A conversation starter
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Buildings and landscapes do not make a place.
People do. Yet, as an architectural historian I am trained to begin with material objects—chairs, artifacts, buildings, streets, and cities. The material world constructed by humans is a portal into something greater than the objects themselves. Buildings lead me to residents, cities to citizens, and objects to their owners. Humans invest objects with values, memories, and meanings. Studying the relationship between an object and its user offers insights that interviews can barely provide. I follow material objects for clues to people. Midtown too led me to its people and a larger network of relationships—between people and places within this neighborhood. Neighborhoods are not mere geographical entities with fixed boundaries. Rather, they are an ecology of relationships. I use the term ecology to represent a complex system of people, places, objects, animals, senses, emotions, and relationships that are experienced as one, but are difficult to disentangle into constituent parts. Neighborhood ecologies are invisible to us until we experience it. We have been here before. The 2015 field school was hosted by ACTS Housing. During that time, we interviewed local clients, staff, and members of this organization; we documented new homes and foreclosed properties. We conducted history harvests with Lao and Hmong residents at the St. Michael’s Church. We organized community walks and designed ceramic tiles with Muneer Bahauddeen. This year we discovered a completely different world that exists in the same locality. We met a group of senior gardeners from the Cherry Street Community Garden. We spent time with elderly residents at the Cherry Court community room. We interviewed board members of the Midtown Neighborhood Alliance as well as a few local residents. We documented the homes of five homeowners and studied an early 20th Century two-car garage. We explored how duplex homes, built for upwardly mobile working class European American homeowners were adapted by African American residents who followed these earlier residents. Community leaders led us on two neighborhood walks and showed us sites of historical and cultural significance—and we produced a digital walking tour out of that information. Yet, there is so much more to do. It is never our objective to write a comprehensive and chronological history of this neighborhood. At least not yet. We describe, however imperfectly, Midtown as an assemblage of ideas, emotions, histories, people, and material objects. Our goal is to try and understand and explain how we experience Midtown. We offer these stories as a conversation starter with the community and ask them to revise it, draw us into longer discussions, and to act on them. We are here for at least two more years in order to sustain these collaborations. This website should initiate a longer colloquy between Midtown residents and us. Arijit Sen, Associate Professor of History, Urban Studies and Architecture |
Summer 2023 Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School events (Photograph credits: BLC Archives)
Midtown images from the past. (Photograph credits: Milwaukee County Historical Society Archives)
Credits
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We thank our funders, UWM Cultures & Communities, Vernacular Architecture Forum, UWM Center for 21st C. Studies, UWM Department of History, Milwaukee County Historical Society and the UWM Office of Undergraduate Research.
