The Grand Tour of Random Cities

There is irony in the fact that a city founded by the most hard-core of the Puritans is now one of the least law-abiding places in the country. As the train enters the city, a decrepit brick building towering over the ruins of another building has a message in graffiti written across it: "Detox the Ghetto." And on the city's tourism website, the changing advertisements on the right of the page are for financial rewards for turning in guns or illegal dumpers, a crime hotline, and a neighborhood renewal group.

Newark, New Jersey, may have dropped from the most dangerous to the 20th most dangerous city in America, but it is far from feeling like an alive and healthy place. It was my latest stop in what could be called my "Grand Tour of Random Cities." In my travels in the past few years, I've gone to places that are largely off the tourist map--East Lansing, Michigan; St. Louis; Springfield, Illinois; Providence; Richmond; Columbus, Ohio; Baltimore; and now, Newark. Each of these cities has its merits, but they are all places that have struck me as still recovering from the near-death experience of white flight and urban decay in recent decades.

I only saw a small pocket of Newark during my visit to the New Jersey Historical Society, but what I found most creepy there--as in Richmond, St. Louis, and to some extent in Baltimore--was the lack of people out in the streets. Broad, congested city streets run through block after block of silent, cold buildings and the people are largely sealed inside their cars. The historical society is in one of the few remaining 19th century buildings in this part of Newark, and as I sat in the 5th floor library, the whole building occasionally shook as a trolley rattled past.

In a city like Newark, the past feels fragile. To walk through the empty streets of a half-dead city in order to read the papers of its earlier inhabitants, inhabitants who lived there when the city was growing and thriving, is in some ways a depressing endeavor. I feel like a voyeur who is peering into the city's past without contributing to its future. Unless, that is, cities like these can figure out--as Washington, Boston, or Charleston have--that their history is what could build their future.

Research Trip, Post #3: Boston's Urban Wilderness

When I mapped the course I'd need to walk to get between two of the places where I was doing research one day--the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Museum of Fine Arts--I saw that my route was going to run along a mysterious patch of green labeled as the "Back Bay Fens." I knew that a fen was a swamp, so I wasn't sure what to expect on my mile-long walk. I was pleasantly surprised by a curving drive along the edge of a slightly-marshy wilderness.


The area wasn't always naturally beautiful. The park was created in 1879 to solve the problem of putrid waters in the area. Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape designer, came up with a plan that flushed out the waters and restore the tidal marsh. The area was still connected to the sea at that time, but that changed in later decades and the fens are now freshwater. Little of Olmsted's original design remains, replaced by sports fields and formal gardens.

Olmsted's vision for the "Emerald Necklace" of parks he developed in Boston was to create

a ground to which people may easily go when the day’s work is done, and where they may stroll for an hour, seeing hearing and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them...

The appearance of the fens may have changed in the past century, but it remains a retreat. I certainly found it to be a calming walk after a morning of hurried scavaging in the archives.

Research Trip, Post #1: A business trip?

Wandering into an archive you've never been to is kind of like starting a new job. You don't know your way around, how things are done, or what the institutional culture is like. And you have about 20 minutes to figure that all out so that you can get started calling up objects you need to look at. Sometimes, finding out exactly what it is you want to see is the hardest part. With the millions of papers, books, diaries, journals, sketchbooks, and more that are stored in archives, finding the useful pieces can be a tiring search.

Fortunately, between doing Internet searches in advance and getting advice from librarians, I was able to get what I needed quickly. And while I was working 9 to 5 at my computer in a quiet room, it was much more satisfying than going to a conventional workplace. My favorite parts of working were always the times when I got to do research, so this exactly what I went back to school to do. I was touching paper people in the nineteenth century had touched, reading what they had written, discovering nuggets that were useful for my project.

My second day doing research, a single piece of paper stopped me cold and reminded me that while I might be enjoying myself, I was looking at real people and sometimes harsh truths. Sandwiched between some personal letters, I found the bill of sale for a slave. I'm sure there are thousands of these, but I had never held one in my hands before. What I found most chilling was the line that said that this man would be the buyer's property "forever." That's not something you'd normally need to emphasize when you sell something, but this was the sale of a person.

I felt vaguely queasy the rest of the day after that find. No matter how much you read about history, holding a tiny piece of it in your own hands will always bring it home. Was going to the archives a business or a pleasure trip? A bit of both--plus a reality check.

The Dream Research Job

I've always wondered how The Daily Show always managed to dig up such great clips, often showing political figures contradicting themselves. Who figured out that Cheney, who now says the polls on the public's views on Iraq don't matter, cited public opinion polls 3 years ago to support the war? It turns out that digging up these clips is a full-time job at the show.

The Washington Post profiled the show's researcher, Adam Chodikoff, in today's paper. One of the show's writers commented that Chodikoff "spots patterns, trends, the forces of history." Chodikoff just comes into work in the morning and starts pouring through news stories to pick out interesting bits. Sounds kind of like what I do...except the final product of his research is a whole lot funnier than mine.