What's Out There Weekend 2023
Washington, D.C. (August 24, 2023) – The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) announces What’s Out There Weekend Rhinebeck & the Mid-Hudson Valley September 30-October 1, 2023, featuring two dozen free, expert-led tours of parks, gardens, and open spaces in Dutchess County, N.Y. These tours enable people to discover the design history of places they may pass every day but don’t necessarily know about. Expert guides provide rich stories, personal anecdotes, and keen observations about each site, landscape architecture, city shaping, and garden design (all tours are free, but attendance is limited and registration is required). Dutchess County’s landscape legacy includes myriad parks, cultural institutions, and historic sites and neighborhoods, including Blithewood Garden, Innisfree, Springside, Vassar College, sites associated with Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others.
In addition to the tours, TCLF will produce a printed What’s Out There Rhinebeck & the Mid-Hudson Valley guidebook that includes all of the tour sites (available for purchase and free as a downloadable PDF), and a more expansive and ever-growing digital What’s Out There Cultural Landscapes Guide to Rhinebeck & the Mid-Hudson Valley (which TCLF maintains in perpetuity). The digital Guide includes an illustrated history of the city’s cultural landscape heritage, more than 40 individual site entries, and biographies of more than two dozen designers who collectively shaped the landscapes that people in Dutchess County move through every day. “By making the people and stories behind these landscapes visible and bringing to life their unique value and civic contributions for all, we can better understand where we’ve come from as a community and where we are going,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s President and CEO.
Research gathered for the tours will have a long-lasting legacy, becoming part of TCLF’s permanent What’s Out There database of more than 2,600 sites across North America, 1,200 designer profiles, and 13,000 images. The GPS-enabled database is a go-to resource for everyone from schoolchildren to scholars seeking trustworthy online information.
