Who Told Us That History Is Dead? It’s Very Much Alive, In Our Faces, and We Don’t Like It.

As someone who has been privileged to help run history & preservation organizations for the last 30 years, I feel compelled to call out, from my limited experience,  what I see as not only my own, but external institutional bias, racism in the preservation field.

Please don’t respond defending preservation or historic districting, or Main Street Preservation Projects etc.  I know there are good things about the field – but these have come later in its life and are exceptions rather than the underlying structure to the effort.

1. Preservation is essentially an elitist, class and racially divisive activity whose result is a form of economic bias and segregation.
2. History sites can perpetuate a divisive form of nostalgia that supports and validates racism and exclusion.
3. Preservation can limit inclusion and perpetuate racial & social bias by regulating cultural narratives to simple themes.
4. Historical regulations, district codes, and Preservation restrictions can be latently economically restrictive and culturally exclusionary, benefiting only those individuals who can afford the added costs, thus ensuring a form of aesthetically gated communities that reflect the dominant culture.
5. Historic districting and preservation code requirements can be a contemporary form of “redlining” which excludes a diverse economic group of people from land ownership.
6. Preservation is susceptible to the harshest form of capitalism in that only those historic sites that are targeted with money actually get preserved.  Preservation choices are a matter of economics, not just history. The most revealing, unglamorous sites have rarely survived, nor have they been preserved.
7. As Preservation has become more professionalized and can require a four-year degree, college has become more expensive and thus constricts the possibility of a racially, culturally, and economically equitable pool of professional practitioners. As a result, professional practices are sometimes biased.
8. Preservationist, right now today, need to stop fetishizing the built environment and begin considering how preservation itself is part of the problem.
9. Look at the money in Preservation. A budget reflects our priorities.  Money goes where it is told.  There is nothing natural about the market economy or what gets preserved. Wealth Preserves Wealth.
10. Language as a tool of bias in Preservation with a weak notion of the appearance of diversity rather than full systemic representation. *

As Preservationists, We Must Do Better.

These posts were written by Franklin Vagnone, Twisted Preservation and edited by Samantha Smith, Gate City Preservation

I don’t suggest that this is the most professional way to experience museum collections, but I love getting lost in collections storage spaces.  Although I am aware of various structural ways that collections are divided and assessed, I think breaking down those divisions can produce new realizations. I interact with libraries in a very similar way.  I walk through unguided by intent, drawn to new and unusual things. 

The best part of this experience is that I allow myself the freedom to make conjectural associations between seemingly unrelated artifacts.  Initially convinced that I was the first to make such connections, I am happily amazed at how often I am proven wrong.  Guess what? That spoon on one shelf (covered in acid-free glassine) actually has a relationship with the chair ten rows down, third shelf up.

It was during one of these moments of unexpected connection that I began seeing artifacts as letters in an alphabet.  They are fragments of a language that, when combined in certain ways, can be the difference between the poetry of Emily Dickenson and e .e. cummings, and the nuances of the subversive lyrics of Cole Porter and Chicago rapper Noname.

I don’t come to this realization from a deeply intellectual background.  Reading was difficult for me.  Because I am dyslexic, much of my knowledge comes from experience and physically engaging in situations.  Rarely can I engage in a situation without understanding the basic parts and behaviors.  I find it odd that others consider me theoretically minded and without practicality, when quite the opposite is true.  Anyone who has worked with me knows that I arrive at theory and strategy by way of tactile engagement and experience.

I think that is why I so love artifacts.  As physical things, I can get to the narratives through the “thingness of the thing.” My interest in collections, in addition to long-term stewardship of their physical condition, is centered on how those things can illuminate stories, make connections, and span generations, class, economics, race, and gender. 

The bigger questions I have now, relate to how the “alphabet” of collections and artifacts can be combined in the digital text of social media. I think of artifacts as isolated letters.  In themselves they are part of a larger alphabet; they contain histories and evolution for their use.  Beyond that, they hold potential–vast potential to express anything. I think this potential can be realized by creatively combining four concepts:

1. Narrative
2. Methodology of communication
3. Connections to contemporary life
4. Intangible histories

NARRATIVE: The best collaborative projects I have worked on are ones in which the curator of collections/artifacts reaches into the present day, spans time, and engages inclusive voices.  These sorts of narrative efforts work best when the nostalgia of the artifact conceptually rises above its function, and through intent, illuminates the world around us. It is not just the facts and function of the artifact, but the poetry of its inclusion within the larger time span and world.

METHODOLOGY: Given new digital forms of communication, how we showcase an artifact can have much to do with how compellingly the ideas surrounding it are publicly perceived.  In addition, there are platforms that allow still images with text, video, and both.  My experience suggests that elevating the artifact above its physical-ness and using it as a platform to tell an entirely additional layer of narrative can greatly engage our potential audiences.  In many ways it can be similar to the idea of “social stories” used in autism spectrum educational projects.  The intent of the “social story,” beyond the particular site or experience, is to reduce anxiety and contain expectations. The use of digital platforms can enhance collections, not just exhibit them online.

