The Anti-Monument

The church at Walnut Street is gone.

There is some press coverage in the Grand Forks Herald. As Emily Wright pointed out, sometimes you need to tear down old buildings to make a neighborhood what it used to be (?!).

But it’s hard not to think of this… 

If you’d like a copy of the new book about the church, The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelical by Chris Price you can get an electronic copy here or a nice paper copy here. 

 

 

The End of an Old Church

This weekend, I attended a conference hosted by the Institute for European and Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Buffalo that focused on monumentality in the archaeological record. At the end of the conference, we had a short but thought-provoking discussion of anti-monuments. These were monuments that seemed to subvert the very notion of monumentality (which itself was a tricky thing to define). 

When I got back to Grand Forks and saw that our old church on Walnut Street was coming down a few days earlier, it got me thinking. (For more on this church, check out Chris Price’s excellent history and, if you feel like it, buy a copy of the book here).

The removal of the steeple reminded me of so many mosques in Greece where the top of the minarets have been removed.

The famous granitoid pavement in the foreground presents the contrasting issues of conservation in our community. An old church is more expendable than pavement.

The de-churched steeple was a depressing sight this morning.

The Old Church on Walnut Street

I am very happy to announce the publication of the first volume of the Grand Forks Community Land Trust’s Neighborhood History Series. As readers of this blog know, it is Christopher Price’s The Old Church on Walnut Street: A Story of Immigrants and Evangelicals. You can purchase a copy of the book for the low, low price of $4.00 here.

The timing could not be better as the church is slated for demolition next Wednesday. It is the last turn of the century wood-framed church in Grand Forks and for over 100 years it stood as quiet reminder of the early-20th century religious, urban, and social landscape. Chris’s book has done a brilliant job at putting this building in social and historical context and the lovely illustrations by Bobbi Hepper Olson and Aaron Barth’s clear description have ensured that the building was documented as carefully as time and resources allowed.

The Grand Forks Community Land Trust and Cyprus Research Fund collaborated in the publication of this volume. If $4 seems a bridge to far for a book about a church in a town you’ve never heard of, then download it for free from Scrbd. 

View this document on Scribd

 

Just Before Dawn

The results of the recent Greek elections have almost spoiled my use of the word dawn, but on a day of grading, paper editing, and preparing for travel… 

It’s nice to be reminded that the darkest hour is just before dawn.

The Story of Churchville

With the first volume of my new Grand Forks Community Land Trust Neighborhood History Series almost off the presses, Bret Weber and I have begun work on Volume 2. This volume will detail the history of the neighborhood called “Churchville” in Grand Forks. It is part of the Near Southside Historic District and ranks as among the first residential subdivisions of the city.

The Community Land Trust has received several properties in the area bounded on the east by Belmont Road, on the west by Cherry St, on the south by 4th Ave., and on the north by 1st Avenue. It is home to several of the cities most prominent buildings including United Lutheran Church, St. Mary’s Catholic Church, and the old Christian Science Church. A number of other churches – including one that served the Greek Orthodox community and the city’s original synagogue – has been destroyed or their congregations have moved elsewhere.

While these buildings are certainly interesting, we will encourage our author to put them in the context of the local community and the developing urban and architectural traditions of the day. We know, for example, that throughout the first part of the 20th century, tucked amidst the churches and homes were small grocery stores and businesses that have all but vanished. The area has also preserved some of the few fragments of the city’s old wood streets and extensive stretches of granitoid pavement. Moreover, there are some great examples of the well-preserved early 20th century streetscapes that we seek to document.

We’ll have more announcements about this project during the summer months. And over the next year, look for the second volume of our little neighborhood history series to appear sometime in the winter.

Reflections on 100 Walks

Today, if I don’t come down with the horrible flu that has attacked my wife, I will walk home for the 100th time this academic year. It’s not a very long walk – somewhere between 2.5 and 3 miles depending on my route – but it can feel longer or shorter depending on the weather and my energy levels!

