A lot has happened since I wrote my post about the Boston Marathon bombings. It's time for an update.The bombing site reopened to the public on Wednesday, April 22 24, a week ago today. I've walked the Back Bay twice since then and found it so very comforting to see people out on the streets. People are the lifeblood of any city, and their absence in and around Copley Square the week of the bombings was even more jarring to me than the sight of soldiers and armored jeeps in front of the Boston Public Library. On both Thursday the 25th and Tuesday the 30th Copley was bursting with people of all stripes—office workers, buskers, skate punks, dandies, tourists, runners, campaign volunteers, dog walkers, moms with strollers. Bostonians are trying hard to get back to normal, sometimes succeeding and sometimes not. On both walks I let myself get lost in the crowd; that's what normal means to me.I have paid four visits to the makeshift bombing memorial: April 20, 22, 25, and 30. Each time I have taken photos to document both the objects left there and the ways people are interacting with the memorial. Each time it has changed significantly since my last visit. It keeps getting bigger, of course. Twice it has changed location. Location 1 was in the middle of the intersection of Boylston and Berkeley, up against the police barricade that blocked Boylston to all traffic:
In anticipation of reopening the crime scene, it moved about 50 feet to Location 2, against the side of a building at that same intersection:
Then, perhaps when it became clear this public ritual needed a space befitting its importance to the city, Location 3 was organized at the north side of Copley Square itself:
Locations 1 and 2 felt cold and hard—nothing but concrete and police barriers against a backdrop devoid of people. By contrast Location 3 feels much more human. It's a large, U-shaped enclosure on the edge of the Copley lawn, an outdoor room of sorts. Ten of the Copley trees are inside the enclosure, and many of the signs and mementos people have left are propped against their trunks or hanging from their branches, with pathways in between. People are out and about again, and they circulate through the memorial, moving from tree to tree, like visitors at an exhibition. Memorial 3 feels like the right place, a place at the heart of the city.At Location 1 people left their objects themselves, with no particular logic other than where they could find available space. But when volunteers moved everything to Location 2, they organized the memorial. Three white crosses, one each for Lu Lingzi, Martin Richard, and Krystle Campbell, became more clearly the centerpiece of the memorial. Around them, flowers were placed with flowers, stuffed animals with stuffed animals, and shoes with shoes. When the memorial moved a second time, this order was maintained and expanded. As someone who studies cities, I find the most striking addition at Location 3 to be the symbols of Boston's membership in the global sisterhood of cities—"Istanbul Stands with Boston," "Stay Strong --Miami," "Nashville Believes in Boston"—but there is much more. There are several large comment boards people can sign. There are many, many shoes. There is a hat section and a flag section.Which leads me to one of the most important parts of the memorial: its unofficial caretaker, Kevin Brown. He is not the only or the first person to tend the memorial but he has been its most enduring volunteer.
A carpenter from Brockton, he has been there during three of my four visits. At Location 1, he and another volunteer were handing out single roses for the children in the crowd to add to the memorial, to give them a way of actively participating in the ritual. At Location 2, which blocked public access to the memorial much more formally than Location 1, mourners had to pass their mementos across the police barrier for Brown to place, and he obliged repeatedly and good-naturedly, honoring requests for him to pose for photographs, answering questions, and following instructions like "please place this around the neck of the black stuffed dog." He told me volunteers were organizing that night, in advance of the storms predicted for Tuesday the 23rd, to bag anything that would get damaged by water. He told me some of the marathon medals had been stolen so they had started setting all the medals aside for safekeeping. He told me he watched a female runner walk up to the memorial, take off her shoes, add them to the pile, and walk away barefoot. He told me he was going to make a fourth cross for Sean Collier. Not only was he the citizen curator of Location 2, he was also its docent; guiding people through the mourning ritual. Kevin Brown's role at Location 3 on Copley Square is different. Because the memorial has grown so big that you can walk around in it, you could miss Brown if you didn't know to look for him. He has a chair now. I watched him make a round to water all the potted plants, and then another round to light all the candles (it was 6 pm). I was glad to see him.
I want to pay particular attention to Kevin Brown because in so many ways he is my counterpart and colleague, even if we don't really know each other. He quickly and spontaneously took up a role at this memorial that I have trained for and practiced for more than 15 years. While he has been out there in the sun and rain every day, those of us in Boston's museum and archive community—the professionals—have been moving more slowly. Granted, there are reasons we are moving slowly. The stakes are high when you're talking about caring for things in perpetuity and we want to do this right (or as close to right as we can). We have indeed made some progress. We have been systematically checking in with each institution in the area, and our list of whether and what each one plans to collect is nearly complete (most notably, at Mayor Menino's direction, the Boston City Archives will preserve items from the memorial). Historic New England has offered its fumigation bubble to ensure that bombing-related artifacts are pest-free before they are introduced into existing collections. We have made contact with folks at the 9/11 Memorial who have offered valuable advice and ongoing support. We are trying to organize pro bono legal counsel to advise on all manner of issues, from how Massachusetts abandoned property laws will affect collecting to release forms for oral histories.I remain concerned that we still have not identified homes for all of the material that should be collected from this event. Boston deserves a thoughtful, compelling, and flawlessly executed exhibition of this material on the one-year anniversary of the bombings—to help Bostonians process their emotions and memories and transform them into some sort of positive civic engagement for the city. But there is so much work to be done in order to tell this story—and tell it well—I remain concerned about that too. One thing I am not concerned about is Kevin Brown. This week Kevin Brown is my curatorial hero. This week Kevin Brown is the heart at the heart of Boston.
