Preservation Roundtable: Public History of the Built Environment | Part One

The Weitzman Graduate Program in Historic Preservation’s Public History of the Built Environment concentration prepares students to put the study of urban and architectural history in service to publicly-oriented preservation practice. Unlike more general programs, the Weitzman School’s concentration focuses on the built environment and is informed by other aspects of historic preservation practice. 

In part one of this Preservation Roundtable, Aaron Wunsch (Associate Professor, Weitzman Historic Preservation) moderates a dialogue with David Barnes (Associate Professor, History and Sociology of Science), Laura Keim (HSPV Lecturer and Curator, Stenton), and LiLy Milroy (HSPV Lecturer and Professor Emerita, Wesleyan University) on the concentration, the history of Philadelphia’s landscapes, and how the public fits into public history. 

Aaron Wunsch  
So I thought, by way of kicking this off, I’d just talk a bit about the origins of the concentration, which, if nothing else, gets you thinking about how your own work plays into this concentration. The concentration group emerged partly out of a pragmatic desire to pull together existing course offerings under a label that would give them a kind of additional intellectual coherence. Unlike the planning concentration, or the conservation concentration, courses that related to history in our program tended to be sort of free floating. And as I discussed that predicament with Francesca Ammon starting in 2017, we decided that they really did actually cohere and deserve to be a concentration, particularly because there had been theses written in this part of the program for really the whole history of the program. So why did they not have an umbrella of their own under which they could nest?

In designing the curriculum, first, we said, alright, you really need to have taken the Documentation course and American Architecture to begin with. They're core requirements for the program as a whole, but we saw those two courses as natural feeders for the course offerings that were specific to the concentration. But then we began thinking about what other things should belong in the concentration. And obviously, not only a new public history course, which is being taught by LiLy Milroy this semester, but also Historic Site Management, which Laura Keim teaches. And then history survey courses of some kind, both Francesca and I taught those: she teaches History of City Planning and I have taught various seminars under the American Architecture label, which has been broadly interpreted to include landscape and any number of other things.

And it's that history seminar label that has opened the way to the most experimentation within the curriculum of the concentration. So back in 2018, David Barnes and I taught a course that was, at least in retrospect, the first official offering within the concentration: it was called Philadelphia Urban Experience and Public Memory. Laura Keim and I taught a course called Germantown Futures that was a kind of hybrid of a studio and a seminar course. And had there been a concentration called Public History of the Built Environment, this definitely would have been part of it. Finally, within that broad history seminar category, LiLy and I have been talking about teaching a seminar on the history of the Philadelphia Centennial and later fairs as they shaped the urban landscape of Philadelphia and Philadelphia historical thought, and future imagining. 

Laura Keim
I want to take that class.

Aaron Wunsch
Well, so do I. Maybe I can convince LiLy to teach it and then I'll take it.

But let me turn this over to you, David. When Francesca Ammon and I sat down to design the Public History of the Built Environment concentration, your work in History and Sociology of Science was part of our thinking. But, you know, unlike say, art history or geography, the history of medicine and public health is not automatically a route into the study of the built environment that most people can summon up when they think about that. So can you talk a little bit about how you see your specialty feeding into the Public History of the Built Environment concentration? 

David Barnes  
It was almost by accident in mid-career that I discovered public history and historic preservation, and it was because of the Lazaretto. As a historian of public health, I should have known all about it. But I didn't even know it existed until a colleague from Temple mentioned it to me in conversation, and I went down to check it out. It used to be the quarantine station for the port of Philadelphia, built after the devastating yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, and it operated throughout the 19th century. It was that site that opened my eyes to this exciting new world of historic preservation and public history. So it was through the built environment--through one particular built environment--that I discovered public history. 

Since then, it's just been a very slippery slope, and now I'm a hopeless addict. I find preservation and public history the most exciting kind of engagement with the past. I realized early on that the key to public history was storytelling—but not storytelling in a vacuum. I think stories are the vehicles through which we construct meaning, and through which we make sense of the world and we make sense of the past. Storytelling requires context, interpretation, analysis, and situatedness within larger structures of meaning, and that's where the scholarship comes in. My training as a historian of public health (and just as a historian, period) is, I think, absolutely vital. But my sense of what history is, and what history can be at its best, has been transformed through my engagement with public history and historic preservation, learning from colleagues like the three of you. And today, I can't think of doing any kind of history or teaching without an emphasis on storytelling and engagement with a variety of communities beyond the academic world.