So to celebrate my 100th walk of the year, I thought I might reflect a tiny bit on what I’ve learned walking home.

1. I should not wear headphones while I walk. Sometime last fall – right around the time when I installed Spotify on my phone – I started to listen to music a few days a week on my walks home. I had been working harder than usual at the office and had cut back on music listening during the day; so, I started to pop in my headphones and listen to music on my walk. While this certainly made my walks go faster, I found that I lost a tremendous amount of awareness about my environment. The aural landscape – from the sound of cars passing on the street to the grind of the rail yard, the sound of the wind between houses, or the barking of dogs created a much heightened awareness of space.

2. Neighborhoods. One of the most interesting thing about walking home is that each neighborhood prompted a different (and remarkably consistent) feeling in me as I walk through it. The neighborhood closest to campus invariably made me feel old. College age students were always out and about and younger families too with small kids and smaller dogs. When I reached Washington St., the feeling of my walk changed. Here I became very much aware of the social distinction between a walker and someone whizzing by in a car. Other pedestrians in this area tended to be individuals who appeared to be walking not because they wanted to, but because they had to. I felt conspicuous both among these people and my colleagues as they passed by in their cars (and on their mobile phones!). Finally, when I ducked back down into the neighborhoods closer to my own home in the Near South Side, I encountered children and other walkers who clearly were outside because they wanted to be outside. I felt like I was another suburbanite talking an evening stroll and far less conspicuous than I was walking beside the rushing traffic of Washington Street.

3. The Wind and Weather. The expansive skies of the Red River Valley are truly amazing, but they come at a price. The howling winds that can cut through even the most weather-proofed jackets can make even a my casual strolls exercises in resistance training. Mostly, however, they don’t. I’ve come to love the close packed houses of campus neighborhoods and the Near South Side. Many of my colleagues who rarely walk in inclement weather remained skeptical when I tell them that once my walking route gets me into a neighborhood (rather than campus or sports fields or other open spaces that punctuate my route), I can hear the wind, but I generally don’t feel it. 

4. Fatigue. I live a pretty sedentary existence. Generally, I sit at my desk for around 10 hours a day. Walking is tiring. I am consistently surprised by how tired I feel after walking home. As a historian of the pre-industrial world, I have always recognized that walking was the most common way to get around through most of human history (and maybe the case even today). Walking home has made me all the more aware of how much walking can limit the scope and extent of one’s world. Simple detours that I might make in the car – stopping at the grocery store or to grab milk at the Quik-E-Mart – seem to be immense inconveniences on my walk even when the additional distance is less than a mile. So while walking brings me closer to my environment, it also makes everything seem much further away.

5. Paths and Hidden Landscapes. My walks have made me much more aware of the paths inscribed in my local landscape. These range from random staircases that allow a pedestrian to move from a sidewalk to a more elevated, perpendicular side street to the paths through grassy areas between commercial and residential districts. The remains of the streets that were abandoned with the installation of the rail yard and resulting changes in the road network are still clearly visible. Strange little houses converted from garages when such things were still possible under building and zoning codes, abandoned storefronts on now-neglected side streets, and repurposed buildings which clearly straddle the line between commercial and residential. So many of the subtle signs of how communities respond to change remain hidden as I blast around in my little Honda Civic, but become visible when I wander home (without headphones).

Finally, there is one additional benefit to walking. I feel better when I get home (albeit more tired) than I do when I leave my office. Less cranky, more relaxed, and usually just slightly (in a pleasant Sunday afternoon kind of way) bored.    

… My feet is my only carriage. So I’ve got to push on through … 

UPDATE: This is a total coincidence, but a happy one. Check out Tom Vanderbilts’s “Crisis in American Walking” on Slate a couple weeks ago. (via kottke.com yesterday)

A Controlled Burn

I had brilliant blogging ideas this morning as I walked to my office, but I became distracted by a controlled burn occurring in the middle of campus.  Now, it would be one thing if this was burning off some prairie grassland in fields adjacent to campus or even behind a biology building, but this was in the middle of campus.

