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• 1 2013-06-27T09:40:02-07:00 Conflicting visions of the Lower Hill 155 plain 2016-03-11T09:44:40-08:00 In the years leading up to the Lower Hill’s demolition in 1956, redevelopers represented the Lower Hill with a singular emphasis on its blight and with no attention to its social vibrancy. This selectively bleak view of the Lower Hill made demolishing and redeveloping the neighbourhood a foregone conclusion regardless of its long-term social costs. In the summer of 1950, Pittsburgh’s City Planning Commission (CPC) analysed the Lower Hill’s blight to certify it as a redevelopment area in line with Pennsylvania’s 1945 Redevelopment Law. The CPC used a survey method developed by the American Public Health Association (APHA) that quantified a neighbourhood’s blight based on criteria like dilapidation, overcrowding, mixed land use and building density. Following the APHA’s instructions, Pittsburgh’s CPC created easy-to-read maps summarizing its quantitative analysis of blight. In its May 1950 report on the Lower Hill, the CPC summarized its entire analysis on one sheet of paper (Figure 3). Three statistical maps stretched down the sheet in a vertical line. All three maps had the same base street pattern and parameters, but blocks within the maps carried different shading designating their housing, dwelling or environment quality grades. According to the page’s legend, black-fill marked 'slum' blocks and a crosshatched-fill marked 'substandard' blocks.
  
  The CPC’s summarizing maps clearly labelled blocks 'slum' or 'substandard' but did not elaborate on the sometimes-debatable criteria used to make these designations. For example, the APHA’s method counted mixed land use against a block’s environmental quality grade in multiple ways. The method penalized blocks based on the percentage of their net area and frontages with mixed land use and added penalties for particular types of commercial land uses like automobile repair shops, butcher shops, bakeries and bars. Mixed land use alone could qualify a block as substandard. Many residents, however, valued mixed land uses. Bars, bakeries, and automobile repair shops provided goods and services to residents, economic opportunities for small business owners and skill development for employees. According to urban critic Jane Jacobs, mixed land use - most notably neighbourhood bars - also spurred an active sidewalk life, which maintained a safe environment. The maps used by Pittsburgh’s CPC to summarize its Lower Hill analysis marked most of the neighbourhood’s blocks black for 'slum' or crosshatched for 'substandard'. Yet, the Lower Hill’s intermixture of homes, bakeries, automobile shops and bars - all aspects of the neighbourhood valued by many residents - lowered the neighbourhood’s quality grades. The CPC’s maps cloaked redevelopers’ debatable criteria for blight and discounted the neighbourhood’s strengths.
  
  As part of its 1950 analysis of the Lower Hill, the CPC photographed rear yards and alleyways to provide on-the-ground testimony of the neighbourhood’s blight. To document the neighbourhood’s building density, the CPC photographed rear yards shared by housing along Bedford Avenue, Fullerton Street and Gilmore Way (Figure 4). Brick buildings dominated the image, dwarfing and encroaching on the rear yards, the scene’s only open space. Worse yet, no greenery graced the scene and laundry lines, barrels and scraps of wood further cluttered the view. Showing rear yards ignored the front of neighbourhood buildings, the view residents consciously groomed for public scrutiny. Much of the scene’s clutter - the laundry lines, oil drums and woodpiles - would not have appeared on main streets. The photograph's concrete, brick and clutter testified to the Lower Hill's building density and suggested overcrowding, but no actual residents appeared in the scene. This absence deemphasized the neighbourhood's thriving social life and obscured who would be affected by demolition. Indeed, residents rarely appeared in the 27 photographs of the Lower Hill before demolition that the Conference collected to document the neighbourhood's transformation.
  