CONNECTIONS: An artifact is valuable beyond itself inasmuch as we allow it to speak to issues wider than its particular era, use, and function.  A meaningful exercise is to take headline news and force oneself to make connections to it through artifacts and narratives found in a collection. This process may feel a bit forced at first, but after participants get used to the concept, the connections are authentic, effortless, and material.

INTANGIBLE: Often when thinking about collections and artifacts, I remained in the world of the physical.  It was hard for me to think about the behaviors that defined a particular object.  As I mature in my understanding of curatorial practice, however, I am now drawn more into the making of the thing, or the use of the thing, or the behaviors that were assisted by the thing.  The intangible becomes the poetry of collections.  

LatimerNOW Initiative and Light on Sound Project

As Executive Director of the Historic House Trust of New York City, one project that I learned a great deal from was the Lewis H. Latimer House’s LatimerNOW Initiative and the “Light On Sound” (2015) Project.  Lewis Latimer (1848-1928) was an African American inventor, an electrical pioneer, and a son of fugitive enslaved individuals.  The family home in Flushing, Queens, NYC, was turned into a house museum and became one of twenty-three historic sites run by the Historic House Trust of New York City. 

The goal of the innovative LatimerNOW Initiative (funded by the New York Community Trust, project managed by Olivia Cothren, and site-directed by Monica Montgomery & Ran Yan) was to learn from Lewis Latimer’s life and highlight the multi-themed narrative to engage the wider Flushing community.  In addition to being an extremely important site dedicated to sharing the African American inventor’s experience, the house resides within an area that is quite diverse, including Chinese, Korean, Native American, and other various native and immigrant populations.  Flushing, Queens is considered the most diverse location in the world relative to languages spoken. 

In response to the diversity of Flushing, the LatimerNOW team chose the concept of “communication” as the theme to use in crossing language and cultural barriers. It was determined that a combination of collection items would be the catalyst for a community-wide engagement project.  The collection items chosen to address the idea of “communication” were a series of poems and scientific publications that Latimer wrote.  As objects, they were two-dimensional documents with a mixture of handwritten and typed compositions.  The “Light on Sound” Project grew out of this humble stack of papers in the Latimer Collection.  The project was created by a collaborative team lead by Caroline Drabik, Historic House Trust of New York City, Director of Curatorial Affairs, artists Jessica Houston & Mya Pindyck, and myself.  In the artists’ statement it outlines:

“(Light on Sound) is an interactive poetry project and installation that engages The Historical Latimer House and the Flushing neighborhood with the voices of community members reading poems. The work commemorates Lewis H. Latimer, African American inventor of the filament for Edison’s lightbulb, and poet. Poems can be turned on through light and called up with a cell phone. The poems that fill the Latimer House and extend into the community were generated, recited, and shared by the people of Flushing in three languages.”

Through this project, a collection item expanded beyond its simple physicality and engaged a city-wide, contemporary audience with current dialogue.  Topics included race, social justice, gender, relationships, and politics. The project grew to include signage throughout the community, cell phone poetry uploads, on-site poetry workshops, and recordings resulting in several on-site poetry slams.

One of the most teachable moments from this project was seeing how a series of two-dimensional, physical collection objects could be the catalysts for a large, interactive, engaging, city-wide project.  The collection items helped to document and define the intangible emotive connections between Lewis H. Latimer’s poetry and the surrounding community.  The collection was not an end in itself, but by creating new ways to communicate its value and meaning,  we were able to tell a story beyond the simple factual details of the artifacts themselves.

I also think that the more we as museum professionals can collaborate, bring in outside artists, such as the talented Jessica Houston & Mya Pindyck, to highlight a different way of seeing our collections, the greater impact these objects can have in our present lives.

I would love to hear what all of you are doing to expand the

usefulness of things?

*NOTE: Even though the project Light on Sound took place in 2015, much of the engagement was digitally sourced making it useful as a prototype in our COVID-19 era.

*Special thanks to: Olivia Cothren, Monica Montgomery Nyathi, Ran Yan, Jessica Houston, and Mya Pindyck.

June Lucas – editing

LatimerNOW Initiatove: https://historichousetrust.org/what-we-do/innovation/latimernow-2/

Light on Sound: https://www.jessicahouston.net/#/light-on-sound/

Caroline Drabik White Rose Curatorial Services: https://www.carolinedrabik.com/03-about

This “One Night Stand” almost didn’t happen.  As I sat across the table from Fabrice Duffand, International Delegate for the French preservation organization REMPART, and Pierre Housieaux, Director of Paris Historique, all I could understand was that the wonderfully French animated facial and body expressions and gesticulations meant that things were not going well.  It did suddenly occur to me that the obstacles inherent when trying to explain why sleeping in a historic space could be of value were multiplied by any language barriers.   I sat next to VP of Twisted Preservation, John Yeagley, who was my calm translator.  All I could do was sit and occasionally smile in apparent agreement.  Preservation is a collaborative and, at times, an adversarial sport – even when the players involved are on the same team.

