Last Turn Your Turn, Robert Rauschenberg

The mission of Nurture Nature Foundation (NNF) is to help in resolving what is possibly the most serious challenge the world faces today:
the intensifying conflict between the indispensable goals of environmental protection and economic development.

Easton Hotel Restoration

Preserving old buildings is often called the ultimate recycling project and NNF successfully completed a major project of this nature in renovating a historic building that had been closed for over a decade. The building, which opened as a hotel in 1926, but had long been abandoned when NNF took it over, is today once again a popular hotel, one that has played a critical role in revitalizing the City of Easton and has become a center of community activity in the town.

The Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas Hylton, who spoke at the hotel’s opening in 2008, wrote in his well named book “Save Our Land, Save Our Towns”:

From Easton to Erie, the trend is the same. Virtually every Pennsylvania city has lost populations since the 1950s, usually accompanied by deteriorated neighborhoods and debilitated buildings… Statewide, thanks in no small part to sprawling development patterns, Pennsylvania has lost more than four million acres of farmland since the 1950s, an area larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island combined.
What we’ve done is spend billions of dollars for new infrastructure to do little more than take our existing populations and spread it around. We’ve ruined our wonderfully livable cities, and ravaged the countryside surrounding them, in order to create a terribly expensive and woefully inefficient way of life.

As noted elsewhere on this website, NNF focuses its work on cities, in an effort to counter exactly the sort of problem Hylton wrote about. Saving the long vacant, deteriorated building and transforming it into what is known today as the "Grand Eastonian Suites Hotel" took a great deal of work and a very significant investment on the part of NNF-- far greater than initially anticipated. The results today, however, are everything NNF might have wished for. Since the hotel opened, the City has experienced a veritable renaissance: businesses are springing up, the arts are flourishing, and more and more people are moving back to town, rather than fleeing to the countryside. As a former city planner in Easton commented, in talking about the new activity, “we feel very blessed in Easton, and it all started with this project.”

For the full story of the Grand Eastonian's long road to sustainability, visit the website of Easton Hotel Restoration, the wholly owned subsidiary of NNF that undertook the project. To book a room in the hotel and visit Easton, and the Nurture Nature Center there, click here.