students to visit downtown tuscaloosa

DePalma's was once a bank and Adrian's, a department store.

Tuscaloosa's Kress 5-10-25 Cent store opened in 1937.

The students and I will travel to downtown Tuscaloosa tomorrow and reflect on what we have learned about emerging life in America. Our attention to this subject has pushed us to think about a variety of topics including the arrival of department stores, leisure time and women in public spaces. We might think deeply about these developments as we insert Tuscaloosa into this narrative. The city was founded in 1819 and served as the state capital from 1826 to 1846. Its gradual rise as an important city in West Alabama coincides with the life of Cincinnati-based hairdresser Eliza Potter who traveled widely. Some of her travels took her as far as Europe, but also to New Orleans (although if memory serves, following her uncle's advice, this woman of mixed race  never entered Alabama). But what if she had? Given that she styled the hair of wealthy whites on both sides of the Atlantic, which occasions would have presented her an opportunity to do as much? How easily would Potter have walked around our downtown area, which has grown considerably over the years after some decades of decline when shoppers turned to McFarland Mall. It is worth it to think about such things as we walk by many buildings including the Bama Theatre, which opened in 1938. Though it is safely outside the window of emerging urban life (1820s to 1910, give or take a decade, according to historian Gunther Barth), this theatre allows us to see yet another example of how an increasingly modern world found people not only working, but also enjoying leisure moments first in vaudeville houses and later, motion picture theatres. One aside: while we are downtown, we will gather footage for our class project: a music video with Tuscaloosa in the starring role. Along the way, we will stop by Edelweiss, a German coffee shop.

"This Old House" features the Italianate style

A scene from "This Old House" this week.

I was channel-surfing tonight and was pleased to see an episode of "This Old House" that focused on Italianate-styled architecture. As I have mentioned several times on this blog, Tuscaloosa certainly has buildings constructed in this style, among them the Jemison Mansion. Receiving inspiration from the Italian Renaissance era, this style is a lot fancier than the conservative, more flat-faced Federal style dwellings built during the late eighteenth century.  Builders had to rely on local timber to construct such Federal buildings. Italianate buildings announce the growth of industry and the arrival of the railroad in mid-nineteenth century America, which permitted the transportation of materials and resources from elsewhere.

The episode of PBS' "This Old House" that I saw showed a restoration of a plain Italianate house, but also a fancier one with lusher embellishments like the tower pictured here.

One postscript: I'll be learning more about the Federal style as I prep for my American Civilization to 1865 course over the summer. I'll share some of what  I discover with students enrolled in "The Nineteenth Century City," too, because few concepts exists in a vacuum. Speaking to this point are words heard from the docent on my recent Chicago architecture river tour: "Architecture is a way for generations across time to learn more about one another." She was quoting architecture historian Vincent Scully. His words resonate with my ongoing interest in buildings. I think now about humbler structures like the shot gun house my grandparents occupied in South Florida when I was a child (so named because the rooms were lined up in such a straight line, you could point a gun through the front door and shoot out the back door). To see such a house across time during the 20th century was to know the residents were likely poor as to see an Italianate during the nineteenth century was to know the occupants were likely wealthy.

But wealth is not the only thing that determines how and where people live. The arrival of apartments in nineteenth century America, as Gunther Barth writes, owed greatly to a lack of space. We will learn more about this and other topics this fall.

juxtaposing a New York mansion against DePalma's building

This multi-million dollar New York mansion was built in 1871.

DePalma's restaurant sits in a building also constructed in 1871.

Ian Crawford leads the students on a tour of  Jemison Mansion.

Architecture is not my area of expertise, but I have learned more about it than I expected while teaching this class. Indeed, it was interesting to read this evening an article in The New York Times about an Upper East Side mansion that was completed in 1871, the year that the building in which Tuscaloosa's Depalma's Italian restaurant sits was constructed. At the time, the building housed, as one of the students in this class has written in a short essay, Tuscaloosa's First National Bank. In this instance, it is apparent again that Tuscaloosa posed tensions with another "urban" space during the nineteenth century. Notably, the New York mansion and Depalma's  were both constructed in the Italianate style,which was popular in the United States from the mid-19th century through the 1890s. Like numerous other architectural styles, the Italianate style receives inspiration from a more distant past, specifically the Italian Renaissance architectural period some three centuries earlier. If memory serves, Tuscaloosa's Jemison-Van de Graff Mansion, which the students visited earlier this semester, was built in the same style. As an aside, that mansion was constructed about ten years earlier on the eve of the Civil War.