Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

Introduction

Matt Delmont, Guest Editor

INTRODUCTION UNDER REVISION

This special issue, under review with Urban History (Cambridge University Press), argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, film, murals, television, and other visual and textual evidence, these essays explore how diverse visual forms not only shape metropolitan spaces, experiences, and identities, but also shape the ways in which people imagine, remember, and forget such spaces and events. Focusing on postwar urban history in local, national, and transnational contexts, this issue attends to questions of community, citizenship, race, class, gender, modernity, and memory. These questions, familiar to urban historians, can be seen from new angles by foregrounding the visual elements of urban political, economic, social, and cultural life. Finally, by presenting this special issue through the Scalar online authoring platform, we hope to offer both new research on urban visual history and also new models for the visual and textual presentation of such research.

In selecting essays for this special issue, I looked for scholars whose research examines the inseparable relationship between what Carlo Rotella describes as “the city of feeling (constructed in words and images) and the city of fact (made of steel and stone, inhabited by flesh-and-blood people).” In the first essay, Laura Grantmyre examines competing visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District in the 1950s and 1960s. While the city’s redevelopment agency circulated images focused on the neighborhood’s built environment, presenting it as desolate and in disrepair, Charles “Teenie” Harris, a photojournalist for the Pittsburgh Courier, the city’s African American newspaper, portrayed the neighborhood as a vibrant community. Bridget Gilman examines representations of everyday cityscapes from another angle in her analysis of Robert Bechtle’s Photorealist paintings of San Francisco. Gilman highlights how Bechtle’s work avoids the city’s natural and architectural icons, or recognizable panoramas from atop one of the city’s many hills, in favor of the “native vision” of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Staying in postwar California, Adam Arenson tells the story of Home Savings and Loan art and architecture, created by Millard Sheets and his studio of artists. Arenson surveys this interplay of community banking and public art, focusing on how communities responded to the bank branches whose distinctive mosaics, murals, stained glass and sculptures remain fixtures in many California communities. Like the public relations campaigns that helped Home Savings navigate local zoning boards, Mona Damluji examines a series of documentary films produced by the London-based Iraq Petroleum Company in the 1950s. Counter to films that portrayed Baghdad as an Orientalist fantasyland for western viewers, the Iraq Petroleum Company films presented the Iraq capital as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The films, screened across Iraq, projected a modern Iraq for Iraqi audiences. A different set of films and videos provides the archive for Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964 Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Garden neighborhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbors to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past fifty years, raise questions about what it means to be a witness in a vertical city of apartment buildings and trace the architectural and perceptual limits of urban vision. Finally, my essay looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by anti-busing politicians and parents in the 1970s. News coverage brought school desegregation battles in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation and helped establish busing as a “massive” national issue. By presenting these articles in Scalar we are able to pair our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of video clips, photographs, and maps.

As digital technologies continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, the six essays in this special issue offer historical perspectives that compliment and complicate how we engage with contemporary spatial visualizations. Among these contemporary projects, the critically acclaimed “The Wilderness Downtown” offers a starting point from which to understand this special issue’s themes and contributions. Developed by writer/director Chris Milk and the Google Creative Lab for the band Arcade Fire, “The Wilderness Downtown” uses the Google Maps street view feature to customize a music video based on the viewer’s childhood address. 

After the viewer enters the address where they grew up on the landing page, the video begins with a young person in a gray hooded sweatshirt running down a wide residential street. As new browser windows open and tile across the screen, the viewer sees multiple images simultaneously: an aerial view of the address they entered, a street level panoramic view, and close-up shots of the runner’s feet and hooded face. These tiled browser windows close midway through the video and a new window prompts viewers to write a virtual postcard on the screen to their younger selves. 

The video concludes with the young figure (now rendered as a computer graphic) running amidst a flurry of animated trees exploding out of the ground. Designed to demonstrate the capabilities of the Google Chrome browser and promote Arcade Fire’s album “The Suburbs” the video succeeded on both fronts. The project won several advertising and web design prizes, including a Clio Award and Favourite Website Award. The website also helped to generate buzz for “The Suburbs,” which went on to be named Album of the Year at the Grammy Awards.

Critics have rightly praised “The Wilderness Downtown” for its evocative combination of video, music, custom rendered maps, and cutting edge HMTL5 web features, but I introduce it here to highlight how the historical approaches to urban visual culture in this special issue offers tools for analyzing contemporary projects like “The Wilderness Downtown.” The essay by Laura Grantmyre, for example, calls attention to the video project’s limitations as a memory device. Using present day visuals from Google Maps to provoke memories of one’s childhood home is central to “The Wilderness Downtown,” but Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that for many people their childhood addresses no longer exist. Grantmyre notes that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African-American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these families, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, a their former addresses might be unrecognized by Google Maps, or a street view might reveal a freeway, arena, upscale apartment complex, or vacant lot where their home once stood. Rather than images of a childhood home producing nostalgia, these urban gaps and erasures suggest traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as “root shock.” Grantmyre reminds us that these “ghost neighborhoods,” as Phil Ethington calls them in the context of Los Angeles, remain part of the visual history and memory of cities. In this context, the photographs of the Lower Hill District taken by Teenie Harris offer an especially important visual archive of a thriving neighborhood. Similarly, Bridget Gilman shows how Robert Bechtle’s photograph-based paintings like Twentieth and Arkansas and Twentieth Street VW, can be seen as precursors to the street view images used in “The Wilderness Downtown.” Bechtle’s work, however, can also defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps has made ubiquitous.