Aaron Wunsch  
So one of the shibboleths of the preservation field, at least in the last 20 or 30 years, has been the word "place". And it occurs to me, as you describe the Lazaretto, which is both building and landscape, that Philadelphia has a particularly rich tradition of trying to address various health issues through buildings and landscapes. Place obviously matters, but we don't often articulate why enough; we sort of say it reflexively. Philadelphia, arguably, is, at least historically, the capital of using architecture and landscape to improve human life in a kind of intentional way in this country. It has been a laboratory for experimentation, some of which, of course, looks very dark, in retrospect: if you look at Eastern State Penitentiary, for instance, the so-called crucible of good intentions can go pretty far off track. 

Nonetheless, partly because of the city's Quaker origins, Philadelphia has produced these therapeutic environments that I think were crucial to bringing me into what we now call public history of the built environment as well. But the sort of landscape dimension of that, or I could say the combination of the two, has also been something that I think both LiLy and Laura have thought a fair amount about: Laura, through the context of Stenton, which, had one of the first and most impressive greenhouses in the city of Philadelphia (it wasn't the city of Philadelphia then; it was the rustic hinterlands of Philadelphia, or maybe the villa District of Philadelphia); and, LiLy, through her book, The Grid and the River, has really looked at the history of green space as a kind of instrument of improvement in Philadelphia from the city's origins, too. Laura, I wonder if you'll talk to us not just about Stenton, but also about your connection to the public history of the built environment, and specifically through the sort of venue of Site Management, which was the course that initially, ensured that you would play a central role in the concentration.

Laura Keim  
Okay, I would just preface my thoughts with a bit about my background and training. I was an art history major in my undergraduate experience, so I share a foundation in that discipline with LiLy. I really loved architecture as part of art history, and studying space. And ultimately, I had an American art professor who really brought a cultural history understanding to art and material culture in my senior year. Because I really didn't know how I wanted to apply my education, I spent a couple of years working in the registrar's office at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, learning about museums and how they operate, and spending my lunch breaks in the American art galleries learning the labels. I knew I wanted to go to grad school, but I didn't want to just get a master's degree in art history. I was drawn to preservation because of the built environment focus and this interest in space and architecture, and so came to Penn myself. 

So I'm a graduate of this program from the mid 1990s, and essentially discovered a deep love of material culture as part of the program, particularly in what were then two History of Interiors courses taught by Gail Caskey Winkler, who's now retired, and her husband Roger Moss, who also directed the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. Roger Moss taught a historic site management class and the documentation course. So I took these courses in previous iterations, and was very much formed by them in my own thinking and methods, and then ultimately went on right after the Penn program to the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture. After graduate school, I went to work at Stenton, which is a historic site in Northwest Philadelphia, lower Germantown, in 1999, specifically to start cataloging, and computerizing collections records, at the time  a grant funded project.

I worked at Stenton probably for close to 10 years before I even had someone say something to me about public history. I still remember this moment. And I would consider myself an accidental public historian, maybe, because I was sitting in a seminar at the McNeil Center, and a question came up that led the people in the room to say, let's ask the public historians what they think about this question. With many eyes then glaring at me, I thought to myself, Oh, yes, I suppose I am a public historian. 

So, you know, I probably still think of myself first and foremost as a kind of material culture scholar, and in that I include buildings and landscapes. And so I probably have, other than the courses I've taught with Aaron, probably done less thinking about the scale of a neighborhood or the city as a whole, and have tended work in this historic site scale, now, for a number of years, which includes a landscape and buildings and collections, and people--and how we tie all that together to create context and understanding, and to place this historic site object both in historical and contemporary contexts, and make it relevant and important for people who come and spend time with us. In this day and age, a lot of our work is online. At the moment, we do a lot more online engagement than in-person engagement at Stenton.

Aaron Wunsch  
LiLy, how do you see things like museums and museum studies relating to public history of the built environment, but also departing from it? I mean, they're not the same thing, and I'd be curious, where you see the overlap, and where you see the limits as well. 

