Office hours: Monday-Friday, 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Phone: 617-547-4252
Email: info@cambridgehistory.org.

For information regarding event space rentals, see below.

Parking on Brattle and neighboring streets is Cambridge Resident Permit only. There are three two-hour parallel parking spaces directly in front of the house for visitors to use.

Since 1957, the Cambridge Historical Society has been headquartered at the historic Hooper-Lee-Nichols House.

About our Headquarters: the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House
The Cambridge Historical Society is headquartered in the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House, the second oldest house in Cambridge and one of the oldest houses in New England.

Like any historic home, it has been changed by its residents over the years and modified repeatedly to meet the style of the day. While it primarily reflects the Georgian Style of the 18th century, parts of the original First Period construction remain and one can see Victorian and Colonial Revival alterations from later generations.

You can read more about the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House here.

Staff
Marieke Van Damme, Executive Director
Rosemary Previte, Development and Administrative Associate
Maggie Hoffman, Archivist
Victoria Seawell, Assistant

Have questions about our public programs? Contact Lynn Waskelis, our Programs Specialist, at lwaskelis@cambridgehistory.org.

The Cambridge Historical Society
Hooper-Lee-Nichols House
159 Brattle Street
Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138
617-547-4252
info@cambridgehistory.org

Officers

• Tod Beaty, President
  President of IRB Real Estate, Tod Beaty is a 35-year resident of Cambridge and a graduate of Beloit College and of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education. In 1981, Tod founded Ingram, Rettig & Beaty Real Estate, where he built the firm’s residential division before becoming President in 1990. In 1993, he joined forces with Hammond Residential’s Saul Cohen and Joe Hare to extend the firm’s reach in Greater Boston. Tod’s company has grown through a number of acquisitions that include the purchase of Ellis & Andrews, Cambridge’s oldest real estate firm, and the acquisition of Breed & Associates and Natoli Real Estate in Belmont. In 2016, Tod relaunched his business as IRB Real Estate, specializing in commercial real estate and property management in Cambridge and the surrounding areas. Tod is active in a range of community organizations including the Harvard Square Business Association, the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and the Buckingham, Browne & Nichols School. He is currently the president of the Cambridge Historical Society.
• Elizabeth Adams, Vice President
  
  Liz was born and raised in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. Her love of all things historical began with exceptional teachers at the National Cathedral School for Girls. Her love of Cambridge began when she moved here in 1978 to attend Harvard College where she majored in American History and studied with Patricia Nelson Limerick, a noted historian of the American West. Liz received an MBA from the JL Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She moved to Boston and worked as a Marketing Director for BayBanks, Boston Company and Fidelity Investments.  Liz is currently working on a memoir of her mother who was a Washington Post reporter in the 1950’s covering cultural events and the Eisenhower and Nixon families. “I love being a member of the Cambridge Historical Society which provides innovative programming on the history of Cambridge.”
• Doug Hanna, Vice President
  Doug Hanna grew up in West Medford and Cambridge. He attended the Cambridge High and Latin School and U Mass Boston. For 38 years, he and his partner Alex Slive were the owners of the Cambridge-based company S + H Construction. They sold the company to one of their project managers in 2016. Doug has managed the restoration and renovation of a number of historic structures in Cambridge. Doug continues to work at S + H, but develops his other interests including guitar playing, biking and hanging out with his grandson. His love of history, and learning that his family has deep roots in Cambridge, were instrumental in his involvement with the Cambridge Historical Society.
• Doug Brown, Secretary
  
  Doug Brown was born and raised in Mystic, Connecticut, home of Mystic Seaport. A rower and American History major at Princeton, Doug arrived in Cambridge in 1999 by way of Maine, Colorado, New Orleans, Gloucester, and Hong Kong. Doug is active in local affairs, serving as vice president of the Fresh Pond Residents Alliance, the recognized neighborhood association for West Cambridge. In addition, he also serves as a member of the Fresh Pond Master Plan Advisory Board, the Envision Cambridge Alewife Working Group, Cambridge Bike Safety, and is the founder of Friends of the Greenway, Inc., a non-profit focused on supporting the soon-to-be-built Watertown-Cambridge Greenway. Friends of the Greenway recently received a $10,000 matching grant from the Department of Conservation & Recreation to create a series of historical markers along the new path. Doug enjoys skiing, cycling, collecting old tools, genealogical research, and contributing articles to the Society’s newsletter. He lives in Huron Village with his wife Dee Elms and three small children.
• Heli Meltsner, Curator
  
