on columns and divided space

The temps are now in the 90s  in Tuscaloosa. Daily walks are best taken on the indoor track at the Rec Center. But two weeks ago, before it got too hot, my husband and I took a stroll around campus. It was then I got this photograph of Frat Row. The columns are always striking to me.

I never noticed columns on buildings the way I do now before I moved to Alabama. They are everywhere. During trips to the beach, I see them on everything from community college campuses to Publix. Last week, while at the beach, I even saw them in Big Fish, a  restaurant in a strip shopping center (I had outstanding Scottish salmon prepared "Big-Fish" style;my husband had yummy crabcakes).

Big Fish, an Orange Beach, Alabama, restaurant. 

I am reminded of what Gunther Barth has to say about how architecture fits into the efforts of human beings to create visual harmony. And whether on Gothic, Neo-Gothic or Greek Revival-styled buildings on college campus buildings or elsewhere,  pillars seem to represent something huge literally and figuratively. Regarding the latter, they represent how people look to the past as inspiration for their aspirations. This was definitely true during emerging urban life in antebellum America.

But I really like this idea of visual harmony, which is what planners of modern cities tried to create by dividing space via, among other things, the gridiron street system. In such a system, streets form a grid by running at right angles. Harmony was also created in how people organized, as Barth has written, "distinct areas of work, residence, and leisure." Early businesses found many proprietors living upstairs, but that increasingly changed (although with gentrification, some of those old ways are coming back. I have a friend whose family owned a restaurant in a happening part of a big city and his sister lived upstairs above it).

The idea of space in emerging urban life is one of the topics I will address this fall with students enrolled in this course. In the meantime, I will keep thinking it all over as I keep getting to know the campus and, indeed, Tuscaloosa. I have been here for more than two years, but am still learning my way around. The numbered grid streets are helpful.

turn of the century urban traffic

Clarence King surveyed the Far West for the U.S. government.

And I thought traffic around Tuscaloosa could be trying. Up top is footage of traffic in London, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles at the turn of the century. It reminds me of a clip I posted earlier with "La Femme D'Argent," an electronica tune by the French band Air, playing underneath (check that video out to the lower right). My colleague, Dr. Bart Elmore, who did a mash-up for a soundtrack under a short film students in this class produced last fall, hipped me to "La Femme."  During a talk before the premiere of the film in our own ten Hoor hall, Bart mentioned that it was interesting to see how well modern-day European  music went with images from nineteenth century Tuscaloosa. Certainly many local buildings, among them Jemison Mansion, have European influences.

And speaking of the nineteenth century, Clarence King, a geologist born in that century and subject of one of this course's readings, once claimed Manhattan "as his new frontier." He was particularly drawn to the lower portion of the island where he could see the urban poor. This practice, which was called "slumming," allowed him to escape the stress he felt when he was with his wealthy friends and business associates.

King also spent time in London where he befriended folks in both the upper and lower classes. According to historian Martha Sandweiss, he "moved easily between one world and the other." However, no matter where his travels took him, King seemed to be drawn most to the poorest in society. Whereas he found a homogenous white working class in London, those in lower Manhattan were black and newly arrived white European immigrants. But by the turn of the century, African Americans, who had been in lower Manhattan since the seventeenth century, were increasingly moving to Harlem where they were joined by people of color from the South, the Caribbean and Latin America.