The opera taking place in front of me turned out to be the core of this “One Night Stand.”  The discussion revolved around grass-roots preservation and how it can work under a larger preservation effort umbrella.  I do have a bit to say about this concept as I helped run two such organizations, one in Philadelphia (The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks), and the second in New York City (The Historic House Trust for the City of New York). It may not seem relevant to other themes found in these “One Night Stands,” but it actually forms the “meat-and-potatoes” of how and why I pursue these experiences.

With John’s translation, I realized that I generally understood the discussion that was taking place before my eyes.  I had many times been deeply engaged in this same conversation.   The argument had nothing to do with the concept of the “One Night Stand,” but rather how history is communicated, funded, and prioritized, and how a “One Night Stand” might be able to highlight these often hidden issues of preservation.  All valuable and important concepts to define. It’s not about what the site is right now, but rather the dance it took to get to the present state.  Such is the story of this particular “One Night Stand.”

This conversation was taking place in a room on the 3^rd floor of the Hotel Ourscamp. The building was to potentially become the location for our first “One Night Stand” in the city of Paris. Fabrice had suggested it because in the early 1960s  the Hotel Ourscamp was one of the first buildings to gain notoriety due to the preservation efforts that surrounded it.  It would make a fascinating study of the long-term sustainability of preservation efforts. The building, the street, as well as the Parisian precinct it rests within all have a somewhat complicated architectural and social history. The animated conversation of preservation history notwithstanding, this complicated history is one of the very reasons that makes the Hotel Ourscamp so compelling.

GETTING THERE & THE CITY

This passion of the discussion reflects directly the complex evolution of Paris in general and the site of this “One Night Stand” particularly.

The neighborhood surrounding the Hotel Ourscamp is full of narrow roads, buildings buckling toward you, and steep stairs. This area of Paris, now called the 4^th arrondissement, contains some of the oldest surviving Medieval structures and urban street configurations of all Paris.  But it nearly came to existing only on old maps.  Tracing this story provided me with a contextual urban narrative to dovetail with the particular narrative of the Hotel Ourscamp.

Amazingly, much of the street system of the 4^th arrondissement is recognizable even today.  One of the earliest maps created for the city of Paris is the La ville, cité et Université de Paris by Olivier Truschet Germain Hoyau, c. approx., 1555 (Basel University Library).  It shows in amazing detail the built urban environment of medieval Paris.  If you zoom into the area that is now the 4^th District, you can identify the very block (and perhaps building) of the original Ourscamp Abbey outpost house. Despite a long history as the aristocratic district of Paris, by the late 18th century, the district was no longer the most fashionable district for the nobility. Following the French Revolution, it fell into despair and was abandoned by the nobility completely.

The street that the House Ourscamp rests is presently called rue Francois Miron (originally called rue Saint Antoine).  Hotel Ourscamp was built on this road as it was the primary entrance into the city of Paris for merchants traveling from the East. The configuration of the street still maintains the scale, direction, and curvature of the medieval pathway.

Although the center of Parisian commerce in the 15^th-18^th centuries, by the 1890s the Ourscamp building and 4^th arrondissement were in far too decrepit shape to live.  It was at this time that the concept of “urban renewal” took hold in Paris.  This urban renewal process began as an extensive survey conducted by Paul Juillerat from 1894 to 1904, which revealed problems of hygiene in certain districts of Paris. Specialists likened the occurrence of tuberculosis cases to the high population density, ancient building construction, and in particular to the narrowness of the traffic lanes in relation to the height of the buildings, resulting in a lack of fresh air. Although of some debate at the time, the City Council of 8 March 1906 created a list identifying six “islands of unhealthy areas” of Paris. The public authorities considered it essential to destroy or redevelop these neighborhoods.  Hotel Ourscamp was in a direct line for this push for urban removal.

The idea of urban renewal of Paris (and in particular the 4^th arrondissement) took many forms and proposals.  One of the most dramatic and absolute was produced by one of the master architects of the last century, Le Corbusier.  His proposal would have demolished the medieval district – and Hotel Ourscamp – to create a new city. To give you an idea of the potential effects of Le Corbusier’s urban renewal on the fabric of Paris, one only needs to look at the 1922-25 Plan Voisin for Paris.  In Corbusier’s idealized and unrealized project, a large portion of the Marias district was leveled to allow for large housing towers with extensive green space surrounding the built form.  The medieval streets were eliminated and replaced with regular, gridded vehicular and pedestrian avenues.  The only way to gain a sense of orientation is by finding the Île de la Cité and Notre Dame Cathedral, then look across the Seine river.  The pressure to eradicate the old in favor of the new was a strong and real potential. The Hotel Ourscamp and many others would have been lost.