Our Collective Memory
All week I have been trying to look at the events unfolding here in Boston through the lens of city museums. Boston doesn’t have a proper city museum. If Boston did have a proper city museum, I would’ve wanted it this week to open wide its doors to the city for solace and reflection (many existing museums in Boston did in fact do so) and to serve as a place for civic dialogue while Bostonians struggled to understand and respond to the bombings, individually and collectively. I would’ve wanted it to collect and document the material culture of this event, and I would’ve wanted it to actively participate in city-wide efforts to interpret and memorialize the bombings.Museum workers are not first responders—let’s be clear about that. But they are part of the second and third and fourth waves. They are public servants, and in times of crisis their job is to collect and document, tell the story, keep the memory, and help the public make meaning of it all. Boston doesn’t have a city museum to do that work right now. I am writing this post to call attention to what we are missing without one, and also to do my part as an urban public historian to capture and frame the details of what Bostonians experienced this week. Right now I’m not so concerned about the facts and timeline—plenty of people are recording and analyzing the chain of events. Rather I care about ordinary Bostonians: what they felt and expressed, and how they are integrating the bombings into their own personal narratives of the city.As most of you know by now (if you didn’t know already), Marathon Monday always takes place on Patriots’ Day, which is a state holiday that commemorates the Battle of Lexington and Concord and the start of the American Revolution. It also launches April school vacation week and serves as Boston’s unofficial first day of spring. Every year on Marathon Monday thousands of Bostonians turn out to support and cheer on the runners along the course. And if they aren’t at the marathon, they’re at the Red Sox game or at gatherings of family and friends all over the city. For all these reasons Boston’s collective emotional barometer was particularly high on April 15 just before it sunk so precipitously.As Bostonians tried to make sense of the bombings this week they turned to history for signs of past resilience: the city that withstood the Siege of Boston and “invented America,” the city that survived the Molasses Flood and the Big Dig. They turned to the brand Boston projects to the world to reassure themselves about the city’s essential character: John Winthrop’s city upon a hill, with one of the best medical communities in the country; a city that welcomes thousands of people from all over the world each year to its universities. They turned to Boston’s popular culture—Dirty Water, Cheers, Good Will Hunting—to express their love and fidelity. And they turned to Boston’s sports teams—the closest thing we have to urban warriors in 2013—for signs of continuity and strength. As they did so, Bostonians were not all on the same page about what constitutes an appropriate level of tolerance, empathy, or law and order; they were not all on the same page about how to mourn and when to get back to business as usual.Every urban resident carries a mental map of their city inside their head. It’s how they navigate on a daily basis, and it’s layered with personal memories and landmarks. Most Bostonians had to look up Norfolk Street in Cambridge and Franklin Street in Watertown on Friday during the manhunt for suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. No one had to look up the finish line stretch of Boylston Street where the bombings took place; it’s on every Bostonian’s mental map. They could instantly reel off the landmarks on those two blocks: the Copley Green Line station, Boston Public Library, Old South Church, the Lenox Hotel, Lord & Taylor, Marathon Sports. They could instantly recall years of personal memories—some mundane, some poignant—that were created there.What a city museum would understand better than anyone else is that the bombings tore a hole in our mental maps. On Saturday afternoon I went down to the bombing site to try to get a handle on the exact nature of that hole. I took the Orange Line to Back Bay Station, walked up to the south side of Copley Square, and then skirted the southern and eastern edge of the secured crime scene perimeter. On one hand what I observed was comfortingly the same as always. The flower stall outside Back Bay Station was selling spring tulips in every color imaginable. The doormen at the Copley Plaza were at their post, greeting guests in tuxedos and evening gowns arriving for a wedding. Runners were running; college students were turning up for a Saturday night out on the town. The landmarks themselves—the library, the churches, the Hancock Tower, were all still there. On the other hand it was disturbingly, radically different. Even after the barricades are gone and the city returns to some version of normal, we need to remember that radical difference.
Every flag I saw was at half mast. Wolf Blitzer and a half-dozen TV journalists were broadcasting cheek-by-jowl on the corner outside the Copley Place Westin, lights blazing and TV trucks humming. Across the street from the news teams, roughly eight men in camouflage and bullet-proof vests, along with several armored jeeps, guarded the barricade at the southwest corner of Copley Square. By that point, with the threat to the city subsiding, they were spending most of their time making small talk with passersby, posing for pictures, and giving directions. Lots and lots of directions—many pedestrians were having trouble figuring out how to get where they were going without crossing Copley Square. A Boston traffic cop was also there directing cars that were having similar difficulty navigating around the hole in the city.I walked east toward the corner of Clarendon and St James, where the lawn of Trinity Church was still strewn with plastic cups and marathon debris. No one had gotten around to removing the Family Meeting Area signs attached to the lampposts, one for each letter of the alphabet, that on Marathon Day give runners a way of finding their loved ones in the finish line crowd. At Boylston and Berkeley I stopped at the makeshift memorial and watched people pay their respects. Many of the items that had been placed there were still wet from that morning’s rain. Two older men were tending the memorial; one of them gave single yellow roses to kids in the crowd so they could lay them near the three crosses at the center of the memorial. Five or six therapy dogs were on hand and getting lots of attention.I caught the Green Line at Arlington Station, heading outbound to a friend’s birthday party in Newton Centre. As the digital announcement system in my subway car flashed Entering Copley, we rode through but did not stop at Copley Station. The station was empty and dark except for a few dim security lights, still closed as part of the crime scene.On Thursday night I talked with the students in my material culture course about the bombings and I asked them what they thought should be collected and preserved in order to capture the experience of Boston this week. With a few additional objects added in by me, their ideas included:
- Marathon medals, bib numbers, space blankets, and yellow runner bags
- The international flags from the finish line
- Yellow Boston Police and BAA Physician vests, marathon volunteer jackets, hospital equipment
- Bill Iffrig‘s orange singlet
- Carlos Arredondo's bloodied American flag
- Martin Richard’s “No more hurting people. Peace” poster
- Signs and t-shirts of support—local, national, and international
- Slain MIT police officer Sean Collier’s uniform
- The makeshift memorial at Boylston and Berkeley
- Red Sox and Bruins memorial jerseys
- Mayor Tom Menino’s hospital bracelet
- The technology of the police investigation
- The recovered lid from the pressure cooker bomb
- The covered boat on Franklin Street in Watertown where suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev hid on Friday
- Photographs, video, news and social media feeds, oral histories, statements by public officials, luminaries, and celebrities
- The soundscape of the week: the typical happy sounds of the marathon (the starting gun, cheering spectators, cowbells) giving way to the explosion and confusion at the finish line; ambulances and helicopters, gunshots and house-to-house searches; and finally cheers of relief and gratitude as the second suspect was taken into custody
And this has been my growing concern throughout the week: that in the absence of a proper city museum, Boston is not prepared to document and collect this story. There is no museum in the city that has a mandate to collect contemporary Boston history. There are several institutions that will likely preserve paper records and photographs, but objects—particularly a collection of this scale—are another matter. I am reaching out to local colleagues to find out if efforts are underway that I just don’t know about yet, and if not, to see if something might be done.I want to end by urging you to read a piece from today’s Boston Globe Ideas section by Stephen Heuser titled Vulnerability in an Open City. If I were planning an exhibition about the marathon bombings for a Boston city museum, this essay would be my compass. Heuser sets out to make larger points about social capital, openness, and risk that apply to any city, but he does it against the backdrop of Boston. In the process he captures in vivid detail the experience of everyday Bostonians this week. In his telling, we see the moral of this story and a value every city museum should hold: “cities bring us together in spite of ourselves.”
