Mad about Helsinki

Porthania BalconyA new exhibition opened this week in Helsinki City Museum's main building on Sofianinkatu. Titled Mad about Helsinki, it focuses on favorite places in the city, some well-known and some off-the-beaten-path, as determined through a recent survey of city residents. According to Helsinki City Museum's website, "The exhibition presents these favorite places in the context of Helsinki’s past, making these beloved locations even more fascinating by giving them historical depth." An accompanying website organizes the favorite places by category—green spaces, cafes and restaurants, entertainment, landmarks, harbor spots—and invites users not only to comment on the featured places but also post their own favorites. I lost myself in the website, thinking about my own special Helsinki places; then I had to stop because I miss Helsinki too much. I'm indulging myself by recognizing only one personal favorite, pictured above: the amazing view I had from my Porthania balcony, looking out across Fabianinkatu at the yellow dome of the National Library of Finland and beyond to the taller white dome of Helsinki Cathedral, which for four months served as my own personal clock. This view was simultaneously immensely common—two major landmarks known to every city resident—and also intensely rare—few people get to experience these buildings from this perspective.Over the past few weeks I've been talking a lot with museum colleagues about the need for city museums to be hyper aware of current residents' experience of their city--what they care about, what they worry about, and what prior knowledge and memories they bring to any interaction with the city museum. These personal connections to the city need to be the starting point for every project that a city museum undertakes. That's why I'm thrilled to see my colleagues in Helsinki creating an exhibition that puts current Helsinki residents' sense of place front and center. More of this, please.

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:Worcester Street before, by Kenneth R. LawWorcester Street after, by Kenneth R. LawWith 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.

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.

The Vale of Humility

I finally made it to St. Petersburg. It was enormous and beautiful, albeit with a patina of decay. Everything I had read about St. Petersburg's relationship with Helsinki fell into place while I was there, just as it had when I was in Stockholm. These two much more powerful cities took turns ruling Helsinki--indeed all of Finland--until the early 20th century. It's funny how you can read about such things for pages and pages but not actually get it until you're there, standing in Palace Square, taking in the architecture of empire. St. Petersburg and Stockholm look like cities that have ruled other places, same as London and Paris.I was born in North Carolina, in the American South. North Carolina is sometimes described as the "vale of humility between two mountains of conceit." Its history, filled with small farms and tradesmen, is much more humble than that of Virginia or South Carolina, the "mountains" to its north and south. North Carolina was slower to develop economically during the 18th and 19th centuries, and was the last state to secede from the US at the beginning of the American Civil War, perhaps because it had less to fight for. Meanwhile, Virginia and South Carolina were rich in southern aristocracy: plantations, old money, power politics.Walking around St. Petersburg, along the River Neva that looks as long and wide as the Thames; and through the Hermitage, with treasure room after treasure room gilded and curlicued within an inch of its life, I realized that Helsinki too is a vale of humility, tucked between one Russian and one Swedish mountain.Helsinki's scale is so much more human. It has its own treasures but no real palaces or other grand displays of wealth and power. Its people are humble--they ask me "Why on earth would you want to study Helsinki?" And they ask it in my mother tongue, not their own--long ago they got used to having to learn other people's languages.The old power dynamics have left their mark on Helsinki--in the layout of the city, the buildings, and the street names--but they matter less now. Even if Helsinki never rules anyone else, its tech economy is making it a world player in its own right. And life is pretty great down in the "valley"--clean air, low crime, good housing. Moreover, the view of the mountains is spectacular.

