To Market, To Market

This Saturday, I visited DC's Eastern Market. It was perfect weather for a walk around Capitol Hill and a morning of shopping outdoors. I wanted to make sure to visit this month, though, because the market has been suffering since its historic 1873 building had a terrible fire on April 30th. It's one of the places in DC that I'll miss most when I move.

Going to a public market has an appeal to it that a shopping mall will never capture. In some markets, being outdoors is one part of the allure, but so is interacting directly with the people who make, grow, or at least select their own merchandise. It also feels like a bit of a step back in time, since people have been selling goods this way for centuries.

Two of my favorite places from past visits to Philly are historic public markets. The city's Italian market claims to be "the oldest and largest working outdoor market in the United States," and I'm excited to be able to go there more often. Reading Terminal Market is a bit closer to where I'll be living and is historic in its own right; it apparently evolved out of an outdoor mess of stalls along what became Market Street.

I discovered that a fellow GW American Studies program alum has published a book called Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-Century America that explores how markets were key to the development of shared community values. The book focuses on New York and Philadelphia, but I think the recent fire at Eastern Market has demonstrated how central the space was to the community here in DC.

The community isn't just about the people that come to the markets; it's about the vendors interacting with their customers. The Slow Food movement (part of which is focused on buying local) calls this "linking producers and co-producers." I think I'll go eat some of the cherries I "co-produced" right now, in fact.

Moving Costs

In a world in which it seems like most of the stuff we're "moving" and "storing" is virtual (files, digital photos, e-mails, etc.), I forget how difficult and expensive it is to move physical objects. As objects for the big show at my museum are being moved in with painstaking care, I'm making my own moving plans. It turns out that moving a tiny studio apartment worth of furniture is a fortune. Having never moved more than a few miles, I had no idea how much places charge to take things longer distances.

It's hard to imagine, then, what it costs to move the art objects arriving at the museum from England, Brazil, India, Japan, Portugal, China...In this case, each collection sending any pieces send a courier, basically a trained escort, to make sure the piece arrives and is installed safely. There are stipulations in the loan contracts for some pieces that say what kind of light should be used, what kind of case the object should be in, sometimes even how close by a guard needs to be.

So, I suppose in contrast, my own move sounds fairly tame. No couriers for my couch, and no installation requirements for my architectural salvage artwork.

Entering the blogosphere

After 10 years of doing web work, I'm making the leap to Web 2.0: I'm entering the blogosphere. The occasion: my upcoming return to graduate school. For the first time in my life, I'll be living outside of the beltway. It's off to the city of brotherly love, Philadelphia, for a history Ph.D. Hence the title of this blog.

There are a few reasons I decided a blog would be appropriate, besides just keeping up with the times. I've been following the scattered blogs out there about academia, particularly those that address technology, and I'd like to become part of that dialogue. So, I'll be writing about both my interests in American history and in technology. Also, as I leave D.C., I want to document life in Philly.

George Washington in the news

Retired Gen. George Washington Criticizes Bush's Handling Of Iraq War

WASHINGTON, D.C.—The Revolutionary War veteran noted that while Hussein was a tyrant, that alone did not justify a "conflict that seems without design or end."

Good old George Washington made a couple of headlines this week. The first, of course, is a farce, but a very clever one. I'm kind of surprised that they didn't bring out more clearly Washington's isolationist view of foreign policy. In his farewell address, he said:

"The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop...If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance..."

Washington also made the news up in my home-to-be of Philadelphia. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I always thought of Washington's home as Mount Vernon. But he also lived in Philadelphia when the capital was located there, and apparently the National Park Service is excavating his home. Archaeologists have found "an underground passageway where slaves slipped in and out of the main house, so they wouldn't be seen by Washington's guests." Apparently Adams also lived in this house, and I have to wonder what he would have thought of having slave quarters in his residence. The website for the site has a live webcam of the dig plus a lot of information on slavery at the house.