  Heli Meltsner, CHS Curator, has been a preservation consultant in Cambridge since 1980, except for a nine-year stint as a Planner for the Town of Framingham. Her book, The Poorhouses of Massachusetts: A Cultural and Architectural History, was published in 2012. She was one of the editors of Saving Cambridge: Historic Preservation in America’s Innovation City, a book published by the Cambridge Historical Society in 2013. She serves on the Avon Hill Neighborhood Conservation District Commission.
• Anand Master, Treasurer
  
  Anand grew up in the city of Mumbai, and he is a recent M.B.A and M.S.I.T graduate from the University of Massachusetts Boston. Anand has been an active leader on the Bloomberg training team at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where he has helped professors complete their financial research papers. He has served as an ambassador for the College of Management, speaking at its student orientation and open house, as a panelist for an undergraduate MAP program event, and presenting to the College of Management’s Business Advisory Board on the professionalism and quality of its graduate programs. Anand lives in Dorchester and enjoys meditating during his free time.
• Bruce Irving, Editor
  
  Bruce Irving is one half of the Bigelow/Irving realtor team at Compass in Harvard Square, representing both buyers and sellers in and around Cambridge. He also runs his own consulting business, helping homeowners through the complex process of home renovation. He produced This Old House and its sister shows for 17 years; is the author of the book New England Icons, about the region’s built environment; writes about architecture for several publications, including Yankee and Design New England; and serves as vice-chairman of the Cambridge Historical Commission. He’s been in Cambridge since 1988 and lives with his wife in the Strawberry Hill neighborhood.

Councilors

• Gus Alexander
  
  Constantine (Gus) Alexander is Senior Counsel to the Boston law firm of Nutter, McClennen & Fish, having retired from that firm as a senior partner for more than 25 years. He serves on the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeals and currently is the Board’s Chairman. He also serves on the Board of Trustees and as the Secretary of Nichols College in Dudley, MA, and on the Board of Trustees and as the Treasurer of the Boston Chamber Music Society.
• Greg Bowe
  Greg grew up in the Boston area. He has a keen interest in history and, while in high school, served the president of the local Historical Society. Greg has worked in banking for more than thirty years, and has worked for the last fifteen years with Cambridge’s 180-year-old Cambridge Savings Bank. He joined the Council in 2014, and looks forward to helping his fellow council members guide this organization as it moves forward.
• Matt Brelis
  
  Matt Brelis grew up in Cambridge and has spent most of his adult life in the city. For the past 11 years, Matt has worked as a communications executive at the Massachusetts Port Authority, specializing in media relations and public affairs. Prior to Massport, Matt spent 27 years at metropolitan newspapers, the last 18 of which were at the Boston Globe, where he worked as a reporter and editor on the national and metro desks. While he was at the Pittsburgh Press, he received a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1987 for his reporting on the FAA’s medical screening process of airline pilots. Matt received a B.A. from Vassar College, where he studied political science and history, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University from 2001 to 2002. Matt lives in Huron Village with his wife, Morgan Baker and their two Portuguese water dogs. They have two adult daughters who were born and raised in Cambridge.
  
• Amy Devin
  
  A commitment to learning and a desire to share information have been the common threads in Amy’s education and career. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature, as well as an M.S. in Library and Information Science with a concentration in archives management. Amy moved to Cambridge in 2003 and became an active member of her neighborhood community. She has served on the Executive Committee of the Cambridgeport Children’s Center and volunteers at the Morse School. A love of old houses, especially the two she and her husband have owned, has led to many hours of research and many months of renovations. Amy lives with her husband and two young daughters in an old Victorian in Cambridgeport.
• Christina DeYoung
  
  Christina DeYoung is Director of Sales and Marketing at the Harvard Education Publishing Group and will graduate with a degree in Museum Studies from Harvard Extension School in May 2017. She also received a Nonprofit Management Certificate from Duke University in 2015. In 2016, her love of public history led to an internship at the Cambridge Historical Society, and she has served on the communications committee ever since. Prior to studying at Harvard, she combined her love of education and history through roles at WGBH as marketing manager for PBSLearningMedia.org and the American History and Civics Initiative. Christina’s favorite Society events are the History Cafés because they “bring together a wide variety of ages and experiences in a relaxed setting (bar) to learn and talk about how history impacts our present and future.”
• Frank Kramer
  Frank was born in Cambridge in 1941. In 1962 he took over the leadership of the Harvard Book Store an independent bookstore founded by his father in 1932. During the next 46 years the bookstore became a Harvard Square landmark and one of the leading independent bookstores in the United States. The bookstore was sold in October 2008. In 2006 Frank, along with Simon Shapiro, of Tag’s Hardware and several other local business owners co-founded Cambridge Local First, an alliance of locally owned independent businesses that actively champions the benefits brought to the community by locally owned businesses. Since 2005 CLF has grown to over 335 members and they have just completed citywide distribution of their tenth annual directory. In addition to being co chairman of CLF Frank is active in community affairs.
• Andy Leighton
• Jonathan Muniz
  