Apparently prairie gardens should be burned back every two years. It was very dry this spring and there was a burning ban in place, but the last few weeks have been pretty wet. So, this fire required some encouragement.  There was something incredibly matter-of-fact about the entire operation. Growing up in the suburbs and attending a large urban school like Ohio State, I could not imagine something like this taking place without two-thirds of the local fire department on stand-by, policy lines set up to discourage people from playing in it, and several serious looking men in Nomex fire-suits.

Here at the University of North Dakota, there was just one guy with a “can-o-fire” and some serious looking work gloves. It was all very peaceful and ordinary.

 

The Old Church on Walnut Street

I am really excited to announce that the first volume of the new Grand Forks Community Land Trust Neighborhood History Series is now in page proofs. The series is edited by myself and Bret Weber, who is also the president of the Grand Forks Community Land Trust.

Chris Price, a University of North Dakota, D.A. student is the author of the first volume (with some help from North Dakota State University Graduate Student Aaron Barth) which documents the history and architecture of the Old Church on Walnut Street. This is the old Trinity Lutheran Church and later the Grand Forks Church of God that will be demolished any day now and become the site of a new house financed by the Community Trust.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ve probably seen this come together (here, here, here, and here). We are already making plans for the next volume and hope to continue our productive partnership with the Grand Forks Community Land Trust to produce some block-by-block history of the Grand Forks Community.

View this document on Scribd

 

North Dakota Work Camps: Some Preliminary Thoughts

Over the last three days I’ve laid out a typology of North Dakota Work Camps (and successfully killed my page view counts for the entire week). I have tried to be as formal  as possible and keep my analysis somewhat separate from these description. In the spirit of this blog, however, I thought it would be worthwhile to offer some preliminary interpretations of these camps. Much of my interpretations here owe something to Paul Shackel’s excellent little book, The Archaeology of American Labor and Working-Class Life (2009).

So, in my tradition of poorly composed lists, here are five things:

1. Docile Bodies. The most uniform, Type 1, style camps have much in common with company towns and the neatly arranged and carefully monitored mining camps of the late 19th and early 20th century. These camps and towns had both utopian aspirations in that they sought to produce a space that would enforce idealized social and economic relationships. The arrangement of the spaces and the utopian supporting them sought, in part, to create docile bodies among the men and women who labored in the name of capital. The well-ordered spaces camp or town reproduced the well-ordered spaces of the factory or the mine and ran explicitly counter to the stereotypical chaos of the working class.

2. Camper Culture. Type 2 and Type 3 work camps move away from the uniformity of Type 1 camps, but nevertheless echo another form of capitalist culture (albeit in a ironic way).  The clusters of camper inhabited by oil patch workers have clear parallels with holiday campers clumped along the shores of various lakes across the northern plains (and the west more generally). The needs and opportunities of the oil patch transformed the campsite from a space of middle-class recreation to a place of working class residence.

3. Agency. On our drives around the Bakken range, Bret Weber and I spent considerable time talking about agency in the settlement patterns exhibited in the oil path. The extreme economy of Type 2 and Type 3 camps and the absence of what many regard as the most basic human comforts hint at the significant poverty and suffering. On the other hand, the temporary and ad hoc nature of the work camps may also reflect a series of economic strategies designed to limit risk and investment in the Bakken oil patch. The nature of booms brought on by natural resource exploitation and global markets makes modest, temporary housing a strategically sound decision for both individuals and communities. Moreover, many of the workers in the oil patch maintain primary residence elsewhere, so economizing at a remote work site is a strategy to maximize profits.  Determining how much agency individual residents of the camps have and what strategies they use to optimize their time in the oil patch will be a key component of interviews as well as efforts to document the material culture.

