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.