  In a 1956 brochure entitled 'The Allegheny Conference on Community Development Presents . . . Pittsburgh!', the Conference paired the Bedford, Fullerton, and Gilmore rear-yards photograph (see Figure 4) with a caption labelling the scene a definitive example of blight, deftly arguing for the Lower Hill’s redevelopment. The photograph’s caption explained, 'The new Hill will wipe away blight, decay, worn out structures and overcrowding'. Instead of saying these conditions existed in the photograph, the caption described a future without them. This implied that the rear-yard scene and, by extension, the entire Lower Hill exemplified blight, decay and dilapidation. However, the photograph showed the rear yards of a block that the CPC actually categorized as one of the Lower Hill’s 'intermediate' rather than 'slum' or 'substandard' blocks. Therefore, the rear-yard scene that the brochure’s caption defined as 'blight, decay, worn out structures, and overcrowding' was officially classified as none of the above. The Conference distributed this brochure broadly through the city's public and parochial schools and personally to the city’s politicians, business leaders and newspaper editors. By linking signifiers like 'blight' and 'decay' to the rear-yard photograph, the Conference's brochure disseminated a mental picture of the 'old' Hill beseeching demolition to the city's decision and opinion makers.
  
  The city’s redevelopers had very little social contact with the Hill District; conversely the Courier’s photojournalist, Teenie Harris, grew up embedded in the neighbourhood’s social and commercial life. Harris’ mother ran the Masio boarding house, billiard parlour, barbershop and miniature golf course on Wylie Avenue in the Lower Hill. Harris’ brother, meanwhile, helped run the city’s illicit numbers lottery. Teenie Harris not only photographed the Hill’s social galas, crime scenes, protests and political events for the Pittsburgh Courier, but also ran a portrait studio in the Middle Hill. According to photography historian, Cheryl Finley, Harris’ lifelong intimacy with the area gave him 'unrivaled access' to the Hill and its residents. Indeed, between 1930 and 1980, Harris took nearly 80,000 photographs mostly of the Hill District. As a lifelong resident of the Hill, Harris valued the neighbourhood’s institutions and centered his photographs on specific businesses, nightclubs, churches and social activities; in doing so, he transformed the 'blighted' buildings and streets in redevelopers’ visual rhetoric into spaces where people shopped, played and prayed. This intimacy and influence went both ways. With a peak circulation of 357,000 in 1948, the Courier and Harris' photographs helped shape how the city's African Americans viewed the Hill. 
  
  For example, Harris photographed the quotidian street scenes and socializing that animated the Lower Hill but remained invisible to redevelopers’ narrative. In the 1940s, Harris photographed children playing stickball in a vacant Lower Hill lot (Figure 5). Harris positioned his camera at a distance behind the kids’ makeshift home plate. This distance and angle allowed Harris to fit the whole game into the frame. He took the photograph as the batter awaited his next pitch with his bat hoisted over his shoulder. Signs of physical deterioration like cracked cement marred the lot, but, unlike the CPC, Harris made the Hill's children and their day-to-day recreation the main subject of his image. Harris also photographed adults using the neighbourhood’s sidewalks for leisure. In June 1949, Harris photographed 14 men gathered around two sidewalk checkers games (Figure 6). Again, Harris stepped back from the action to take in the whole scene. The players sat on crates and rested the checkerboards on their laps. No one officially designated the sidewalk a checkers arena or the vacant lot a stickball pitch. Yet residents transformed both into recreational spaces by descending on them with bats, crates and checkerboards. According to Harris’ photographs, residents saw the Lower Hill’s vacant lots and sidewalks as much more than examples of blight.
  
  Although Harris conscientiously photographed the Lower Hill’s vivacious social life, he also documented residents’ protests against the neighbourhood’s unsanitary housing. In 1946, the Conference claimed Pittsburgh’s residents had become so inured to the city’s bad conditions that they had to rely on the Conference to identify the city’s problems and set an agenda for change. Harris’ photographs contradict this claim by showing residents bringing evidence of the Hill District’s bad housing to the attention of the mayor and city council and articulating housing as a citizenship right. In 1946, Harris photographed a protest in city council chambers that was part of a months-long drive by the Hill District People’s Forum Social Action Committee (SAC) to force Pittsburgh’s mayor and city council to enforce housing codes in the Hill District (Figures 7 and 8). Harris took these photographs from the room’s front-right corner. This angle captured the protest’s organization, size and arguments. Well-dressed protesters filled the chambers and held signs declaring they had gone 'From G. I. Latrines to Hill District out houses' and 'From G. I. foxholes to Hill District rat holes'. By linking their service to the country during World War II to their demands for humane living conditions, the protesters built on the Double-V campaign, a wartime movement spearheaded by the Courier that connected America’s fight against fascism to African Americans’ struggle against racial injustice. Harris’ photographs illustrate that Hill residents were far from inured to their neighbourhood’s conditions and that they strategically linked humane housing conditions to their wartime demands for equal citizenship.
  