Adam Arenson’s essay on the reception of Home Savings and Loan art and architecture highlights how “The Wilderness Downtown” plays differently if you enter a commercial rather than a residential address. Aerial photographs make clear that bank branches, shopping malls, and distribution warehouses dot metropolitan landscapes and these sites of capital and commerce can both compliment and complicate the residential memories foregrounded in “The Wilderness Downtown.” Arenson also presents a postcard of a pedestrian mall that Millard Sheets designed and decorated to reinvigorate the downtown of his hometown in Pomona, California. The image features a Home Savings branch and, like the main street postcards Alison Issenberg has identified as central to efforts to promote downtown business districts in the early twentieth century, casts a different light on the virtual postcard viewers are asked to write in “The Wilderness Downtown.” Mona Damluji’s analysis of how Iraq Petroleum Company’s films and public relations materials projected an image of Baghdad being made modern through oil production, calls to mind contemporary intersections of technology, modernity, and resources. Viewed from this angle, the best sites to map in “The Wilderness Downtown” might be the Google Data Centers in places like Council Bluffs, Iowa; Quilicura, Chile; or Dublin, Ireland, that make web access to the video and, for many readers, this Scalar project, possible.

Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case and my examination of how conservative politicians and parents used television news to oppose busing for school desegregation make it clear that the concept of “neighborhood,” central to the “The Wilderness Downtown,” is not politically neutral. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behavior, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighborhoods. Fearing the failed neighborhoods of the Genovese case, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of “neighborhood schools” as sites that needed to be defended from the threat of racial integration. These efforts to protect decades of federally supported racial privilege disavowed explicit appeals to anti-black racism in favor of color-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighborhoods and schools. For busing opponents “neighborhood” was a fighting word.

The filmic representation of the Genovese case and the television news coverage of busing protests cast “neighborhood” in more sinister terms, and prompt different questions about the young person running in the “The Wilderness Downtown”: Are there people in the houses watching this runner? Is this figure running from someone or something? Is the person welcome in this neighborhood or are they running away from it? The young person running in the video is wearing a grey sweatshirt with the hood pulled up, likely to conceal the actor’s race and gender so that viewers can more easily ascribe their personal memories to the video. 

“The Wilderness Downtown” was released in August 2010, but it is impossible for me to view the video’s “hoodie” runner now without thinking about seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, shot to death by neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida on February 26, 2012. Martin’s hoodie sweatshirt became a symbol of racial profiling and, after protestors wore hoodies in marches calling for Zimmerman’s arrest, an emblem resistance. Martin’s murder is the highest profile example that “neighborhood” means differently in different contexts, and the essays in this special issue offer models for analyzing how ways of seeing and practices of looking erect borders of inclusion and exclusion in urban spaces.

I have introduced this special issue’s thematic foci in relation to “The Wilderness Downtown” to demonstrate not only the essays’ innovative research on urban history and visual culture, but also how these historical studies can illuminate themes that might remain unseen in contemporary projects. Watching and re-watching “The Wilderness Downtown” has also led me to learn more about Nicollet Towers, my childhood home in Minneapolis. The panoramic street views showed the apartment complex undergoing exterior repairs and featured a large sign for Volunteers of America Minnesota. These visual clues led to me to websites, newspaper articles, and e-mail correspondence that taught me new things about the place I grew up: that the building was built in 1979, meaning my family was among the first to move in; that the building has always been managed by Volunteers of America Minnesota, whose mission is to “help people gain self-reliance, dignity and hope,” that the agency helped to ensure that the apartments remained rent subsidized after federal funds declined in the 1990s; and that Nicollet Towers recently underwent a renovation as part of a public-private partnership for financing affordable housing, led by the MacArthur Foundation. Watching the animated trees in “The Wilderness Downtown” sprout from the concrete courtyard of Nicollet Towers reminded me of how, in the mid-1980s, that concrete replaced the real grass and trees in the courtyard. 

The video also made me realize how much more I know about the metropolitan spaces about which I write and teach, than I know about the city where I grew up. As an urban historian, I find “The Wilderness Downtown” to be a generative project because it encourages me to move among and across visions of urban space, on personal and popular scales, in historical and contemporary contexts. It is my hope that readers will find this special issue to be similarly generative for thinking about urban history and visual culture.

Table of Contents:
  • Laura Grantmyre, "Conflicting Representational Discourses of Urban 'Renewal' in Pittsburgh’s Hill District: Was a vibrant community supplanted by a symbol of racial injustice or was a desolate slum replaced by a marvel of urban modernism?"
  • Bridget Gilman, "San Francisco Views: Robert Bechtle and the Reformulation of Urban Vision"
  • Mona Damluji, "Visualizing Iraq: Oil, Cinema, and the Modern City"
  • Carrie Rentschler, "The Archive as Witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese Murder"
  • Matt Delmont, "How Busing Became 'Massive': Television and Anti-busing Activism in 1970s Urban America"
You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use main menu on top left of screen to navigate to essays.

This page references: