Intelligent Design - Landscape, Business and Art; Herman Silverman

I recently had the opportunity to interview Herman Silverman, founder of Sylvan Pools (among many other ventures!) for an article in Suburban Life Magazine. He is an amazing and inspiring businessman and philanthropist who I thoroughly enjoyed speaking with. Unfortunately the profile being published was limited to 600 words which hardly do justice to his incredible story, so I am including the entire version here on our blog.

The Preservationist – Herman Silverman

By Sharon A. Shaw

Silverman may be a bit of a misnomer, for nearly everything this 91-year-old year old business man has been involved with has turned to gold. Herman Silverman is the founder of Sylvan Pools, once the country’s largest pool builder; Silverman Family Partnership; the Art Mobile; the Doylestown Hospital Heart Club (now the Heart Institute); The James A. Michener Art Museum; past president of his alma mater Delaware Valley College and board member of the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency. Hard work and creative thinking have helped Silverman overcome obstacles he faced in both life and business. “Einstein,” he notes, “said that imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Herman Silverman was born in the Strawberry Mansion section of Philadelphia.  After his father passed away, he and his two brothers were raised by their mother, who sold coal door-to-door to support the family, and assisted by the generosity of local relief organizations. One such benefactor was a businessman who gave him a book of Horatio Alger stories while Silverman was at summer camp. From that book he learned the three pillars of success; be good to your mother, be honest and work hard. “Do these,” he says, “and you will succeed.”

After graduating high school in 1937, Silverman attended Farm School at what is now Delaware Valley College and farmed for six years before serving in the United States Army. There he taught classes and ran the shows, providing entertainment at Camp Croft. “We wanted to put on a musical written by composer Oscar Hammerstein,” said Silverman. “So I wrote to him to ask for the score and told him that we had been neighbors in Bucks County. He sent back a booklet [two inches thick] with the music, set and costume design.”

When the war ended and he returned to civilian life, Silverman turned his ambition towards business. “At that time you could buy any surplus Army vehicle if you had $500 and your discharge papers,” Silverman says. He chose a two ton pick-up and began Sylvan Landscape Services. ‘Sylvan’ is a Latin word referring to idyllic rural locations and wooded forest areas, an apt description for Bucks County, a retreat for many famous artist and actors of the day. Oscar Hammerstein soon became one of Sylvan’s clients. When Hammerstein asked Herman to build him a pool, Sylvan Swimming Pool Company was formed. Hammerstein’s referral introduced Herman to a number of wealthy clients but it was his own quick-thinking helped his business grow and survive.

Sylvan pools ultimately had offices located in 12 states and in several countries. In the days before advanced market research and analysis Silverman says he had a simple formula, “When I flew, I watched out the window to see where homes were being built.” Wherever it looked promising, Herman established his business. He was not selfish with his talents either. Silverman says one of the keys to his business relationships was to “Do something without asking for anything.” This mantra helped gain him a position as a board member on the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, a program of the Governor’s office which raised funds for low-income housing projects.

When drought restrictions one year threatened his ability to install pools, Silverman contacted the Pennsylvania State Governor with a proposition. He suggested that the Governor waive the ban on filling swimming pools if the owners would sign a contract agreeing to allow firefighters access to the water if needed. “I told the Governor that the pool industry was in danger of collapse if we couldn’t fill pools, but I also knew that emergency services were having difficulty with the hydrants.” It was a win-win solution.

His talent for creative problem solving again benefitted the community when Silverman established the Doylestown Hospital Heart Club in 1977. After his accountant suffered a heart attack, Silverman asked his doctor what the newly built Doylestown Hospital would need to establish a cardiac unit. Based on those needs, he and three friends began holding an annual $100 lunch to raise funds. “It would have been difficult to ask for $10,000, but not one hundred,” he says. Ultimately they helped to create the Heart Institute at Doylestown Hospital.

Silverman also recalls an incident when that creative thinking helped his business survive; a bad year had made it difficult to pay his company’s bills. “I called all the [suppliers] I owed money to and invited them to lunch,” he says. At this lunch he presented an eight-page advertising supplement that he hoped to run in the newspapers. “I told them that I didn’t have the money to do it, so I was asking them to loan me a percentage of what I already owed them.” This bold move paid off, on March 15th five-million copies of the supplement ran in newspapers from Washington, DC to the suburbs of New York City and customers began to call. Silverman was able to pay his debts and the additional loans that year.

