Friendville City Museum

This post may leave me open for a lot of ribbing because it will sound so dorky, but I’m going to do it anyway. About ten years ago, my college mates and I came up with a concept that to us is quite sticky. It’s called Friendville, and it’s the imaginary city of our dreams. Friendville is exactly an hour from every place we care about: the mountains, the sea, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Barcelona—you get the idea. Moreover, every person we care about lives there (or at least keeps a pied à terre). And our families are as close—or as far—as each of us wants them to be. That amazing Vietnamese noodle shop in Minneapolis? It’s there. So is the yummy brunch spot from Providence, and the hole-in-the-wall Atlanta BBQ joint. Friendville has a whole slew of jobs in each of our chosen fields, no matter how obscure they are. And there’s something new to discover—an interesting building, a flea market, a park with giant old trees, a public concert—around every corner. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to imagine city history in Friendville. It goes without saying that there must be an excellent city museum, where I am in charge, with an endowment of 80 gazillion-jillion USD. But if I could create a city where history truly mattered, what would it look like, in everyday practice? Here are some of my ideas:

• Whenever you move into a new home or apartment in Friendville, along with the keys you receive a detailed history of the place—who lived there before you, how the building has changed over time, and historic photos of your block.

• Once a year, the city museum holds a “Documenting Friendville” day. Residents are encouraged to submit their photographs and artwork, diary entries and oral histories, and artifacts and ephemera representing everyday life in Friendville to be added to the museum’s collection. Each year the date is different to reflect the changing seasons and other calendar variations. (This concept is borrowed from the local historian Carol Kammen and others.)

• The city museum also has been actively documenting residents’ mental maps of Friendville for several decades. At first these maps were drawn by hand by residents, sometimes individually and sometimes as a community-wide event. Now they are also collected online, so that patterns can be tracked more easily. Its mental map collection helps the city museum cultivate a deeper understanding of places in the city—not just landmarks and grand civic spaces, but also nooks and crannies off the beaten path—that hold meaning for residents, and how these places, and their meanings, have changed over time.

• One of the local arthouse cinemas (there are five, you know) plays old historical footage and documentaries of Friendville, continuously throughout the day. Residents can submit their own home movies and other found footage to be added to the loop. (And this one is borrowed from the Helsinki City Museum, which collaborates with Cinema Engel, next door).

• There is a lot of great public art, with an historical theme, throughout Friendville (more on this subject in later posts).

• All over Friendville there are spots where the GPS on your IPhone (all Friendville residents have IPhones) triggers an historic view of Friendville—photo or painting—to pop up on your screen. The IPhone app helps you position yourself so that you have the same vantage point as the historic view, to compare “then and now” seamlessly.

• Deep-set windows are quite common in Friendville townhouses—it’s part of the local architectural style. Over the last few years a tradition has developed: with the help of Friendville City Museum staff, residents living on the ground floor stage mini historical tableaus in their window wells to delight and entertain passersby.

• The city museum is working with the local schools to create an intensive “Special Places” curriculum. This curriculum teaches students a range of skills for understanding the power of place—mapping, direct observation, storytelling, photography, historical research, preservation.

Hopefully this vision of Friendville helps you understand my values when it comes to city history. I want city history to be creative, personal, and visual; to invite a high degree of participation from local residents; to permeate our everyday experience. I want to cultivate “place literacy” and experiment with the hyper-local. I want to find a way to make city history matter so much that Friendville’s residents truly believe the city museum has earned its $80 gazillion-jillion endowment. Pipe dream? Who knows. There are tiny bits of Friendville happening right now in cities all over the world. But how about you? What’s your vision of history in Friendville? (Or just Friendville in general; I could talk about its restaurants alone until the cows come home…)

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?

