Doors Open Baltimore – This Saturday, October 25

After my last post about the decay of Baltimore progressive civic icons from the 19th century, Doors Open Baltimore celebrates the industrial past that made it possible this Saturday, October 25, 2014 from 10am-4pm. Fascinating physical industrial heritage spanning from the early 19th century forward still survives in the city.

If I were going to be in Bawlmer this weekend, I would go see…

  • Mt Royal Station, former uptown home of the Baltimore and Ohio RR. It closed in 1961 and was purchased by the Maryland Institute College of Art. Photo: Wikipedia.

    Mt Royal Station, former uptown home of the Baltimore and Ohio RR. It closed in 1961 and was purchased by the Maryland Institute College of Art. Photo: Wikipedia.

    Mt Royal Station (now owned by Maryland Institute College of Art, itself a Baltimore institution of long standing)

  • Montgomery Park – a 1925 mega warehouse, one of 9 in the states
  • Union Mill – at the time it was built largest manufactory of cotton duck
  • Merritt Downtown Athletic Club – didn’t know it was the Northern Central Railroad freight shed
  • Crown Cork and Seal – the inventor of the bottle cap in 1892
  • Baltimore Streetcar Museum – been there already, but for electric traction and Ma & Pa Railroad fans, it’s a good time. Lots of volunteer gear-head spirit makes this place happen.

Make your own itinerary and get program info at http://doorsopenbaltimore.org.

The Zoo, the Park, and a Baltimore Befuddlement

I’m not an expert on Baltimore, by any means. I’ve never lived there. I was born in Towson and grew up in Carroll County. But Baltimore was my first exposure to City and all that big “C” entails. The redeveloped Harborplace of the early 80s. Field trips to the National Aquarium, before it was $35 per person. Seeing traveling Broadway productions at the Morris Mechanic Theatre, now being turned into brutalist rubble. It pains me to see the amazingly beautiful stretches of Baltimore neighborhoods underused.

A 1921 Postcard showing the Mansion House, 1801, turned into a mid-19th century pavilion at the Zoo. Rootsweb.

A 1921 Postcard showing the Mansion House, 1801, turned into a mid-19th century pavilion at the Zoo. Rootsweb.

We visited the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore last weekend (terrible name, change it back to Baltimore Zoo as soon as you possibly can, regardless of who is footing the bill). I don’t think I had been by Druid Hill Park since my last visit to the zoo 30 years ago.  Baltimore, its fine bones seen from train or car window, is a place worth restoring. Easy access to interstates and suburbs and the gutting of public transportation caused a fast and sudden osmosis of talent and neighbors in the 1950s and 60s. The collapse of industry in the 1980s finished off many other human resources.

Driving past Druid Park, I thought of what was, and what could be. The Zoo is rather fascinating in terms of its long institutional history. With roots extending to the 1860s, there are institutional artifacts littering the property. Other institutions may have torn them down, but they provide fascinating layers of cultural heritage to view. Why not celebrate that heritage with some interpretive signage? (Disclaimer: I could have missed labels, now that I have a son). Instead of taking the tram from the entry gates, we walked to the park, past stone foundations of unknown purpose. Ancient pagoda-like wood aviaries (possibly?) sat behind a “Staff Only” sign near the entrance. My father remembered visiting the zoo in the 1950s, when you could drive through it. I think that the relics of the many previous incarnations of the zoo tell a great story on their own and deserve interpretation.

The grand Mansion House Pavilion (1801) belies the donation of the Rogers Family of their estate to Baltimore during the mid-19th century parks movement. Entry to the zoo takes you past the fantastical Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory and Botanic Gardens of Baltimore. Late nineteenth century bits of revival architecture litter the landscape, speaking of former fountains, rail lines through the park, and other social ideas left to deteriorate. During my years here in New York, I’m amazed at what types of structures can no longer exist within my adopted city due to its ravenous developers and boom boom boom mentality, but are preserved in others.

Wikipedia.

Wikipedia.

Nearby stand landmarks to public transportation, the City Beautiful movement, Jewish heritage, and more complicated stories of segregation (the white tennis courts were integrated by 24 African-American players in 1948, and arrested for doing so) and anti-immigrant politics. Shaarei Tfiloh Synagogue is a beautiful, rock-faced 1920s structure that served Eastern European immigrants until their move to suburbs like Pikesville in the 1960s. Interestingly, the Young Men’s and Women’s Hebrew Association used the Mansion House in the zoo in the 1940s for meetings.

Amazingly, the car barns for the Baltimore City Passenger Railway Park Terminal line the route. A Doorway beckons mysteriously “Waiting Room.” These buildings are rare veterans of the streetcar era and have repurposing by the MTA as a bus depot and urban blight to thank for their survival. (I’m surprised some rail fan hasn’t made this complex their mission and created an online monument to it). As noted by many streetcar-friendly urban planners and historic preservationists, streetcars foster greater economic development along their entire length than bus routes. The Baltimore streetcar lines were famous, and could be a force for revitalizing past City Beautiful investments.