“The street consists of a thousand different buildings, but we have got used to the beauty of ugliness for that has meant making the best of our misfortune. Those thousand houses are dingy and utterly discordant one with another. It is appalling, but we pass on our way. On Sundays, when they are empty, the streets reveal their full horror. But except during those dismal hours men and women are elbowing their way along them, the shops are ablaze, and every aspect of human life pollutants throughout their length. Those who have eyes in their heads can find plenty to amuse them in this sea of lusts and faces. It is better than the theatre, better than what we read in novels. “(Le Corbusier and Jeanneret)

This level of urban renewal never took place, in part because of the role that the Hotel Ourscamp played in the public debate regarding the value of historic place vs. the vision for a new modern city.  By the 1950s the Hotel Ourscamp was considered too dilapidated to inhabit and further, even to restore.  This is when a group of preservationists stepped in and advocated for not only the building but also the entire Maris arrondissement.  The city agreed to retreat from their renewal plans only if the preservation group would restore and occupy the Hotel Ourscamp and make it the historic center of the district.

In many ways, the Hotel Ourscamp owes its existence to a slow, tedious, argumentative process involved in city planning and urban reconsideration.  Just like the discussion I was witnessing between my two new friends, preservation doesn’t come easily or without a fight.   In this case, the fight saved the Hotel Ourscamp.

THE ABBEY OURSCAMP and the HOTEL OURSCAMP

To better understand the location of this Paris “One Night Stand” – the Hotel Ourscamp – we have to start our story out in the French countryside far away from Paris.  Hotel Ourscamp was originally built in 1248 as the merchant outpost for the Notre-Dame d’Ourscamp abbey. The d’Ourscamp abbey, located about 50 miles northeast of Paris,  was established in 1129 and became one of the most influential, powerful, and wealthy  Cistercian monasteries in all of northern  France.  The name Ourscamp (house bear) goes back to a very old legend that states during the construction of the estate, they managed to harness a bear into pulling a plow to plant the agricultural fields. One of the profitable economic endeavors for the abbey was the agricultural production of staple crops, bringing them into Paris (storing them in the crypt of the Hotel Ourscamp), and selling them in the urban markets to residents. Today the remote abbey complex is a stabilized ruin with a few buildings later renovated for other uses.

The original  c.1248 Parisian Hotel Ourscamp was a squat building that contained a sizeable full basement crypt used for storage of agricultural goods to be sold, and two floors of housing for transient monks (who were studying in local libraries), as well as traveling merchants and craftsman.  The entire building was made of local stone with the crypt structure designed in the early Norman style of groin vaults.   In about 1585 the original stone building was demolished, and a new building was built on the foundation crypt of the original Hotel Ourscamp.  The house built in 1585 consists of the main body with a façade, and two floors and a roof at two levels existing under a very heavy French roof.  After he Revolution, the abbey was expropriated, the house sold, and small traders inhabited the building. The house underwent many transformations and additions over the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, resulting in the facade and interior configuration of today.

It is because of this somewhat layered and complicated history that REMPART suggested Hotel Ourscamp for a “One Night Stand.”  Indicative of preservation in France, our world is never as clearly defined as we try to make it out to be; Hotel Ourscamp stood as a manifestation of the complexities of making sense of history.  Here we had a c. 1248 crypt, acting as the foundation for a 1585 building, that in itself had many additions and modifications in the 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th centuries, with 20^th and 21^st-century restoration efforts currently underway. You can’t get more authentic (and complicated) than that!

Somewhat off the beaten path of the tourist masses, just a few blocks west, this somewhat aesthetically quiet building held within its walls (and basement) a fully authentic and rarely surviving 16^th-century crypt.  The crypt and multiple-floored structure have been the administrative center of Paris Historique organization as well as a street-level visitor orientation center.  The orientation center is stocked full of books, maps, and photographs relative to the urbanism and social history of the city of Paris.  This room alone (along with the very friendly greeters) is well worth a visit.  Compared to more trafficked history sites just a few blocks away, this highly accessible and non-touristy-center was waiting to be explored.

 

The location within the building that was chosen for the “One Night Stand” was either the crypt itself or another floor of the building that, just like the original abbey travelers’ building, housed visitors.  We chose to sleep on the top floor.  Under the weighty roof structure, one big room was used as a storage space for tools used in the continuous restoration of the building.  All around our cots were chisels, hammers, ropes, and a myriad of smaller buckets and containers used by the restoration preservationists.  In some ways, it felt like sleeping in a tool shed.  All of these objects of use served to keep the intellectual concept of restoration alive with the imagined sounds of steel chisels and hammers shaping stone. The ever-present layer of stone dust introduced itself as a fellow traveler – a traveler who was also residing at the Hotel with me.

The temporary quality of the cots felt appropriate, given the transitory nature of the building’s use in medieval times.  I imagined the steady flow of visitors from the abbey coming and going at all hours of the day, unloading produce to be sold at the Parisian markets.  Rather than feeling like I was staying in a comfortable home, it felt like the center of a wheel tying itself to the abbey, the markets, and the locals.  This building served as the unifying element for the Parisian population and the outlying agricultural producers.

