The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory
The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory
The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory
ScholarlyCommons
Theses (Historic Preservation) Graduate Program in Historic Preservation
2002
Daly, Kate, "The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory" (2002). Theses (Historic Preservation). 520.
http://repository.upenn.edu/hp_theses/520
Copyright note: Penn School of Design permits distribution and display of this student work by University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Suggested Citation:
Daly, Kate (2002). The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory. (Masters Thesis). University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Comments
Copyright note: Penn School of Design permits distribution and display of this student work by University of
Pennsylvania Libraries.
Suggested Citation:
Daly, Kate (2002). The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory. (Masters Thesis). University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia, PA.
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UNIVERSlTYy
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The Interpretation of Ruins at Sites of Memory
Kate Daly
A THESIS
Historic Preservation
MASTER OF SCIENCE
2002
Supervisor der
David Hollenberg David De Long
Lecturer in Historic Preservation Professor of Architecture
KyM/tM^
Graduate Uroup Chair
Frank G. Matero
Associate Professor of Architecture
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UNIVERSITY
PENNSYLVANIA
LIBRARIES
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the staffs at the three historic sites studied in this thesis for
assistance of Sally Elk, Executive Director of Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site;
Frank Hays, Superintendent of Manzanar National Historic Site; and Steve Long,
I would also like to thank my advisor, David Hollenberg, for his invaluable
guidance throughout the process of conceptualizing and writing, and my reader, David
from my family.
11
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations iv
Illustrations 88
Bibliography 96
Index 103
ui
List of Illustrations
Figure 3: The ruins apartment, 1995, Lower East Side Tenement Museum 90
Figure 4: The Gumpertz apartment, 1995, Lower East Side Tenement Museum 91
Figure 7: High School Recess Period, 1943, Manzanar War Relocation Center 94
IV
Chapter One: Introduction
episodes in U.S. history. No longer content to preserve only those parts of the built
memorialize labor and immigration history and the history of women and people of
color. As a consequence, sites that still have the power to make visitors uncomfortable,
such as nineteenth-century factories and slave quarters, were restored and opened for
tours. This development in the United States was influenced in part by the growing
Within the past ten years, three such historic sites of conscience that share a
common history have been adaptively used as museums. Eastern State Penitentiary in
Philadelphia, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, and
Manzanar National Historic Site in California all served as housing for marginalized,
displaced or imprisoned persons, were abandoned and left to decay, and are now open
to the public. All three sites have been chosen to commemorate important periods or
events in American social or political history that have not been memorialized as
integral parts of U.S. history. Abandoned and forgotten by most, the neglect of the
sites led to their deterioration, until they were resurrected by non-profit organizations
or the National Park Service to serve as museums or historic sites open to the public.
These three sites were chosen for this study because they present similar theoretical
1
challenges to their curators. Rather than attempt to restore the sites completely and
recreate an imagined past, the sites' managers have elected to allow decayed areas of
the sites to remain as testimony to the passage of time, permitting the period of
acknowledging that the decay contributes to the impact of the sites. At some sites, the
visible signs of age and decay make the buildings more evocative for visitors, as the
decay represents the period of neglect and perhaps evokes the marginalization of the
site's former occupants. At other sites, the decay may serve to distance visitors from
the events being interpreted, and diminish the relevance of past events to current
since each of the three sites has a contemporary mission that shapes curatorial
This study seeks to evaluate how the interpretation of each of these three sites is
shaped by efforts to preserve the existing decay, to incorporate it into the site's
message, and to balance the theatricality of the interpretation of this decay with ethical
serves to illustrate some of their similarities, the sites have dissimilar origins, histories,
manipulated at American historic sites, and how the concept of heritage has been
appHed to sites of uncomfortable history. Museums and memorials have begun to play
a more prominent role in helping the public engage with the positive and negative
aspects of the past. Tourism exerts a significant influence on the promotion and
creation of heritage, and has encouraged a level of theatricality at some historic sites
Chapter Three addresses the changing perceptions of ruins in Europe and the
United States. An examination of theories of ruin and reconstruction in Asia and the
Middle East is beyond the scope of this study, since non-European cultures have had
less influence on theories of decay in the United States than have England, France, and
Italy. Attitudes toward ruins that were created through acts of war differ greatly from
attitudes toward ruins that were created through neglect and abandorunent. This
assesses their relevance to the three sites studied. This discussion of the aesthetics of
decay seeks to shed some light on the extent to which decay lends "authenticity" to the
sites or, conversely, serves to symbolize the disjunction between the past and the
present.
The subsequent three chapters are devoted to case studies. Of the three sites in
this study, one, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, is an institutional founder of
different periods in the building's history, and left one apartment and portions of the
hallway in the state of ruin in which they were found in 1988. This site is the only one
of the three for which the mission preceded the building. Museum directors sought a
site suitable for their plan to create a museum that emphasized a "usable past."