I ♥ Helsinki

I was hanging out with a few of the staffers from the Helsinki City Museum the other day, and I asked them about their favorite places in Helsinki. First Tove Vesterbacka said anywhere along the harbor; to her Helsinki means water. She also mentioned Linnanmäki, the amusement park—it sits on a rocky cliff and the ferris wheel stands out in the skyline from many places in the city. Then Sari Saresto talked about her route home from work by bicycle, from city centre to east Helsinki. The landscape changes so much along the way, from the classical architecture of Senate Square, to the industrial buildings along Sörnäinen, to the island of Kulosaari, and then on to residential east Helsinki. Ulla Teräs said the wooden buildings in Vallila, near her home. And Jari Harju said in summer the Esplanade but in winter, anywhere inside with a good view of snow, trees, or frozen harbor. Which prompted everyone to agree that one’s choice of favorites changes with the seasons. Later I asked the same question of HCM director Tiina Merisalo. Like Sari, she described her commute over the Kulosaari bridge—this time by train and not bicycle—and how much it revealed about the development of the city. She also talked about east Helsinki, where she has raised her family—the neighborhood, the bike paths, and the old manor house. To her this is the Helsinki of real life, the part the tourists will never see.I came to Helsinki to explore city history and city identity—what makes Helsinki, Helsinki, and how the city’s history shapes its sense of place. Four months later, one of the things I have learned is that there is no monolithic concept of Helsinki; for each person the city is a series of individual places, moments, and memories that together form a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Certain images may rise to the top in the mind’s eye—a particular building or street, the water, the parks—but cities are nonetheless comprised of cumulative experiences, some collective and some that are all your own. The longer you live in a place, the more experiences accumulate—locals know their city better than short-timers. And I do believe that those who learn the history of their city understand it better than those who only live in the present.I leave Helsinki tomorrow, bound for further adventures in other cities, all of which will be interesting and amazing but none of which will be Helsinki. The eve of my departure begs the question: what are my Helsinki places? The challenge of my Fulbright project has been to accumulate a sense of the city at a faster than normal pace, to pack several years worth of place experiences into four months. I can't claim to know Helsinki like Tove, Sari, Ulla, Jari, and Tiina, but here are my top three:1. The view of the Tuomiokirkko, the national cathedral, from my 7th-story apartment—in snow and fog, lit with floodlights in the winter and glinting in the sun through the midsummer night. From the ground, in Senate Square, the cathedral is one of the most photographed landmarks in Helsinki, but I have a different view:Through the floor-to-ceiling picture window in my living room, this view has been a constant since I arrived here, so much so that I tell time from the cathedral’s clock. In fact, it has become my cathedral. I can’t imagine Helsinki without it.2. Kallio neighborhood, as a whole. I live just over the Pitkäsilta Bridge from Kallio, and I have spent a lot of time there. My favorite restaurant in all of Helsinki is a little Thai place called Lemon Grass, just a block down the hill from the Kallio church. There’s also Hakaniemi market, the Worker’s Housing Museum, karaoke at Paja, the outdoor deck at Siltanen, Karhu Park, and the ethnic groceries along Hämeentie. Kallio holds a special place in the cultural landscape of Helsinki. It’s a little grittier—ever so slightly rough around the edges. In such a safe, clean, middle-class city, I like the texture it provides.3. Helsinki’s art nouveau architecture. It’s concentrated here in a way that you just don’t find in American cities. And it’s a special brand of Finnish art nouveau too. It makes even the schlep to do my laundry interesting:I am not finished with Helsinki. If anything, I hope that my relationship with this city is just beginning; I would like to live here again someday. But for now I am bound for other places. We leave for London tomorrow on an evening flight, followed by Barcelona, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berlin. I will continue to use this blog to consider Helsinki, but I will also write about these other cities, and their city museums.

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?

Lenin Slept Here

While waiting for a bus the other day in Helsinki’s Hakaniemi Square, I snapped this photo of a plaque on an apartment building. In English the plaque reads “V. I. Lenin lived here 1917.” There are similar plaques on a few other buildings in Helsinki, and there's a Lenin Park. There’s also a restaurant I’ve eaten at a few times, Juttutupa, that boasts in its menu of serving Lenin. Such tributes are not as ubiquitous as the “George Washington Slept Here” markers up and down the east coast of the United States; and they have attracted their share of controversy. But nonetheless Lenin does have a presence in Helsinki, particularly in Kallio, a neighborhood with a strong working-class identity.Growing up in the American public school system at the end of the Cold War, I was taught to treat anything smelling even faintly of Communism as suspect. Therefore it’s been an adjustment spending some time in a city that straddles east and west; that fought its own civil war, Whites vs. Reds; that has very complex yet close ties to Russia. Helsinki is much less a Russian city than it was at the turn of the 20th century, but in the center of Senate Square, the civic heart of Helsinki, there is a statue of Czar Alexander II and not a Finn:A red brick Russian Orthodox cathedral shares the skyline with the white dome of the Lutheran national cathedral:And according to Helsinki Urban Facts, Russian-speakers are the largest foreign language group in the city. The history taught to Helsinki schoolchildren is different than the history I was taught. I’m grateful for this chance to see a different perspective, not just in Helsinki but in Tampere and Tallinn. RIP, VIL.

