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.

using a photograph to ponder race and the urban space

While waiting for yet another round of bad weather to pass through Tuscaloosa, I continued thinking about this fall course and where I might take the students on a field trip. Last year, a planned trip to Sloss Furnaces was cancelled because of weather (Weather is a common theme around here. This is interesting for someone who is from South Florida where we have time to prepare for hurricanes).

I am considering Sloss again, but also downtown Birmingham. What stories will we intuit about the past by examining buildings in this city whose initial rise in the late nineteenth century owed largely to the arrival of steel and the railroad?

I wonder, too, about the opportunities for discovering things that late nineteenth century American cities have in common with other cities in other "spaces." The photograph here features a woman of African descent in Puerto Rico in the late nineteenth century. Two things struck me:

1) Only a year before this photo was taken, the United States made claims on Puerto Rico, an archipelago whose name is translated as "rich port." Port cities in and outside of the United States are generally one of the first places we can look to see wealth as people and commerce have across time moved through ports. This was certainly true in the States during the nineteenth century, but also earlier and later.

2) The woman is standing against an old building where a peeling theatre sign hangs. Evidently, an increasingly modern world here presented time for leisure moments, something Gunther Barth points out in his study of city culture in America. He, among other things, uncovers how vaudeville,  another source of entertainment, figured into the rise of urban life in the States. That said, black face entertainment in vaudeville houses revealed the ongoing conflict between people based on wealth and skin color. Such conflict is also evident in Puerto Rico if we ponder the caption under this image, which first appeared in an 1899 book.  According to the caption, the woman is considered attractive partly because she is biracial and not entirely of African descent (One aside, Eileen K. Suarez Findlay has written an outstanding study on the turn-of-the-century surveillance of women of African descent). 

But being of African descent was not the only thing that resulted in racial division in America and the Atlantic World. As the students in this course will learn,   there was also tension between white Europeans, a topic addressed in part by, among others, Dr. Jenny Shaw of UA's History Department.

"the game almost reduced their daily tensions"

 Spaulding Collection, New York Public Library

As Americans learned how to make time for work and play, baseball became a popular sport. But how do we make connections between it and the growth of cities? The students in this course will learn as much next fall. 

Indeed, by the 1880s, men who were confined to New York and Pittsburgh factories and offices, headed to ball parks.  In this course, we will learn how city dwellers found opportunities to enjoy themselves through baseball which was just one of many spectator sports drawing crowds in and outside the urban space. Cricket and horse racing  were among the most popular until many turned to baseball and football in the second half of the nineteenth century. Like football, baseball eventually became big business.

One of three course readings

But whereas football was initially associated with the wealthy and educated in the United States, baseball early on made room for working class urban dwellers. But by the time it got professionalized in the late nineteenth century, the ball clubs - not the players - increasingly had the most power and this was true for decades. Moreover, for decades this sport, like many, was segregated, oppressing certain players even more.

We will learn how baseball figures into the needs of urban people who, as Gunther Barth tells us, not only needed something to divert their attention from their depressing environs, but something that mirrored their own struggle for success. Writes Barth, "the game almost reduced their daily tensions because its ups and downs seemed more momentous than their own lives."

Coming Fall 2014

Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies

I just hung fliers around campus and tenHoor Hall for this course. I will teach it for the second time next semester. One of the fliers features a photograph of Sarah Forbes Bonetta Davies, a woman of West African royal ancestry who was reportedly orphaned in 1848 when her parents were killed in a massacre. Two years later, the king of Dahomey presented her as a "gift" to Queen Victoria. After becoming the queen's goddaughter, Davies apparently spent the rest of her life between her home in England and Africa until her death in 1880. 

I was struck by Davies' elegant hairdo in this photograph. It made me think of one of the historical actors the students will learn about in this course:  Eliza Potter, a hairdresser of mixed race.  A native of New York, Potter, too, traveled to Europe, working as a nursemaid and later as a hairdresser for wealthy people on both sides of the Atlantic. All this as she eventually  owned a home with her "own fig tree," as she put it, in Cincinnati. Through studying Potter's life, the students will learn how gender, race and class figure into an increasingly urban America. The growth of cities begins in earnest in the early nineteenth century. By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than the countryside.

I also used an image depicting the cover of Bloomingdale's 1886 catalog on a flier because this course will also address, as Gunther Barth has written, how by the late nineteenth century, department stores helped define city life in the United States. So did other things including, believe it or not, baseball, a sport played by New York businessmen during this century.

I am still pondering how this course will incorporate architecture into the curriculum. Last fall, the students in this course became "experts" on Tuscaloosa buildings that were built in the nineteenth century. Their efforts culminated in a short film. I am wondering if we might try something different, perhaps a music video. We shall see. 

Finally, I am also wondering about the best way to highlight the specific experiences of men of color as I am now reminded of the "watermen" who spent time in port cities on the Eastern Seaboard and inland. What new things can their experiences teach us about how nature, or specifically, how waterways figure into America's growing urban economy? I may turn again to David Cecelski's study on this issue (students taking my Black Urban Culture course this spring read an excerpt from his book). In the meantime, I look forward to teaching this class next fall. The class will meet 3 to 5:30 pm every Wednesday.

Tuscaloosa, The Nineteenth Century City, a short film

We presented our short film, "Tuscaloosa, The Nineteenth Century City" today. Katherine Richter, Executive Director of the Tuscaloosa County Preservation Society and University of Alabama graduate, spoke after the film was shown. You may see the entire short here. Enjoy.

the playlist

We are checking the sound system one more time for tomorrow's humble premiere of "Tuscaloosa, The Nineteenth Century City." The Faculty Resource Center did a great job of helping us synch the music and voice-overs. If all goes well, expect full sound via some righteous tubes in an old amp. Meanwhile, Dr. Bart Elmore has shared the playlist for the soundtrack. It is as follows:

Air - La Femme D'Argent (Versailles, France)

Ulrich Schnauss - Goodbye (German electronic producer and magician)

Thievery Corporation - Liberation Front (truly international band)

Daft Punk - Nightvision (French duo)

Tangerine Dream - Love on a Real Train (German electronic band)

Finally, I gave the students one final short writing assignment,. To complete it, they must pretend to be seated beside someone famous, dead or alive, at a fancy dinner. This person is a history buff and moreover, someone who loves the nineteenth century. The student  will reflect on what he or she learned this semester and share as much with the person in question.