Once again, we had a record number of entries in our graduate student blogging contest!
Our 2024 theme, “Connection,” inspired submission by twelve students whose work intersects with urban history. Online publications such as The Metropole can provide an outlet for writing that allows for creativity and experimentation, both in content and how information is presented. Successful pieces also require writing with a more general audience in mind and being engaging, clear, and succinct.
Our judges see all these characteristics in this year’s winning piece, “My Street Looks Different Now: Oral History and the Anti-Redlining Movement,” by Joshua Rosen, a PhD student in history at Boston College.
As summarized by our much-appreciated judging panel, Andrew Sandoval-Strausz, Elizabeth Hinton, and Dale Winling:
Joshua Rosen’s piece “My Street Looks Different Now” is an accessible bit of writing that engages with historiographical literature and employs a compelling mix of methods. In exploring the battle over redlining and mortgage discrimination in the 1970s, Rosen tells a story that brings urban history in Jamaica Plain, Boston, to life, while also reflecting on the present-day challenges of gentrification and housing affordability.
Rosen details the conundrum organizers faced in the 1970s, of fighting redlining while being aware that they were opening neighborhoods for gentrification. He uses oral history to draw on organizers’ own reflections, showing how challenging it is to lobby for policy victories but see that legacy tarnished by subsequent events and changing patterns of capitalist real estate investment.
The piece hits the theme of “Connections” in a variety of ways: Rosen reveals connections between people and place, activism and outcomes, policy and unexpected consequences, exploring the complexities of neighborhood revitalization and gentrification in a way that emphasizes the human element in the form of neighborhood residents’ imperatives, decisions, witnessing of change, and ambivalence about earlier actions. It reminds us that our causes can have contradictory effects, some of which can even be seen early on in the process.
Rosen’s blog post works well because it engages a highly complex subject matter—gentrification—in relatively few words. He immediately sets the stage with a particular individual in a particular neighborhood at a particular time, then follows them over the course of decades. Richard Wise’s life frames the story of Boston’s Jamaica Plain in and out of the urban crisis, providing a narrative in the form of an oral history that reveals gradual neighborhood change in actual practice: not as a facile narrative of gentrification, but as a series of choices in straitened circumstances that give way to particular opportunities and obstacles.
While there could only be one contest winner, we were impressed with the quality and variety of pieces submitted this year. If you haven’t yet read them all, below is a list of and links to the rest of the submissions. Thank you to all who participated; it’s your work that makes the contest compelling and enables the larger field of urban history to continue to grow.
Matthew Adair, McGill University, Where Do You. Summer? How the Urban Elite Forged Connections While Escaping the City
Today, many families, be they working class to the wealthy embark on an annual summer sojourn. However, in the nineteenth century especially, such vacations were accessible largely for elites, who used such vacations as more than a means to relax: “In cities across the country, upper-class denizens carved out their vision of seasonal summer bliss in suburban, exurban, and rural locales near and far. But more than mere periods of leisure, summer presented an opportunity to strengthen critical social and professional connections that maintained elite dominance in political, social, and economic spheres in early twentieth-century American cities. During a time when summer vacations (and paid time off) were a rarity, the urban elite used seasonal residences as a mode of peacocking their social position as well as displaying class solidarity with their social peers.”
Andrew Allio, University of California-Santa Cruz, BART (Dis)Connects the San Francisco Bay Area
While Bay Area’s BART system has long been a standard bearer for West Coast transit systems and has undoubtedly helped San Francisco overall, it came at the expense of working class Brown and Black communities, notes Allio: “However, despite BART planners’ sweeping vision, the system imposed significant burdens on minority communities and failed to live up to the economic promises used to promote the system. Though planning documents mention centering the needs of the communities through which BART passed and ensuring further economic growth in the region, it is clear that in some areas these were hollow words.”
David Bruno, University of Mississippi, Americanizing South Los Angeles through National Retailers and High-Security Malls
Mayor Tom Bradley proved a canny political operator constructing a multiracial political coalition to become Los Angeles’s first Black mayor. Bradley’s neoliberal vision of the city encouraged Pacific Rim outreach, corporate investment and shopping malls, this final peg in his economic plan illustrative of the other two. “Mayor Bradley was particularly fixated on South LA having the same shopping choices as the rest of the LA metro area. He personally recruited major retailers such as Hallmark and Sizzler to the Plaza … In his mind, retail connected the community to the rest of the country and removed negative perceptions by showing that South LA could look and function like mainstream America.”
Weilan Ge, Univeristy of Florida, Connecting to the City to the Sea: The Development of the National Aquarium in Baltimore.
In the tradition of Margaret O’Mara (Cities of Knowledge) and others, Weilan Ge discusses the role of conservation and environmentalism as a means for urban economic development and the transformation of the public’s relationship to nature in Charm City. “[U]rban elites decided to build a new aquarium with a larger area, a wider variety of marine life, a more advanced infrastructure, and in keeping with the trends of marine science and public education. They believed the aquarium would be a key part of rebuilding the Inner Harbor and helping Baltimore rebuild its image as a city.”