Mapping Locals and Tourists

I just heard about the work of Eric Fischer, a programmer in the San Francisco area who has created a series of maps of major cities showing where people take photographs. Because the public photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa enable geo-tagging of the images people upload, Fischer was able to create maps that show the hot-spots—the places that are photographed by many people every day. This is interesting for my research because it could help city museums visualize the urban spaces that are most important to the public—the places that possess a high amount of social capital, the ones we want to remember.As if that weren’t enough, Fischer took it one step further and used the timestamps on photos to divide them into those taken by tourists and those taken by locals.  He defines tourists as people who took photos in a given locale for less than a month, and locals as those who log timestamps over many months in the same city. Above is Fischer’s Locals and Tourists map of Boston. Blue represents locals; red represents tourists; yellow represents photos that couldn’t be categorized. Since city museums must be mindful of the different needs of locals and tourists, it’s really interesting to be able to confirm in such graphic terms that the places residents care about are often not the places tourists care about.Here’s the Locals and Tourists map of Helsinki:The first thing I noticed is the prominence of the ferry ride to the island fortress of Suomenlinna. It shows up as a sharp blue line extending from the southeastern edge of Helsinki centre to a blue and red island that looks like a bunch of grapes. The blue line is so defined that you’d think it followed a road, but it’s actually traversing the harbor. And then, of course, you can also see Senate Square and the Esplanade in bright and shining red at the centre, in contrast with the oval blue outline of Toölönlahti, Helsinki's version of Central Park, just to the north. I look at this map and I am proud to say that I have visited just as many blue spots as red. While I am by no means a local yet, I do know something about the Helsinki of Helsinkians.You should all go explore the cities you love through Fischer’s maps—there are hundreds of them. Fischer has made them available in multiple sizes, everything from thumbnail to the original 6137 x 6137 files—just click on the “all sizes” button in the top left corner of each map to access a version with more detail. Isn’t it amazing when information becomes a work of art?

Accessible Stuff

The photo above is for all my collections manager friends who like to check out other people's work. In March I was lucky enough to get a tour of Helsinki City Museum’s main collections storage facilities from curator Elina Kallio. I couldn’t resist snapping a photo of their old cataloging system. Don’t you just love the hand-drawn pictures? They have card after card like this. Here are some more on the outside of storage boxes:Digital photography sure has changed the day to day work of museums. So have computerized collections databases. Helsinki City Museum is in the process of photographing and computer cataloging their entire collection, but with 300,000 artifacts the work proceeds slowly. Elina estimates that they now have 65,000 records in the database; 40,000 with photographs. Everything else is still accessed the old way, by card catalog. As for the photograph collection, about 40,000 of 1 million prints/negatives have been digitally scanned.Having a key-word searchable catalog record and digital image of every piece in the collection will make it exponentially easier for the staff at Helsinki City Museum to research and use their artifacts. But projects like this one will have an effect on other city museums as well. Eventually, along with museum collections across the globe, the Helsinki artifacts will go online. Then it will be much easier for other city museums to compare their material culture to Helsinki’s, identifying both commonalities and areas of distinction.City museums are pretty good at analyzing and understanding how their city fits into the history and culture of its region or country. They are less good at comparing themselves to cities in other places. Globalization may call for more and more of such cross-cultural investigation in the coming years. It will be helpful to be able to use the artifacts as a jumping-off point, especially since Google Translate is making it easier for us to understand catalog records in other languages. So Elina, you don’t mind finishing the other 235,000 records this summer, do you? Look at it this way: at least you don’t have to draw each object by hand…