April 1943. “Baltimore, Maryland. Trolleys inside the Park Terminal at night.” Photo by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information.

April 1943. “Baltimore, Maryland. Trolleys inside the Park Terminal at night.” Photo by Marjory Collins for the Office of War Information.

Museum Monday: Why Set Collections Priorities for Emergencies? How to Get Started

Ready NYC has named their family emergency preparedness campaign “Winging it is not an emergency plan.” This may resonate with you if you have ever promoted an emergency preparedness effort, only to be told “each emergency is different. We can’t figure out what to do now. We can only decided what to do when it happens.” Resistance to planning can come from any section of your institution, from curators, administrators, and surprisingly, conservators and security staff.

Yes – each emergency is different. But not planning for how your institution will act during an emergency situation can lead to confusion, damage, and even loss of life. We participate in fire drills. We have our fire extinguishers inspected. And to preserve our collections to the best of our ability during disaster recovery, we need to drill our decision-making capability.

A good way to get started is for curatorial and conservation decision makers to brainstorm about what “collection priorities” means to them. Collections preparedness literature dictates that planners select their most valuable objects, mark them on maps, store extra keys to them offsite, and so forth. These are logical steps, but for large collections, this can seem overwhelming, and can derail discussions before they begin. But when your team practices establishing collection priorities, they are exercising their ability to make quick and meaningful decisions as a team about objects compromised by water and fire damage.

Sit your decision makers around a table. Include curatorial, collections, and conservation voices, depending on the make-up of your staff. Select one gallery or storeroom. Say “there has been a fire in this room. The fire is out. What do we need to salvage and/or secure first?” Most permanent staff can quickly pinpoint within that room groups, if not specific objects, that have high value to the institution’s mission, without using the collections information database. Make a list of the team’s first impressions. They could include “the cased photographs,” an Album quilt recently published and exhibited in a travelling exhibition, and so forth. Don’t forget rare books and institutional archives too. Object records, if without a digital or hard copy back-up offsite, must also be considered. Think about it: is it less expensive to begin a digitization project now, or to salvage damaged materials at a rate exceeding $50,000 for 800 linear feet later? Certainly, this list will change depending on what areas of your institution are affected.

One group we need to automatically account for during an emergency is objects loaned to the museum. These objects are not ours, and we need to alert the owner that their object has been involved in an incident, damaged or not. Depending on how many objects your museum borrows from outside lenders, this can be a big task during recovery.

Private collectors can also do this exercise. It is worth thinking about what objects are most valuable and most meaningful to you prior to an emergency.

Use the information from your first brainstorming session to refine collection priorities at subsequent meetings. The priority list should be reviewed and updated as new objects enter the collection. Flag priority objects in your collections database with a status flag, attaching a keyword, user-defined field, or collecting them in a package. Make sure you can search these priority objects by location, so that if a flood damages one gallery, you can quickly generate a list of priority objects from your database. Repeated sessions will familiarize and strengthen your team’s capacity to prioritize during a salvage operation.

This information will be critical to helping you, conservators, and your emergency response team make tough decisions during salvage operations after a fire or flood. This period is stressful and emotional. Help your team prepare for it by considering collection priorities now.

 

Museum Monday: New Frontiers

Visiting Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond at the Louisiana State Museum in March 2012.

Visiting Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond at the Louisiana State Museum in March 2012.

This month I begin a new venture: developing a preservation and emergency consulting practice. You can visit my new website at www.rebeccafifieldpreservation.com. I’ve largely been an institutional creature up to this point in my career. I crave process and figuring out systems that bring colleagues together. I’ve decided to take that enthusiasm to help a variety of organizations with their preservation and emergency planning challenges. I’ll be offering collections management and emergency preparedness services as well as historical research and interpretation services. Some of my favorite past experiences included my work with local history collections and historical sites. Staff and volunteers at these sites often provide much of the elbow grease and demonstrate real buy-in. These are organizations that can really benefit from a systematic approach to preservation that uses their limited resources wisely. Successful preservation programs are dependent not only on conservation science, but on creative management, benchmarking, and staff coaching. Preservation must be a joint effort in which all inputs are valued – this fosters cross-organization collaboration.

Maryland Material Culture: Bushel Basket

Quiz: What does a Marylander most often associate with a bushel basket?

Sure, you can put fruit or vegetables in it (pick-ur-own or picked up at the farmstead), but Marylanders most want to see this lined with newspaper and stuffed with steamed crabs, caked with Old Bay seasoning.

