Interview with Tom Block, October 21, 2016

FERNHEIMER: Where, where are you gonna take us?

BLOCK: So we are now at Bernheim Forest, in--outside of Louisville. And Bernheim Forest has fourteen thousand acres, and of the fourteen thousand acres, six hundred are formal arboretum, designed by the Olmsted Firm, and the other nearly fourteen thousand acres are a natural area. So what we're doing now is we're gonna leave the arboretum, and we're going to go into the forest. And then--you have to put your seatbelt--we have to--you have to fasten your seatbelt. You're gonna hear this beeping noise. We're going to go into the natural area. As I tell people, you can see, when you leave, the arboretum, which is all maintained, and enter a natural area, which is not maintained. But 00:01:00you--there'll be a trailhead where we get off the trail--off--out of the car, too. We'll talk about.

[Pause in recording.]

FERNHEIMER: To think about how th--there is a, a bigger Jewish story--

BLOCK: --so I guess--

FERNHEIMER: --hiding (??)--

BLOCK: --his family went from Spain to Greece?

FERNHEIMER: Um, I'm not sure how they landed in Greece, but I'm guessing somewhere along the line, there were descendants--they were in Rhodes, Greece, and then they ended up mostly in Alabama. -----------(??)----------

BLOCK: So we're talking--being filmed?

FERNHEIMER: Yeah. It's so beautiful in the fall.

BLOCK: Uh-huh. No, it is. So we're now in the forest. So as I said, we have over fourteen thousand acres. About six hundred acres is in an arboretum, which 00:02:00is maintained and formally planned, and then twelve thousand acres or more are in the forest. And this is the forest. So we are now at the end of what we call a canopy tree walk--

FERNHEIMER: --hmm--

BLOCK: --and at the end, we're seventy-five feet above the forest floor. We actually have a trail that winds around. You can actually walk right underneath the canopy tree walk, and so you can see the forest from the floor, and up here above the floor. So Bernheim is all the land you see. So all that ridge, and then far up there to the radio tower, and then mainly way behind us is where most of our twelve thousand acres are. And this land was actually harvested twice. First, the Europeans came and took the trees down for their fields and their houses and everything. Then the forest started to grow again, and they discovered iron ore. And in fact, this trail is called the Iron Ore Trail, and 00:03:00they took down the forest again so that we could--they could run their smelters. And so the trees you see now--so when my great-grandfather came here, this was pretty destroyed, bad land, and now we've been maintaining it for ninety years, and so the trees are ninety to a hundred and ten years old. The naturalists tell me that, to be an old-growth forest, you have to be at least a hundred and fifty years old. So we're very excited that we'll be coming--we can see the day when this would be an old-growth forest.

FERNHEIMER: When, when you move into that next level of old-growth forest, what does that bring, or--

BLOCK: --it just brings a level of, of stewardship. It just means that we have--from our point of view at the forest, I think we feel it demonstrates that we are--we have been good stewards of this land. Um, it's been in the local papers here in Louisville, here in the end of 2016, that, um, we've had our first sighting of a brack--black bear.

FERNHEIMER: I've been following this in the news.

BLOCK: And so the naturalists tell me that they--they're so excited, because black bears require a very good, sustainable environment to live in, and so we think that's the best sign of what a good steward we've been of this fourteen thousand acres, that it can now attract and sustain a black bear.

FERNHEIMER: And I know that there was a little bit of a contest involved with naming him?

BLOCK: Right, right.

FERNHEIMER: Where did--where did--

BLOCK: --so--

FERNHEIMER: --he end up--

BLOCK: --so--

FERNHEIMER: --is it he?

BLOCK: It's a he--

FERNHEIMER: --okay.

BLOCK: --and we can tell that. So we've spotted--he was first spotted by a visitor down, um, by--in the arboretum, and now we have trail cameras all over the--in the forest, embedded in the forest, and we have spotted him in there. And those pictures were of high enough resolution that we could tell it was a he, and the winning name was Bernie.