House Calls

Continuing on the topic of history-themed contemporary art, on Sunday I checked out a project called Encounters at the Helsinki City Museum’s main building on Sofianinkatu. For this project, the museum hosted a group of students from Aalto University who are taking a class called Museums as Artistic Medium. It’s taught by the artist Outi Turpeinen, whose work often centers on issues of museum display. The students created artistic interventions that were sprinkled throughout the city museum’s galleries, in and around the permanent exhibition Helsinki Horizons, during the month of May.Unfortunately I don’t have any photos of the students’ work—I forgot my camera that day and now the show has closed. But I want to tell you about one piece that got me thinking. This particular student had gone out across Helsinki, in different neighborhoods, and knocked on doors at random. If someone answered she would ask for an object to be donated to her display at the museum. About 20 of these objects were then exhibited as part of Encounters. Accompanying text listed the neighborhood and a few sentences about the donor, the meaning of the object, and why it was chosen. Objects ranged from a broken cell phone, to old cut nails found during renovation work, to a custom shot glass made by the owner’s husband (he had worked in the Arabia factory). From the text you could tell that these folks probably felt a little put on the spot—some of them chose the first thing they could get their hands on, or pieces that clearly held little value for them (a bottle of cologne bought for a husband who turned out to be allergic to it, for example). But others were thoughtful about their choice and told stories of personal significance.Which got me thinking. Lots of museums have started community collecting initiatives, putting calls out to residents to donate artifacts that fill gaps in the existing collection. And there have also been intensive neighborhood documentation efforts. Helsinki City Museum, for example, has initiated several projects to document specific areas of the city—in the 1970s the Pasila neighborhood and also Vaasankatu and Museokatu Streets, and then more recently Myllypuro. These HCM projects focused on architectural and photo documentation as well as interviews. Some artifacts were acquired too, on a lesser scale.But has anyone ever tried to take a material culture census, so to speak? Door-to-door collecting, literally an object for every household? Not that I know of. And would it work?These days museums try to be very selective with the artifacts they acquire. Once you formally take something into the collection you have to care for it forever. Although photographs and oral histories have their own preservation needs, three-dimensional artifacts are a particularly heavy drain on resources. And there’s also a valid argument that not everything is worth preserving—some objects just don’t stand the test of time. Therefore museums are very careful to retain their right to turn down a donation. Plus, working with so many individual families—to build up trust, to determine the most suitable object (you wouldn’t want them to choose on the spot as described above), to fully document each artifact—would be daunting. In fact I can hear curators all over Europe and North America sighing with exhaustion just from reading this.But on the other hand, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we might make museums more inclusive. If it truly were every household, a material culture census would create a direct, 1 to 1 ratio between the city museum and the community it claims to represent. It might make a strong statement that every life has value; we are all part of history. Maybe it takes working that hard to put history at the center of community life. There’s also something special about doing it with objects—both their tangible nature and their symbolic meaning.And to what end? Would it be worth all that work? Would it simply create a lot of white noise? I can envision some people deriving a profound satisfaction from the cultural acknowledgment of seeing their entire community in the museum, and the “everyone included” approach opening the door for a new kind of public history. I can envision a lot of people not caring. I can envision a really interesting conversation about the role of museums in 21st century society. I can envision wrangling over ownership and privacy rights. I can envision some powerful artifacts and stories that otherwise would never make it into the historical record. I can envision a lot of junk taking up space in museum warehouses. I can envision historians a hundred years from now being so thankful they have such a sweeping body of material to work with. I can envision it requiring a completely different skillset than what today’s curators are trained for. I want to try it anyway and see what happens.