With our cots established and all of our electronics plugged into the outlets, I stepped outside on to a balcony.  In the distance, I could hear the church bell of the neighboring St. Gervais and noticed all of the intricate details of the building up close.  Of particular interest was how the Hotel met and transitioned to the neighboring buildings. Many times, the historic buildings I sleep in are isolated and separate from the world; however, here I felt like I was a small part of a much larger entity.  This concept seems central to a more inclusive view of preservation of the built environment.  Contributing to a larger whole in a way that sustains an important fragment of our built environment can be seen as, in some ways, more important than restoring a single building to its “original state.” Every fragment of the whole that is stabilized and connected to the other fragments around it begin to provide a strength of place otherwise impossible.

The only way to get to the any of the floors of the Hotel was through an idiosyncratic and irregularly crafted winder staircase.  It is one of the remaining elements from one of the earlier building efforts on the site.  The steps are uneven, and the risers vary in dimension. My physical interaction with the staircase quickly became a point of anxiety.  I felt like I would fall the entire time I was traversing this wooden obstacle course. My experience on the stairs became a constant aggressive reminder of how regular and standard our lives have become. It would be difficult for someone living in a world of standard architectural codes that regulated things such as stair dimensions and construction to internally and tactically feel and understand the constant present tension involved with authentic history sites and, for that matter, narratives.  Our expectations are to even out the irregularities, soften the abrupt connections, and cover up the unsightly repairs to poorly constructed realities. This staircase kept reminding me that authentic history is neither standard, perfect, nor easily understood.

One of the ways that I avoided falling down these stairs was to keep a constant level of connection to the walls that encased the staircase.  Even during the night when the light was considerably dimmer, my steady guide was the touch of my hand on the wall surfaces.  The walls changed from wood, plaster, stucco, and stone.  It was an interesting sensation to be so intimate with the building. There were episodes of gentleness as expressed by some of the smoothed wood, in contrast to the stone and mortar that felt aggressive to my touch.  There was real sensuality to my relationship with the building. In many ways, I felt like I was encased in an environment of uneven and highly sensitive conversations.  Like an awkward marionette, my foot was balancing upon the surfaces of the everchanging stair treads, while my hands were caressing the walls, while my head was trying not to bang into the low door jambs. Our world seems devoid of such thrilling tactile environmental communications.

As the sun set, I went over to one of the two dormers that windowed the top floor.  Looking out through the warbled glass, the quickly changing sky color reflected off of the surrounding buildings.  The transition of daylight to nighttime produced that “Margit” moment where the sky is brilliantly colored while the light quality has diminished. I felt like everything in this experience was transitory, variable, and fleeting.  How can one possibly make such a thing knowable? It’s not my particular view of history, but rather what I do with my understanding of that history. Just like this building to the city of  Paris, I am only a very small contributing element to the much larger experience, and my understanding of the world around me can be modified and mature as the intellectual environment changes around me.

On the street level, off to the side and out of the way stands a sign on which is written, “ATTENTION ESCALIER DANGEREUX.”  Wandering over to the sign, I noticed that it was signaling the presence of a very steep, narrow stone staircase bisected by a fragment of a barrel vault.  My hosts told me that the stairs took you down to the original crypt. The crypt was used as the storage space for all of the goods brought in from the abbey to be sold at the Paris markets.  The travelers would bring the agricultural products to the crypt through a street-facing door and then climb this interior stair to their temporary sleeping quarters.  The condition of the crypt in 196? has been documented by a series of pictures showing that the space was half filled with debris from the many building campaigns on the site as well as the structural collapse of some parts of the groin vaults.  It became the first step in the restoration of the building to remove centuries of debris from the crypt.  Looking at the pictures of the young preservationists working on the building in the 1960s, you are reaffirmed how collaborative and communal preservation is.  It strikes at a group emotional need for continuity and stewardship of significant places.

Today the hidden crypt is at the center of the restoration efforts by Historique Paris.  Entering the space gives you a visual manifestation of all phases of restoration.  The activity and intense effort to restore the crypt is very obvious.  It is very rare to be able to get immersive in active restoration efforts. It is a fascinating experience to wander the space and decipher the process and history of the space through visual clues. Scaffolding and wood buttress staging are placed throughout the space as left behind skeletons of activity.  To a preservationist like me, the tools of the trade are just as interesting as the structure itself.  So much of the process is hidden from the public’s view.

When I visit historic sites, I tend to look for the details and the anomalies to the overall “packaged narrative.” While experiencing the crypt, my eye was pulled, not into the regular spacing and organization of the groin vaults, but the idiosyncrasies of around the edges – the items that caused a disjuncture to the cohesion of the space.  One of those was a small wastewater line scurrying out of a hole in the 16^th-century foundation wall and traveling straight up into the building above.  To the right of the wastewater pipe was a small opening in the wall which opened up onto the street level.  The light storming through that tiny space made me realize how dense and dark the crypt felt.  On the opposite wall was a mysterious gate which locked off another space and hallway.  Upon asking my host, he told me that it goes into the neighboring building.  Most medieval foundations of Paris are intertwined with interconnected passageways and odd spacial relationships.