Your Museum gallery, Bologna
Objects in the Wild
I am traveling in Italy at the moment, and earlier this week I had an opportunity to visit the new Museum of the History of Bologna, which opened in January of this year. It's housed in the former palace of the Pepoli family, and it's part of a larger project, Genus Bononiae, initiated by the Carisbo Foundation to restore and link together eight cultural sites in Bologna. The Museum of the History of Bologna is a particularly interesting city museum for several reasons, one of which is that it's a distinct departure from the "museo civico" model found in so many Italian cities. At some point I need to write a proper blog post about my experience there. But as is often the case when I visit for the first time a museum I really like, the seed of a new idea is planted in my head and I feel compelled to spend my post sharing that instead.The idea I had in Bologna was sparked by a gallery at the city museum called "Your Museum" (pictured above). Its goal is to involve Bologna residents by inviting them to bring their own objects to be exhibited in the museum. Massimo Negri, the museum's scientific director (i.e. chief content developer), told me he had originally hoped this gallery would be much bigger, with a system where people could bring in their objects and on the spot have them added to the display. Unfortunately, due to space and logistical constraints, he had to settle for the iteration I saw.Many museums are now interested in public participation, and they have been experimenting with the best ways to do it; Your Museum in Bologna is one example. At the same time, we also acknowledge that the museum collections we have inherited, formed in previous centuries, were assembled haphazardly, with major gaps in the stories they can tell. They leave out large groups of people and do not adequately represent the breadth of our history and culture. In short, the objects that have made their way into our museum collections represent only a tiny fraction of our entire material heritage. I've been thinking about these challenges a lot recently, as have many of you, I'm sure. I've also been thinking a lot about my recent visit to the Museu da Maré, a community museum in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Museu da Maré has a much more flexible collections policy than museums are normally used to: a member of the community can donate an object to the museum and then, if later he or she wants it back, the museum gives it back. Community members might also technically give the museum an object but still keep it in their home. I have heard that the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa has a similar policy. Mix all of these concepts together and you end up with my Idea du Jour:Can a city museum catalog the material life of its city without actually acquiring and owning it? Imagine a zoo that collects animals from the wild and puts them together in cages. Currently, our museums are like zoos. Now imagine a biologist who tracks and studies animals, but never takes them out of the wild. We have sophisticated RFID tags and we have extensive object database software. Why not conduct a material culture census, or inventory, of a city, but not actually collect anything?This may seem like a lot of work for nothing. I would have said that too five years ago, but the museum landscape has changed enough that I think we could start to see the potential. There are so many opportunities here for public participation. Residents can catalog their own objects, with or without the help of a curator. People can "like" the objects they are particularly drawn to, or contribute additional information about objects posted by other people. Curators can put out a call for certain gaps in the "collection" that need to be filled. But perhaps also a resident can recommend that her neighbor's object be added to the collection because it has a great story. And perhaps if an object gets many, many likes, it is then recommended for physical acquisition by the museum (subject to the owner's approval, of course), a kind of crowdsourced method of determining which artifacts are most important to preserve, combined with some gentle community pressure for public ownership of them. Individuals could also recommend a neighbor's object for exhibition at the museum, and so on. The role of the museum curator, then, is to highlight really interesting objects, monitor and improve accuracy, draw connections, and start conversations.Because, as you know, I am obsessed with geotagging objects, I think it would be great to have a mapping component where you can see all these objects existing out in real space, out in "the wild," across the city. Although that may present a security risk that could serve as a deterrent to community members. If people know you have special things in your home then maybe they want to steal them. (And who knows what other practical considerations this idea raises since I'm really just thinking it off the top of my head.) On the other hand, many objects no longer live in the place where they had the most geographic meaning, so the tags on the map don't necessarily have to represent current location, just location of meaning. Also, it would be easy enough to hide the identity of object owners so that only the museum has personal contact information.But wouldn't it be interesting to see what happens when the material culture of a place is collectively exposed in this way, regardless of whether it is owned privately or publicly? Would it make us rethink what cultural heritage means, and perhaps assume a different kind of shared responsibility? I wonder if anyone out there has already experimented with this concept--if so chime in and let me know. Otherwise, let's make it happen somewhere as a pilot project.
The Greatest Grid: Great for Visitors?
