Joan Walter sent this update,
“After graduating from Dwight, I attended Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in art history. I then enrolled in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning and received a Masters’ Degree of Science in Architecture in 1973. While I was still enrolled at Columbia University, I became a consultant to New York State and planned the locations of interstate highways, mainly Westway, a highway that was planned for the west side of Manhattan in New York City from West 42nd Street south to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Westway was controversial, to say the least, and was never built.
During the last three years that I worked on Westway, I was enrolled in evening classes at Fordham University’s School of Law, where I obtained a Juris Doctorate degree in 1987. I practiced law for 20 years, mainly representing architects and engineers in malpractice litigation.I married Douglas M. Kerr in 1972. We lived in our renovated brownstone on West 104th Street in Manhattan until 2003 when we moved to Saratoga Springs, New York and renovated another old house. I survived a bout of ovarian cancer in 1989. We have one son, Christopher Kerr, who is 32 years old. I am now retired. I have been active in the Saratoga Springs Preservation Foundation’s Historic Plaque Program and have researched and written comprehensive histories of over 200 historic houses in Saratoga Springs as part of that Program.”
