Excellence Award Spotlight: Julie Nucci
Julie Nucci standing next to her house while it was in the process of being elevated.
After her historic Owego home flooded in 2011, Julie Nucci embarked on a years-long project to elevate her house. It is the first National Register-listed home in NYS elevated for flood mitigation and is included in the Secretary’s Guidelines on Flood Adaptation for Rehabilitating Historic Buildings. Since then, she has worked tirelessly to advocate for people and communities impacted by climate change by promoting resiliency and disaster preparedness. She recently formed J. Nucci Consulting, LLC and is working with the National Hazard Mitigation Association and FEMA on engagement and resilience strategies for under-served communities. Many historic communities are located along waterways, from coastal cities to canalside towns. And many of those places, across the state and country, are under-served – just like her Village of Owego, NY. As one of our 2023 Excellence in Historic Preservation Award winners, we wanted to find out more about how she thinks about preservation and why it matters.
How did you first get started in historic preservation?
Well, I became a very amateur preservationist when I bought my first historic home in 1990 – an 1864 Italianate. I quickly learned how wonderful and time consuming and frustrating and precious older homes are. That is when I fell in love with old windows. We made custom storms to keep the frost from forming on the inside of the single paned wavy glass panes in winter (brrrr). The windows all had arched or rounded tops, so buying storms wasn’t feasible. We were young and had skills, but not a lot of money, so we opted for the labor-intensive route. My preservation activities took on an entirely new level when the second historic house I owned, my current Greek Revival home (by then I was hooked), flooded in 2011. I am now an ex-officio member of the Owego Historic Preservation Commission for flood-related issues. My husband is the OHPC chair, so we work together.
Why is it so vital that preservationists engage in climate action? And how can preservation truly be a part of the solution in addressing climate change?
Our historic communities are virtually all built on water! We need to be flexible to figure out where purist ends and practical starts. Keeping a building in its pure, original state but letting it flood just isn’t a solution. Neither is a bad, insensitive elevation project that destroys the character of the building but protects it. I hope that preservationists can face reality and embrace the middle ground in between that will allow us to consider when buildings should be moved and when they should be adapted, and to consider the best practices needed to do that in an architecturally sensitive way that protects the character of the buildings, the nature of the community, and the mental health of the people who live there.
What do you hope your legacy will be?
Julie Nucci’s Greek Revival home is used as a case study on flood adaptation for historic properties by the National Park Service.
I hope my legacy will be that communities adapt to climate change to protect buildings and the mental health of the people who live in them. Professional folks (flood mitigation and historic preservation) naturally focus on the buildings. But as someone who has survived a flood, I feel like it is my calling to remind them that you are also protecting and securing the mental health of the people who live in those building and that buildings don’t mitigate themselves. Only by caring for the people who live in/own them, can you get them to the good mental place they need to inhabit to enable them to preserve/protect the buildings. In between the time when my house flooded and when it was elevated, I got really nervous every time it rained hard. Like many people in the village, I would look at the river gauge online to see where the river was going crest. During superstorm Sandy people emptied their basements and some people moved stuff from their first floors! Logic would have told them this wasn’t necessary in Upstate NY. Newsflash: you can’t expect people to be logical about something that is so viscerally emotional. As a scientist, I am well trained to be logical, and I think that is what allowed me to be as successful as I was in the face of disaster and to make smart decisions. But you shouldn’t have to be a PhD scientist to be successful! Our system needs to change so that we provide more support to communities to help them face and respond to the realities of climate change, hopefully before disaster strikes.
After the house was elevated, I was much less nervous/paranoid/anxious by weather forecasts. A home, whether it is a historic gem, a raised ranch, or a double-wide, is supposed to be someone’s safe place, where they relax after a hard day. When you live in danger of flood, it is your safe place where you relax, until it isn’t. Then it becomes your ultimate anxiety place. And when that happens there is no place that you can relax. This needs to change for people who live in vulnerable places. We are devoted to our communities and if it doesn’t make sense to retreat, we need to adapt.