FERNHEIMER: Bernie. All right. Pretty good.

BLOCK: Mr. Bernheim's name--nickname was actually Ike, from the Isaac. But, 00:05:00but anyway, that's--this is one of my favorite spots, because you have this beautiful view, and then the valley there is actually called Bingham Valley, because Barry Bingham of the Louisville Bingham family was a huge supporter and former president of the forest.

FERNHEIMER: Oh.

BLOCK: And so we named this--it's one of the few named areas in the forest, and we call it Bingham Valley.

FERNHEIMER: And can you tell me a little bit about the trees that we're seeing--

BLOCK: --so the trees--

FERNHEIMER: --right there?

BLOCK: --it's a hardwood forest. Most of the trees are either oak, maple, beech, hickory, and sycamore. So if you can identify tho--and, and, and, um, poplars. So if you can identify those six trees, you can probably identify eighty percent of all the trees in the forest. Now we're gonna go down to the gravesite.

[Pause in recording.]

F: Rolling.

BLOCK: So this looks like a beech tree, uh, or a hickory tree, and you can tell from the bark and the leaf.

FERNHEIMER: What is significant about the bark?

BLOCK: Oh, so the--uh, the leaf looks very much like the beech, but it's--the bark is bark, and if we saw a beech, it would be very smooth.

FERNHEIMER: Huh, okay.

BLOCK: And this, I think, is an oak, and it looks like a white oak. And then this is a maple, because it's changing leaves already. I can just see.

FERNHEIMER: The orange ones?

BLOCK: Yeah, yeah.

FERNHEIMER: It's beautiful. We have a big maple in our front yard.

BLOCK: Uh-huh. This is -----------(??). So this is the, the trail to my great-grandfather's gravesite, and one of the things we've done just in the past two years is we've made it handicap-accessible. So this trail used to have steps, and now the steps aren't here. And actually, just a few weeks ago, we had the young adults group from the Jewish Community Center here in Louisville come, and there was one of the, uh, young people participating in that group who was handicapped and had an electric wheelchair, and so--unfortunately, we don't 00:07:00yet have a trail, but he could come and join us, and we have a wonderful picture of him sitting with, with us up at the top of this, uh, trail. And then we've, we've planted some nice specimen plants around here, too.

FERNHEIMER: And these are all native Kentucky plants?

BLOCK: No, some--basically native Kentucky. Some--they aren't all native. So again, this is our trail where we took out all the steps, and when we get to the top, we'll see both my great-grandfather's gravesite and then the beautiful meadow. So again, Isaac Wolfe Bernheim--you can see that his wife is there with the other tombstone, but no--

FERNHEIMER: --no recognition.

BLOCK: No recognition that she's here.

FERNHEIMER: Is her name on the tombstone at least?

BLOCK: I think so.

FERNHEIMER: (laughs) What was the name of his first wife?

BLOCK: Fanny. That's--

FERNHEIMER: --Fanny--

BLOCK: --who's here.

FERNHEIMER: Fanny. That was Fanny Dreyfus?

BLOCK: Yes.

FERNHEIMER: And then he later married her sister?

BLOCK: Right.

FERNHEIMER: Right?

BLOCK: But that--but there's nothing about her. I don't, don't see anything anywhere about her.

FERNHEIMER: So they weren't married for very long?

BLOCK: No, no, no. So this is where my great-grandfather's buried. He commissioned this, uh, piece of sculpture, and he was, again, so very ecumenical, so one of these symbolizes a Christian church, and the other symbolizes a Jewish synagogue, and it's part of his story. And then both he and his wife are buried here, but again, as we were talking about, the story was Isaac and not Issac and Fanny, and so his--only his name is here, but you can see two grave markers, and so they're buried next to each other. So this is our 00:09:00first piece of art that he commissioned, and out in the field you can see our most recent piece of art, which is called Earth Measure. Uh--so this is--if you think of--are you recording?

