On Sunday, September 18th at 1:30pm, Lawrence Preservation Alliance will hold its Annual Meeting of Membership at the Union Pacific Depot. A brief business meeting will be followed by recognition of outgoing LPA President Dennis Brown, who, with sixteen years of board leadership to his credit, has been the longest serving president in LPA history.

Lawrence Preservation Alliance returns to the Union Pacific Depot (1889) for the first time since the Annual Meeting of Members in 2008. The depot stands today due to the efforts of a loose coalition of advocates who worked—sometimes frantically—for six years, spanning an initial demolition announcement by Union Pacific on December 11, 1984, to the donation by the company of the depot to the City of Lawrence on February 7, 1990. Narrowly avoiding demolition several times, those advocates were slowly able to add enough support from city and state leaders—and Lawrence Preservation Alliance—to produce a positive outcome.

The Union Pacific Depot was designed by Henry Van Brunt, a classically trained architect from Boston, as part of multiple commissions from Charles Francis Adams—then president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Van Brunt had moved to Kansas City, Missouri in 1887 to form the architecture firm Van Brunt & Howe with his friend Frank Howe. Most of Van Brunt’s work in this area was in Kansas City, but he did design one other Lawrence structure: Spooner Hall on the University of Kansas campus in 1894.

Register for this free program by Thursday, September 15th here. Refreshments will be provided.

If you are not able to attend the meeting, but would like to make a donation to LPA or extend your membership, you may do that here.