Today we’d like to introduce you to Karla Rosenstein.
Karla, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
History, art, and museums have been my passions since childhood. On my first trip to New York City at nine years old, I begged to stay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just a little bit longer. Years later, I moved from California to New York for graduate school in art history and afterward got my first real job at that very same museum. I moved to Rhode Island when my husband got a faculty position at Brown University and started work at the Newport Mansions. These opulent summer homes were my first foray into the world of historic house museums. When I discovered that Historic New England was opening a new museum in Milton, I wanted to be part of it. I was hired as site manager for the Eustis Estate and have been helping to build it into a wonderful resource for the Boston community.
Has it been a smooth road?
In launching anything new, there will always be obstacles. We have certainly had our share of the unexpected but we have been able to learn and adjust as we go. As visitors give us feedback we also have been able to improve and create something that is shaped for a modern audience.
We’d love to hear more about your business.
The Eustis Estate is the newest property of Historic New England, the oldest and largest regional preservation organization in the country. The house was built in 1887 for the Eustis family and was lived in by that same family for three generations. In 2012, the 80 acre estate was purchased by Historic New England and we spent several years restoring the beautiful historic interiors and doing the work to convert it into a public museum space. The house is a gem of the Aesthetic Movement style and it is the only house by the architect, William Ralph Emerson, open as a museum. The property is at the base of the Blue Hills and feels like a rural oasis, even though it is less than a mile outside of Boston proper.
The house is designed to be different from a typical historic house museum. It is self-guided and utilizes interactive touch screens so visitors can go at their own paces and customize the information to their interests. We also invite visitors to make themselves at home and experience the house from the perspective of the inhabitants, so you can actually sit on the sofas in many of the rooms or read books in the library. We also have special exhibition galleries on the second floor that allow us to have changing exhibitions to showcase things from Historic New England’s massive collection of objects from the region’s history.
Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Boston is a city that loves its historic sites so we are in a good place for a museum like this one. We wanted to go beyond the traditional audience for a historic house museum and engage with the many diverse communities in the greater Boston area. We hope this will be a place that everyone feels welcome to come to and make their own.
Pricing:
- $15 adults
- $12 seniors
- $8 students
- Free to Historic New England members and Milton residents
Contact Info:
- Address: 1424 Canton Avenue
Milton, MA 02186 - Website: www.historicnewengland.org/eustisestate
- Phone: 617-994-6600
- Email: eustisestate@historicnewengland.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/historicnewengland/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eustisestate/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/historicne
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/eustis-estate-museum-milton
Image Credit:
Courtesy of Historic New England
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