One of Silverman’s most enduring legacies in the region though does not bear his name.  In the early 1980s Silverman was working with officials to promote the arts in Bucks County through the creation of an Arts Council, the appointment of a poet laureate and with a traveling Art Mobile that taught children about painting, sculpture and other mediums, but his ultimate goal was to create an art museum to showcase the style popularized in Bucks County during the first half of the century.

Opportunity finally presented itself in the form of a new jail. The relocation left the county in charge of the former jail building which stood in the heart of Doylestown, the county seat. With the same creativity that helped propel his business forward, Silverman set out to turn it into a museum. Among the first decisions made was the one to use the name of his well-known friend and famous Bucks County native, author James A. Michener. This selection enabled the organization to raise more funds than it could have otherwise.

Silverman and Michener had grown up in similar circumstances and agreed on the importance of public art. Herman and his friends enjoyed visits to the nearby Philadelphia Art Museum while young, a free form of entertainment. “I got to see all of this wonderful art,” he says, “and realize there was so much more to it.”

A prominent name alone was not enough build a museum though, so Silverman and his fellow board members sold signed limited-edition prints and Key Club memberships to raise the funds needed for their goal. Of course, they also approached friends, neighbors and government officials with the same sort of audacious requests that Silverman employed to grow his business. In 1988 the James A. Michener Art Museum opened its doors to the public featuring many pieces of artwork on loan from friends and locals.

In 2011 Herman Silverman brought his support of the arts directly to the artists. “The Michener celebrates old artists, but young talented ones were having a hard time selling their work. I asked ‘What do you need?’” he says. “And they told me; ‘Wall space and publicity.’” Being the owner of several commercial spaces, with a keen eye for business and many connections in the community, Silverman knew he could change the public’s perception of the new artists’ value and opened The Silverman Gallery in Buckingham. The gallery offers “investment affordable art” showcased in an upscale gallery with a museum-like setting - professionally decorated and properly lit. “Good art is an investment, something you can pass on to your children,” he says. “It becomes more precious each year.”

Silverman has built quite a legacy to share with his four children, seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren. “I have been able to do all these things because of the encouragement and support of my first wife, Ann (to whom he was married for 65 years before her death,) my current wife Elizabeth Serkin and my family.” As for how he continues to accomplish so much; The secret, he says, is that he enjoys his life. Each day Silverman drives his BMW convertible to his office at Silverman Family Partnership. “There is always time to do something else,” he says.

New York, New York! (It's greener than you think) - Part 2: High Line

We recently visited NYC's High Line Park. This unique public space was created on the platform of an old elevated rail track built to service the Chelsea neighborhood's meatpacking district. It is beautifully well designed, encouraging all sorts of interteraction; from playful water features and areas which encourage visitors to watch traffic below - while also being framed for veiwing - to a market, relaxing chaise, benches and, of course, gardens. The plants themselves are chosen to withstand the variety of challenges this unique setting poses: strong winds, reflected heat, dry conditions, pedestrian traffic, limited space and a low maintenance requirements. The gardens are both wild and defined, urban, yet naturalized.

(more photos below article)

Highline - New York City's Park in the Sky Was Once Just a Pie in the Sky

The following peice, describing the creation of the park, was broadcast on NPR September 3, 2011. The original content can be found at:
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/03/140063103/the-inside-track-on-new-yorks-high-line?sc=fb&cc=fp
This link also contains a slideshow, information on the book; High Line - The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky, a podcast of the show and downloadable audio tour.

In August 1999, Joshua David walked into a community board meeting in New York City's Chelsea neighborhood. People were debating what to do with an old, elevated rail track that ran through the neighborhood between Gansevoort and 34 Street. It had been abandoned since 1980. Before that, it was built to haul goods into the city's meatpacking district.

David thought it was kind of a cool old relic, and he thought other people would feel the same.
"I went into that meeting thinking, 'Oh, we'll find some historic preservation group that's all into this,'" David tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan. "We'll just give them 20 bucks, lick a few envelopes and feel good about it."

