Crumbling Castle Given New Life

When I opened my browser after getting home from class tonight the BBC told me about an awesome renovation project. Though it's not a history project it is perfect for thinking about adaptive reuse of structures that have become deteriorated beyond repair, especially in Philadelphia.

Astley Castle Restoration

Readings Response: Public History and Place

Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation argues that grass roots public involvement is necessary for historic preservation in urban communities. Both enlightening and encouraging, the book highlights practical issues faced by history projects in St. Louis. The tendency to want to tell a positive story can lead to an avalanche of problems including estranging the community, isolating social problems and selective or revisionist history.

The case of Scott Joplin’s toilet became a pivotal point in the book where historical accuracy and community desires collided. Scott Joplin did not have indoor plumbing. By accepting this fact and not allowing it to affect Joplin’s legacy, Hurley shows a dynamic between heritage and history that is often ignored. Historical research can make people question race, class, immigration and abandonment, but at the end of the day heritage is how people chose to identify themselves. Community history projects require more consideration than work that will never leave the academe because people have to live with the results.

Dolores Hayden opens The Power of Place with a circular dialogue between a sociologist and an architectural critic. Neither understands the others language and neither tries to step outside of their own disciplinary foundations. This excerpt is particularly poignant for anyone involved in Funeral for a Home, a project that is attempting to bring together artists, historians, and community members of the past and present. Hayden portrays herself as being the bridge in the divides of public history and art projects. Her writing successfully manages to bring together public art, murals, community gardening, and preservation under the umbrella of understanding space through place memory and social memory.  

Both authors stress inclusivity as being paramount, yet the limits of inclusivity are debated. Hayden explicitly stated that suburban infringement on urban environments is just as important in the consideration of place as the crowded row homes commonly thought symbolic of city life. While Hurley preaches inclusivity there is a bias against development, which, while grounded in very real sins of developers in the past, refuses to acknowledge many problems of the present. The cost and time constraints of adaptive reuse is never discussed in relation to the scale and severity of dilapidation in many inner cities. Addressing this question is arguably the prime objective of Funeral for a Home, which will hopefully provide a meaningful neighborhood history and preserve a sense of place while simultaneously preparing said place for advantageous future use.

Hurley’s most inspired statement comes when he stated that the purpose of their work was to show that “the fate of the built environment rests in the hands of ordinary citizens.” For the ordinary citizens this thought is empowering, yet it is imperative to look at public history and preservation projects and see how many of them originated within an outside organization. Though believing this statement is noble, reality seems much more muddled.

Readings:

Hayden, Dolores. “I: Claiming Urban Landscapes as Public History.” The Power of Place: Urban Landscape as Public History. 1-78. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995.

Hurley, Andrew. Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010.

Readings Response: Communities and Their Pasts

Michael Frisch in the introduction to his collection A Shared Authority tackles questions of authorship and the divide between both traditional historians and public historians as well as between public communities and historians. Public history shines through as a way to “redefine and redistribute intellectual authority.” (xx) Intellectual authority is a central issue in both oral history and community history projects.

The Oral History Manual provides a straightforward instructional guide for students and professionals about to embark on an oral history project. The authors are clear about everything with the exception of the origins of oral history, at which the writing’s tone becomes defensive. They dismiss the Federal Writers Project and resulting slave narratives, instead focusing on the more journalistic post-WWII soldier interviews as a precursor to oral history as an established research methodology. Though limited by the technologies and social structures of the time, the goal of the slave narratives is in line with that of oral history, as defined by the authors. It is as if admitting that oral history has roots in the traditions of folklorists would somehow discredit the methodology today.

            “When Community Comes Home to Roost” by Leon Fink, is a troublesome piece from beginning to end. It tells of a northern historian’s failed collaboration with the Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA) in North Carolina. The CHA, led by Jim and Lynn Rumley, clearly cares more about preserving a fabricated, romanticized version of the town’s heritage rather than thought provoking historical work. What is worse is that the organization becomes involved in politics with a blatant conservative bias. Worst is the fact Mr. Fink only became disenchanted with the project when the people he thought were left-leaning activists turn out to be conservative. His aversion is not to self-interested activists, but to activists with whom he disagrees.