There is something about being in the ground, underneath all of the beauty of Paris, dark and removed from the public facing facade of this extraordinary city, that I felt a connection to the everyday people like myself who lived (and live presently) all around where I am standing.  Who preserves those memories? Who preserves those everyday experiences and tactile interactions?  Like my hand rubbing along the stone and wood wall as I ascended the spiral stair in the Hotel Ourscamp, who keeps that memory alive?  The insignificant. The fleeting. The common?

Exiting the crypt, I traveled through time all the way up to the top floor, turned around, and traveled all the way down the stairs to the street level.  Catching my breath and sitting on a chair in the now-closed visitors center of Paris Historique, I heard noise coming from the street.  It was getting louder and louder.  The street felt very narrow so that all of the activity occurring on either side of the street seemed to be occurring directly in front of my view.  Suddenly, and without any expectation on my part, streamed a large Parisian Garbage truck.  It kept stopping – men would jump off, grab the trash, throw it in the back, and the truck would move on.  It was fluid with almost no abrupt stopping or starting.  There was something very startling about this experience as I had just come out of the 15^th-century crypt and now I was assaulted with the necessities of modern urban city life.

Squinting to the flashing red light atop the garbage truck, I began to image how medieval Paris, with the exception of the Plague, civil wars, and foreign occupation, at a very basic human experience, was full of life, complexity, and the necessities of urban life.  The right bank, where Hotel Ourscamp is located, was considered swampy and was occupied by the merchant class who lived and worked close by.  It is where the main marketplace was located and considered the commercial center of Paris. It makes perfect sense that the Abbey Ourscamp would build their outpost trading storage and residency building in this area.

In researching the medieval markets of Paris, I became interested in visiting some of the present-day markets.  I traversed the city visiting produce and flea markets wanting to get a feel for this layer of the city.  We ended up at the Flea market. The environments of the markets were overflowing with unique and eccentric items.  The term Marché aux puces literally translates to exactly “flea market.” The largest Paris flea market (and that of the world), located in St. Ouen, was established around 1870, earning its name because of the ostensibly flea-infested furniture and other wares sold at the market just outside of the city’s northern fortifications.

There is something about the confusion and seemingly staccato quality of the Paris flea market that feels somewhat like what medieval Paris itself must have felt like.  Much like how Corbusier wrote of Paris itself, “Those who have eyes in their heads can find plenty to amuse them in this sea of lusts and faces. It is better than the theatre, better than what we read in novels.”  As I walked down the endless streets of flea market booths, filled with every type of vintage artifact imaginable, I could imagine how some would find this atmosphere anxiety-producing. Perhaps this is how Corbusier felt about walking the streets of Maris.  The discordant styles, dirty streets, and the discordant complexities of urban life must have made him fill with anxiety.  All one has to do is look at his architecture and see his version of the ideal is housed in a “machine for living” – clean orderly, and consistent.

In some ways, this is precisely where I feel like preservation may have taken a wrong turn. Often, I will see beautifully fully restored buildings exist within a world of sterile perfection.  Even in an attempt to preserve, we have the ability to kill the very thing that drives us to preserve it.  Not always, but often.

That’s what makes the Hotel Ourscamp so compelling.  It’s not perfectly restored, nor could it ever completely fulfill our modern expectations of code-driven architecture.  Its architectural presence is so strong, its fragmentary combinations of habitation are so clear, that it stands apart from the world – yet is only clearly visible while it is a part of the world.  Its power and quality come from the uncomfortable abruptness it has with our contemporary habitation.

My traversing of the 15^th-century stair made it very clear who was in charge – the building – not the inhabitant.  Like a Grand Dame, who was so old and had lived through so much, the building felt impatient and abrupt.  Not in a negative way, more like your great grandma who was way past trying to impress anyone but was instead living a transparent life of clarity and honesty. There is a point that you can’t cover up the wrinkles or flaws any longer, you can’t suck in your gut to appear skinnier.  You are what exists.  You exist as a result of your choices, decisions, and natural processes.  By accepting that, and embracing the inevitability of time, we become free from expectations and most importantly, nostalgia.

Maybe in some ways that is what Corbusier was searching for, an escape from nostalgia.  I wonder if we can bypass nostalgia by simply accepting things as they are and not imposing expectations?  Hotel Ourscamp exists both as a fragment of medieval Paris, but also as a part of modern Paris.  Its value comes from the simultaneity of these situations.  We must be able to hold both images and experiences together in the same place, at the same time, and allowing them to contradict and inform each other.  It is both a “beauty of ugliness” as well as a precious and rare artifact.  Just like the flea market, when you buy something, bring it home, clean it up, and make it a part of your like – it loses something.  There was a power to the companionship of place and challenging proximity of discordant abjectness.  Perhaps that should be the goal of preservation – to seek a simultaneous and challenging relationship between the past and the present.  Don’t try to resolve the uneven transitions, but rather celebrate those odd connections.  Like the passageways I found in the crypt that connected disparate buildings all throughout the Parisian underground, the undiagnosed and unconfirmed are in themselves an element of history worthy of being preserved and valued.

