Kim Maier Celebrates 20 Years at The Old Stone House
Kim Maier Celebrates 20 Years at The Old Stone House
The Executive Director reflects on her two decades at Park Slope's town square
Happy 20th anniversary, Kim!
Back in August 2004, Kim Maier became the first Executive Director of The Old Stone House [OSH] in Park Slope. Twenty years later, Maier is still there. A revered community stalwart, she deftly manages the historic house and surrounding Washington Park with diligence, grace, and vigor.
Since taking on the role, Maier has helped transform a lackluster asphalt park into a bustling community space and historic site, boasting lush gardens, basketball and handball courts, a skatepark, a dog run, a multi-use synthetic turf field, and a popular playground.
Maier and her small but mighty team serve as the conservancy organization for OSH and Washington Park, having overseen $9.5 million in park renovations over the years, providing educational programming for 7,000 students each year, and hosting an array of vibrant cultural and family-friendly events.
“When I started we had $1,500 in the bank and now we’re a half-a-million-dollar-a-year organization,” Maier said on a recent summer afternoon. “It’s a lot of work by a lot of people and a lot of people’s persistence.”
A Brief History of the Site
On August 27, 1776, The Battle of Brooklyn – the largest battle of the Revolutionary War – took place on the site where OSH currently stands.
“This site is really where the battle culminated,” Maier explains. “[The battle] was not very long. It started around 6am and it was over by noon. The bulk of the troop movement happened here around the stone house.”
During the Battle of Brooklyn, British troops advanced toward the American camp in Brooklyn Heights to cut off any escape. General William Alexander led a small regiment of Maryland soldiers against 2,000 British forces at the stone house site. Though they fought hard, the Marylanders were greatly outnumbered. General Alexander surrendered after 256 Maryland soldiers were killed or went missing, according to theoldstonehouse.org.
The British won the Battle of Brooklyn and occupied Brooklyn and Manhattan for seven years. Although the Americans lost the battle, the efforts of the Maryland regiment allowed Washington and his troops to escape across the East River and, ultimately, win the war.
“It’s not a well-known battle because the Americans lost,” Maier notes, “but for us it’s an incredible opportunity to talk about resilience, losing the battle and winning the war…. We’ve been having the same arguments for the last 250 years. None of this is new.”
By 1910 the original stone house — a farmhouse built by the Dutch settler, Hendrick Claessen Vechte, in 1699 — had fallen into disrepair and was eventually buried under 15 feet of landfill as the neighborhood around it developed.
After a “fairly extensive conversation between Robert Moses and the Park Slope community, which had wanted to recognize the history of the site for many years,” the current OSH opened in August of 1935, steps away from where the original house stood, near the corner of 5th Avenue and 3rd Street — “right where the baby swings are,” according to Maier. The house is a replica reconstructed using the original stones.
OSH became a member of the Historic House Trust of New York City in 1991 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2012.
During the early years of the OSH, there was a capital office on the first floor and kindergarten classes upstairs, according to Maier. Community youth programs were held in the building in the early 1970s but by the late ‘70s the city fell into a “fiscal crisis” and funding for “social services had been depleted,” so the house was shut down. “Kids would climb in…it was referred to as the old stoned house,” Maier says.
Over the years, locals volunteered to re-open and maintain the house and preserve its past. In 2001 a lively 225th anniversary of the American Revolution reenactment was staged by volunteers and board members of OSH. It started “up in Prospect Park and the Brigade of the American Revolution came running down 3rd Street,” Maier says.
OSH board members reached out to Maier in 2004 who was a co-president of the PTA at MS 51 at the time. “They were very focused on the history and they were having a hard time getting engagement.” They didn’t understand why students weren’t attending any of the educational programs at the house.
“My questions were really about the park. Why was the park not an engaging public space? Why was the park so rundown? Why was there no public programming in the park?” Maier remembers. “That was where we began our conversation – if you’re going to get people to care about the history of the site, you have to get them to care about the space.”
A New Era for The Old Stone House
Maier grew up in Dover, a small town in Massachusetts with a population under 6,000. Her father was a salesman and her mother was a member of the League of Women Voters who helped found the Dover Historical Society. “My mom was a big history lover, architecture lover, preservation lover. I thought history was the most boring thing,” Maier recalls, laughing.
Growing up she was interested in the arts, a “classic theater kid” who did ceramics and taught drama at summer camp. “My mom was a big museum-goer so we went to The Museum of Fine Arts [Boston] and the [Isabella Stewart] Gardner, which is my favorite museum,” she says. “I had a lot of exposure to really amazing arts programs. I got to travel and go to Italy when I was in high school.”
After studying art history at Trinity College in Hartford, she moved to New York City and worked at the Wildenstein Gallery and assisted an artist at the Hotel des Artistes. She met her husband in 1982 and moved to Park Slope in 1984.