Here’s to summer time eating, whether you use a mallet or a knife to clear your claws.

Summer wonderful. Crabs. RL Fifield, 2012.

 

Transportation Tuesday – B&O Centenary Pageant, 1927

Ladies in nymph-like attire twirling and leaping through fields – sounds like the turn of the century pageantry movement to me. The Centenary Pageant in 1927 for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad is a rather late occurrence of this type of display of civic and industrial pride. Part artistic endeavor and part technological exhibition, Baltimore and Ohio set up a location for the festival at Halethorpe near Baltimore.

The pageant, staged each afternoon of the festival, melded historical displays and demonstrations of historic equipment. Company musical groups made up the cast of the pageant, including the Women’s Music Club, the Men’s Glee Club, and the Mount Clare Band, with the addition of some outside performers. The Baltimore Sun captured women wearing vintage clothing from the 1830s and members of the Blackfeet tribe that camped on the festival grounds.

Interestingly, the B & O intended the buildings in Halethorpe to house and display their historic collections. In 1935, an intense storm toppled the buildings. Eventually, the B & O Museum opened on the Mount Clare site in Baltimore. The collapse of the B&O Museum roundhouse roof in 2001 in an ice storm likely means some of their collections have weathered more than one disaster. Restoration of the damaged works continues today.

See a fascinating short film by Eastman Kodak of the Pageant here. The first half, showing men and women in historic clothing riding on stage coaches and scrambling down from the first locomotives is followed by a timeline of rail equipment.

For more reading, see David Shackleford’s The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in Maryland and David Vrooman’s Daniel Willard and Progressive Management on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

 

 

 

Museum Monday: Ten Things in the Indiana State Museum’s Video that Make Me Happy

What makes me happy when I watch the Indiana State Museum and Historic Sites Happy video? See it here!

  • Double-sided side truck
  • Not one, but two fume hoods
  • Heritage Preservation’s Emergency Salvage and Response Wheel
  • Labeled archive boxes
  • Blackout/dust covers over hanging costume storage and shelving content lists
  • Nice loading dock leveler
  • Stellar carpentry shop
  • People in meetings -non-museum people don’t know what sorts of coordination is necessary to make it all happen!
  • Huge freight elevator
  • Great museum cabinets and compact units

 

The staff at the Indiana State Museum truly seems happy! It takes a lot of talent to run a museum, so kudos to all the different departments making it happen at ISMHS and represented in the video(knowing full well that staffing is different in every institution, so if I give the folks at ISM a chuckle, great):Preparators, Photo Studio, Design, Security, Facilities, curator (drinking coffee?), Museum Shop, Conservators, Collections staff of varying ilks, Registrars (did I see a clipboard or two?), Visitor Services, and Education. And of course, the folks who filmed and edited it. Thanks!

 

When Your Favorite Place Closes

Pintxos. It was a tiny hole in the wall on Greenwich Street in a cluster of old storefronts squeezed against the Hudson at the end of Spring Street. Small tables snugged up against benches with cushions and the perfect night there was a soft summer night, the windows thrown open onto the sidewalk. I remember squid ink paella and minerally Txakoli. Other nights held croquetas, heartbreakingly good olives and cheese, and friends I no longer see. The kitchen was the size of my apartment kitchen – just enough space for a cook to stand in one place and reach everything. Chatting with the owner one night, he said the tight kitchen was the most efficient way to execute his craft. You don’t spend time running across the floor to the fridge, the prep space, the stove. It became my philosophy in renovating my 24 sq. foot Manhattan kitchen.

But Pintxos closed many years ago, and while I heard that their chef moved to Cafe Ronda, another favorite tapas space of mine, you never can go home again. When a restaurant closes, so do your memories. Did you ever exist in that space? You can’t visit to reconfirm that joke, that night she said yes, that moment in which you both decided the answer was “no longer.” Pintxos is now a bit of a curled lip and a shrug.

I figured that if I ate every meal in a restaurant in NYC, I would never eat at the same place twice. This is especially true considering those restaurants that are flashes in the pan, opening and closing, and being replaced in short order. Sometimes I wonder at the point of having a favorite place in NYC; given all the options, it seems wasteful to go to the same place again and again. But choice can be too much – many New Yorkers consider five blocks distant from their apartments to be another neighborhood. We’ll haunt our Mexican hole in the wall, Sabor a Mexico, Burger Fi, Om Indian, or the Upper East Side version of the Meatball Shop without restraint. One has to set limits.

