Historic Preservation
Cook and his wife Gayle took an interest in historic preservation projects as business ventures. The most notable project has been the restoration of the West Baden Springs Hotel in partnership with Indiana Landmarks. This project led Cook to take on the development of the French Lick Resort Casino project in Orange County, Indiana. In June 2007, Indiana Landmarks unveiled an award, to be called the "Cook Cup," for outstanding individual contributions to historic preservation in Indiana. Also in 2007 Bill, his wife Gayle and son Carl provided the funds to restore Beck's Mill at Salem, Indiana. In April, 2010, Indiana Landmarks announced a $7-million pledge from the Cooks to restore the former Central Avenue Methodist Church in Indianapolis as a performance venue and new state headquarters for Landmarks now known as the Indiana Landmarks Center. Since early 2009 he had been working to build up and preserve the downtown area of his hometown, Canton, Illinois, also building a factory and new hotel there, with plans to build a second factory.
Read more about this topic: William Cook (entrepreneur)
Famous quotes containing the words historic and/or preservation:
“We are becoming like cats, slyly parasitic, enjoying an indifferent domesticity. Nice and snug in “the social” our historic passions have withdrawn into the glow of an artificial cosiness, and our half-closed eyes now seek little other than the peaceful parade of television pictures.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self.... And so at the cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)