In the ‘90s, after having her first child, she left her position as Director of National Programs for the non-profit Business Committee for the Arts. “There was no part-time, no work-from-home,” she says. She kept busy volunteering for Ellis Island transcribing oral histories, serving on the PTA at PS 321, and consulting with the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition [BWAC] on their exhibitions.
When her eldest child began middle school at MS 51, adjacent to Washington Park, Maier joined the PTA there and that’s when OSH board members, Joe McCarthy and Peter Joseph, approached her about the Executive Director position. “They created that transition from a volunteer, insular, public history organization to an outward-facing public history site where you’re engaging the community on a lot of different levels,” Maier says. From the get-go, she knew that she had to make the site’s outdoor space more inviting to attract the public.
She immediately enlisted help from Claudia Joseph, a permaculture educator, to design a garden in the urban space. “There was nothing beautiful,” Maier recalls. “We had this scrabbly grass area behind the chain link fence.” A thriving sustainable garden was planted using permaculture principles.
In 2005, Maier brought in John McEneny and his company, Piper Theatre, to present outdoor productions in the park. “My daughter was in his theater program at MS 51. Piper started out [in Yonkers] and they had a small summer workshop program…. I said, ‘Why are you doing it in Yonkers? Everybody that knows and loves you is here!’” The group began to produce Shakespeare, as well as musical spectaculars, outdoors at OSH every summer.
Maier believes one of the “most significant and elemental” additions to OSH are the contemporary art exhibitions curated by Katherine Gressel. Each year OSH shows a series of contemporary art exhibits with themes that draw from history. “We came together completely by happenstance,” she reflects. “The building where she was supposed to have an exhibit closed down and she desperately needed another space to exhibit in. We were able to say, ‘yes,’ and that was the beginning of this 14-year partnership.”
Maier has enjoyed long-term friendships with many of her OSH team members. She’s known Maggie Weber, Director of Education, and Mina Jones, General Manager, since their kids were little. “I’m just very fortunate to have these amazing colleagues,” she says fondly. “That sense of team…. Everybody was able to give a lot and be here to bootstrap the place along. I feel very proud of the fact that we’ve been able to get to the place where we have.”
Over the last 20 years Maier and her team have advocated for more than $20 million in capital improvements for OSH, including a new community space, but that being “such an expensive proposition” and there being “so many other underserved parks,” they let that dream go. Alternately, as part of the Gowanus rezoning’s Points of Agreement, OSH received $10.95 million to make the building ADA accessible with an extension, an elevator, new staircase, and public restrooms. “We’ve had all this amazing programming but the Great Room (on the second floor) has not been accessible to the entire community,” Maier laments.
Construction is scheduled to begin in September 2025 and is expected to last 18 months. “Fingers crossed. You know when you touch an old building, you never know what’s going to happen,” Maier says cautiously. The work will likely overlap with the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Brooklyn, but Maier has that covered. “We have funding from Senator Andrew Gounardes and Council Member Robert Carroll to do an online interactive Battle of Brooklyn exhibit. It will be accessible on our website and by QR code so in the likelihood that we’ll be closed during the 250th anniversary of the Revolutionary War, the whole country will have access to the Battle of Brooklyn information virtually.” OSH will remain on-site during the renovations, with its offices relocating to a trailer on 4th Street and outdoor space being used for exhibits and programming.
Reflecting on her time in Park Slope and at OSH, Maier considers some of her favorite places in the neighborhood. She and her husband enjoy exploring Prospect Park, “the more wooded parts, further towards Lefferts.” She’s also a regular at Café Martin, Bagel World, Russo’s, The Gate, and Zuzu’s Petals. “It’s sort of incredible to have my whole life in a four-block radius,” she muses.
She also considers her favorite parts of the job. “The history is really engaging to me,” she says. “The story of the battle, just this idea of committing to something…because you understand the greater good, to me that’s an incredible idealism.” She’s also grateful for the community. “I really did grow up in a small town. I could walk to the library and walk to the drug store, but I didn’t have any sense of the community that I have here,” she says. She credits NYC Parks and current Brooklyn Parks Commissioner Martin Maher, as well as the 5th Avenue BID, the Park Slope Civic Council, Park Slope Parents, Gowanus Canal Conservancy, Arts Gowanus, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange for partnering with her and supporting OSH throughout the years.
“Obviously I love the house. I’m here a lot.” Maier continues. “Programmatically a lot of the things we’ve developed are because we all work really hard and we don’t get out much, so we may as well have fun when we’re here.”
The Old Stone House
336 3rd Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215
Pam Wong is a Brooklyn-based writer and curator who loves contemporary art and sharing community stories. Follow her on Instagram at @arthagnyc. To read more of her writing, go to arthagnyc.substack.com or arthag.typepad.com.