journal selections

Workshop, fall 2000

Anne Whiston Spirn, Critic

The site has become a much grimmer place now that the leaves are coming off the trees and the window of opportunity for good light gets smaller and smaller. I went last monday at about 12 noon, a bright grey day, and walked concentric circles, as dictated by blocks, around the 'core' of our architectural site. I was there for over an hour, studying the usual parks, streetscapes, and buildings, and saw (I counted) 14 people, total. Many of these people I would meet twice or three times as I circled around, down, up, and around again. With the exception of one city construction worker with a grease gun and a friendly little old lady, the attitudes have been almost without exception those of suspicion -- I don't think I'm imagining it -- mothers pulling children to the other side of them, and so on.

I don't know if I mentioned it previously, but there was an old lady down near the bottom of the hill in a previous visit, sweeping up leaves by her tidy little house. She had on a housecoat and a hat, and didn't pay me much mind until I aimed my camera at an old water heater in the street, which was rusted out and making these interesting stains on the blacktop. She asked me what I thought I was doing, and by the time our exchange was finished she was actually angry, standing between me and the water heater, as I put my camera down and tried to reassure her that I didn't mean her any harm and I and my friendly japanese friend (Kazuyo) would just be on our way now.

This all contributes to an extra-curricular (not immediately photographable) sense that I am an intruder in this community, even in the most public of parks. This kind of common intruder-ness gives me a little unexpected leeway in terms of where I can go, however -- I walk down people's driveways with (relative) impunity, peer over their fences at the views, etc. At some point after I drive down prison point bridge and head uphill toward Bunker Hill Road I've entered a communal 'house' that, all real estate renovation and speculation aside, still belongs to an aging, somewhat catankerous crowd skeptical of new housing patterns and living conditions. What would a photograph of this look like? I certainly would want to lead my web site with it if I could.

I wondered to myself as I walked along the street how I could look like I fit in, like I was a local who just happened to be carrying a camera and picking it up and snapping a shot now and then. People are having a hard time believing that they or their houses (or their water heaters, for that matter) are subjects worthy of record or reflection. This humility wouldn't be such a bad thing if it didn't get me into so much trouble. I have to do a little research and look at other photographs of similar post industrial urban situations. My attitude hasn't been one of uniform hopeless bleakness, or of sunny adaptive-reuse optimism, but has been mostly dispassionate and opportunistic -- I take 'em as I can find 'em. The intent has been mostly to capture as many disparate, sometimes abstract, moments in the site as possible; the attitude is still, for me, a little hazy.

The most recent visit to the site was instructive; it was right around Thanksgiving (the saturday following) and the weather was at its most destructive -- leaves were mostly blown off the trees and the park and streets started to feel like those of chicago, my hometown. The downside to living on a hill, of course, is that you're exposed to the full fury of the elements. Many of my pictures show a pastoral, sunny, presumably warm climate in bunker hill. The difficulty is going to be to show the other side, the 6 or so months that are awful.

I still haven't been to the site on a Sunday, when the churches would (I assume) do a brisk business. I wonder how many people trickle out of the church and down the steps that lead to the bottom of bunker hill and homes, stores, etc. Where do people park for church? Do the churches serve exclusively local traffic? It would be wonderful if they did; it would also suggest an incredible statistic of believers-per-capita in such a small neighborhood as this. What I'm noticing is the lack of after church restaurants, coffeehouses, gathering places within walking distance.

This observation -- that there are no structured (in the social sense), sheltered (in the architectural sense) semi-public spaces within walking distance -- is consistently true in charlestown, and suggests perhaps the way that much of boston was a generation or more ago. I'm not saying that the cafe is a recent invention, but only that widely distributed, mostly residential 'hang-outs' that aren't bars might be relatively recent additions to sleepy little towns like charlestown or somerville.

There's a VFW-type building that older gentlemen occasionally go into or out of, but it seems like the home is the primary location for entertainment. People invite other people over to the house, where they go inside and chat, eat a meal, have a drink -- in short, do all the things that one might do in an otherwise public cafe, piazza, bookstore, neighborhood restaurant, grocery, etc.

I don't know why I constantly single out the errant beer can or broken mirror when I walk along the streets in this neighborhood. It feels like I'm being too negative about someone else's streets, but in a sense, I feel like it's the only way I can get a hold of the people who live on these streets. It's also possibly the reason that my photographs have taken a particular kind of phenomenological, dramatic attitude toward the site.

(Part of the interesting thing about this class, of course, is the reading of the photograph, rather than the reading of the landscape -- if I didn't explain outright the absence of people in my photographs, the impression would probably be that I was scared of taking pictures of people or people were scared of my camera)

So the fact that I have the urge to record the broken scraps of the neighborhood must be because I have a negative attitude about charlestown? I hope not. I think the neighborhood is terrific, the buildings are pleasing (a good proportion of them, anyway), the location is spectacular, and the place is poised to be the locus of new, expensive development and gentrification.

There's a little raised garden outside what appears to be an old folks home but is probably just an apartment building, and the amount of trash that gets thrown into this grassy area is just unbelievable. One can't walk up onto it to retrieve trash, so beer cans, broken mirrors, scraps of paper and plastic collect there, in full view of people walking. Similarly, in the overgrown areas directly next to the public stairway, the amount of trash is really -- well, not surprising, really, to someone who's spent some time along morningside park. People spend time sitting on those stairs -- I've seen kids messing around there, and at least a couple of people eating lunch sitting there, and I doubt that they are the people who, somehow, wedged a styrofoam cooler into the crook of a tree.

It's interesting, I guess, to see how big - city treatment of public spaces finds its way into the sleepy hamlet on the hill. The wholesale neglect trashing of public spaces (a la Bryant Park before the renovation) is not something that only happens in big cities -- it happens across the board, and you just have to look harder in smaller towns to see it.