Historical Art in Public Places

Forgive the recent silence; I have been preoccupied by a tough deadline. I was asked to write about my city museum research for a collection of essays on cities and memory, to be published (in Finnish) by the Finnish Literature Society. Now that I have sent my draft off to the editor, I can turn my attention back to you, dear reader.One of the topics I discuss in my essay is historically-themed public art. I think it can be a particularly interesting way to interpret city history, and at the same time build meaningful urban spaces. Here are a few examples of particularly successful pieces:First, there’s the sculpture pictured above, at the beginning of the post. It’s Balancing Act by Stephan Balkenhol, on Axel-Springer-Strasse in Berlin. It poignantly marks the borderland of the Berlin Wall with a larger-than-life figure of a man, perched on a section of the Wall as if it were a tightrope. The effect is iconographic: anyone who knows even a little bit about the history of Berlin immediately gets the message with no need for complicated interpretation.I also love this piece in Philadelphia. In 1976 architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown recreated the frame of Benjamin Franklin’s former house, just off Market Street. Nicknamed the Ghost House, it is an evocative and award-winning piece that writes Franklin back into the landscape of the city he so influenced.And here’s a project from 1989 in Los Angeles, Biddy Mason Park. It’s a collaboration between the architectural historian Dolores Hayden and two artists, Betye Saar and Shelia Levrant de Bretteville. The park commemorates the site of Biddy Mason’s home with two pieces of historical art. Biddy Mason was a slave who petitioned and won her freedom in the courts in 1856. She also eventually owned a significant amount of property in what is now downtown LA. While she was well known in her own community, she was not particularly remembered by mainstream American history until this project came along. She was a midwife and healer, and embedded in the concrete wall are impressions of objects from her everyday life—a midwife’s bag, a medicine bottle, scissors, a spool of thread.This is an interesting one that suggests possibilities for city history, even if it’s not quite that itself. Denise Ziegler’s 1999 Epigrams for Helsinki Citizens consists of messages cast into eight manhole covers throughout the city. It’s the kind of special thing you have to know about and look for, promoting a sense of discovery and belonging.And this is Edge of the Trees by Janet Laurence and Fiona Foley, outside the Museum of Sydney. It symbolizes the first contact between the two cultures, when Arther Phillip's First Fleet sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788 while the area's aboriginal people watched from the shore.Here’s one that’s a little more abstract: the Chicago Bean, formally titled Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor. While its connections to Chicago history aren’t that direct, I love that its highly-reflective surface acts as a mirror, situating each viewer in relation to the city skyline: in case you have forgotten, you are here, in Chicago. That's right, Chicago.And lastly, here’s a lovely little memorial that's halfway hidden, at Suomenlinna, the old island fortress in Helsinki Harbor. It alludes to the 1918 Civil War in Finland, an event that still isn’t completely resolved in the country’s collective memory. After the war, one of the prison camps for Red soldiers (the side that lost) was established on Suomenlinna. There was a food shortage throughout Finland, and food was particularly scarce in the prison camps. Thousands of prisoners eventually died of hunger and disease in 1918 and 1919 at Suomenlinna and in the other prison camps. Marja Kanervo, who created the memorial, explains how it works: “The years cut in the broken bedrock will disappear as slowly as the marks of violence, stretching over generations. In addition to being a physical contact to the silent world of the dead, the rippling water is also a wearing tool, which, like time, shall finally do its task. Until then, the emotions and traumatic memories stirred by the artwork take place in the present.”I lived in Washington, DC in the late 1990s. It’s a city full of neoclassical architecture meant to visually reinforce the power of the American federal government. It’s also full of public art in the form of memorials: some that are treasured by the public—the Lincoln and Washington monuments, Maya Lin’s groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial—but also a lot of dead white men, made of bronze or stone, with or without horses, that get little attention these days. I’m sure those military men and city fathers were important and known to past generations, but most of them have been forgotten with the march of time. I remember once while I was living in DC I made a trip to Cleveland and was caught off-guard by the contemporary public art there—colorful pieces, abstract pieces, pieces I doubted would ever get through committee in DC. My point being that each generation writes its own history, and therefore our commemorations and allusions to it through public art need to be a continuous process that never stops. Which is why I find this temporary piece made for a Helsinki festival in 2005 intriguing:It’s called Time Signal, by Elina Lifländer and Eliisa Suominen, and it creates a dialogue between a statue of the poet Eino Leino created in 1953 and the present day. I couldn’t find much online about the artists’ intent—I think the female silhouette may represent the writer Onerva Lehtinen, his lover—but even simply imagining the possibilities is interesting.I’m going to end with a few public spaces I’ve encountered in my explorations over the past few months that seem to be screaming for public art:The courtyard of the Stockholm City Museum. I was there on the cusp of the tourist season, so maybe it doesn’t stay this empty all summer long. And I’m sure there are good reasons to keep it a flexible, programmable space. But can’t you imagine some colorful and intriguing historical public art as a centerpiece?Tunnelgatan, also in Stockholm. This is a very long, public tunnel near the center of the city that saves you from walking up a steep flight of stairs only to go back down another one. Right now, its yellow walls are bare. Hmmm.And finally, this is an old gasometer (or gas holder) in Helsinki, just northeast of city centre. Gasometers are used to store natural gas; they are more common in Europe than in the US. This particular one is part of an abandoned industrial complex that is slated for redevelopment as a cultural center. In Dresden, the architect Yadegar Asisi transformed one of these gasometers into a 360 panorama of the 18th-century city. You can stand in the center and be enveloped by 1756 Dresden. Asisi did a similar panorama of 312 Rome for a gasometer in Leipzig; in 2009 it was replaced by a view of the Amazon rain forest. What should Helsinki do with its gasometer?