A few weeks ago I spent a couple of hours at the Museum of the City of New York seeing the temporary exhibition The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011, which runs through April 15. I'm really glad I got down to New York for this show, because it reinforces a lot of the concepts I've been exploring on this blog, and in my research on city museums in general.I got there around 1:00 pm, and the museum was a lot busier than it had been the last time I visited in July 2011, when the main temporary exhibition was about colonial revival architecture. I had to wait in a line 20 people deep at the admission desk, and it was a good thing I arrived when I did. By the time I left at 3:00 not only had the admission line gotten longer but there was also a separate line for The Greatest Grid; the exhibition was so popular that the gallery housing it reached fire code capacity. I talked to a security guard who said it had been that crowded every weekend since the exhibition opened. At one point the exhibition curator, Hilary Ballon, showed up to do a gallery talk and had to use a microphone to be heard amidst a sea of attentive visitors.Blockbuster exhibitions happen all the time at art museums, and at a lot of science museums too, but they are rare at city history museums. Why is The Greatest Grid so popular? From what I observed during my visit, I would say that MCNY struck a chord with New Yorkers. The museum could've presented a fairly standard urban planning exhibition, filled with historic maps, and gotten a reasonable turnout. But instead a decision was made to structure the exhibition around the concept of the Manhattan street grid—why and how it was developed, and what effect it has had on the city over time. That's a concept that New Yorkers can really sink their teeth into.Anyone who lives or works in Manhattan contends with the grid on a daily basis (click here to see an excerpt from 12x155, a video installation by artist Neil Goldberg, included in the exhibition, that illustrates this point quite effectively). Not only (says the gal from Boston) is it a particularly easy system to navigate—because of the grid you always know which way is north, and how long it will take to get from one place to another—but it also has a lot to do with what makes New York, New York. For example, the 19th-century real estate boom set in motion by the introduction of the grid is one of the big reasons NYC became such a financial powerhouse. And because the grid doesn't really allow for inner courtyards, it constantly pushes Manhattanites out on the streets, ratcheting up the energy to that frenetic level we all associate with NYC.Consequently, what I observed at the exhibition was a gallery packed full of locals in small social groups, spending a very long time pointing and talking about this grid and what it means to them. Often they were trying to find themselves—their home—on the historic maps, but just as often they were pointing out all the interesting things they noticed about how other parts of the city had changed. Here's my slide show of all the pointers:[slideshow]Anyone who follows Nina Simon's Museum 2.0 blog knows that museums have a new imperative to craft social experiences that compel visitors to engage with one another while learning. The Greatest Grid is very effective on this level.Another thing the exhibition team did really well was to develop a small companion exhibition, The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan, installed upstairs from the main gallery. It features the eight winners of a call for ideas sponsored by MCNY and the Architectural League of New York that asked architects and urban planners to envision ways of improving the grid for the 21st-century. These proposals are quite creative, and pull in visitors even further by asking them to consider whether the grid actually works in its current form. They also reinforce a theme introduced by the main exhibition, that the grid was not inevitable but exists because of—and will continue to be shaped by—a series of urban planning decisions. I've written before about the need for city museums to address not just the past but also the present and future of their cities. Therefore I was glad to see The Unfinished Grid help visitors extend the historical timeline to include both contemporary urban life as well as hopes and dreams for a New York still to come.But the exhibition team missed an opportunity to address another new imperative that Nina Simon regularly writes about: creating experiences where visitors actively participate in making meaning, alongside the curators. If I were a New Yorker visiting this exhibition, filled with excitement and new knowledge about something that feels very personal and real in my daily life, I would want to express it beyond my own social group. I would want to stick comments on a giant map of Manhattan, or photograph myself sharing the most interesting thing I learned, or vote on my favorite avenue. And doing so would help me see beyond my own experience, to the collective life on the street that all New Yorkers share.New Yorkers, get thee to MCNY to see this exhibition, and then tell me what you think. Do you find it compelling? Did it make you want to share your own experience of the grid? What did you point at?
Urban History Exhibited in Aarhus, Denmark
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4h2d3gNBCf0]In October I flew to Aarhus, Denmark, to give a paper at an urban history conference hosted by the open air museum Den Gamle By. The Aarhus City Museum just merged with Den Gamle By, and the conference was organized in part to guide strategic planning efforts under the new management structure. This is a video of my talk; it's a half-hour in length. Hardcore city museum folks will also want to check out the other conference presentations, not only from Aarhus but also Copenhagen, Rotterdam, and Ghent—each one has a different take on urban history.
Things You Should Know About: Brooklyn City Reliquery
Have you heard about the City Reliquery in Brooklyn, NYC? It's a special place. It began in 2002 when artist Dave Herman started displaying things in the window of his ground-floor apartment, things he had collected over the years, little bits of the city. Other Brooklynites started to notice and encourage the window exhibition, and gradually the collection grew. In 2006 the City Reliquery moved into its own building on Metropolitan Avenue, where it hosts a robust lineup of temporary exhibitions and community events. For more background on the Reliquery you might want to listen to this NPR piece by Diantha Parker.I visited this summer and was impressed by how vibrant and imaginative the City Reliquery felt, even as a small space on a shoestring budget. Here's a photo of the entryway:
And here are a couple of photos of the main gallery, showing the kinds of relics the Reliquery collects:
Temporary exhibitions are mounted in the back gallery; when I was there it was the work of Colin the Slice Harvester. Colin is trying to eat a slice of pizza at every pizzeria in NYC; he rates and photographs as he goes:
And lastly, here's the back courtyard, where City Reliquery hosts both a film and a concert series, show-and-tell nights, craft nights, and other community events:
This is a completely different kind of space than the local historical society one typically finds in communities across the country, which makes sense because Brooklyn is so different from most communities—it has become the artist/writer/hipster capital of the United States (and in fact the NPR piece referenced above raises the issue of the City Reliquery’s conflicted role in Brooklyn’s gentrification). So here's my question to all of you: do those traditional local historical societies need a dose of the City Reliquery? Do the traditional local historical societies merely reflect more traditional local communities, or instead are they staying the same while their communities' interests and tastes are changing?
Did You Hear the One about
My own joke repertoire is pretty slim, but I did just hear about a really interesting collaboration between the Chicago History Museum and the improv comedy group The Second City. They are teaming up to create a new show about the history of Chicago. The Chicago History Museum is providing guidance and historical materials while Second City develops the show, and last month CHM hosted eight preview performances where the audience was invited to provide live feedback on the work in progress. Second City is scheduled to debut the completed show in December. A recent writeup on redeye gives this description of the preview:
Though in this construction phase the performances are different each night, but if a recent show was any indication, the comics don’t plan to hold back on much. Chicago Public Schools, aldermanic elections, Chicago police, Chicago politics, Wrigleyville, trolley tours, Schaumburg, and the bean (“It looks like a lady’s pleasure button”) all fall under the satirical scrutiny of the show....If this performance was any indication, the show will blend those kind of catnip-for-the-audience jokes with more esoteric references to Chicago’s long history.
There are two things I like about this project. First, it looks at history in a different way, always a positive in my book. Second, it makes sense from a collaboration standpoint. The Second City is a venerable Chicago institution in its own right, but it is not the traditional kind of partner for a city museum. Therefore Second City brings a lot to the table: fresh ideas, and a new audience. So look around your city: what are the beloved institutions, no matter the field, that might make interesting partners? And let me take that one step further: maybe city museums should establish residency programs, inviting specialists from a variety of different fields to spend a few months to a year creating collaborative work. I would like to see the results of such cross-pollination, comedic or otherwise. In the meantime, I'll keep an eye out for reviews of the new Second City show at the end of the year.