It seems to me that is what Fabrice and Pierre were arguing about – where is that line of ownership, value, and history? What is the level of anxiety and uncomfortable-ness we can accept as we preserve and restore the world around us?

After packing my bags, traveling down the stairs, and walking out of the building and toward the Seine River, I passed Notre Dame Cathedral.  It occurred to me that the Hotel Ourscamp and Notre Dame Cathedral existed at the same time in medieval Paris – both existing as fragments, friends of a bygone era.  After my experience at Hotel Ourscamp, the scene was overwhelming.  I walked through the crowds stopping once to view the Cathedral.  The line filled the building and lassoed the entire plaza.  I would come back another day to visit Notre Dame.  The best I could do that day was to snap a picture from across the street, but there were so many buses that the image I was able to achieve was, at the time disappointing, as you could only see the Notre Dame towers partially, the rest obscured by the busses.  Of course, three days later the Cathedral caught on fire.  And now, just like Hotel Ourscamp, I am reminded that we now have to hold discordant concepts simultaneously – and move on.  What it was, what it is, and what it can be.

SPECIAL THANKS:

Association Paris Historique – Pierre Housieaux (Director)

REMPART – Fabrice Duffand (International Delegate)

John Yeagley (VP Twisted Preservation) – Research, logistics, and translation

Karen Walter – Editing

One of my most difficult memories as a student of architecture is when I presented a project to a room full of people and one of the critics stood up, walked over to my meticulously drawn images and ripped them off the wall and crumpled them into small balls of waste paper.  I cried.  It was awful. I, wrongly, thought that it was a good project.  I stood there asking myself nothing but questions.

Decades later I find myself asking the same questions, but in a different context.  Is there a right and a wrong way to view & interpret history?  Who owns this history?  I keep asking myself this over and over.  I never really have a solid answer to the question.  As a capitalist, the answer might be, “whoever funded it”.  To a socialist, the answer most likely would be, “Everyone owns our collective history”.  Still, others might be a bit more cynical and state, “history belongs to the winners”.   For me, the deeper concern is how fluid is history?  How much change can history take before it burns to the ground leaving only ashes?

I am old enough to have lived several lives, been lucky enough to facilitate a few positive examples of cultural change.  What I am also old enough to know through personal experience, is how much real history is lost simply in the passing of time.  Details, undocumented comments, facial expressions, pivots of opinion, and of course subversive and behind the scenes constructions that no one publicly realizes.  Sometimes I have been involved in those meetings, but most often I have been on the other side of the door merely inferring from the results.

I do understand why most of us feel like real choices and decisions happen outside of public, transparent discussions.  This fuzzy feeling makes us skeptical.   I think being skeptical is a good thing.  We should keep pushing until we get a good answer – an answer that satisfies our innate skepticism.  Sometimes though, I feel like the monster of skepticism takes over and won’t allow for reason or discussion to compromise our thoughts.  Research is showing us that is f we generally have our minds made up, then there is not much anyone can do to change our minds.  I wonder how drastic, confrontational change must be for all of us to stand still – take notice – and realize that things are not as they used to be?

What is that moment when we realize that we have symbolically moved from Fall to Winter?  Do any of us have any real impact on the current of the stream, or are we simply in a raft floating along, falsely believing, that we are controlling the outcome?  I am not really speaking spiritually, although for many of you I know that you find comfort in believing that the stream is providence, for me I am wondering if anything we do really is impactful on the long-term life of memory?

Institutions have a life cycle.  Even within my life, I have noticed major organizations & companies go from monster economic engines to bankruptcy.  I have also, however, experienced the opposite trajectory from failure to dominance.  Are our attempts to maintain something merely a way for us to pass the time as the reality of this seasonal change inevitably rolls forward without any regard to our actions?

The machine is going to do what the machine was designed to do.  The question is – What are we supposed to do while it does that?  Is history simply our way of placating ourselves against the inevitable decay of memory?

I again feel like that young man, after the drawings were ripped from the wall.  I have more questions than answers.

Eastland Mall was the core of my adolescent social life. The enormous regional, retail complex was, at the time, the largest mall of its type in the state of North Carolina. Its parking lot was so vast that shuttles were needed to transport Christmas shoppers from their cars to the mall entrance and back. For me, Eastland Mall provided the setting for my high school existence. It was where I took my first date (think dinner and movie at T.G.I. Friday’s and the Regal Cinemas). It was where I worked a part-time job (hello Belk Department Store). And it was where “meet you at the mall” signaled the start of a Friday evening.  Looking back, I see that I was too young to understand the underlying social and racial bias behind the suburban mall movement, white flight, or the result of such forms of commercial segregation. To me, Eastland Mall was just the center of my universe.