FERNHEIMER: Yeah.

BLOCK: So if you think of Olmsted, we saw ponds, and we have ponds, but if you think of Central Park, which is probably his most famous work, there's the meadows, and then there's the rambles and the hills, and this is sort of those principles, super-sized. So we have a thirty-five-acre meadow, and we have the hills, and then to the side, which you can't see from this spot, we have our, our bodies of water. And then you can see, in the landscape, our, our newest piece of sculpture, which was done by a local artist named Matt Weir, a young man who's in town, and it's dedicated to Barry Bingham, and there's a big hole, 00:10:00which is supposed to be a camera lens, as Barry was a photographer. And there's a dish, a rock that's dug out like, like a satellite dish, because Barry, as head of WHAS, the local TV station that the Bingham family owned, went into satellite technology for their broadcasting. And then the meadow, we're trying to do several things. One, it's--our official title is Bernheim Re--Arboretum and Research Forest, so one of the research things we do here is about a quarter of, of the meadow, we burn each year. And as you look at it from here, you can see it's all meadow and very few trees. If you think about it, if nature just did its thing here, this would all be forest. So this is the arboretum. This is where we manage the land, and here what we're trying to manage is making it into this beautiful meadow. We're also planting pollinators and milkweed, and hopefully this will become a, a way station for the monarch butterfly, which is 00:11:00endangered, as their habitat is being taken away, and we would like to make this part of the stopping point as they fly from Mexico to the northern United States and Canada. And so we have--and we have gotten some supporters to help us put wildflowers in it, and you can begin to see the beautiful grasses, the beautiful flowers, and it's one of my favorite spots at Bernheim.

[Pause in recording.]

FERNHEIMER: Okay.

BLOCK: We are in Indian Hills.

FERNHEIMER: Okay, sure.

BLOCK: Right off of Brownsboro Road. So we are very--so the--you know, we--when we lived in New York, we could never afford a nice house. My wife is an artist and she could never have her studio.

FERNHEIMER: And now you've got--

BLOCK: --and now we--right--

FERNHEIMER: --this beautiful house--

BLOCK: --yeah--

FERNHEIMER: --lovely neighborhood.

BLOCK: Yeah. So we are very happy here. And our house in Florida is very nice, but it's very small compared to--I mean, it's a small house. But it's 00:12:00very, very well-designed. And it's two blocks from the ocean.

FERNHEIMER: Wow.

BLOCK: Surrounded by a nature preserve.

FERNHEIMER: -----------(??).

BLOCK: So the staff has done a won--so we had our, our--

FERNHEIMER: But I mean, like, I.W. and his--and -----------(??) were they--

BLOCK: --no. Oh, no, they were--they--

FERNHEIMER: --interred here or were they interred somewhere else -----------(??)?

BLOCK: They were originally interred in Cave Hill.

FERNHEIMER: Okay. That's what I thought. -----------(??)----------- it's really beautiful.

BLOCK: So here we are at the area called the Quiet Garden, and it's one of my f--another one of my favorite spots. And over here, in the story of Bertram had the son he named after Mr. Bernheim, Isaac W. Bernheim II, who changed his name to I--Isaac I.W. Burnham. So the gravestone says I.W. Burnham II, and if you 00:13:00come over here--so this is the water. This is our lake. So again, fitting into the Olmsted plans of combining meadows and hills and water, this is our main water feature. And here's a plaque where Mr. Burnham dedicated this garden to his father, and it says, "Placed here in memory of his--by his son, I.W. Burnham II." But of course, we know there was no I.W. Burnham the First. So it's really because he's named after our founder, my great-grandfather, I.W. Bernheim, but it says here--and you can see his father was Bertram Bernheim. So the only person who changed his name was Burnham as--but, um, Isaac's other son, Palmer, also changed his name to Burnham. So there are Burnham descendants from 00:14:00Palmer, and there are Burnham descendants from, uh, from, from, from Bertram.

[End of interview.]