Frank J. "Jay" Barrett Jr. is a second-generation practicing architect who grew up in the "Village at the College" in Hanover, New Hampshire. As a young boy, he watched many of the buildings that he has written about be built or "lost" as part of a changing village and college campus. Jay was trained in architecture and structural engineering at Wentworth Institute in Boston. Increasingly, Jay's architectural practice includes historic preservation work, and his home is a restored former Boston & Maine Railroad station located at Ely, Vermont, that has been placed in the National Register of Historic Places.