It is time to announce the winners of the 2024 Preservation Awards!
We have 12 awardees this year that span across preservation advocacy, preservation craft, residential restoration, commercial restoration, emerging preservation leaders, lifetime achievement, and more. We will be highlighting each of the awardees over the next few weeks – to entice you to attend our award ceremony on Thursday, May 30th at the Buffalo History Museum. You can get your tickets here.
Lifetime Preservation Achievement
We are starting with announcing our Lifetime Preservation Achievement Award which will be going to the one and only, Ed Healy at Visit Buffalo Niagara!
Throughout his life and career, Edward Healy has been a champion of Buffalo and its beautiful, historic buildings. Professionally, Ed has worked, and succeeded, in establishing Buffalo and Erie County as a destination for cultural and architectural tourism for more than 20 years. We included a highlight reel of his work below – just so you can take in the amount of work he and his team have done.
A note from Bernice, our Executive Director:
Ed is someone everyone seems to know and love. His entire life has been focused on telling Buffalo’s story – a story that is founded on preservation and our remarkable historic architecture. Back in 2010, Ed helped to launch the Buffalo: This Place Matters video which focuses on the legacy that we have inherited at a time where not everyone seemed to realize what historic gems we had.
Ed and his team focus on local: local shops, local restaurants, local historic sites and beyond to create an experience that has put Buffalo and Niagara Falls on the map as a destination to visit. He took the lead with bringing the National Trust for Historic Preservation to Buffalo – a conference that personally changed the trajectory of my life and so many others who used the conference as a launch pad for their careers. People started to truly believe in Buffalo as a result of that conference! Ed directed the effort in the video Buffalo: America’s Best Designed City with John Paget which highlighted our historic city in so many ways. I believe this video really helped to change the minds of people who did not believe in Buffalo. The good news is, the hard work is paying off! We see over 600 million dollars that come to Erie County for heritage tourism and almost 25% of all tourists coming for two things: family and architecture.
May we all be as fortunate as Ed to look back on our lives and see such a positive impact from our efforts.
One of our favorite recent articles that shows the passion Ed feels for our community can be found here: https://www.visitbuffaloniagara.com/the-rebirth-of-buffalo/
Here are some of Ed’s achievements and highlights throughout his career:
- Worked to bring the National Trust for Historic Preservation Annual Conference to Buffalo in 2011, which arguably sparked Buffalo’s recent resurgence and increased attention to our architecture. During the conference, Visit Buffalo Niagara even trained cab drivers on the historic details of Buffalo’s historic buildings to make sure they were equipped to discuss and point out these places to attendees. You can read about its impact here.
- Ed and Visit Buffalo Niagara helped to bring the Congress for New Urbanism to Buffalo in 2013.
- Served as Executive producer on John Paget’s short film, Buffalo: America’s Best Designed City, which was released in 2014. You can watch it here.
- Established a marketing campaign, The Unexpected Buffalo, which rolled out in 2017 and called attention to Buffalo’s overlooked aspects, including architecture and Buffalo’s unique brand of restoration and adaptive reuse of historic buildings. The campaign won an ESTO Award in 2018.
- Worked to pitch and host hundreds of travel writers, architecture critics, and preservation journalists to write and highlight stories of Buffalo’s architecture, design, adaptive reuse, and resurgence.
- Serves as board member of the Lipsey Architecture Center.
- An avid photographer whose work has been featured in CEPA Gallery exhibits. A majority of Ed’s photography focuses on Buffalo architecture and buildings.
- During Ed’s tenure at VBN, Buffalo has been named one of the National Trust’s Dozen Distinctive Destinations, America’s Friendliest City by the readers of Travel & Leisure magazine, one of 52 Places to Go in 2018 by The New York Times, a Top Ten Value Destination for 2020 by Lonely Planet, one of the Best Places to Travel in 2021 by Travel & Leisure magazine, and, most recently, one of the top 22 places to travel to in 2022 by Architectural Digest. The “Unexpected Buffalo” advertising campaign developed and implemented by my team was named the Best Branding and Integrated Marketing Campaign in the nation at the U.S. Travel Association’s ESTO Conference in August 2018 in the $1 million to $2.5 million budget category
Congrats to you Ed! This is an award we cannot wait to present to you and your family and friends on May 30th. Well deserved, truly!
From Ed’s bio on Linkedin: Ed Healy is the Vice President of Marketing for Visit Buffalo Niagara where he is responsible for VBN’s destination marketing strategies. Ed’s portfolio includes overseeing all marketing communications, including the production of an annual touring guide, web sites, e-newsletters, social media, videos, podcasts and consumer advertising, as well as media and public relations.