The Common Folk

The Helsinki City Museum operates a Worker Housing Museum. It opened for the season on May 5, so yesterday I went to check it out with a Finnish friend who lives nearby. It’s in Kallio, a working-class neighborhood just to the north of Helsinki Centre.The museum is part of a block of four buildings with a central courtyard, built by the City of Helsinki to house city workers. Visitors can step inside nine one-room apartments, each furnished to represent a different time period from 1910 to 1985. Here’s an apartment that housed a widow and her seven children, in 1925:HCM researched the families that actually lived in these “stove rooms,” and their stories are presented both by a museum guide who accompanies you through the building and in panels on the door of each apartment. A tenth “hands-on” apartment contains furnishings that kids can try out for themselves:You even get to see the toilets, in the basement (they were hooked up to the city sewer system in the 1940s):Jari Karhu, head of visitor services for the Helsinki City Museum, tells me that the Worker Housing Museum does not get a lot of visitor traffic—about 7,000 people during the 2009 summer season. But those who do make a special trip to Kallio give the museum higher than average marks in visitor satisfaction surveys: 88% rank it a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5.The interpretation is quite effective, and I was of course immediately reminded of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City. The Tenement Museum is much-lauded as one of the more innovative and successful museums in the U.S., and it’s also one of my personal favorites. The experience there is more immersive than Helsinki’s Worker Housing Museum but the two operate in a similar vein. Since Americans tend to think that we are the center of the universe, and since the Tenement Museum is so well-known in the museum field, I assumed it served as a model for what I saw yesterday. But it turns out the Worker Housing Museum opened in 1989, a full three years before the Tenement Museum started showing its first restored apartment. That’ll teach me.For much of the 20th century the typical historic house museum provided visitors with a window into the lifestyles of the rich and famous: fancy mansions, fancy furniture, fancy clothes, fancy parties. But that’s not how most of us have lived—historically or today. The Worker Housing Museum and the Tenement Museum are part of a movement to democratize history by interpreting the lives of ordinary people. First, the idea is that all history matters. But it’s also that, instead of expecting visitors to live vicariously through upper-class history that only represents a tiny fraction of the population, museums of everyday or working-class life build a more direct—and therefore more powerful—link with the past by presenting historical characters that visitors can actually relate to: the common folk. Countless visitors make connections between their tour of the Tenement Museum and their own family’s immigrant story. And indeed, a similar connection happened when I was at the Worker Housing Museum: Ulla, my Finnish friend, saw a cupboard in the 1940s apartment that was like one in her parents’ home. She was struck by it, and took care to explain to me its special pull-out board for kneading bread.The Helsinki City Museum’s commitment to interpreting the everyday life of ordinary Helsinkians doesn’t stop with the Worker Housing Museum. In my conversations with the HCM staff, it’s a theme that has come up again and again as their highest priority. For instance, when Elina Kallio, curator of collections, gave me a tour of HCM’s two collections storage centers, we saw example after example of commonplace items. Elina talked about wanting to collect objects that evoke the kind of sense memory Ulla had—objects from your grandparents’ home, or your working experience, or from popular culture. Many city museums have good intentions when it comes to interpreting everyday life, but they don’t have the artifacts to support such an approach; their collections were built at the turn of the 20th century, when historical institutions typically only cared about preserving the history of privilege. That’s why it’s so important that HCM is making a concerted effort to comprehensively collect the everyday experience of Helsinki. This is a resource-intensive process, but it is HCM’s way forward nonetheless.A few days after my tour with Elina I had a similar conversation with exhibition curator Jari Harju. We talked about projects they’ve undertaken to document everyday life in Helsinki’s neighborhoods, including one in Myllypuro, on the northeastern side of the city, that involved artifact acquisitions, photo-documentation, and interviews with residents (museum director Tiina Merisalo wrote an essay about the Myllypuro project for the publication City Museums as Centres of Civic Dialogue that you can download but keep in mind that it’s a 226-page PDF). In addition, right now Jari is working on a project to document poverty in Helsinki. It’s part of a collaboration with the Luxembourg City Museum and Minnesota Historical Society, among others. Many city museums still pretty much ignore their poorest residents, so this project is ahead of the curve.I think one of the major reasons that in the 20th century city museums failed to establish a place for themselves at the very center of urban life is because their version of history only took into account a narrow slice of the cities they claimed to collect, preserve, and interpret. As Tiina Merisalo asks in her essay about Myllypuro, “Whose image of the past is the museum reflecting and shaping? Whose city are we representing?” Like the Helsinki City Museum, many of these institutions realized the imperative for a more inclusive version of history as the 20th century was drawing to a close. Which leads me to three final comments.First, walking the walk is a lot harder than talking the talk when it comes to representing everyday life, particularly when it involves the aforementioned resource-intensive collecting initiatives. So I’m impressed by the progress Helsinki City Museum has made but also concerned about how smaller city museums will manage to do the same, practically speaking, even if it is indeed the way forward.Second, one of the reasons the Worker Housing Museum and the Tenement Museum are so striking is because the experience is intensely urban. Space is at a premium and thin walls separate neighboring families who constantly negotiate shared stairwells, courtyards, and toilets. So it’s not just the stuff of everyday life in the city but also the way one lives, with unpredictable situations and less personal space. Capturing this essential urban-ness—what makes city life different from life outside of cities—is an interesting challenge for 21st-century city museums.And third, one of the reasons the Worker Housing Museum is such a special place is because the opportunity to step inside a one-room apartment that housed five people is rare and therefore memorable—if it were as ubiquitous as the typical upper-class historic house museum then we might get bored. Therefore, this is not a prescription for every city museum to create its own working class housing site and then call it a day. Each city museum needs to find its own creative, fascinating, and unique ways to use the everyday history it collects.This post has gone on and on. I haven’t even touched on issues of ethnicity, which is tangled up with class in most cities (and yet in completely different ways here in Finland). I also haven’t discussed the difference between 20th-century history—the recent past—and, say, 17th-century history—the truly dead past. These are both important related topics but they will have to wait for another day.In the meantime, the Worker Housing Museum, combined with the homemade blueberry tart Ulla served afterward, made for an excellent Sunday afternoon. I highly recommend them both the next time you are in Helsinki.