Fink would best do to take the advice of Michael Frisch. Frisch claims, “It is history, not memory, that can provide the basis for shared reimagination of how the past connects to the present.” (xxiii) The shared part is integral: Fink makes no effort to understand the culture of the white southerners he is dealing with. Fink correlates Civil War reenactments with “sentimentalizing a Jim-Crow ordered social world,” (125) and never goes beyond his initial reaction to understand the meaning of reenactments to the community. In a racially volatile environment the CHA is not doing the community any favors. Neither is Fink.

The conclusion of this article says all the right things. Historians need to be aware of what happens outside of the academe and how academic work can be construed. Likewise, communities need to be aware of the way constructing a positive sense of heritage can manipulate the past. Unfortunately, the self-reflection Fink talks about never extends to his own actions and biases.  

Readings:

Fink, Leon. “When Community Comes Home to Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause.” Journal of Social History Vol. 40, No. 1 (Autumn 2006), 119-145.

Frisch, Michael. “Introduction.” A Shared Authority. SUNY Press, 1990.

Sommer, Barbara W. & Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual. 2^nd ed. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2009.

Readings Response: Memory in Public History

            Questions that surround the study of memory range from how individuals and collective groups understand their past, how groups interact with one another, how places are defined by collective remembrances, and how can public historians understand/use memory to tackle both historical and contemporary controversies. While the questions remain open-ended, this weeks readings highlight the importance of creating a dialogue and collaboration in finding the answers.

            The Presence of the Past illuminates how many people choose to understand to past in terms of personal family history over grand narratives. In a massive survey, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen attempted to understand what people think about history and how people learn about history. The conclusion that people most trust other people (mainly family members) and museums in which they can understand the past on their own terms places a pressure on public historians to talk to people rather than at them.

            The ensuing dialogue is invariably tied to the controversies of the day. Carolyn Kitch’s Pennsylvania in Public Memory wrestles with this issue when discussing how industrial heritage sites glorify a past that for some is still the present. How does one deal with immigration, environmental preservation and labor when those issues can be divisive, especially when pitted against one another? When approached on a national scale, these issues become abstracted in what Kitch terms “an unspecific moment of ‘yesteryear.’” (54) The strength in some of the places Kitch visits, were not however in the national story, but in the strong local and regional ties that bring people to be interested in visiting a factory or mine.

             The locality of history is a theme that is relevant not only in the readings, but also in the upcoming Funeral for a Home project. Kitch’s work on industrial sites of the past and present forces the question “which (and whose) version of community, place and character will prevail?” (Glassberg, 19) While it is noble to believe that multiple histories could exist simultaneously, more often than not, a single time and identity is given to a place. In her discussion of how the nineteenth century industrial surroundings of Independence Hall were demolished to situate the area in the eighteenth century in the minds of visitors, Kitch highlights this problem. (33)

The particulars of the creation of Independence Mall could be viewed as recognizing the realities of the economy and the roles of the heritage industry and tourism. Or one could point to the fact that because so many people have left Philadelphia, there is not much impetus to save Philadelphia’s industrial heritage from descendant populations. This example caught my attention because of the emphasis that Kitch, Rosenzweig and Thelen place on speaking to real people about the past combined with the fact that the last time I was at Independence Mall my father made a comment about how the Mall and surroundings became so much nicer after the buildings were demolished. Should public historians be more concerned with the memory of a place that is gone or the creation of a new place to create new memories in? Public history is situated in an unusual position from which to try to both understand and challenge historical memory.

Readings:

Glassberg, David. “Public History and the Study of Memory.” The Public Historian Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), 7-23.

Kitch, Carolyn. Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.

Meringolo, Denise. “Prologue: A New Types of Technician: In Search of the Culture of Pubic History,” in Museums, Monuments, and National Parks. University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Rosenzweig, Roy and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Tyrell, Ian. “Public at the Creation: Place, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907-1950” The Journal of American History Vol. 94,  No. 1 (June 2007), 19-46.