Class 3. September 11. Sensing and apprehending the place:
Methods: Fieldwork, recording physical city (visual, auditory, olfactory), oral history, environmental autobiography
(Friday, September 13: Prof. Gutman lectures in the morning at an all-day conference on “The Big Picture: Large-Scale Developments in New York City,” Center for Architecture, 536 LaGuardia Place.)
Expert: Phil Kasinitz, Presidential Professor of Sociology, GC
Readings or applications:
Malka Simon, “The Walled City: Industrial Flux in Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1840-1920,” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 17, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 53-72.
Carolyn Steedman, “What a Rag Rug Means.,” chapter 6 in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
Edwin Dobb, “Location, Occupation, Juxtaposition, Interpretation: Notes on the Erotics of a Mining City,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 17, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 1-12.
Philip Kasinitz and David Hillyard, “The Old Timer’s Tale: The Politics of Nostalgia on the Brooklyn Waterfront.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 24, no. 2 (July 1995):139-164.
Review these resources:
“Gowanus Atlas: Telling a Community’s Story,” and Mapping Contexts and Stories around the Gowanus Canal,” Gowanus by Design, http://gowanusbydesign.org/
Suggested:
Henri Lefebvre, “Seen from My Window,” chapter 22 in Writings on Cities, trans. & ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996, trans).
Jeffrey E. Klee, “Fieldwork, Mind, and Building,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 25 no. 2 (Fall 2018): 10-16.
Nostalgia is a theme that runs through this week’s readings. Kasinitz and Hillyard, especially, delineate the nostalgia of the “old-timer,” white working class of Red Hook, Brooklyn. These bear a sentimental and often pain-filled longing for a Red Hook that is past, expressed in stories about historical and geographical decline from a “golden age of ‘homefulness’,” of “personal wholeness,” of “genuine social relations” and authenticity. Kasinitz and Hillyard, notably, argue that in Red Hook nostalgia functions to valorize an otherwise stigmatized community, to potentially legitimate its preferences in the development of urban place, and to marginalize in this process the perspectives of especially brown and black newcomers.
It is interesting to note that this sort of very local nostalgia has quite global correlates. It is apparent, as soon as one looks, that nostalgia is a pervasive feature of not just local, but also world politics. It has, for instance, played a central role in the discourse of the now globally assertive far-right. Trump, similarly to many others in the West, rose to power on Make America Great Again nostalgia. People outside the West, such as Nahendra Modi in India, make reference to a pristine golden age before colonisation by Europeans, and even before the arrival of Muslims in the first millennium.
Nostalgia, as these examples attest, is often reactionary and nativist, but it need not be. There is no one-to-one relation between nostalgia and the major political tendencies; it structures politics more subtly, at one step remove from the basic categories of political thought. Centrist Democrats and Republicans test the confines when they remember nostalgically a past golden age of supposed civility and basic consensus before the rise of Trump. The Sanders Left expresses a kind of nostalgia for the New Deal era, before Reagan and neoliberalism, if only as a way of rendering their policies tangible and presumptively feasible.
It may be worthwhile, if using the notion of nostalgia, to keep such macro-concerns in mind. Politics is probably always simultaneously operative at multiple scales. The local provides a lens onto the national and the global, and vice versa. The global is always significantly local, and so on.
Like Ryan, I picked up on the theme of nostalgia running through this week’s readings. In “Viewpoint,” Edwin Dobb wrote: “When the past and the present interpenetrate, there’s a danger that reclamation will become a form of erasure, of inadvertently or deliberately induced amnesia” (9). I love this sentence. And it really resonated with Kasinitz and Hillyard’s study of “Old-Timers” in Red Hook. In many ways, we are seeing this play out on a national scale with the promise to “Make America Great Again.” In the case of the Red Hook old-timers, they are not just nostalgic for an industrial past in Red Hook, they long for a level of respectability. In fact, they claim that, while they certainly had an attitude of toughness it still represented a certain level of decency in comparison to the “‘disreputable poor’ who now dominate the area” (153). The old-timers feel that even crime was more respectable in the past. It goes without saying that racism is part of the narrative here even though it is not always explicitly made.
When thinking about the redevelopment of Gowanus, it’s interesting to think about what will be erased from memory as a result of the rezoning. What memories will the residents of Gowanus choose to glorify and which will they easily forget? What kinds of narratives will be told about the “good-old-days”? Given that Gowanus has never had a large residential population perhaps the myths will die easy.