Emi Higashiyama, Savannah College of Art and Design, After the Same Rainbow’s End: Purists, Pragmatists & Racial Advocates Duke It Out in Savannah
Modern conflicts about urban development often serve as windows into long standing debates observes Emi Higashiyma. This is no less true in Savannah, Georgia, where the city’s civic center serves as stalking horse for three hundred years of discourse on the nature of the Georgia municipality. “It should be no surprise, then, that when a huge topic like the Savannah Civic Center comes up, strong opinions will surface across many divided lines—and in a historic city dating back to 1733 (famous for its city plan that distinguished it from other colonial towns), there is a lot to talk about. That’s why the hottest debate (that acutely started some two decades ago)—‘What do we do with the Civic Center?’—is arguably an issue that started almost three centuries ago.”
Genna Kane, Boston University, Circumventing the Past: Navigating the Harbor through the East Boston Tunnel
Kane goes deeper than the Big Dig to discuss how Boston reoriented its transit in the 19th century: “Many historians understand infrastructure, including wharves, freight railroads, and passenger transportation, as facilitators for capital accumulation and consumption. Historians also emphasize that infrastructure changed, as David Nye argues, when people made cultural choices ‘within parameters set by the energy sources, technologies, and markets of any given time.’ During the age of industrial capitalism, Bostonians reconfigured and bypassed the structures from the bygone era of maritime commerce and prioritized new infrastructure and connections.”
Bridget Laramie Kelly, Washington University in St. Louis, One Hundred Years of the Renaissance Theater and Ballroom/Casino
“Unlike every other Harlem hot spot, the Renaissance was owned and operated exclusively by African American proprietors,” writes Bridget Laramie Kelly. The 100-year history of the building provides a vantage point from which to consider not only the building’s history and attachment to the neighborhood, but the role of preservation in such developments. “Did the [historic] designation maintain the Renaissance’s core character, one that centered community needs without exorbitant entrance barriers? Has the landmark classification maintained a connection to the Ren’s past?”
Matthew McKeown, Trent University, Boxing and Urban Decline: Community Development & Urban Revitalization in Early 20th Century Winnipeg
McKeown travels to north to Western Canada and Winnipeg where he explores the role of third spaces, notably boxing gyms, in the early 20th century city: “Third places provide a space where specific organizations can consolidate, and where people can relax and mingle, creating a sense of community and inclusion. Having spaces for events, organizations, and gathering places for residents to form new opinions, debate, and informally gather helps generate community, fosters public interaction among different groups, improves social capital, and creates informal spaces of civic society.”
Zhiyi Wang, University of California-Riverside, How to (Not) Get Lost in City of Phnom Penh
in recent decades, the art of navigating a city has been muted somewhat by Google and other map sharing apps. However, even with such advances some cities, like Phnom Penh remain difficult to traverse as “the mismatch of the map (and the conceptual knowledge it provides) with the real-life practices of residents” clashes with “their local knowledge of places,” writes Zhiyi Wang. Attempting to align the two, Wang explores the intersection between digital mapping and local knowledge, “Landmarks embody the collective memory of Phnom Penh’s residents across generations, as the city never stopped evolving and is changing at unprecedented speed today … Place names, therefore, are not only spatial references, but also bear historical significance, and are weaved into the social fabric of the population.”
Jeremy Lee Wolin, Princeton University, How to Keep a School Open: Two Carvers and the Fight for Fair Desegregation
Wolin explores the proverbial “tale of two Carvers” or how two different schools in Waco, Texas and Tulsa, Oklahoma, managed to keep their doors open in the face of opposition to desegregation and with the help of federal funds from the Model Cities program. “The report revealed a hidden connection, a factor key to keeping Tulsa’s and Waco’s schools open while barely registering in local news at the time: a grant from the Model Cities Program. A federal urban planning program, Model Cities hardly intended to change the course of local school integration, but in Tulsa and Waco, advocates for fair education ensured that it did.”
Jackie Wu, Yale University, Pittsburgh’s Chinese Laundries
In recent years, Pittsburgh’s food scene has enjoyed the opening of several new Asian restaurants and stores, many of which are Chinese in origin. However, writes Jackie Wu, these are not really new developments but rather new wrinkles on an old pattern. “These histories also disrupt common assumptions about the trajectories of historical immigration. Reflecting demographic changes of the last few decades, more and more Asian businesses are opening across Pittsburgh, especially in the Oakland and Squirrel Hill neighborhoods. Residents are excited to see more Asian restaurants and stores open. Unknown to most, however, many of these areas had once featured thriving Chinese-owned laundries.”
Featured image (at top): An abandoned building, 31 and 33 Seaverns Ave, Jamaica Plain, circa 1970s photograph by Donald W. Latham, Jamaica Plain Historical Society.