  The Courier’s extensive and supportive coverage of the SAC’s housing campaign further spotlighted residents’ agency and emphasized decent housing as a citizenship right. The Courier sent photographer Oceana Sockwell out with SAC leaders to document residents’ housing complaints and rouse public support for the campaign. Three Sockwell photographs appeared in an article entitled 'Shocking housing conditions exposed in drive'. The first showed the Youngblood family talking over desperately needed home repairs with SAC leader James Owens. In the next photograph, a veteran drew water from a hand pump to demonstrate 'how sixteen families in Humber Way are supplied with water'. The third image pictured a mother, Mrs Morgan, pointing to her kitchen’s dilapidated walls. These photographs showed residents, including a World War II veteran, discussing the specific conditions they wanted the city to remedy. The article also noted that they had signed a petition demanding better housing-code enforcement. The Courier’s visual coverage highlighted the Lower Hill’s bad living conditions, but - unlike the Conference’s vacant rear-yard photograph - the Courier spotlighted residents as the experts on neighbourhood conditions and the initial agents for change. Notably, residents also advocated code enforcement as a way to rehabilitate and preserve - not redevelop - the Hill District. City officials, however, deemed housing code enforcement too difficult and opted instead for demolition and redevelopment. 
• 1 media/Scalar UH background and title June 2016.jpg media/Scalar UH background final.png 2013-01-31T09:11:13-08:00 Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture 60 splash 2015-07-25T20:50:37-07:00
  Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  In April 2014, Google publicized a new feature to its Google Maps application. “If you’ve ever dreamt of being a time traveler like Doc Brown, now’s your chance,” the blog post announced. “Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop. We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.” While Google Maps is among the most popular and sophisticated digital tools, this announcement highlights that dynamic technologies do not necessarily provide historical depth or historical imagination. The Street View historical imagery is a neat feature if you are interested in how place images have changed over the past seven years, but if, as the blog post suggests, you want to travel back to 1955 like Doc Brown (a fictional character in the 1980s Back to the Future films) you will have to look elsewhere. As digital tools like Google Maps continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing, and analyzing these myriad urban sights.
  
  Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, 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 this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, 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. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, 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 contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including color images; present selected clips from films and television that are analyzed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways.
  
  The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History, and Communications, and this the special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon, Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek, and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken, Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodrokozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting, and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue 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. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African-American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the 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.
  
  Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban “progress” and “modernity.” Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital “worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land, and labor.” Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African-American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyzes how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighborhoods to make way for a “capital fit for a modern country.” Gyan Prakash has written that “urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations, and memories.” In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process.
  
  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. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a “single photograph through variations in medium, color palette, tonal range and cropping.” Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like Twentieth and Arkansas and Twentieth Street VW speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous.
  
  Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision—Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications?—that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video 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. 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. 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. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyze a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars.
  
  Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of “failed neighborhoods” analyzed in Rentschler’s essay, 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. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders.
  
  By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Curatescape Omeka application for public history storytelling, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools, and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture, and their presentation online.
  
  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, "Buses from Nowhere: 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.
• 1 media/Scalar UH background 2.jpg 2014-09-15T15:34:29-07:00 Introduction 36 plain 2016-03-06T06:25:50-08:00 Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  
  The fields of urban history and visual culture both thrive on expansive horizons. Streets and rivers, neighbourhoods and stadia, festivals and parks populate the work of urban historians, who examine these and other subjects from local, metropolitan, regional, national and transnational perspectives. Viewing these urban themes with and through visual culture increases the potential areas of analysis exponentially. Not only do photography, film, television and advertising produce countless images of urban spaces, visual culture encourages scholars to take seriously the ways of seeing and practices of looking that shape how people understand and engage with the metropolis. Visual technologies, both old and new, make places meaningful in ways that have broad cultural, political and economic consequences. As digital tools continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing and analysing these myriad urban sights.
  
  Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, 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 post-war urban history this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, 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. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, 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 contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including colour images; present selected clips from films and television that are analysed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways.
  
  The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History and Communications, and this special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon and Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken and Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodroghkozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue 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 neighbourhood’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 neighbourhood as a vibrant community. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the traumatic tearing apart of communities through urban renewal, which Mindy Fullilove describes as 'root shock'. Grantmyre reminds us that these 'ghost neighbourhoods', 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 neighbourhood.
  
  Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban 'progress' and 'modernity'. Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital 'worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land and labour'. Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyses how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighbourhoods to make way for a 'capital fit for a modern country.' Gyan Prakash has written that 'urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations and memories'. In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process.
  
  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 favour of the 'native vision' of residential streets with large quantities of pavement. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a 'single photograph through variations in medium, colour palette, tonal range and cropping'. Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like "Twentieth and Arkansas" and "Twentieth Street VW" speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous.
  
  Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision – Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications? – that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video reproductions of the Kitty Genovese case. In 1964, Genovese was raped and murdered in the Kews Gardens neighbourhood in Queens, New York. The violent murder and widely reported failure of neighbours to help Genovese made the case a symbol of urban danger and public apathy. The Genovese case remains one of the most famous examples used in social science and popular texts to describe how built environment shapes human behaviour, with the failure of witnesses to call the police serving as a condemnation of apartment living and of some urban spaces as failed neighbourhoods. Rentschler examines how filmic reenactments and retellings of the Genovese murder, over the past 50 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. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyse a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars.
  
  Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of 'failed neighbourhoods' analysed in Rentschler’s essay, anti-busing politicians and parents mobilized around the concept of 'neighbourhood 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 favour of colour-blind rhetoric to justify segregated neighbourhoods and schools. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders.
  
  By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture and their presentation online.
  