City Branding

A tagline on the Greater Boston Convention and Visitors Bureau website reads: “America’s birthplace. History’s showcase. The past is present in Boston.” Meanwhile, Frommers.com calls Boston “relentlessly historic.” And Fodors.com says “to Bostonians, living in a city that blends yesterday and today is just another day in their beloved Beantown.” History is the core of Boston’s brand. Consequently, I have found it interesting to move to a city that doesn’t particularly consider itself historic. Turku maybe, but not Helsinki. A tagline on the City of Helsinki’s official tourism website reads “A little bit Eastern, a little bit Western—totally Finnish.” Frommers.com says Helsinkians are “the best educated, the best clothed, the best fed, and the best housed on earth.” And Fodors.com calls Helsinki “a city of the sea.” These websites all certainly refer to Helsinki’s past, particularly its past with Sweden and Russia, but they don’t describe it as an historic city. They focus instead on technology and design, the high quality of life, the water, the climate. History is not part of Helsinki’s brand. So this week I’ve been reading some of the branding literature, to see if anyone has anything significant to say about the impact of history on the perception of cities. I found a master’s thesis from Julia Winfield-Pfefferkorn that asserts that possessing a unique history helps a city build a successful global image; she cites New York and Paris as examples. I also found the 2008 Saffron European City Brand Barometer, which awards 20% of its “city asset strength” score based on “sightseeing and historical attractions” (Helsinki ranked 21 out of 72 cities). And in the introduction to the 2006 version of his famous Anholt-GfK Roper City Brands Index, in which Boston ranked 23 and Helsinki 36 out of 60 cities, Simon Anholt says that city brands “are inextricably tied to the histories and destinies of all these places.” But history does not play a direct role in any of his six scoring components: presence, place, potential, pulse, people, and prerequisites (perhaps because it doesn’t start with P?). So far, none of this is overwhelming evidence. So far, I haven’t found anything that adequately delineates a link between history and brand. I wrote a few weeks ago about Boston’s preoccupation with the history of the American Revolution, and it’s clear that its identity as a historical city yields an enormous amount of tourism and global recognition. Every child in America knows Boston because they learn about it in their American history classes. The same can’t be said for, say, Austin or Phoenix. Boston makes a nice example, but I don’t necessarily think that a city needs to have a globally-recognized history in order to build a meaningful brand. I would like to see all cities develop a stronger sense of their own history, but not for the sake of branding. In fact, I think city branding is a tricky concept to begin with—Simon Anholt himself even says as much. What I really care about is not so much branding—how many people know about a city and where it falls on a ranking list—but whether a city’s history has an impact on the daily lives of its residents. Can public history strengthen the social fabric of the city and make people feel more connected to the place where they live? I fear that such a correlation will be difficult to substantiate, qualitatively or quantitatively. My next step is to look at visitor studies. In the meantime, any thoughts, residents of Blogosphere?

