These communities all preserved and presented a nearly identical set of nineteenth-century buildings to create eerily similar, lifeless fauxtopias. Each boasts at least one pioneer log cabin, a rescued one-room schoolhouse, a small church, and a general store.
These are the structures that form the bedrock of community: the rustic hearth, with separate spaces for education, religion, and commerce. These historic parks are perfect symbols of the romantic small-town fantasy most people first thought they would get when they moved out of the city. That today they are besieged on all sides by freeways clogged with rush-hour traffic, thriving businesses and office parks, and neighborhoods full of homes shows that no one escaped the city: they brought the city with them.
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I keep thinking about those bricks Henry Ford knocked out of a perfectly functional building and hauled back to his walled town to incorporate into a replica of a modest turn-of-the-century workshop. What did he think those bricks meant? What strange power did he believe they held? Does it even matter, in the end, that the bricks came from the wrong house, when the underlying idea of moving any bricks from one place to another to represent some physical space of historical significance is so ludicrous? What story does a building tell when it has been removed from its original context: the mill from its stream, the general store from the community it served, the log cabin from the path of civilization in which it stood? What does Robert Frost’s home in Greenfield Village mean if we can’t walk down the same sidewalks he did when we leave it, or past the same hills where he gazed while dreaming up verse? And what about historical buildings rebuilt entirely after they were razed in war or some other disaster? Or historic buildings gutted to shells and filled with Chinese drywall and modern ornament? In the end, is any building really anything more than just mud and carbon?
It seems we are capable of interacting with history only through limited means. The first way is through the tangible. When we hold an antique or view something in a museum, we understand that we are interacting with the same object in the same way as others throughout history. Henry Ford believed very strongly in this tangible history. He created a legacy where future Americans would understand living history through interaction with ordinary objects—that’s why he collected so many thousands of ordinary tools and handicrafts and machines. But the second (and perhaps more important) way we interact with history is through the intangible; through our imaginations and the inspiration of others’ memories, their spoken or written words or artistic and photographic records. “History is about places of the mind,” writes historian David Starkey2. Appreciating history through architecture requires some of this imagination. When we visit the Roman Forum, we like to tell ourselves that we are “walking in the footsteps of Caesar,” but those bricks and columns have been toppled and rebuilt and broken again before being screwed together by dozens of archaeologists thousands of years after the Republic fell. Still. We believe architecture brings us closer to history the way medieval pilgrims believed relics brought them closer to Christ. They must have known that chunk of wood probably didn’t come from the true cross, but still, they bought it. We know a building is really just wood and bricks, but still we tell ourselves it’s something more, and open our imaginations to the wonder of those who came before us.
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I have never lived anywhere so burdened by nostalgia, which is a sort of enemy to history. How many older suburbanites cluck on and on about the state of Detroit today and then wax nostalgic for how good it was in the good old days? If it was so good, why did any of them leave? Most of the folks who live in the communities I’ve discussed above do not trace their origins to whitewashed steeples or quaint one-room schoolhouses that have been saved as a nostalgic reminder of a past most never really experienced. They trace their stories through Detroit, and the old world beyond it. While Detroit rots, the nostalgic, fauxtopian villages that surround that city are a vision of history some would rather embrace. This is what happens when we try too hard to preserve the past. We create towns without memories. We abandon buildings by saving them. We create history without any history. A history of nowhere. A history that is, I suppose, easier to contend with.
ERIC ANDERSON
Pretty Things to Hang on the Wall
I WANT TO LAUGH WHEN I hear that people are moving to Cleveland to practice their art. Then I want to spit in their faces. I want to do them grievous bodily harm. How dare they, I think. The nerve. Cleveland has never been the kind of place where it’s easy to be an artist; in fact, people who want to unravel the greater mysteries or search for universal beauty or answer the unanswerable questions usually leave Ohio, while those who stay often find themselves using art as a way to make life on the North Shore more bearable. In Cleveland, there just aren’t that many careers in the arts to be had. When I told my father I was thinking about going to the Cleveland Institute of Art, he said, “What kind of work can you find doing that?”
In fairness, he knew I lacked any sense of practicality. I wasn’t thinking about a career in graphic design. I wanted something like Warhol, but you know … more manly. But I was young and I didn’t have an answer to his question, so I did what he did. I found a job working construction in the steel mills.
When my artist friends talk about the dangerous toxicity of things like cadmium red and sprayable fixative, I nod politely but inside I’m cracking up. During
