(From left) Andrew Cushing, Sonja Lengel, Julia Griffith, Charlette Caldwell, and Amy Lambert take a picture of their reflections in the bean. Photo by Sonja Lengel.
(From left) Andrew Cushing, Sonja Lengel, Julia Griffith, Charlette Caldwell, and Amy Lambert take a picture of their reflections in the bean. Photo by Sonja Lengel.
Valley Forge. Photo by Sonja Lengel
Although the students from Penn did not run into any dinosaurs, Sue the T-Rex kept watch over the city during the Vernacular Architecture Forum in Chicago. Wikipedia Commons.
The only postcards I’ve ever received from Chicago were of Sue the T-Rex and of the city’s imposing, squarish skyline from Lake Michigan. Though I had seen images of Chicago landmarks in architectural history classes, I expected a city that was much like Philadelphia, but with wider streets and perhaps dinosaurs.
Chicago does have wider streets. All of us in Professor Wunsch’s praxis class couldn’t stop noticing the Midwest city’s scale. While Philadelphia is big, it’s walkable. Chicago’s sprawl makes it impossible to understand the city’s neighborhoods without access to all kinds of transportation and the help from knowledgeable natives. Lucky for us, at the Vernacular Architecture Forum, we had just that.
The VAF annual conference is a must-attend event for preservationists. From the get-go, we were thrust into the company of historians, practitioners, students, and professors. Several tours bused us to corners of Chicago not normally seen by the average tourist. (Though we couldn’t resist seeing Oak Park and Pullman.) These tours revealed layers of Chicago history that play out in the built environment: Polish immigration and the push for Americanization, the conflicts between institutions (University of Chicago) and historically black neighborhoods (Bronzeville), or how the government has thought about and treated the poor. Combined with paper sessions and a few beers, the VAF was a delightful filling to our praxis course sandwich – the weeks on either side having been spent exploring and researching Philadelphia’s “hinterlands.”
Back from the Windy City, we buckled up in the Pennmobile and trekked down to Delaware and Maryland for some plantation hunting. Our goals were to dig deeper into the Chew Family papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (the Chews owned the Germantown estate known as Cliveden), and to connect the primary sources of yesteryear with today’s landscape. With the help of Becky Shepard of the University of Delaware, we were introduced to the First State’s history of slavery, and to those Philadelphians (like the Chews) responsible for reaping the rewards of free labor.
It was a whirlwind of a summer class. Even without the dinosaurs.
Andrew Cushing is entering his second year in the Master's Program in Historic Preservation at PennDesign. He is from New Hampshire and received his undergraduate degree from Bowdoin College in Maine.
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