What’s Out There Weekend – September 21-22 – Free Two-Day Celebration of the Berkshires
Media Contact: Nord Wennerstrom | T: 202.255.7076 | E: nord@tclf.org
What’s Out There Weekend – September 21-22 – Free Two-Day Celebration of the Berkshires
Free, Expert-led Tours of more than 30 Sites throughout the Berkshires, MA – Special Offers at Numerous Area Golf Clubs and Hotel Discounts
Washington, DC (July 2, 2013) – On September 21-22, 2013 in the Berkshires, Massachusetts, The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) will host What’s Out There Weekend Berkshires, providing residents and visitors an opportunity to discover and explore more than two dozen free, publicly accessible sites in Western Massachusetts. This is the first non-urban What's Out There Weekend and will feature a special program for golfers at separate historically- significant courses with discounts and reserved tees times. A companion What’s Out There Weekend Berkshires Web site features downloadable information about all the locations, a schedule of tours, golf packages and hotel discounts. Shakespeare & Company is offering a 10% discount on tickets, the Red Lion Inn is offering a 20% discount on room rates and Cranwell is offering a 20% discount on Classic Resort Doubles or King accommodations; other local lodges and B&Bs are participating with special packages as well. Bartlett Tree Experts and the Berkshire Visitors Bureau are the presenting sponsors of What's Out There Weekends. Adele Gravitz with the Berkshire Synergy Project (BSP), an innovative arts programming venture working to make collaborative connections between arts and non-arts organizations and events in the Berkshires, has been instrumental in helping organize What’s Out There Weekend Berkshires.
The weekend is an extension of the What’s Out There database of America’s designed landscapes. The free, online, searchable, Wiki-format, and vetted database hosts illustrated entries of nearly 1,400 parks, gardens and open spaces throughout the US, supported by more than 9,000 images and 650 designer profiles. What’s Out There is now optimized for smartphones and other handheld devices and features What’s Nearby, a GPS-enabled function that locates all sites in the What’s Out There database within a 25-mile radius of any given location.
What’s Out There Weekend Sites and Golf Courses
| Ashintully Gardens | Jacob's Pillow |
| Bartholomew's Cobble | Laurel Hill and Mary Flynn Trail |
| Bascom Lodge/ Mount Greylock | Lee Town Park and Main Street |
| Berkshire Hills Country Club (Golf) | Lime Kiln Farm Wildlife Sanctuary |
| Berkshire Botanical Garden | Pittsfield Park Square |
| Bidwell House | The Mount: Edith Wharton's Home |
| Chesterwood | Naumkeag |
| Country Club of Pittsfield (Golf) | Stockbridge Golf Club (Golf) |
| Cranwell Golf Course (Golf) | Stockbridge Main Street |
| Elm Court | Tanglewood |
| Freight Yard Historic District | Tub Parade |
| Gould Farm | Ventfort Hall |
| Greenock Country Club (Golf) | Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute |
| Hancock Shaker Village | W.E.B. DuBois National Historic Site |
| Hebert Arboretum at Springside Park | Wahconah Ball Park |
| Housatonic River Walk | Wahconah Country Club (Golf) |
| Ice Glen | Williams College |
What’s Out There Weekend is coming to the Berkshires through the efforts of the Berkshire Synergy Project (BSP), Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area ‐ Housatonic Heritage, Berkshire Visitors Bureau, Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, Jacob’s Pillow, Shakespeare & Company, Boston Symphony Orchestra (Tanglewood), Cranwell Resort, Spa, and Golf Club, and the Red Lion Inn. Through BSP, TCLF has developed an active partnership with Housatonic Heritage’s Heritage Walk program. This partnership pairs a long serving regional organization with a national group focused on cultural landscapes to celebrate the unique landscape heritage of the Berkshires.
What’s Out There Database
What’s Out There Weekend dovetails with the Web-based What’s Out There database (WOT), launched in October 2009, the most comprehensive, searchable database of the nation’s designed landscapes. The database spans more than two centuries of American landscape design and is searchable by landscape name, locale, designer, type, and style. It’s profusely illustrated and includes a glossary of 27 types, 49 sub-types, and 14 styles, nearly 1,400 designer profiles and site entries, descriptions of some of our country’s most important cultural landscapes, and relevant links. The goal of the WOT database is to raise public awareness of the rich diversity and interconnectedness of our shared designed landscape heritage.
What is a cultural landscape?
A cultural landscape is a geographic area that includes cultural and natural resources associated with an historic event, activity, person, or group of people. Cultural landscapes can range from thousands of acres of parkland to small homesteads. There is a broad range of landscape types, including waterfronts, campuses, cemeteries, commemorative landscapes, and scenic highways. They exist in direct relationship to their ecological contexts. They are works of art, narratives of cultures, and expressions of regional identity.
About The Cultural Landscape Foundation
The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) provides people with the ability to see, understand and value landscape architecture and its practitioners, in the way many people have learned to do with buildings and their designers. Through its Web site, lectures, outreach and publishing, TCLF broadens the support and understanding for cultural landscapes nationwide to help safeguard our priceless heritage for future generations. TCLF makes a special effort to heighten the awareness of those who impact cultural landscapes, assist groups and organizations working to increase the appreciation and recognition of cultural landscapes, and develop educational tools for young people to better connect them to their cultural landscape environs.
# # #
