In poor neighborhoods, history is a bit more legible, more transparent. Houses are less often painted, signs less often replaced, while abandoned buildings experience a long afterlife of slow decay. Within their walls, the artifacts of the distant-recent past sometimes remain for decades, suspended in time even as time accelerates for the world around.
I remember visiting an empty Providence mill building in the mid-2000s with a friend. It was built in the 19th century and housed Thurston Manufacturing Co., maker of precision cutting saws, until its closure some time in the early 1990s. In the top floor office was a dried-up potted palm tree next to an orange armchair, the floor strewn with business letters and squatters' clothes. In a room nearby was a desk cluttered with blueprints and boiler reports going back to the 1930s. Amazing, that such ephemera could survive for more than a decade after abandonment. To be in a place like that, one feels the arrest of time, and it is a shock to the senses. Adjacent to Thurston Saw was Interstate 95, from which the angry drone of cars tearing by offered a perfect counterpoint to the stillness inside.
Thurston Saw has not made the switch to digital record keeping.
Thurston Saw does not accept web-based orders.
Thurston Saw does not enforce a no-smoking policy.
So what does this have to do with the South Bronx? Both the mills of Providence, RI and the neighborhoods of the South Bronx were casualties of the regional transition from an industrial to a 'knowledge-based' economy, along with the flight of jobs and capital to the suburbs. In both places, the built environment ceased to function as a dynamic symbol of progress, in effect ceasing to mark the passage of time-as-progress. The clock stopped for thirty years or so, and even now a few blocks remain unchanged from 'the bad old days.' To walk them is to slip through a crack in the edifice of our 'homogenous, empty time.' To do so without having to takes spirit, like opening a letter from a collections agency.
photo by Richard Townley.
Great post! You are quite right to say that "In poor neighborhoods, history is a bit more legible" -- and yet, so often, this legible surface is read only by others. For to those who live among it, the "value added" in acts of reading may be least. This is the irony of history, and part of the reason why I fear that, in America, the real value of history is as something you can afford to avoid, and only rent when needed. Nevertheless, there are often local informants, self-made historians of the neighborhood, who cross this line -- hope you have met up with some.
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