  Jonathan Muniz is a Senior Consultant at Ernst and Young LLP focused on Cybersecurity, and Digital/Emerging Technologies. In his role, he is responsible for defining, developing, and delivering differentiated offerings that focus on winning in markets and delivering iconic user experiences. His product areas of expertise revolve around technology infrastructure, security solutions, digital commerce and customer experience. In the past, he functioned as a Product Manager at IBM around similar themes. He has an MBA from the University of Rochester, with a focus on strategy and marketing. He is particularly interested in the balance between history and illustrating this history through new and emerging themes.
• Samantha Richard
  
  Samantha Richard, originally from Indiana, moved to the Boston area to attend Wellesley College as a political science major, fell in love with the area, and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. After spending some time in consulting, Sam works in Boston and Cambridge’s bustling tech scene, building growth and operations teams at Dispatch, a service logistics platform. Sam and her husband spend their spare time listening to history podcasts and renovating their historical home in East Cambridge.
• Ed Rodley
  
  Ed Rodley is a lifelong resident of Cambridge. He received a BA in Anthropology from UMass Amherst and his MA in Historical Archaeology from UMass Boston. He is currently Associate Director of Integrated Media at the Peabody Essex Museum, where he manages a wide range of digital media projects, with an emphasis on temporary exhibitions and the reinterpretation and reinstallation of PEM’s collections. He has over 20 years’ experience developing engaging and educational museum experiences and is a recognized authority on the use of digital technologies in the gallery and beyond. His current interests involve incorporating emerging digital technologies into museum practice while building digital literacy and capacity among staff members. His museum career began in seventh grade, when he took part in a Museum of Science volunteer program for Cambridge Public Schools students. He and his wife live in Inman Square in the house he grew up in.
• Kyle Sheffield
  
  Kyle is a native New Englander, and he grew up in an 1800s house in Essex, Connecticut. He is a Principal at LDa Architecture & Interiors in East Cambridge, and focuses on designs that mediate between traditional New England architecture and the need for more diverse contemporary spatial relationships. Kyle received his undergraduate degree in Architectural Studies from Connecticut College, and his Masters in Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. He also serves on the Cambridge Historical Commission, and is a member of the Harvard Square Conservation District Study Committee. Kyle lives in a Frederick Rindge-commissioned home in Mid-Cambridge with his wife and two children.
  
• Ken Taylor
  
  Ken is a resident of the Old Cambridge Historical District. His professional career included planning and design of major healthcare facilities in the United States, as well as urban design plans for Newport and Portsmouth, Rhode Island. His historic preservation advocacy includes the Beacon Hill Architectural Commission, which he chairs, and past membership on the Property Committee of the Preservation Society of Newport County. His office facilities were housed in historic landmarks including the Grain Exchange Building and the Ames Plow Building in Boston, and the Knowles-Perry House in Newport. He is currently a member of the Harvard Square Kiosk Working Group. The “Light Cambridge” project, which addresses appropriate lighting of important structures, is one of his key interests.
  

Advisors

• M. Wyllis Bibbins
• Kathleen Leahy Born
• Carol M. Cerf
• Robert G. Crocker
• Luise M. Erdmann
• Ted Hansen
• Chandra Harrington
• Swanee Hunt
• Jinny Nathans
• Larry Nathanson, M.D.
• Alyssa Pacy
• Paula Paris
• Susan S. Poverman
• Maxwell D. Solet

If you are interesting in volunteering or interning with the Society, please email us at info@cambridgehistory.org and answer the following questions:

• What area are you interested in working in? (Archives, administration, programming, marketing, website & social media, or fundraising?)
• How many hours a week are you available?
• When do you want your project to begin and end?
• Do you have a resume you can send, or a LinkedIn page?

Press Releases:

• Cambridge Historical Society Press Release: History Café Series to Focus on “Where is Cambridge From?” (May 15, 2018)
• Cambridge Historical Society Press Release: The Cambridge Historical Society Wins AASLH Leadership in History Award for Program Excellence (September 14, 2017)
• Cambridge Historical Society Press Release: Upcoming “Common Goods” art workshop and History Cafe in Harvard Square June 15 (May 30, 2017)
• Cambridge Historical Society Press Release: The Cambridge Historical Society Annual Fundraiser a Success (May 11, 2017)
• Cambridge Historical Society Press Release: New Brand Identity (May 2, 2017)
• Cambridge Historical Society Press Release: New Council Members (April 24, 2017)