LiLy Milroy  
Like Laura, I come from the ranks of the art historians. But before I got to graduate school, I actually had worked at a museum for a couple of years, I worked at the National Gallery of Canada. And so that gave me, fairly early on, experience in organizing exhibitions that had to be comprehensible to the general public. And so, one of the aspects of museum work I think is a little different than someone who, say, has spent their career in the academy is that you are interacting with the public from the start, particularly if you're in education. Though one could argue that many curators spend most of their time in a back room, you know, sort of working with objects and don't connect with the public as they should.

I guess it's kind of a roundabout route: I was teaching at Wesleyan and still working in a more conventional traditional kind of art history, which was looking at the history of painting. But I got really interested in the history of exhibitions and I started asking the question, where did people see art in the mid-19th century? And I happened upon the Civil War-era Sanitary Fairs, which, of course, were these huge events that were organized to raise money for the Union medical services, essentially. So here's this interesting connection with the history of science and health and medicine as well. And the largest art exhibition to date was in Philadelphia in 1864, at the Great Central Sanitary Fair, which was on Logan Square. And I found that very little had been really written about that exhibition at that time, although it seemed like everybody was getting interested in it.  As I was working on the fair, I kept running into references to "the new park" and "Philadelphia's wonderful new park". And I thought, okay, I need to look this up. 

Because I kind of vaguely knew about Fairmount Park, because I lived in Philadelphia, and I'd been in the park and I'd walked through it but I’d never really studied its history in any sense. And back to David's point about stories and storytelling is that I discovered, first of all, that very little of substance had been written about the history of Philadelphia's park system. And much of what had been written and was being told and retold was wrong. The best example of that being the Philadelphians, who proudly will tell you that Fairmount Park is the largest park in the world, or the largest park in the United States. It was the largest park system in the United States, in 1912. It has not been the largest park system in the United States for a long time. So, you know, I wanted to correct that. 

And in the process of studying the history of the park, I, again, as a 19th century historian, thought that it was initially a 19th century story. That's how it had been treated by most historians. And again, the more I dug into it, the more I realized that you really did have to go back to William Penn. And what you learn about is how Philadelphia has also been about manipulating its own space, and manipulating the built environment to project its image as the sort of ideal enlightenment city. And you know, what William Penn was hoping to create. 

And of course, if you work in the history of landscape, you have to think about the need to, for example, be able to identify trees. You know, what's the difference between a maple tree and an oak tree and how do you talk about that to the public? How do you talk about landscapes that grow and die? 

And actually, one interesting project I was involved in many years ago was writing a nomination for national historic landscape status for Fairmount Park. And it was interesting because when we sent the nomination to the National Park Service, they didn't know what to do with Philadelphia's parks because they had not been designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. The Park Service criteria don't understand something that was essentially assembled—it was not designed. And so the nomination, basically, has been sitting on a shelf for the last 20 years because what do you do without a designer?

And back to public history: throughout all this, I was giving talks in museums to people who would come to gallery talks, and something that people who work in museums get a lot of experience with, and Laura can speak to this is, you know, what do you do with the tour group that arrives? How do you talk to them about a particular object or a particular site, a particular structure in a way that catches their attention—and in a way that stimulates conversation? So I actually worked as the Head of Public Programs at the Art Museum for a number of years, and one of the things we were trying to do there was to move away from the gallery talk that's like one person talking at everyone else, and really develop gallery talks as conversations and dialogues. So you don't know what people are going to bring to the table. And so the storytelling becomes a very dynamic and fluid kind of process, which was really interesting.

And I'll finish by saying that the approach I took in writing my book about Philadelphia's parks was to emphasize the fact that these were spaces that had been documented, visually or pictorially, for decades before an official city park was actually instituted, in prints, drawings, paintings. By comparison, Central Park in New York, is entirely the invention of Olmsted's mind, of Olmsted and Vaux's design. In Philadelphia, the park was assembled when the city expropriated estates principally owned by elite Philadelphians who had developed the villa district along the Schuylkill which had been memorialized by artists. Rather than inventing a new park, Philadelphians actually preserved existing landscapes and incorporated those into a park, in an act of what was essentially Historic Preservation rather than design invention. That's unlike most of the urban park systems in this country, which was unusual. So the art historical record was really important to understanding the history of Philadelphia's parks.