencing the band ØKSE's eponymous debut. He also notes that the label, which began in 2003, had success last year despite no release from the 'tentpoles' like himself, ELUCID, or Armand Hammer. Projects like Cavalier's two albums, and ShrapKnel (the duo of Curly Castro and PremRock) kept the flag waving for Backwoodz as a home for talented indie acts, genre be damned. And, along with being an artist and label head, Woods is delving into book writing with a memoir that he says has been 'challenging.' The book will chronicle his parents, as well as his winding journey from childhood into young adulthood. 'My parents being where they were from and who they were from,' he explains. 'And then ending up moving to Zimbabwe right after the revolution, [the] first 10 years of Zimbabwean independence and then living there for that time and coming back and forth to New York in the eighties and Jamaica, and then coming back here and being rudely thrust into life in the nineties DC area. Yeah, all of that's interesting enough, but more interesting really than anything to do with rapping.' He says he's 'pretty close' to turning in the book. In the meantime, he's set to drop Golliwog, a project that uses horror to put up a funhouse mirror to society. The album is laden with social commentary, but Woods isn't overestimating its potential impact. While noting the figurative 'beginning of the Fourth Reich' in America he says, 'I would not have this hubris to say what I can do about' the state of the world 'on an artistic level,' though he values art for connecting 'as human beings across time and space and experiences.' He adds, 'When I read Dostoevsky, I live in a world that he couldn't have imagined and he lived in a world which I have never seen, but I can connect to their ideas that can connect to my experience, and enrichen my understanding of the human condition and of myself and of the world.' That's exactly what many would say about Woods' work. Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
Yahoo
01-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
City of Birmingham to commemorate National Historic Preservation Month
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — The city of Birmingham will commemorate National Historic Preservation Month with a series of events, workshops and more. The events are free and begin at noon, except for an event on Saturday, May 10. The events will highlight the role of historic preservation in fostering community pride, supporting heritage tourism, and contributing to communities' social and economic well-being. Nick Saban to speak at University of Alabama event featuring President Trump Here's a list of the events set to be held: Training Thursday, May 1: Overview of the City of Birmingham Historic Preservation Program, Held at Birmingham City Hall, City Council Chambers, 3rd Floor Tuesday, May 27: Selling Real Estate in Historic Districts, Held at Birmingham Association of Realtors, 3501 Independence Dr., Birmingham, 35209 Historic walking tours Saturday, May 10 at 10 a.m.: Historic Walking Tour: Collegeville Section of the Birmingham Civil Rights Heritage Trail, meet in front of Historic Bethel Baptist Church, 3233 29th Ave. North, Birmingham, 35207, (In the event of rain, the alternate date will be May 17.) Wednesday, May 21: Historic Walking Tour of the Civil Rights National Monument & 4th Avenue Historic District, meet at the Four Spirits Statue on the corner of 16th Street North and 6th Avenue North (In the event of rain, the alternate date will be May 23.) Thursday, May 22: Historic Walking Tour of Sloss Furnace, meet in front of the entrance. Historic preservation education lecture series Tuesday, May 6, Best Practices for Preservation Materials and Methods, Chloe Mercer, Alabama Historical Commission, Held at Sloss Furnace, West Room Tuesday, May 13, Community Preservation Spotlight, Paula Stanton, Titusville Historical Marker Committee, and Community Member, Bush Hills Neighborhood Association, Held at Sloss Furnace, West Room Tuesday, May 20, Building Birmingham: The Architecture of the Modern Movement, Caroline Swope, Ph.D., Held at Sloss Furnace, West Room Thursday, May 29, Historic Preservation and Easements, David Fleming, Director, REV Birmingham, Held at Sloss Furnace, West Room Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New Dartmouth vineyard, dock woes, Strawberry Moon expansion: Standard-Times top stories
As we head into a new week, let's take a look at the news from this past week. Since Westport Community Schools Superintendent and longtime town resident Thomas Aubin announced his impending June retirement plans back in March, the search for a new district leader has resulted in two finalists. They are anticipated to have their last-round interviews in public at the committee's April 30 meeting. The grand-looking Saint Anthony of Padua Church on Acushnet Avenue and its prized 1912 Casavant Frères Organ are a part of history. The fact that Saint Anthony of Padua's pipe organ remains functioning is thanks to fundraising efforts that began in the 2000s. The "Music at Saint Anthony's" program is continuing to raise funds for other repairs through concert and recital events. Make sure to keep up with high school sports with scores, game highlights, and Player of the Week voting at And here are the most-read stories of the week on When the Barwikowski family decided it was time for a change, they had no idea just how much hard work it would take to leave their old life behind and start fresh. That fresh start closer to family led to starting up Anchor Rock Vineyards on Bakerville Road in South Dartmouth. The goal is to open the vineyard to the community this summer, offering visitors the chance to enjoy 100% local wine, live music, and food from local food trucks. Anchor Rock Vineyards: A Dartmouth family's fresh start rooted in local wine City councilors changed their minds on a $150,000 proposal to install a 200-foot dock for rowers on the upper Acushnet River off Belleville Avenue through a Community Preservation grant. The council OK'd the proposal in committee but then voted it down in regular session 9-1 after Councilor Maria Giesta criticized the process. No, no, no your boat: New Bedford City Council votes down Acushnet River boating dock After eight years of connecting the SouthCoast with crystals, candles and all things mystical, owner Andrea Berry-MacDonald is charting a new path for her metaphysical boutique, Strawberry Moon. Following the closure of her Warren, Rhode Island, location on April 1, Berry-MacDonald said she is pouring her creative energy into an expanded and reimagined Dartmouth shop located in Padanaram Village. A magical experience: After closing RI store, Strawberry Moon has big plans for Dartmouth Concerns with safety downtown and the need for greater police presence were the main points expressed in a discussion hosted by city councilors with downtown business owners and residents. More than a dozen people spoke during the meeting, which was held to air their concerns about downtown and discuss solutions. Downtown New Bedford: business owners say they want more police presence It's officially a sign that summer is approaching with Pier 3's The Whale's Tail set to reopen for the season on May 2. Next to The Black Whale and behind Mirasol's Cafe, The Whale's Tail offers some of the best locally sourced seafood from lobster rolls to fried clams. Mark your calendars: New Bedford summer staple The Whale's Tail set to reopen next week All of these stories can be read in their entirety at This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Anchor Rock Vineyards, dock vote, Whale's Tail opening: Top stories