  Table of contents:
  • Laura Grantmyre, 'Conflicting visions of renewal in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1950-1968'
  • 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, 'Filmic witness to the 1964 Kitty Genovese murder'
  • Matt Delmont, 'Buses from nowhere: television and anti-busing activism in 1970s urban America'
  You can access essays by clicking on author's names above, or use the main menu on the top left of the screen to navigate to essays.  To view detailed the table of contents with links to each page, click here.
• 1 2014-09-15T16:14:48-07:00 [TEST] Introduction 7 plain 2014-09-17T10:46:36-07:00 Matt Delmont, Guest Editor
  In April 2014, Google publicized a new feature to its Google Maps application. “If you’ve ever dreamt of being a time traveler like Doc Brown, now’s your chance,” the blog post announced. “Starting today, you can travel to the past to see how a place has changed over the years by exploring Street View imagery in Google Maps for desktop. We’ve gathered historical imagery from past Street View collections dating back to 2007 to create this digital time capsule of the world.” While Google Maps is among the most popular and sophisticated digital tools, this announcement highlights that dynamic technologies do not necessarily provide historical depth or historical imagination. The Street View historical imagery is a neat feature if you are interested in how place images have changed over the past seven years, but if, as the blog post suggests, you want to travel back to 1955 like Doc Brown (a fictional character in the 1980s Back to the Future films) you will have to look elsewhere. As digital tools like Google Maps continue to make more urban spaces visible to more people, scholars have a crucial role to play in researching, organizing, contextualizing, and analyzing these myriad urban sights. Using the Scalar online authoring platform, this online only special issue argues that visual forms and ways of seeing are crucial to understanding urban history. Drawing on photography, painting, film, 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 this issue attends to questions of community, race, class, gender, sexuality, 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. By presenting this special issue through Scalar, 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 contrast to a traditional print issue, Scalar affords the opportunity to present a large number of images, including color images; present selected clips from films and television that are analyzed in the essays; and create visualizations to present evidence in more dynamic ways. The authors of this special issue are trained in History, American Studies, Architecture, Art History, and Communications, and this the special issue builds on the work of scholars who have examined urban history and visual culture from multidisciplinary perspectives. The work of Cécile Whiting, Joshua Shannon, Rebecca Zurier offer important insights on art and the city, while Dana Cuff, Margaret Farrar, Christopher Klemek, and Samuel Zipp have outlined the importance of images in urban renewal. Media Studies scholars Anna McCarthy, Lynn Spigel Marita Sturken, Pamela Wojcik have offered important analyses of the spatial relationships in film and television, while the work of Aniko Bodrokozy, Herman Gray, Melanie McAlister, Vinzenz Hediger, Patrick Vonderau, and Sasha Torres traces the importance of visual media in building, mobilizing, contesting, and controlling cities and nations. Taken together, this special issue 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. Grantmyre’s study of visions of urban renewal in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District shows that over 1,800 Lower Hill District families, mostly African-American, were uprooted as part of a redevelopment project. For these residents, and thousands of others forcibly displaced by urban renewal, photographs highlight urban erasures and the 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. Mona Damluji, like Grantmyre, explores the use of visual culture to define urban “progress” and “modernity.” Damluji examines how the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company’s (IPC) documentary films and public relations materials in the 1950s presented Baghdad as a city made modern through oil industry revenue. The IPC screened the films across Iraq and Damluji argues that these films and their cinematic representations of Iraq’s capital “worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land, and labor.” Similar to how Grantmyre shows the Pittsburgh Housing Authority seeking and receiving support from the African-American community for redevelopment efforts, Damluji analyzes how an Arabic-language IPC documentary, Assimatun Ajmel (A More Beautiful Capital), shined a favorable light on the destruction of older Baghdad neighborhoods to make way for a “capital fit for a modern country.” Gyan Prakash has written that “urban dwellers experience their globally situated and connected urban space as decidedly local lifeworlds, thick with specific experiences, practices, imaginations, and memories.” In Pittsburgh and Baghdad, Grantmyre and Damluji detail how quickly and irrevocably these urban spaces can be destroyed or remade, and how images and films are central to this process. 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. Bechtle returned to the same source images frequently and Gilman uses overlay visualizations to show how Bechtle transformed a “single photograph through variations in medium, color palette, tonal range and cropping.” Bechtle’s carefully created photograph-based paintings like Twentieth and Arkansas and Twentieth Street VW speak to a dedication to ordinary scenes and objects and, viewed in the 2010s, defamiliarize the street level photographs that Google Maps Street View has made ubiquitous. Gilman’s essay emphasizes questions of urban vision—Who can see what? From which locations? With what implications?—that figure prominently in Carrie Rentschler’s analysis of film and video 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. 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. 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. Like Damluji, Rentschler uses Scalar to present and analyze a small archive of films that are not readily available to scholars. Matt Delmont looks at the flurry of television news coverage garnered by Florida Governor Claude Kirk and Pontiac housewife activist Irene McCabe in the battle over busing for school desegregation in the 1970s. Fearing the image of “failed neighborhoods” analyzed in Rentschler’s essay, 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. News coverage brought anti-busing protests in places like Manatee County, Florida and Pontiac, Michigan to millions of television viewers across the nation without the historical or legal context for the busing orders. By developing this special issue in Scalar we have combined our traditional academic analysis with a wide range of images, photographs, videos, maps and visualizations. Like the Hypercities platform for the layered historical mapping of cities, the Curatescape Omeka application for public history storytelling, the Photogrammar archive and visualization platform for United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information photographs, and many other digital humanities platforms, tools, and projects, we have used digital technology to expand and extend our historical analysis of and to bring this sustained engagement with the past to a wide audience through an open access online format. It is our hope that readers will find this special issue to be generative for thinking about urban history, visual culture, and their presentation online. 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, "Buses from Nowhere: Television and Anti-busing Activism in 1970s Urban America"
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