My Favorite New Yorker Issue in Recent Memory

Is the one from April 18, 2011, with the “Journeys” theme. Fittingly, this is the issue I happened to grab for my trip to Europe last month, and I read it slowly, on a train in northern Scotland, in a small town in southern Italy, during the white nights of Helsinki's midsummer. Under the heading "Coming to America," it has one-page reminiscences from six different writers about their experiences immigrating to the United States. I was particularly struck by Lore Segal’s piece, “Spry for Frying,” in which she talks about her memories of moving to New York City from Austria, by way of Dominican Republic. She writes at the end:

“The refugee in me still feels displaced when I leave New York. It’s not in America, not in the United States, that I’ve put down roots. It is in Manhattan.”

This quote reminded me of a point Jette Sandahl, the director of the Museum of Copenhagen, made in a talk she gave at Harvard back in April. She said that one either is or isn’t a Dane—this is determined by where you are born—but one can choose or not choose to be a Copenhagener:

“In the city we are more interested in where we are going than where we came from.”

Sandahl went on to say that city museums have a duty to emphasize diversity and teach tolerance, because part of the experience of living in a city means learning to share the same apartment building, or subway car, or park bench with the many different kinds of people who have also chosen that city to put down roots.In my own way I am an immigrant in Boston. It's true that I was born an American, but I come from a part of the US that's quite different culturally from this New England city. I have chosen to be a Bostonian, and I love my city all the more for the ways it reveals itself to me slowly over time. I like the idea of a city museum that has room for me and all the people I see on my block and in the subway and the park. So how do we make that happen? The Museum of Copenhagen is taking on these issues this year in an exhibition, Becoming a Copenhagener. I look forward to seeing it this fall.

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.

Dog's Eye View

Last week one of my students, Madeline Karp, told me about her family's visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. She was particularly struck by the Hall of Birds, which she described as a long hallway lined with glass cases displaying the bird collection, some stuffed in poses and some displayed more as specimens, flat on their backs. One case was filled with comparisons: birds from popular culture (Tweety, Opus from Bloom County) next to their counterparts from the natural world. Here's the photo she took of Toucan Sam:According to Madeline, there was a lot of intense birdness in the Hall of Birds. It was maybe even a little disturbing if you weren't used to seeing bird specimens flat on their backs like that. The experience led her mother to comment that it looked like the exhibition had been made either for or by cats.I was thinking about Madeline's story the next morning while I was walking my friends' German wirehaired pointer. I was imagining cats roaming the Hall of Birds, noses pressed to the cases, and a team of cat curators making decisions about the most tantalizing specimens to display (maybe throw in some fish for variety, and open the window shades to make plenty of sunny spots on the floor).Meanwhile, here I am walking the dog, and she's investigating every nook and cranny of the neighborhood streets with the kind of enthusiasm and detail that I wish every city resident would display. And it hit me: cats don't get out in the city all that much, but dogs certainly do. Has any museum ever done an exhibition depicting their city from a four-legged point of view? The urban history of things dogs care about: hydrants, parks, smelly things, leash laws, dogcatchers. Historic photographs taken from two feet off the ground. I would give a nice tasty chew toy to see that, and I don't think I'm the only one.

Rectify This

Like old maps? Have a little time on your hands? Maybe you want to participate in the New York Public Library's Map Rectifier project. NYPL put its collection of historic maps online, and is asking the public to help align all the old maps against a more precise contemporary map. The rectification process not only allows everyone to compare then and now, but it also helps resolve inaccuracies in the old maps. The contemporary map NYPL is using for this project is Open Street Map, which is sort of Wikipedia for cartography. By tagging "control points," specific coordinates that are constant for both maps, the historic one is brought into alignment with Open Street Map. At the NYPL site, in addition to actually doing the rectifying, members of the public can browse all the historic maps and also view the rectified ones in Google Earth. A video tutorial on the NYPL website, using an 1860 map of Central Park as an example, makes the process seem easy enough for anyone with basic computer skills. This project is an interesting example of crowdsourcing, and a great way to get to know a city better.

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.

The God of the City

When I was in China last month I spent a day in Hangzhou, a city of 7 million a few hours southwest of Shanghai. Like most Chinese cities, it has a temple for the god of the city. These gods serve as the spiritual counterpart to living local officials, protect their cities from all manor of problems (wars, natural disasters, crop failures), and also address the individual needs of residents.Hangzhou's current city god temple is not very old; it was built in the 1990s. But nonetheless it is beautiful, and well-sited. Surrounded by trees, it sits on Wu Hill, not far from the Hangzhou Museum, looking out at the entire city. Here's the view from the temple toward West Lake:And the view looking east, toward Hangzhou's business district:I'm not very religious, but the city god is a concept I can get behind. I'm thinking of America's Rust Belt cities, struggling to reinvent themselves given new post-industrial realities. Or Washington, DC, which so often gets swallowed up by the federal government. Or New Orleans. These places could all use a god just for them, to give an extra push where us mere mortals fail.Or a super-hero. Or a fairy god-mother. I'm not picky.

Where Am I?

I took these photographs on a recent travel excursion. Can you guess where I was?If you guessed somewhere in the UK, you're wrong. I was in Shanghai, China.I was visiting a development called Thames Town, which is part of Shanghai's One City, Nine Towns initiative. One City, Nine Towns is of a series of planned communities around the outskirts of Shanghai, each one designed after a different European architectural style: British, German, Italian, Spanish, Scandinavian. They were meant to echo the international flavor of Shanghai's colonial past, but something happened in the execution.The homes in these new developments reportedly can cost as much as $900,000, a hefty sum made even less attractive by the distance from the city centre. Many units were snatched up by speculators who have failed to find buyers. From what I have read, none of the Nine Towns have reached adequate occupancy levels, and in some cases construction was halted before completion.The result, at least for Thames Town, is something that looks like Disney, or a movie set: buildings that don't look fully real, few signs of everyday living, and storefronts with displays in the window but no actual businesses inside. It's made all the more eery by scores of Chinese wedding couples using the development as the backdrop for their professional photographs. In addition to the red phone booths and the Winston Churchill statue, there's a church and a church green:And tons of mostly British architecture:And a chip shop:And even fake British people:In the face of globalization, I believe each city should preserve and cultivate the cultural elements that make it different from any other city on the planet. We need authentic, unique places---now more than ever. Maybe I'm bringing in my own cultural biases, or maybe Shanghai's identity in the 21st century is in fact something like Disney, but Thames Town feels all wrong to me (even if it was a fascinating way to spend an afternoon).Much has been written about the One City, Nine Towns project. If you find it as fascinating as I do, you should check out this Smithsonian Magazine slide show, this piece from Time, and also this piece from the cultural journal Assembly. If you're really serious you might want to read a new book by urban planner Harry den Hartog, Shanghai New Towns.I was in Shanghai to present a paper at a conference for CAMOC, the city museums committee within the International Council of Museums. In the coming weeks I plan to post several entries chronicling both the conference and my overall experience in Shanghai, but Thames Town was my top posting priority. I hope my photos do it justice.

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: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.

I Want to Go to There

I'm a fan of the urban planner Charles Landry and his concept of the creative city. I just started his book The Art of City Making and came across this passage:

Our sensory landscape is shrinking precisely at the moment when it should be broadening. Sensory manipulation is distancing us from our cities and we are losing our visceral knowledge of them. We have forgotten how to understand the smells of the city, to listen to its noises, to grasp the messages its look sends out and to be aware of its materials.

I was reminded of Landry when I came across a link to a contemporary art exhibition currently showing at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in NYC. It's called You Are Here: Mapping the Psychogeography of New York City. According to the Pratt Manhattan website, the exhibition includes:

  • a three-dimensional map of the lower Manhattan skyline made of a Jell-O-like material by Liz Hickokan
  • an anxiety map of the five boroughs lit by sweat-powered batteries by Daniela Kostova and Olivia Robinson
  • a “Loneliness Map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington
  • a scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
  • a cemetery map of Polish ancestors’ graves by Kim Baranowski
  • an installation constructed from city ephemera by Pratt faculty member Robbin Ami Silverberg
  • personal maps created from a call for submissions by the Hand Drawn Map Association including works by Tony Dowler, Will Haughery, Janine Nichols, Yumi Roth, Gowri Savoor, Rob Servo, Krista Shaffer, Kees Touw, Dean Valadez, and Shane Watt
  • a series of mapped reflections on the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the ascendancy of the rock dove by Miranda Mahera
  • a New York subway map in Urdu by Pakistani artist Asma Ahmed Shikoh
  • photographs of a buzzing honeycomb map created by Liz Scranton’s bees
  • the preliminary artwork for New Yorkistan, Maira Kalman and Rick Meyerowitz’s post 9/11 cover for The New Yorker, and Kalman and Meyerowitz’s culinary subway map of the city
  • Nina Katchadourian’s New York soundtrack, assembled from found segments of cassette tape
  • Jeff Sisson’s ongoing Bodega List project
  • a Happiness Map by Jane Hammond
  • Bill Rankin’s maps of Not In My Back Yard-isms showcasing various geographies of community and exclusion
  • a diptych of memory maps by Dahlia Elsayed