One of our first dates took place at Nina’s Argentinian Pizzeria, on 2nd Avenue in the 90s. The project of Italian immigrants to Argentina, their food offered the best of both worlds, incredible pasta, empanadas, sangria, flan, and chewy crust pizza – our favorite was one with chimichurri and meatballs. They greeted you with a soft, garlicky eggplant spread, made silken with olive oil. We bemoan that the owner hasn’t seemed to relocate, but it doesn’t stop us from occasionally Googling Nina’s. It wouldn’t be the same, but couldn’t he have reopened in Brooklyn, or maybe Hoboken? Alas. Those special first evenings can’t be relived. But we’d love to be able to make a pilgrimage to Nina’s to mark the passing of time all the same.

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Pintxos, NYC, a tapas restaurant on Greenwich Street. Strong in the memory, though it closed several years ago.

Don’t Confuse Geisha and Courtesans (Oiran and Tayu)

Images of geisha and courtesans are often mislabeled. For those unfamiliar with subtleties in the styling and wear of kimono, obi, and traditional Japanese hairstyles, it can be difficult to differentiate between a geisha, a bride, a housewife visiting friends, a Hollywood fantasy interpretation of a geisha, and a tourist playing dress-up (yes, for a fee, you can be decked out like a maiko, an apprentice geisha). Painting Japanese traditional dress with a broad brush perpetuates misunderstandings of the roles geisha and courtesans play(ed) in the entertainment districts within Japan’s flower and willow world.

The terms geisha and kimono have been misapplied by Western culture to anything from bathrobes to science fiction characters. The western world created confusion of the roles of geisha and courtesans. Lumped together, the nighttime entertainment roles of geisha and oiran (in Edo) and geiko and tayu (in Kyoto) could only mean sex to Westerners. The West was familiar with hierarchies within sex work, from the courtesan to the streetwalker. The geisha, an entertainer who sang, danced, and provided witty repartee while clients waited for their time with with the courtesan, does not have an analagous counterpart in Western culture. Geisha, which loosely translates as “arts person” continue their role of entertainer in the absence of distinct courtesan culture today.

I’ll limit this post to indicate a few primary details in the differences between the dress of geisha, maiko apprentices, and courtesans. There are details in the ornamentation, hairstyle, and how they wear their kimonos that indicate their respective roles.

Geisha, traditionally the arbiters of cool, have always been more austere in their appearance compared to the come-hither tinkling of batteries of hair ornaments and sumptuous fabrics of the courtesan. As the nineteenth-century progressed and modernization arrived in Japan, geisha began to appear more elegant to their admirers, while courtesans began to look tawdry, antique, and cheap.

Today, geisha and their maiko apprentices entertain in exclusive tea houses (read: clubs) and restaurants and are featured on-stage during festivals. Courtesans are now represented by actresses as tourist attractions in oiran parades and tayu reenactment parks.

Here is a very brief comparison of oiran, geisha (known as geiko in Kyoto), and maiko:

Oiran: extravagant hair ornaments and hairstyle, large obi tied in front (easier to untie and retie that way), towering clogs in which she parades in a figure 8 step – this is worth watching! Watch here (the oiran comes into view around 2:00).

An oiran parades with a male attendant. She would often be accompanied by teenage and child apprentices. Konstantin Papushin, 2008. CC BY-SA 2.0

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Geiko and maiko: Their appearance is demure in comparison to the tawdry oiran and tayu. Both wear their obis tied in the back. Long sleeves and tucks in the maiko’s kimono signify her immature status, even though these teenagers are full-size. The maiko’s more heavily patterned kimono and collar and exuberant accessories will become more subdued as she advances in her career, as can be seen in the geiko’s apparel. Still, the maiko’s embellishments are restrained in comparison to those of a courtesan. They are cute, whereas the courtesan’s appearance is loud.

The Maiko on the left has a long obi, sleeves, and a hairstyle revealing a flash of red. The geiko on the right has a shorter obi and sleeves, more subdued kimono, and different hairstyle. CC BY 2.0

Stripey Runaway Buys 10 Dozen Continental Buttons at a Vendue-Store in 1784

I was playing around on America’s Historical Newspapers, a digital subscription newspaper archive based on the American Antiquarian Society’s collection of historical newspapers. My mother’s family has been based in Harford County, Maryland for almost 400 years. A search on “Harford” often yields the quirky and interesting. Havre de Grace, the city at the transition between the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay, was once called Harford Town.

I particularly liked Stephen Locket’s colorful “red and white striped silk jacket” and “blue and white striped cotton trousers.” Major Thomas Yates’s Vendue-Store was located in Frederick Street in Baltimore. Vendue-Stores hosted auctions for estates, land, and market goods, as well as sold sundries.

Stephen Locket’s purchase of 120 continental buttons makes one wonder as to his purpose. Are they for petty sutlery? His own use? Thoughts welcome, as this is not my area of expertise.

Maryland Journal, January 11, 1785. American Antiquarian Society.

Maryland Journal, January 11, 1785. American Antiquarian Society.