But there were no groups. No one wanted to save the old track — except for one other guy at the meeting, Robert Hammond. Neither David nor Hammond had ever been to a community board meeting before, but they exchanged business cards and decided to start a nonprofit, Friends of the High Line. With a few more meetings and some fliers, they thought, maybe they could convince the city not to demolish the old track.

"My mom asked me, 'What's the chances of it happening?'" Hammond says. "I said, 'You know, 1 in 100.'" It took 10 years of fundraising, permit applications, feasibility studies, and wooing city and state officials, but Hammond and David beat those odds. They tell the story of how they did it in a book out next month, High Line: The Inside Story of New York City's Park in the Sky.

Early Opposition
Today, the High Line is one of Manhattan's most popular public spaces: a mile-long, modern, high-concept park built on the old railroad track. In the 10 months after it opened in 2009, it drew 2 million visitors and — in a rare ratio for a public space in New York — about half were tourists. Half were native New Yorkers.

There are hints in the modern park of the High Line's history: You can see the original rail tracks sticking out from areas of shrubs and trees. These rails date back to the 1930s, when they carried trains loaded with goods into the meatpacking district on tracks that ran along 10th Avenue.

The last train ran in 1980. "It was a trainload of frozen turkeys coming into the meat market," Hammond says, "to give New Yorkers turkeys for Thanksgiving." Over the next 20 years, many people in the neighborhood came to view the High Line as an eyesore and wanted it torn down. Many thought it was holding up development of the neighborhood. "Mayor [Rudy] Giuliani really wanted to demolish the High Line," Hammond says. "One of his last acts in office — two days before he left — was signing the demolition order."

By that time, Hammond and David had the support of Chelsea's gay and art communities. The two eventually gained support from celebrities like fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and actor Edward Norton, both of whom contributed to a growing list of benefactors funding legal efforts to save the High Line. Early on, no one had any big plans for a park. They just wanted to keep the track around.

Rail-Banked
For Hammond and David, the "holy grail" of saving the High Line was something called a Certificate of Interim Trail Use, or CITU. Issued by the Surface Transportation Board, a CITU allows the government to "bank" out-of-use rail corridors as trails on the grounds that the country might need them again. The term of art is "rail-banking." Without a certificate to rail-bank it, the land beneath the High Line would have been lost to local owners and developers. "We originally thought we could just apply and get one, they way you'd send away for a prize by mailing in a couple of cereal box tops," David writes in High Line.

After five years of fundraising, permit applications and even a lawsuit against the city, they had their CITU authorizing development of two-thirds of the full High Line. "Nothing more stood in our way," David writes. "We could break ground." A few years later, Hammond and David were on a roll. They'd settled on a design team to work around a "wildscape" of weeds and wildflowers. They'd secured both city and federal funding, including $18 million that came with the help of then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.

They'd wooed the Bloomberg administration with an economic feasibility study that showed the High Line would easily double its original $150 million cost in tax revenue from increased property values in the area. (That revenue figure has since been raised to nearly half a billion dollars.)

Still Wild
If you start at its southern terminus and walk the entire length of the High Line, you eventually arrive at a locked fence at 30th Street. Hammond and David have the combination. One the other side is the final, undeveloped third stretch of the High Line. It goes all the way around Manhattan's west side rail yards.

Hammond and David are trying to secure development rights for this part of the High Line. For now, it's just the way they found it years ago: nothing but rusty railroad tracks and waist-high weeds. "To me," Hammond says on a tour of the site, "this was the magic we wanted to save. Like right now, we're alone. It's just us, up here [in] this private garden right in the middle of New York."

Hammond says he was always secretly fearful he wouldn't like the new park as much as the old, secret High Line. "What's made me so happy is that I like the new park better," he says. "The design influences the way people interact. "I always notice when you're up on the High Line you see people holding hands. And you don't see that, just in people walking down the street. New Yorkers don't do it. But on the High Line they hold hands, and so I think that's the testimony of it really working."

New York, New York! (It's greener than you think) - Part 1: Gramercy Park

Gramercy Park is a small, fenced-in private park in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. The approximately 2 acre park is one of only two private parks in New York City; only people residing around the park who pay an annual fee have a key and the public is not generally allowed in – although the sidewalks of the streets around the park are a popular jogging, strolling and dog-walking route.