Stabilization, rather than restoration, is the first priority at the site, which offers historic
The third case study, the Japanese-American internment camp Manzanar, offers
the greatest challenge to curators, since most of its buildings were relocated or
destroyed when the camp was dismantled after World War II. The chapter on
Manzanar National Historic Site will explore the National Park Service's decisions to
relocate or reconstruct some elements of the built environment and allow others to
remain in ruins in an effort to balance the powerful image presented by the windswept
and barren camp with the need to interpret the site in a coherent and instructive way.
The final chapter of this study will present the conclusions drawn fi-om an
heritage and history that guide the interpretation of historic sites in the United States,
and the relatively recent shift in interpretation to engage the public in the present-day
relevance of less widely embraced aspects of our shared heritages and multiple pasts.
groups. Historians J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, authors of one of the few texts
area or craft for tourist revenue. Tunbridge and Ashworth used a marketing model to
that the development of audience demand precedes the development of a heritage site.'
In Great Britain and the United States there has been a great deal of scholarship
and debate about the term heritage. Historic sites and conservation organizations in
both Britain and America use the word "heritage" to define their cultural and historic
J.E. Tunbridge and G.J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in
Conflict (Chichester, England; John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 1-2, 8.
nations, the preservation of a defined cultural heritage, as reflected in the built
environment, is of vital interest to the regions that increasingly depend upon it.
In the United States, the non-profit National Trust for Historic Preservation
offers a Heritage Tourism Program to help communities develop heritage tourism. The
Trust program equates heritage tourism with an authentic interpretation of the past:
The economic imperatives of heritage tourism are made even more explicit by
England's equivalent to the National Trust for Historic Preservation: English Heritage.
The organization's 1992 report, Managing England's Heritage: Setting Our Priorities
To understand our past helps us to come to terms with the present and
provides the foundations for the future. Our heritage plays an important
educational role, but even more importantly, a vital social role. Our
heritage also plays an important role in the economy. Tourism is a
major producer of invisible earnings for the country. It is our stately
homes and historic monuments, our battlefields, our fortresses, our
landscapes which draw visitors to our shores and money into our
economy. Without these attractions we would be the poorer in more
than just the visual sense.^
The prevalence of heritage tourism has altered the meaning of the term
"heritage" and opened it up to criticism as a vague generalization that sheds little light
"
web site: www.nationaItrust.org.
National Trust for Historic Preservation
Jocelyn Stevens, Managing England's Heritage: Setting Our Priorities for the 1990s (London: English
Heritage, 1992), quoted W.E. Krumbein, P. Brimblecombe, D.E. Cosgrove, and S. Staniforth, eds..
in:
Durability and Change: The Science. Responsibility, and Cost of Sustaining Cultural Heritage (New
York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994), 233.
^
on the accurate presentation of the past. Historian B. Goodey asserts that heritage's
educational and social roles may be eclipsed by its economic role, noting that since the
1980s, "heritage interpretation" has been packaged to create "heritage attractions" and
events. However, most heritage interpretation may be differentiated from the selective
explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time; heritage clarifies pasts so as to
"*
B. Goodey, "Selling Cultural Heritage; Conflicts and Possibilities," in W.E. Krumbein, et al.,
Durability and Change, 225-239.
'
John Brinckerhoff Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1980), 102.
infuse them with present purposes."'' Of course history, like heritage, is subjective, and
what historians and curators select to exhibit and interpret is necessarily infused with
scholarship. It has been called "an uneasy mixture between scholarship and marketing
hype, fact and nostalgia, educating and entertaining, and monologue and dialogue."^
simplifies history by smoothing over complications, like contested memories and the
Most critics of the term agree that "heritage" fails to encompass diverse cultures
and identities. Although many heritage sites do seek to recognize the multiple cultures
that participated in the history presented at the site, most sites in the United States still
carefully avoid any controversy that could arise from contested interpretations of
events and places. The "whitewashing" of negative historical moments or sites has
patriotism and nationalism in forming the American collective memory, the majority of
historic sites in the United States emphasize the positive contribution to American
"David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), xiii.
Stuart Hannabuss, "How Real Is Our Past? Authenticity in Heritage Interpretation," in Heritage and
Museums: Shaping National Identity, ed. J.M. Fladmark (Dorset: Donhead Publishing Ltd., 2000), 351.
8
history made by the person or events commemorated by the site.*^ James W. Loewen's
For several decades, historical sites and museums in the United States have
been criticized for presenting selective history and failing to acknowledge the
connection between the past and the present. The growing popularity of "heritage
One of the most important effects of heritage has been its intensification
of the modem emphasis on promoting the past as that which is entirely
complete and removed from the present. This has served to neuter the
past and permit its manipulation and trivialization in the present.'^
necessary part of shaping national, group, and personal identity, is being employed
more and more by public historians who seek to shape the interpretation of the past in
new ways. Today, an increasing number of historic sites seek to link the past to the
present in order to encourage visitors to see the contemporary relevance of history, and
Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in Ameiican Culture
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 10.