A few years ago, it was demolished.  Pictures of the mall prior to its removal have a ghostly presence. Its death was prolonged and difficult to watch. The large illuminated “Eastland Mall” sign, like an artifact of looted colonialism, was removed from its original setting and is now accessioned as a collection item in a historical society. Interestingly, the same social reasons for the mall movement became the very reason for its demise.  Demographic change.

Something about this demolition makes me pause. Being an old, queer public historian, I have lived in the margins. I know that what seems central, solid, and standard can easily fall away. But this removal seems different – more intimate.  Perhaps I am now old enough to personally experience, within my own lifetime, the effects of such social progress and change.  I am no longer solely pursuing change; change is also being forced upon me.

People around me used to call me “Blue Sky” because I always saw the good and positive in a situation.  I was also the one who would step forward and try to solve a problem. I had to encase my deeply insecure self with a dense layer of positivity as protection.  Now that I am out, deeply flawed, and post-50 years old, it seems that rather than solutions, all I think about are the questions. I find myself pulling back, remaining quiet, and listening. That layer of bravado protection now seems like a suffocating obstacle, not a protective weapon. I am not so sure every problem has a solution. For the Eastland Mall problem, the solution was to remove it from existence.

When I was younger, I thought the past was a distant, observable, and clearly defined object.  Frankly, not of much use. Like a thing you can possess or an artifact you can buy at a flea market, the past had no nuance – it simply was with what you visually connected.  Now, in contrast, when I look to the past, all I see is an orgy of swirling, foggy, dimly lit shadows.  My new truth is this: the only way to figure out what is in the shadows is to walk into the obscure.

The difficult thing is that for those who do chose to enter into the mess that is “history,” you put yourself directly in the violently damaging range of “nostalgia.”  If there is one thing I have learned after 30 years in public history is that you don’t fuck with “nostalgia.”   Nostalgia is the fog that diminishes our ability to accurately see the world around us.  It will so reduce your vision that you can crash.

Nostalgia is fueled by words like “tradition,” and “precedent,” when what we really are describing is “memory.”  Truth is, memory is rarely authentic, accurate, or in reality what occurred.  In contrast,  nostalgia makes money, pays salaries, and is fairly simple to market.  In our Orwellian world of spin, nostalgia enrobes history like the fleshy substance of an apple.  Is the apple the soft part or the seed itself?  Again, I don’t have any answers; all I have now are questions.  I feel as though I am about to enter a phase of my life that is masked by fog and difficult to maneuver.

Like the empty site of Eastland Mall, restricted by a chain link fence, what remains when something is removed?   What part does nostalgia play in my memory?

I don’t really know.

All that I know is that it’s too foggy to continue.  I have to pull aside, wait till this confusion passes.  Maybe it will give me time to think. Maybe this is like a “time out” for me.  I am placing myself in the corner.

Who cares if I can make a chair without electric machinery? 

Oddly, I ask myself this question all of the time.  As a member of the team at a living history site, where among other things, we do show people how to make things by hand and without machinery, other than as a novelty, what importance might this have on contemporary visitors? How might my newfound knowledge of how a foot-powered lath benefit my thinking in 2018?  Could the answer to this question affect how I vote? What policies I promote? What I eventually do in my life?

Like a dandelion seed floating through the breeze, the answer to this question has far-reaching and unforeseen results.

I don’t know if I actually have an answer.  I understand why being knowledgeable about the tactics and strategies of history could better inform your decisions today, but I feel less firm on why the physicality of everyday life is an important thing to know.

I watch, stunned, as kids are presented with a rotary phone and asked to place a call.  The young minds have no concept of how the phone works.  “How do you text?” one young girl asks.  Another, instead of rotating the dial, continuously pushes the holes of the rotary dial expecting the call to go through.  Will they ever be expected to use a rotary phone?

I know how all of this must seem.  It’s not even an issue for the everyday person.  For a visitor to a living history site, it’s all novelty and visually arresting.  To those of us who really work at making these experiences meaningful beyond simply the cool-ness of the interaction, it weighs heavy on our minds.  Is it good enough to simply be compelling?  Is it Ok to also be thought-provoking; challenging; and sometimes adversarial?

I am fundamentally a sculptor.  I make things (  https://franklinvagnone.org/  ).  Watching people make things, and even better making the things myself, can be one of the most satisfying experiences at a living history site.  In fact, I often find myself sitting and chatting with the woodworkers at history sites – asking them questions. Why? What about this behavior fulfills something in the modern mind that is missing?  At a most basic level it is tactile.  Sensory engagement matters. Is that all there is?

What’s the next level of benefit of this experience – how can an obsolete action inform my life today in a useful and substantive way?  

Any ideas?