4. Community. In many of the discussions of the oil patch, we hear how the arrival of significant numbers of workers, heavy equipment, wealth, and all of the attendant chaos has effected local communities. Rarely have we heard much on the nature of communities of workers in the region. While communities may emerge in any number of places, surely the work camps represent a place where some basic community practices come into play. The arrangement of units, dispute resolution practices, discard behavior, and other issues that impact even the most ad hoc communities, certainly manifest themselves on both the social and material levels. The construction of community in the work camps remains a key interest of our project moving forward.

5. Work and Home. One of the more remarkable things at many of the camps was the blurring of the lines between domestic space and space of work. In some cases, Type 1 camps were built on the actual work site. Type 2 and 3 camps were often surrounded with truck tires, industrial equipment, and other indications that the residents used the unit as both a place of work and a place of lodging. Unlike company towns where an effort was made to maintain clear delineations between domestic and industrial space, work camps show a far more fluid and ad hoc relationship between the two spheres. While this is unsurprising perhaps for temporary housing serving an area of rapid industrial expansion, it nevertheless represents another way that life in a North Dakota man camp challenges traditional views of settlement and habitation practice in the U.S.

The temporary nature of camps presents a challenge and opportunity to study settlement strategies in a remarkably dynamic corner of the world. None of the 10 camps that we visited this past weekend, for example, appear on satellite images taken in 2010. Documenting such ephemeral and sudden shifts in human settlement should provide insights into economic and social strategies, changing notions of domesticity, and the requirement of early 21st century industrial capital.

A Typology of North Dakota Work Camps 3

Over the last three days, I have offered a formal typology of work camps associated with the North Dakota oil boom. This is part of a larger project focusing on the archaeology of contemporary work camps.

Type 1 camps are the most elaborate, orderly, and – one would imagine – comfortable. These camps feature prefabricated trailers arranged on a leveled slab, designed for northern winters, and offering most of the comforts of home. Type 2 camps represent more ad hoc arrangements of mobile living units. This type of camp typically involves campers with some amenities including electrical and sewage hook-ups, leveled ground, and some efforts at winterizing.  Type 2 camps show a whole range of different kinds of units and far less rigorous controls of their immediate environments. As a result there is a greater degree of personalization present.

Type 3: These camps are the most informal. They involve mobile trailers like in Type 2 camps, but unlike Type 2 camps, these trailers are not set on formally leveled ground and lack electrical or other hook-ups outside of very informal arrangements. These camps tend to be small and often include only a handful of campers clustered around a farmstead or set in a field. The informal nature of these camps makes it difficult sometimes to identify whether it is a work camp or just a few abandoned older campers parked with discarded farm equipment in a back lot.

The arrangement of units in a Type 3 camp ranges from the chaotic to the well-ordered. The lack of any requirements – such as the location of hook-up – for the arrangement of units means that the positioning of the individual units is at the discretion of the residents or the environment. The freedom to locate each unit in whatever way was suitable allowed residents to pull their vehicles quite close to their homes.  (It is interesting to note that in most cases, the units are arranged in a line or in some sort of orderly fashion even though there is no real reason to arrange the units that way.)

Like Type 2 camps, each unit tends to be different. There is some evidence for winterizing the units against the cold northern plain’s winters. There are also some efforts to personalize the units with chairs, grills, and various other household objects placed outside the camper. Wood pallets served multiple purposes and generally kept objects off the ground. There were also significant amounts of industrial material – like some Type 2 camps – arranged around the units. In some cases, generators or extension cords run to nearby buildings indicate that some ad hoc efforts were made to provide power for each residence.

Type 3 camps are often hybridized with Type 2 camps particularly Type 2 camps attracted more units than utility hook ups. It is also worth noting that some Type 3 camps may not be purely residential. In same cases these camps might serve as office space or break rooms for local workers.