The Only Game in Town

In mid-March I spent a week in Berlin, at a conference for Fulbright fellows from all over Europe. In between sessions I did some exploring: the city museum, the Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, the Jewish Museum, Checkpoint Charlie, and a strange, edutainment site called “The Story of Berlin. ”What that week showed me is that for Berlin history, there is only one game in town: the Wall. Pieces of the Wall are everywhere, and so is historical interpretation of the Wall—not just along its former route, but at Alexanderplatz near my hotel, and woven throughout the tour I took of the city’s modern architecture. Moreover, the history of the wall has been commodified—you can buy your own wall souvenir from street vendors, take a tour of underground escape routes, or pay some guy dressed as a soldier a few euro to stamp your passport and let you take a photo with him at Checkpoint Charlie. I know another town with only one game (okay, two if you count the Red Sox). In Boston, the only history that matters is the American Revolution. Tourists flock to the Freedom Trail, they take their photos with tour guides dressed in colonial costume, and they buy tricorn hats and Tea Party tea to take home to Indianapolis or Santa Fe or Tokyo. On one hand, Berlin and Boston are lucky to have these dominant stories (as much as one can call the Wall  a stroke of luck). It’s wonderful that people are interested in some history, any history. At a time when visitation to art museums dwarfs that of history museums, the Freedom Trail is the largest tourist destination in New England. But as with most things in life, it’s a double-edged sword. For starters, having only one game widens the gap between tourists and residents. Sites like Checkpoint Charlie or the Boston Massacre become mobbed with map-toting, sneaker-wearing gawkers, and locals intuitively avoid them like the plague. The one game—whether it be the Wall or the Revolution—becomes something specifically for tourists, and locals turn away to look for other stories, for history only a longtime resident would know. This gap presents a dilemma for the city’s public historians. Do you focus your efforts on the tourists—the low-hanging fruit—or do you remain loyal to your local base, even if their interests are more diverse, and therefore more challenging to address? Or do you try to do it all, and perhaps spread yourself too thin in the process? And this hyper-commodification of history—how does it affect the work of public historians? I can say from personal experience that it becomes harder to find the line between quality historical site and tourist trap, and to stay on the right side of it. Particularly when it feels like lots of photo opps and a big gift shop with sort-of-historically-accurate bright and shiny things is simply giving the public what they want. Or, that if you don’t do it, someone else will. And lastly, does the only game in town help anyone—tourists or residents—truly understand and know these cities? Berlin is a city that is healing—physically, mentally, and economically. Boston is a proud city, a city that ended up on the right side of history. But that barely scratches the surface. They both have other stories too, and other identities. It’s okay to start with the Wall, just please let’s not end there too.

The Helsinki City Museum

While I am here I am working informally with the Helsinki City Museum, exchanging information and ideas. So far I have visited three of their ten sites, met with the senior staff, and toured two storage facilities. I will write much more about their work in coming days, but for now, a want to give a few first impressions. I can’t help but start with the fact that the Helsinki City Museum is considerably larger than its Boston counterpart, in every way: the number of public facilities (10 vs. 1), staff size (71 vs. 11, full-time), budget ($9.8 vs. $1.2 million), and the number of artifacts owned (300,000 vs. 7,000). There are two obvious reasons for this significant disparity. First, European museums have a history of strong public support, and the Helsinki City Museum is fully funded by the local government. By contrast, the Bostonian Society is mainly supported through private funding—grants from foundations and corporations, individual donations, and earned income. Its staff has to work a lot harder for every dollar earned, and therefore its resources and assets have accrued much more slowly over time. Second, in Boston, dozens of historical organizations compete for resources, visitors, and new acquisitions. In the 18th century the American Revolution marked Boston as an historical city, and therefore as far back as 1791 institutions have been springing up to preserve this or that historic site, or to collect this or that part of the story. The Bostonian Society may own only 7,000 artifacts, but caches of Boston treasures can also be found at Massachusetts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, Historic New England, Museum of African American History, the Paul Revere House, Old South Meeting House, Harvard University, historical societies for each neighborhood, and the list goes on. In Helsinki history is consolidated, and Helsinki City Museum’s sister historical organizations can be counted on one hand. I am also struck by the quality of the work at Helsinki City Museum. It’s not necessarily cutting edge, but it is thoughtful, comprehensive, and creative. Yes, ample resources do help, but we’ve all seen institutions with huge endowments that produce poor product. Perhaps good leadership has something to do with it? I have a lot of respect for Tiina Merisalo, and she has been director since 2003, long enough to make her mark. But I also wonder if there isn’t something about the Finnish workplace. Americans bring so much baggage into work, particularly in the non-profit sector, where many are poorly-paid and making do. From what I have seen, Finns don’t come to work worrying about their mortgage or their kid’s education or a myriad of social problems. They don’t hold onto a job that makes them miserable simply to have health insurance. They come to work and, remarkably, they just work. Does quality of life affect quality of final product? I intend to investigate further.