My Approach

When I describe my project here in Helsinki, I’ve had a few people make the assumption that I spend my days doing research in various archives around the city. It’s happened enough times that I feel I should clarify my approach. I want to start by emphasizing that I am not an academic historian; I am a public historian. That means my job is to take the research academic historians produce and translate it into something that is not only easy for the general public to understand, but that also is meaningful, unexpected, captivating, or even entertaining. I’m not saying that academic history can’t be those things, but a lot of the time the techniques academics are required to adopt in order to be deemed successful by their peers run counter to the learning needs of the general public. My process typically goes something like this: 1) I study the academic history; 2) I use it to develop interesting content for the public; and 3) I have one or more academic historians check my work before launching, to make sure I haven’t inadvertently misinterpreted an important detail or nuance. Therefore, while I have spent my fair share of days in libraries and archives, I have spent just as much time studying the needs and interests of museum visitors, or searching for new creative methods of display and interpretation. What I care most about accomplishing while in Helsinki is further developing my skills to help the public understand cities and city history. So my primary sources are not archival collections, but rather the city of Helsinki itself—its buildings, streets, and squares; its residents and tourists; its museums and historic sites. And I spend my time:

  • Talking to residents, academic historians, and public historians about Helsinki, history, and city history in general

  • Exploring the city—sometimes on my own, in the shoes of a tourist; and sometimes accompanied by a local who can give me the resident’s perspective

  • Reading secondary sources spanning a variety of topics, from Helsinki history, to urban studies, to city museums, to audience research

  • Writing this blog, and eventually an article or two to submit for publication in museum journals

There is a vast supply of rich information in this city. Indeed, to borrow from Alice in Wonderland, which I just saw at my local Finnkino, I have six city history ideas before breakfast. At this point it may be a little difficult for you to figure out exactly where I’m going with all of this. But be patient, dear reader, and all will be illuminated.

History Repeating Itself, Part 1

It will come as no surprise that I’ve visited a lot of city museums lately, both in the US and in Europe. Patterns are emerging. Today I want to discuss one in particular: the permanent city history exhibition. Almost every city museum has one, and they are remarkably similar. They are almost always chronological in nature, starting with prehistory and native communities, and winding up somewhere around 2000. The following topics are covered, more or less in the following order:

  • Colonization

  • Early development and trade

  • [Insert fire/flood/famine here]

  • [Insert war here]

  • Industrial revolution

  • Transportation

  • [More war and disaster]

  • Immigration

  • Labor issues and social ills (at this point we’re somewhere in the late 19th century)

  • Modernization

  • [More war]

  • Famous local products and people

  • The time we hosted the World’s Fair/Olympics

  • New Immigration and ethnic diversity

  • Hooray for our city!

Such treatments of city history, on one hand, are admirable. On some level, every member of the general public should have a basic grounding in the sweep of history over time, and in the forces that shaped each of these cities from nothing more than a defensible position near a developing trade route, to modern metropolises. I’m all for an educated citizenry. But I see so many visitors with their eyes glazed over as they try to make it through case after case of the same old story, and I’m not sure how much knowledge they walk away with in the end. I’m interested in whether there might be a different approach. I wonder if the chronologically organized, permanent city history exhibition is even necessary (maybe it is—I’d like to hear arguments for and against). It seems to me that perhaps what’s most interesting to visitors is not what a particular city has in common with every other city in North America and Europe, but instead, what sets it apart. At the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, I really liked a brief audio piece on Pittsburgh accents. At the McCord Museum, in the Simply Montreal exhibition, there was a creative display about Montreal’s extreme winter climate, with historical artifacts ranging from snow shoes, to fur hats, to bed warmers. Not to be outdone, the Helsinki City Museum currently has on display at the Sederholm House an entire temporary exhibition about night in Helsinki, so fitting for a city that spends months every year in darkness. So again I ask, is the chronologically organized, permanent city history exhibition necessary? Is it a core duty and responsibility of city museums? If it’s necessary, is there a way to make it more interesting, and more digestible? If it’s not necessary, then what can we replace it with?