City of Erie

As a city grounded by manufacturing and the maritime industry, the City of Erie, until recently, has not had historic preservation as a guiding principle. The city now does, and its Historic Preservation Plan offers innovative practices relative to Erie’s needs within a comprehensive and easy to use format.

In the plan, five key values were established through community outreach and stakeholder engagement sessions, and ten key imperatives were identified to guide the recommendations. The plan’s findings ultimately include a variety of initiatives, associated implementation actions, and targeted benchmark deadlines-all meant for use by policy makers, stakeholders, neighborhoods, and residents.

The plan engages diverse sectors of the community to participate in preservation efforts of varying scales, stages, and budgets. Collectively, the plan is both attainable and realistic while providing a visionary concept for a mid-size, heritage, rust-belt city.

Erie’s 2016 comprehensive plan was instrumental in laying the groundwork for this historic preservation plan by acknowledging that blight, disinvestment, declining population, and shrinking revenue were issues working against Erie’s stability. The comprehensive plan also highlighted historic assets within the city and the need to make placemaking central to the city’s quality of life and potential revitalization. Erie’s Historic Preservation Plan builds on this preliminary work and provides an excellent guide for the city to use its deep historic routes and compelling historic resources as key competitive advantages in the quest for new investment. Through the plan, residents and neighborhoods have rediscovered the environment and place they collectively share.