Thanks for your patience during our recent outage at scalar.usc.edu. While Scalar content is loading normally now, saving is still slow, and Scalar's 'additional metadata' features have been disabled, which may interfere with features like timelines and maps that depend on metadata. This also means that saving a page or media item will remove its additional metadata. If this occurs, you can use the 'All versions' link at the bottom of the page to restore the earlier version. We are continuing to troubleshoot, and will provide further updates as needed. Note that this only affects Scalar projects at scalar.usc.edu, and not those hosted elsewhere.
Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Main Menu Introduction Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Introduction, Start Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Histories Concealed Histories Concealed landing page Projecting 1943 Sense of Pachuca Broadway as Background Splash page for Broadway as Background / Background as Broadway Photo Essay: Marquee Stories Intro to photo essay: Marquee Stories Prototypes Exploring project prototypes Portfolio Ejected Spectators and Inactive Users: Locating Multimodal Historiography In Repurposed Media Spaces

Nostalgia Conceals Washington Heights

3429
To be sure, there are eloquent relics of the historical past along the way… At 175th Street the eye is drawn by the gaudy home of the United Church…

Mainstream accounts commonly ignore Reverend Ike’s deliberate and inventive uses of space, place and media technology after his church’s adoption of Loew’s 175th Street theater. The theater has been mistaken for “a Hindu-Indochinese temple,” its location presumed to be in Harlem, and its purchase falsely attributed to a donation from the Loew’s Corporation to United Church. These inaccuracies reveal a disjuncture between the church’s creative repurposing and prevailing perceptions of the theater as a relic of a bygone era. Douglas Gomery has noted that the construction of the theater in 1930 helped to convince New Yorkers that Washington Heights was a viable middle-class neighborhood. While the theater’s initial symbolic value for Washington Heights suggests its potential social value and uses, we should not allow nostalgia for cinema and that historical moment to overshadow the culturally significant forms of reuse that have occurred over time at the site.

Laments about the United Palace’s new role as a church instead of a movie palace reflect a “longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed.” Svetlana Boym calls this restorative nostalgia, a form of recollection that “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.” Restorative nostalgia seeks to reconstruct the past as whole and coherent. It is unfettered by memories that stray from this unity or that would fragment the past. Certain about history’s meaning, proponents of restoration “propose to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps.” Restorative nostalgia occurs when preservationists “rather than uncovering the past… create an illusion of a credible material past.” When this “credible material past” is not complemented by an engagement with the social and cultural histories of post-cinematic reuse, preservation ends up reinforcing nostalgic narratives of cinema’s golden age.

This page has paths:

  1. Histories Concealed Veronica Paredes