When the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission created the Gramercy Park Historic District in 1966, they quoted from John B. Pine's 1921 book, The Story of Gramercy Park:

The laying out of Gramercy Park represents one of the earliest attempts in this country at 'City Planning'. ... As a park given to the prospective owners of the land surrounding it and held in trust for those who made their homes around it, Gramercy Park is unique in this City, and perhaps in this country, and represents the only neighborhood, with possibly one exception, which has remained comparatively unchanged for eighty years -- the Park is one of the City's Landmarks.The area which is now Gramercy Park was once in the middle of a swamp. In 1831 Samuel B. Ruggles, a developer and advocate of open space, proposed the idea for the park due to the northward growth of Manhattan. He bought the property, which was then a farm called "Gramercy Farm", from James Duane, a descendant of Peter Stuyvesant.To develop the property, Ruggles spent $180,000 to landscape it, draining the swamp and causing about a million horsecart loads of earth to be moved. He then laid out "Gramercy Square", deeding possession of the square to the owners of the 60 parcels of land he had plotted to surround it, and sought tax-exempt status for the park, which the Board of Alderman granted in 1832. It was the second private square created in the city, after Hudson Square, also known as St. John's Park, which was laid out by the parish of Trinity Church. Numbering of the lots began at #1 on the northwest corner, on Gramercy Park West, and continued counter-clockwise: south down Gramercy Park West, then west to east along Gramercy Park South (East 20th Street), north up Gramercy Park East, and finally east to west along Gramercy Park North (East 21st Street).

Gramercy Park was enclosed by a fence in 1833, but construction on the surrounding lots did not begin until the 1840s. Landscaping began in 1838 with the hiring of James Virtue, who planted privet inside the fence as a border; by 1839 pathways had been laid out and trees and shrub planted. Major planting also took place in 1844, followed by additional landscaping by Brinley & Holbrook in 1916. These plantings had the effect of softening the parks' prim formal design.

At #34 and #36 Gramercy Park (East) are two of New York's first apartment buildings, designed in 1883 and 1905. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, nineteenth century brownstones and carriage houses abound, though the 1920s brought the onset of tenant apartments and skyscrapers to the area.

In the center of the park is a statue of one of the area's most famous residents, Edwin Booth, which was dedicated on November 13, 1918. Booth was one of the great Shakespearean actors of 19th Century America, as well as the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. The mansion at #16 Gramercy Park (South) was purchased by Booth and renovated by Stanford White at his request to be the home of the Players' Club, which Booth founded. He turned over the deed to the building on New Year's Eve 1888.

Next door at #15 Gramercy Park (South) is the National Arts Club, established in 1884 in a Victorian Gothic mansion which was originally home to the New York Governor and 1876 Presidential Candidate, Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden had steel doors and an escape tunnel to East 19th Street to protect himself from the sometimes violent politics of the day.

On September 20, 1966, a part of the Gramercy Park neighborhood was designated an historic district, the boundaries of which were extended on July 12, 1988. The district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.


In 1983, Fantasy Fountain, a 4.5 ton bronze sculpture by Greg Wyatt was installed in the park.

Information gathered from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramercy_Park

Intelligent Design - Bringing Inspiration to Reality: Part 2

We continue our series on Intelligent Design, and bring you photos to follow-up the drawings and concepts presented in Bringing Inspiration to Reality: Part 1. If you recall, we had a client interested in recreating the atmosphere of a Balinese spa in their backyard with custom designed concrete seating, fountain, an outdoor shower, hot-tub, privacy and tropical looking plants. Of course, this being the Northeastern portion of the country we had to use plants and materials tolerant of the climate. Here is the resulting landscape:

The water feature, surrounded by ferns, provides soothing sounds.

Tropical hardwood decking was chosen for it's color and weather resistance.

A stepping stone path leads to the secluded shower and spa.

The custom teak and concrete bench found a home amid the large foliage of hostas and gold specked Acuba.

Sleek contemporary pots filled with colorful annuals provide additional interest.

Many annuals are tropical, allowing for their use as seasonal accents in the garden.

Vibrant colors and sleek styling create a zen spa-like vibe in the landscape.

The use of containers allows arid succulents to grow beside hostas in front of the bamboo shower screen.