I don't know about you, but I'm thinking this exhibition is probably chock-a-block with sensory experience. I can't make it to New York before the exhibition closes on November 6, but I'm hoping an NY reader might check it out and report back. Do you come away with a deeper, more visceral understanding of the city? And which pieces are most successful? In the meantime, the rest of you can find more description and some photographs at UrbanOmnibus.

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.

Soul Landscapes

A few weeks before I left Helsinki in June the director of the Helsinki City Museum, Tiina Merisalo, invited my husband and me over for dinner. In the middle of new potatoes and salmon smoked by her husband Matti, the subject of “soul landscapes” came up. This concept was new to me, but as Tiina explains it, your soul landscape is the one that hits you in the center of your chest, they one you always carry with you, the one that immediately feels like home. It is often the landscape of your childhood, but it doesn’t have to be.Tiina’s family is from Oulu, on the western coast of Finland. She says her soul landscape is the sea at Oulu. Her husband Matti grew up in East Helsinki and has never lived anywhere else. This is his soul landscape—you can see it in his eyes when he talks about his neighborhood. For my husband Graham it’s the wooded lakes of New England, for which he found an excellent Finnish substitute, Kuusijarvi, a short bus ride from Helsinki centre:And me? Mary Chapin Carpenter wrote a song that describes my soul landscape perfectly, called I Am a Town. It's the rural American south of my childhood, in 5 o’clock sun, as seen from the local road—tobacco, corn, and cotton fields, decaying wooden barns, rusted-out cars. This will give you an idea:Even though 3 out of 4 of the examples above have to do with countryside, I don’t mean to imply that cities can’t be soul landscapes—anyone who has ever watched a Woody Allen movie can see that’s not true. I know plenty of people whose cities hit them in their chest.Ultimately soul landscapes are about personal memory and personal history, about an affinity for a place that develops slowly over time, based on a multitude of small interactions and visual impressions that pile up in the brain. As I consider new ways of creating public history for cities, I am particularly interested in the power of these personal histories, and the collective memory points at which many people’s personal histories intersect—Boston’s 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire or San Francisco’s 1967 Summer of Love, to give two random examples.In 2006 the Museum of London launched an online project called Map My London that had the potential to be a really wonderful representation of this concept. Members of the public were invited to tag a Google map of the city with personal memories, creating what the museum called London’s “emotional memory bank.” Sometime this year Map My London was taken off the web—not sure if the museum didn’t feel it was achieving its goals, or if it’s being retooled, or what. You can see a screenshot of what it used to look like at the Google Maps Mania blog.I’d like to see more cities try things like Map My London. Heck, I’d like to design a project like this myself. But in the meantime, I’d like to hear about your soul landscape. Mountains, rivers, fields or skyscrapers and sidewalks? What’s the landscape that calls to you?

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.

21st-Century Warriors

I was in Amsterdam a week after this summer's World Cup championship game, in which Netherlands lost to Spain, 1-0. At the Amsterdam Historical Museum I saw this exhibition case, built out from the side of the building into a public courtyard:It normally houses just the medieval armor, but was updated to include the orange dress and vuvuzela in response to the World Cup. Here's another angle:In a previous World Cup match against Denmark, 36 young women were thrown out of the game for allegedly participating in a publicity stunt by Bavaria beer in orange dresses like this one. Several online sources quoted museum spokesman Hester Gersonius: "The orange dress stands for 'originality, cheekiness, entrepreneurship, creativity and humor, in short, all qualities that belong both to Amsterdam and our museum." I love the contrast with the armor, and the fact that the museum was able to respond so quickly to an incident that everyone in Amsterdam was talking about.Of all the city museums I visited in Europe this year, Amsterdam Historical Museum was one of my favorites. Stay tuned for more discussion of its strengths in subsequent posts.

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.