I was really taken by Simon’s history of Red Hook in “The Walled City.” I have seen the Red Hook shoreline many times and never knew that those warehouses were built for storage. And what a glorious past! I did not know that it was once-upon-a-time been considered the “breadbasket of the world” (66). But what most impressed me was the detail that Simon brought to her research and storytelling – how studying the built environment can tell a larger story about the ups and downs of a community.
A lot has changed in Red Hook, especially since Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012. The reconstruction and development of Red Hook has popularized it among the affluent “creative class.” Since both “Walled City” and “The Old-Timers’ Tale” were written prior to 2012, I think it would be interesting to read updated studies that look at the recent revival of the neighborhood and how new restaurants and storefronts play up Red Hook’s past as a port in addition to being a community of fishermen.
I love finding street art history plaques in Gowanus, which I saw you all found on Friday. I wish I could attach a picture here of one I often pass, describing someone jumping into the canal, with faint black ink scrawled over it: “SO F*CKIN WHAT.” Could not be more applicable to the questions raised by this week’s readings: how is meaning derived from a place’s history? Why do we seek meaning in history at all?
In Steedman’s exploration of these questions on a psychological dimension, she writes of “the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings” (5). In beginnings one finds answers, whether they’re true or not. For the old-timers in Red Hook in the early 1990s that could mean looking to earlier days to explain why they stay, or they might look to understand how and why things changed. “To find and possess all sorts of beginnings.” This comes to the question of capital we touched on a bit last class, and some of the instrumentalization of history used both by old-timers and white newcomers in the Kasinitz and Hillyard piece. Steedman, or Derrida, really, introduces the idea of a piece of history, an entry in the archive, as a commodity. In the case of the nostalgia wielded by “Make America Great Again,” as discussed above, the value and power of well-messaged history, whether accurate or not, is made plain. But when and how does that power accumulate? What is the particular process of meaning-making that can link a piece of history to political or market value?
And so, with the street art history plaques in Gowanus – they are in many cases peculiar anecdotes. But I don’t know that they qualify as “nostalgic,” or valuable. Can public history projects invoke nostalgia? Do the plaques create meaning?
Love all of these comments and questions. It almost seems that the plaques create meaning through a certain snarky manipulation of the past, poking fun at the traditional levels of preservation (plaques, designations, etc) given the neighborhood’s history of mainstream neglect/ industrial decline.
Really enjoyed reading our class’s comments on this week’s readings and the thread of nostalgia and storytelling in the readings. I was fascinated by the link between not only social narratives and the specific physical landscapes that activate memory. We can probably agree that Redhook and Gowanus’s “built environment” serves as receptacles for the past. Dobb’s call to promote agency and “value the builder” of the landscape directly connects with the Gowanus Atlas of Gowanus by Design, as well (Dobb 2). People-centered preservation can use the past to interpret and provide context for the present, but should not be preserved at the expense of the equity or sustainability of present communities. For our case study site, Dobb’s question of if/how redevelopment move us away from an urban “wake” and the “industrial sublime” (Dobb 3, 5) is a worthwhile one to consider as we move into the space of memory collection and the (potentially destructive) power of nostalgia, as explored by my colleagues. This week’s reading and themes connect me to the broader issue of a (post)capitalistic landscape, as explored in one of my favorite books, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2017) in her discussion of the inefficiency of “living-space entanglements” and the abandonment of space after it has served is productive industrial purpose(Tsing 6). Her unique study builds on the principles of nature: first nature, defined by ecological relations, including humans; second nature, the capitalist transformations of the environment; and third nature, what manages to live despite capitalism’s destruction and abandonment. This progression is definitely one that we’ve been exposed to in studying the history and current moment in Gowanus’s life.
The presence of Dobb’s “natives” and Kasinitz’s “old-timers” emphasizes the continued pride in these spaces and the power of social narratives to redefine space – Tsing’s life in spite of capitalism idea: “[the culturally resonant portrait of the past] is used as symbolic capital to claim authenticity and thus the power to define the neighborhood culturally, and even geographically” (Kasinitz and Hillyard, 142). Simon bring the ideas together, claiming that the industrial landscape and its “sheer repetition, often of the mundane and unremarkable” shaped a “clear identity” for our case site. How will the proposed rezoning and questions of change at hand alter this defining characteristic of the site?