The Power of Community in a "Dying" City
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI]If you happened to miss, like I did, the Grand Rapids LipDub video that went viral two weeks ago, stop everything and watch it right now. The video was created through the efforts of Rob Bliss and Scott Erickson in response to Grand Rapids' inclusion in Newsweek's list of America's dying cities (based on population decline) in January. Hundreds of local residents turned out to appear in the video, lip-syncing to Don McLean's "American Pie," to help Bliss and Erickson prove Newsweek wrong. I won't go into the details too much because really, you just need to watch it.I've been traveling in Europe for the past few weeks, with spotty internet access, so I hadn't heard anything about this video until it was referenced on my favorite blog two days ago. Then there I was Friday morning in a friend's kitchen in London, reduced to weeping at the sight of all these Grand Rapids residents, from different walks of life, stepping up to make a statement about their city. Fifty or a hundred years from now, when Rob Bliss, Mayor George Hartwell, and even perhaps Newsweek itself are long gone, Grand Rapids LipDub will be a powerful historical document, a snapshot of the city during a period of significant change: the dress, the cultural life, the architecture, the people. Here's hoping someone stays on top of migrating the video to new formats.Addendum: Two more comments as I continue to think about Grand Rapids LipDub. First, it's definitely boosterism, but at least it's an organic form of boosterism, widely supported by local residents, in reaction to boosterism's other extreme, "ruin porn." And second, because I do see this as a form of documentary, something Grand Rapids will want to look back on years from now, I wish it had been able to show us the full picture—good and bad, ballroom dancers and local celebrities but also the city's homeless citizens or children without health care. But of course then it wouldn't be boosterism. I'll take it anyway.
DC Tries Again
The George Washington University has announced a major gift from Washingtoniana collector Albert Small. Small's collection of rare books, maps, documents, and ephemera comes with a $5 million dollar fund that will be used to create a new museum of Washington history in the 19th-century Woodhull House on the GW campus.In 2003 the Historical Society of Washington DC opened a new City Museum in the old Carnegie Library at Mount Vernon Square. Although there was considerable buzz when the museum first opened, it closed a year later due to lack of funds and poor attendance. It has since reopened with a smaller staff and a more limited range of programs and exhibitions. Local history can be complicated in Washington, where the Smithsonian museums, and the federal government in general, loom so large. The needs of tourists, as well as those of transient federal workers, often overshadow the needs of longtime locals. The new Small museum at GW seems to be a more focused project and it has the backing of a major university—hopefully it will fare better than the City Museum, and will provide some meaningful programming to help the residents of DC understand their city.Meanwhile, I'll take this opportunity to point out one thing I love from the DC urban history scene, something that does work for locals. It's the Art on Call project, which restored police and fire call boxes throughout the city, and partnered with contemporary artists to fill them with interesting installations: 
(Photos by Nick Eckert © 2009 via Cultural Tourism DC)Each neighborhood chose its own theme for its call boxes, so they really do have a local, community feel. They often allude to nearby historic buildings, or to famous people who lived in the neighborhood. The Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood even has a call box website with images of each box and a map of the box locations. So next time you are in DC put these call boxes at the top of your must-see list. Air & Space Museum can wait.
For Your Netflix Queue
Today I found the ticket stub for Baarìa, a movie I saw at the Glasgow Film Theatre last summer. Baarìa is written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore of Cinema Paradiso fame (another film that should be in your Netflix Queue if you haven't already seen it).Simply put, Baarìa is Tornatore's love song to his hometown of Bagheria, Sicily. History is a major character in the film: we see Bagheria change through three generations of the same family, from the 1920s to the 1980s. Without spoiling anything, there is a breathtaking moment at the end of the film where time runs together and you feel—acutely—Tornatore's longing for the Bagheria of his memories. Baarìa is a visually stunning example of the imprint a place can make on one's soul.Interestingly enough, parts of Baarìa were filmed in Tunis (presumably in the Medina?), because it more closely approximates what Bagheria looked like in the early 20th century. (As an aside, you might want to check out the work of my colleague Habib Saidi at Laval University in Quebec City; he studies tourism and cultural heritage in Tunis, among other places.) Which raises another possible topic for a blog post: cities that feel like other cities—past, present, or future.
Rectify This
Walking the Talk
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a big fan of exploring cities at a pedestrian’s pace and scale. You pick up details that could easily be missed in a car or train, and repeated walks over the same ground create layers of experience, a sense of change over time. Walking tours of cities or neighborhoods are nothing new; they’ve been around for years. But I’m starting to collect examples of tours that go beyond the typical expert-walks-you-around-and-points-out-sites-of-interest, or you-walk-yourself-around-and-read-said-expert’s-text.One I encountered recently is a self-guided, oral history tour of Providence’s Fox Point neighborhood called Speaking of Wickenden. It was created by students in Anne Valk’s Community and Documentary Storytelling course at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities. At each stop, instead of commentary from the traditional expert guide, you hear oral histories by longtime residents of Fox Point (historically it was a mostly Portuguese, Cape Verdean, and Irish working-class neighborhood) that were recorded and edited by the Brown students. I’m sure Speaking of Wickenden isn’t the first oral history cell phone tour, but it’s a nice example, nonetheless.The first time I heard this tour I was reminded that no public history project can be successful without great content—you either have it or you don’t. And these oral histories are great content, primary source content. I’ve posted before about online historic photograph projects like Historypin and SepiaTown. I would love it if these sites mapped oral history content as well. There are a few projects doing it in small doses—PhilaPlace and City of Memory are two. But it’s too bad that something as massive as the StoryCorps archive isn’t geo-tagged online. Meanwhile, you can listen to Speaking of Wickenden audio stops on the Internet, even if you’re not in Providence. Here’s hoping the students expand their scope to other neighborhoods.
Walking Through Time
In my continuing effort to keep abreast of urban history-themed apps for mobile devices, today I’m featuring a new IPhone app developed by a team from the Edinburgh College of Art and University of Edinburgh, Walking Through Time. It syncs historical maps of Edinburgh with the current, GPS-enabled map on your IPhone so you can navigate both geographically and chronologically as you stroll around Edinburgh. You can set the application to follow maps from a range of different time periods, 19th and 20th century. You can also toggle back and forth between old and new, or customize the transparency level to view both maps at the same time. A set of walking tours gives the application some structure if you don’t want to wander aimlessly.Chris Speed, one of the developers, was quoted in the Edinburgh Journal: "The great fun is giving it to someone and then taking them to where a street doesn’t exist and say ‘walk’, but they can’t because there’s a new building in the way.” Here’s a brief video explaining the Walking Through Time concept:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJwYv-6wgf8]When the project launched, Walking Through Time featured historical maps of London as well, but only for a brief promotional period. The team is negotiating a long-term rights contract to include the London maps permanently, and hopes eventually to branch out to other parts of the UK.Comments from users, posted on ITunes, have been mixed. Sounds like there were some glitches out of the gate (which may now be fixed), and Londoners want their maps back. But it’s clear that we are going to see more and more of these GPS historical apps in the next few years, and with experimentation and practice they will get better and better.Which reminds me of this great little animation that Plate of Peas Productions developed in 2007 for the Old State House, the museum I used to run in Boston. It shows nearly 300 years of change, both to the Old State House itself and to the neighborhood around it, sped up at a rate of roughly 15 years per second. You can see it here, as part of a longer History Channel piece about Old State House preservation, 1:10 into the video:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DalYthWk6FU]I’m wondering if all this technology is heading to a place where the historical timeline is visible, the way it is in the Old State House animation, not just for a few landmark buildings but on every street corner throughout the city. That means many layers of history, all open to us simultaneously, so that we toggle back and forth between the present and many different pasts seamlessly. And then what does that do to our everyday experience of the city? And what does it do to the city museum?
Urban Roots
In July of this year Asian Longhorned Beetles were found in six red maple trees in a wooded area about a mile from my house in Boston’s Roslindale neighborhood. Asian Longhorned Beetles bore into hardwood trees like birch, maple, and elm, eventually killing them if left untreated. Authorities consequently set up a quarantine area that includes my street. This means no one is allowed to transport firewood or yard waste out of the area, and an inspection is being conducted within the quarantine zone. There is a particular concern for the trees of Arnold Arboretum, which lies within the quarantine area.In 2008 there was an Asian Longhorned Beetle outbreak in Worcester, Massachusetts. The city was forced to cut down 25,000 trees. Here’s a before and after comparison:
With old trees, as with historic buildings and artifacts, sometimes you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.This August in Amsterdam, the tree that Anne Frank studied (and wrote about) from her attic hideaway (adjacent to the Anne Frank House but not on its property) fell down, despite efforts since 2008 to support its weakened trunk. Its owner plans to donate parts of the tree to Jewish museums around the world.On Boston Common, in the heart of the city, there used to be an elm tree, called the Great Elm. It was a landmark, and some people called it Boston's Oldest Inhabitant. When a storm felled it in 1876, L. Prang & Co. printed portraits of the tree onto thin, veneer-like slices made from its trunk; Mayor Samuel Cobb even signed the image to certify its authenticity:
Another Boston tree had even greater historical significance: the Liberty Tree. During the years leading up to the American Revolution, Bostonians met under the Liberty Tree to mount public acts of protest against the British government. Unlike Boston’s indoor meeting places—Faneuil Hall, Old South Meeting House, and the Town House—anyone could witness or participate in the goings-on under the Liberty Tree, regardless of class, race, or gender. British troops cut down the tree when they occupied Boston in 1775-1776 at the beginning of the Revolutionary War.Other cities have particular relationships with trees. Helsinki would be nothing without its birches. Every resident of Tokyo, and Washington, DC, marks the coming of spring in their city with cherry blossoms. The ombú trees in Buenos Aires are captivating, with their exposed roots and deeply shaded canopies.So how can we more fully recognize these trees that have witnessed so much change in our cities? Artist Katie Holten organized an outdoor “Tree Museum” along the Grand Concourse in the Bronx in 2009. The main feature of her project is a cell phone audio tour, in which 100 trees “talk” through the voices of local residents from all walks of life. Organizations in San Francisco and San Jose lead walking tours of interesting trees in their cities. And the UK’s Woodland Trust has an “Ancient Tree Hunt” feature on its website that allows users to find notable trees, both urban and rural, on an interactive map, and also to nominate trees for inclusion in the Trust’s registry. Plenty of science museums have organized exhibitions about trees, but I haven’t found any history museums that have explored, in an historical context, what trees can mean to a place. I think it would be an interesting project. With hugging allowed.
We Are What We Remember
I finally had a chance to try out Historypin, the website that lets you link old photos to Google Street View. Historypin was developed, in partnership with Google, by We Are What We Do, an organization in the UK that takes big goals like a cleaner environment or better schools and breaks them into small, manageable steps they call "actions." Historypin represents action #132, Share a Piece of Your History, as part of a goal of strengthening intergenerational relationships.I was home in North Carolina this week for my 20th high school reunion, so I rooted through my childhood photo album and found an image that seemed perfect for Historypin:
It's the house I grew up in, just after an ice storm in 1979. The house was torn down in 1984 to make way for a baseball stadium, so the site looks radically different today. I was able to successfully pin the photo to Street View and upload a brief story about the house. You can view the results here.Historypin debuted in June 2010 and it's still in beta form. In theory, linking historical images to Google Street View creates compelling before-and-after comparisons, and I like the idea that anyone, anywhere can upload to the same global map. But in practice, Historypin is still a clunky experience.First, the user interface is complicated and not intuitive for a general audience. The layout of the page is confusing and it's not always clear which button to click to navigate between Google map, Google Street View, and the specific information about each image--you can easily end up somewhere you didn't intend to be. Plus, the Street View function, by far the most interesting part of the site, doesn't always work properly. When people pin their old photos to Street View, the scale or angle is often skewed. It's hard to get a crisp comparison, to toggle back and forth between old and new, or to zoom out far enough from the image to get the overall effect.Second, the map still needs to be saturated with a lot more images. So far, mine is the only one pinned to Greensboro, North Carolina, a sizable city. I can imagine that many of the photos that would be most interesting for Street View--the ones that are at least 20 years old and therefore show significant change--have not yet been scanned into digital format; they are in closets and attics and basements all over the place. Historypin will be much more meaningful if everyone uses it. Seeding the content is a challenge for many online projects, not just Historypin.And third, copyright restrictions present a barrier. You're only allowed to upload photos for which you own the rights, which is how I ended up rooting through the photo album at my mom's house. Again, the most interesting photographs are the older ones, most of which are owned by historical societies and libraries. Historypin is encouraging these organizations to add their fabulous photograph collections to the map, and a few are doing so. Meanwhile, I imagine there are some local history enthusiasts out there who would spend countless hours researching, uploading, and pinning images if access and permission could be brokered.I hope after some retooling that Historypin succeeds, and eventually launches a mobile app version. In the meantime, did my test case strengthen any intergenerational relationships? I spent an hour talking to my mom about the old house--she remembered details that I had forgotten, and we debated the height of the magnolia trees and what kind of story I should write. Later my sister came over and added her two cents. We are all walking around today with vivid memories of a place we shared that no longer exists. Action #132: check.
Cincinnati at a Gazillion DPI
Wired Magazine recently ran a feature on Charles Fontayne and William Porter’s 1848 photographic panorama of Cincinnati’s waterfront, owned by the Cincinnati Public Library. Conservators at the George Eastman House have been working on the eight daguerreotypes that comprise the panorama, and in the process they have done a couple of interesting things. First, using a stereo microscope, they figured out just how far they could zoom without loosing resolution—according to Wired, “the panorama could be blown up to 170 by 20 feet without losing clarity.” They also created high-resolution digital scans of each 6.5” x 8.5” plate and trained a computer to “clean” them of spots left by dust and other deterioration, pixel by pixel. Looking very carefully, the conservation team has been able to discover all sorts of new information embedded in these views: faces in windows, shop signs, the time on the clock tower, clues to a imminent cholera epidemic. The panorama even provides early documentation of Cincinnati’s free black community. On the Wired site you can see all eight images, and zoom in on one of them at 10x.The Cincinnati project reminded me of a small exhibition I saw this summer in Brussels at the BELvue Museum. It was an in-depth exploration of a panorama painting by Jean-Baptiste Bonnecroy of Brussels ca. 1664-1665. Here's a photo I took of one section of the exhibition:
You could study the huge painting itself in all its glory, but you could also use interpretive features to learn more about the details Bonnecroy depicted. There was a key to all the major landmarks, for example, and an interactive touchscreen for zooming in on specific parts of the city. There was also a contemporary photographic panorama for comparison. If I hadn’t been scheduled to meet my husband, I could’ve spent a good hour in there staring at this image.The Cincinnati daguerreotypes also reminded me of my niece Franny’s recent fascination with Richard Scarry books. Franny is starting to make connections between different scenes—the photograph on the desk on one page is of a character who appears a few pages later, for example. Busytown, USA is a very different kind of city than Cincinnati or Brussels, but it’s no less real to millions of kids who have zoned out to Scarry’s illustrations (and in fact in 1990s the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry did indeed create a real Busytown as a traveling exhibition). I’d like to think that Franny is learning the kind of close-observation skills that some day will help her mark the subtle patterns and changes in her own neighborhood.Sometimes you need to see a city in broad strokes of history, but other times it’s just as important to stop the clock and get lost in the details. So here’s to panoramas and birds-eye-views, and Busytown USA. And here’s to looking really, really hard.
The History of Yum
The other day I stumbled upon a great little program called Food(ography), hosted by the delightful Mo Rocca. The particular episode I was watching (still airing a handful of times on the Cooking Channel throughout September) was about street food, and it investigated various carts/trucks in cities throughout the US. I'm something of a foodie, and I love Mo Rocca, so it wasn't a stretch for me to watch this show. But I wasn’t expecting it to have anything to do with my work until suddenly culinary historian Jane Ziegelman pops on the screen, on location at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in NYC.Ziegelman recently published a book about the food history of the Tenement Museum's turn-of-the-century residents, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. On Food(ography) she was explaining the street food vendors that started appearing in the Lower East Side in the late 19th century (watch her clip from the episode here). Ziegelman calls Orchard Street the "main drag" for Jewish push carts--pickle, anyone? Oyster carts were also common, providing what was at that time a cheap and plentiful local protein. And a concentration of German immigrants meant that sausages were eaten on the streets as well, first served on a communal plate, and then by the 1870s on a bun for easier transport. Irish and Italians in turn added their culinary traditions to the Lower East Side so that its streets, markets, delis, and home kitchens slowly blended into the melting pot we now call American food. I haven't read Ziegelman's book yet, but I imagine that food from pushcarts, so much less of a social commitment than stepping over the threshold of an unknown shop or a neighbor's apartment, may have served as an important gateway for New Yorkers sampling a different ethnic food for the first time. And street food is particularly significant as the food of the people: affordable, readily available, quick and easy to cook--no fine dining here.Later this year the Tenement Museum is scheduled to open its new visitor center at 103 Orchard Street. It will include a demonstration kitchen, run by Ziegelman, where visitors can experience immigrant cooking and connect with an aspect of the urban experience that too often gets left out of city museums. Meanwhile back at Food(ography), Mo introduces me to the Indian spice mini-donuts from Chef Shack and Ethiopian Beef Tibs from SHE Royal Deli, two food trucks gaining loyal fans in Minneapolis. The food history of cities continues to evolve in the most delicious of ways.It's lunchtime. Think I'll go grab a Vietnamese sandwich.
Imaginary History
Have I got a story for you. Earlier this month I paid a visit to two cities on the German/Polish border: Frankfurt on der Oder [German] and Slubice [Polish], separated by the River Oder. They used to be two sides of one German city, but Poland ended up with everything east of the river after WWII. The people who live in these cities don’t have much personal history there: Frankfurt was evacuated during WWII and very few of the residents ever returned; meanwhile Poles were brought in from elsewhere to resettle Slubice when it became Polish territory. There is one bridge across the river between the two cities (see above). From the end of WWII until 2007 it was at times a controlled border crossing and at other times closed completely. But now that Poland has joined the European Union’s border-free Schengen Zone, anyone can walk over the bridge without so much as a Simon says. The result: people who spent many years having nothing to do with one another (save perhaps a black market cigarette sale) are suddenly close neighbors. And although the two cities are starting to connect in small ways, traveling across the bridge is rarely a part of daily life. You can’t take public transportation from one to the other, for example.Enter Michael Kurzwelly. An artist who speaks both German and Polish, he moved to the area in 1998 and began staging public “interventions” to explore issues of identity along the border. Most of these interventions center around his vision of a united city, called Slubfurt, and with help from other residents he has set about convincing people that it really exists. At the invitation of Florence Maher, a fellow Fulbrighter studying border politics at Viadrina European University in Frankfurt, I took a tour of Slubfurt and talked to Kurzwelly about his work.Kurzwelly’s projects have been wide-ranging. He created a Slubfurt coat of arms, a rooster sitting on an egg. With a nod to the medieval city walls so prevalent across Europe, he got permission to erect wall fragments that delineate the Slubfurt city boundaries, a symbol of enclosure rather than division:
With help from other residents he staged parliament elections for Slubfurt; the parliament meets regularly despite its lack of official political power. An array of glossy tourist information awaits the Slubfurt visitor: an impressive travel guide, a color map of the city, and tours led by Kurzwelly himself. In each case some of the information is factual and some of it is not: Kurzwelly worked with local university students to change the street names on the map, and he makes up stories about local landmarks to suit his purposes. For another project residents were invited to sign up for dinner in the home of someone who lives across the river; a Slubfurt cookbook, with recipes that blend the cuisine of both cities, is forthcoming. “Mediatekas” in the two public libraries provide a wealth of resources for the curious, including artifacts donated by Slubfurt residents—accompanied by personal stories—that can be checked out like books:
This is just the tip of the iceberg; I could go on for several more paragraphs describing the efforts to actualize Slubfurt.People seem to be catching on. While I wouldn’t call it a groundswell, Kurzwelly has drawn enough attention to the divide between the two cities that there now seems to be a public dialogue about border issues where one didn’t previously exist. When Kurzwelly offered the residents of both cities the opportunity to apply for official Slubfurt identity cards, 300 people signed up within the first two days. You get the sense that if Kurzwelly ever left the area people would genuinely miss his interventions. He was even asked to serve on the culture committee for the Frankfurt local government.I find Kurzwelly’s work fascinating and brilliant. Bit by bit, he and his collaborators are creating a new sense of place for these two border cities. And they are doing it from the ground up (Kurzwelly actively encourages anyone and everyone to submit suggestions for interventions and to participate in their execution). What’s more, Kurzwelly believes in a lighthearted approach, which not only makes it more fun for his audience but also allows him to create a strong breeze without ruffling too many feathers. Public historians could learn a lot from his approach.Eleven years on, the city of Slubfurt now has its own history. Who’s to say it isn’t real?A special thanks to Florence Maher and Michael Kurzwelly for sharing Slubfurt with me. I came away with tons of Slubfurt material—the travel guide and map, campaign materials, a DVD—that I am happy to share with any interested individuals. And post a blog comment if you have ideas of your own for further Slubfurt interventions; I am making a list for Kurzwelly.
Barca
We hit Barcelona last week. It was a culture shock after Helsinki--loud, huge, hot, a little disordered, and out all night. It smelled differently too: on the streets there was always a faint whiff of frying food, garbage, urine, hot dirt. A few months ago I posted that it took time for me to get adjusted to the smell of Helsinki when I arrived there in March--my nose was off-kilter for the first few weeks. In Barcelona I realized that, having grown up in a warm climate, it was the underlying smell of things baking in the heat--slightly off-putting but nonetheless familiar--that I was missing in Helsinki.The Barcelona city museum is in the old city, in a complex of buildings that includes a medieval palace and church. The lower level has been excavated to reveal the remains of dyeing, fish processing, and wine-making businesses. You can walk around on platforms just above the excavations. I have seen this technique at two other museums: Pointe-à-Callière in Montreal and Aboa Vetus in Turku, Finland.Most of the permanent exhibition at the Barcelona city museum is devoted to early history. The 20th century makes a brief (maybe 30 second) appearance in the introductory video. I saw no mention of Barcelona under Franco--still too raw after 35 years?There was a temporary exhibition on the expansion of Barcelona and the influence of the urban planner Ildefons Cerdà. It was perhaps too academic for a general audience, but there were two meaningful moments that I liked very much. The first was El Cubo Atmosferico (the atmospheric cube). It was a transparent cube that you could walk into, based on the 19th-century urban planning notion that there was a certain volume of clean air every couple needed when they slept each night to renew themselves from the day and to protect themselves from disease. The idea was that every bedroom should be large enough to provide this volume of air. In the midst of such an academic exhibition, being able to inhabit the physical cube was a concrete teaching tool that worked.The second was one of the best museum videos I've ever seen, "Barcelona, Visions de la Primera Metròpoli." The museum commissioned this video from a production company called Nueve Ojos. Historic photos of Barcelona are animated so that they morph into one another and go from 2D to 3D, seamlessly. You can see a clip from the video on Nueve Ojos's website. Make sure you watch the whole piece because the end is particularly spectacular. If you like this animation style, you should also check out their other project "The Beijing of Lao She."After four hot days we moved on to Paris, which turned out to be no cooler. More to come the next time I have internet access.
Open Air Exhibitions
I've seen two interesting open air history exhibitions this spring, a permanent (or at least semi-permanent) one in Alexanderplatz, Berlin about the fall of the Berlin Wall:
And a temporary (one month) one in the Kamppi plaza in Helsinki about Warsaw Pact countries and their efforts to shed Communism during the Soviet Union's final years:
I watched a steady stream of people checking out both of these exhibitions. With the Kamppi exhibition, I think one of the reasons people stopped to investigate was that it presented an unexpected change to a public space that was otherwise very familiar. In other words, if you walk through Kamppi plaza every day on your commute and suddenly the landscape changes, you want to know why. I'm interested in the idea of inserting some public history into public spaces for just a month or two so that it becomes an event, as opposed to those permanent historic markers on buildings that start to blend into the background and almost become invisible over time. There's also the concept of it being right in the middle of your path, instead of having to make an active choice to walk into a museum to see an exhibition. I'm wondering if this would be a good thing to try in Boston, perhaps at Quincy Market, or along the Esplanade?