James W. Loewen, Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong (New York: The New
Press, 1999), 17, 19.
Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World
(London: Routledge, 1992), 4.
many museums and memorials acknowledge the role they have to play in helping the
public confront both the positive and negative aspects of the past.
historical events, some museums and historic sites actively seek to promote social
move beyond its recent efforts at some sites to discover and to tell "untold stories," and
to enhance the process of "civic dialogue" within the parks and monuments under its
purview. A National Park Service paper connected with this potential initiative stated:
We want to enable the National Park system to look at our own parks in
a different way, not only as keepers of American cultural and natural
resources but also as centers for important dialogue on civic issues.
This effort to involve an engaged public in bringing the present into the
interpretation of the past can be seen as part of an incipient movement in the United
States. Proponents of a new role for museums and historic sites seek to involve local
communities in the interpretation and presentation of their histories. Museums like the
Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum in New York City participate in this movement by involving local
communities in their interpretation of the past and present experiences of urban life.
Greater participation by the public in their own history may reveal sources of
conflict among diverse cultures and viewpoints. These contested histories often play
themselves out within contested spaces. For example, at the Lower East Side
" National Park Service, "The National Park Service and Civic Dialogue" (paper prepared for a
workshop sponsored by the National Park Service, New York, NY, December 2001).
10
Tenement Museum, some local groups have expressed their dissatisfaction with their
representation within the museum, which they do not believe accurately represents or
lay a claim to the site's history, and have sought to prevent the primacy of one historic
period or defined heritage over another in the National Park Service's interpretation of
the site. Museums have begun to play a role in balancing contested histories by
interpretation.
A deeper understanding of past and present through civic dialogue and social
sites that celebrate. Edward Linenthal has perceived the role memorials in particular
can play in effecting a civic transformation of the public. Asserting that memorial sites
have emerged as points of moral order, Linenthal suggested that such sites should play
a more active role as institutional agents of moral influence. He suggested the public
'"
For a more extensive discussion of contested memory, see Edward Linenthal's analysis of successful
between memory and history in the context of the United States Holocaust
efforts to achieve a balance
Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., where curators included both commemorative and historical
perspectives in consultation with survivors; and less successful efforts surrounding the well-publicized
The Atomic Bomb and the
cancellation in 1995 of the Smithsonian Institution exhibit "The Last Act:
End of World War II," as a result of protests from veterans groups and other critics. Edward T.
Linenthal, "Can Museums Achieve a Balance Between Memory and History?" The Chronicle of Higher
Education. 10 February 1995.
11
should enter museums as "civic pilgrims" and leave transformed and empowered by
The increased visitation to sites around the world that commemorate events that
are to be remembered but not celebrated may reflect an increased willingness on the
part of historic site managers and the public to examine as moral narratives the less
appealing facets of their shared heritage. These sites range from European
concentration camps like Auschwitz (now a World Heritage Site) and other sites of
atrocities to sites not explicitly associated with death, but rather with exploitation and
marginalization, like the Workhouse in England and the Gulag Museum in Russia.
However, it is not clear that these sites of conscience inherently effect the "civic
particular horror, such as concentration camps, may seem exceptional, with no overt
Birkenau, Donald Home concluded: "When we stand piously in the presence of these
ruins, we comfort ourselves by imagining that this is the past —never the present, never
the fiiture." Additionally, some historians question whether the altruistic intentions
of site curators at sites of atrocity and other less horrifying sites are necessarily
paralleled by similar morally valuable motives on the part of the visitors, who in
Edward Linenthal, "September ll"" and After: Museums, Memory & Meaning" (paper presented to
the College of Physicians, Philadelphia, PA, November 2001),
Donald Home, The Great Museum: The Re-Presentation of History (London and Sydney: Pluto Press,
1984), 247.
12
consuming both the education and entertainment offered by the sites may or may not
hi the United States, the National Park Service and the Lower East Side
Tenement Museum, both discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters, are both
Coalitions such as these recognize that every historic site that claims to represent the
13
contemporary interests. By elucidating their own programs, the coalitions encourage
member sites to take advantage of public interest to openly engage visitors in a moral
agenda.
from the different words used to describe them. The phrases "sites of shame," "sites of
shame or conscience seems to call for reflection upon shared accountability for an
This remembrance can be interpreted through the lenses of both official accounts of
history and the collective memory of the public. At sites commemorating events that
took place in the twentieth century, there are likely to be survivors who may participate
in the site as visitors or advisors, contributing individual and collective memories to the
One of the central questions of this study is whether the ruins of three sites of
uncomfortable history, Eastern State Penitentiary, the Lower East Side Tenement
Museum, and Manzanar National Historic Site, evoke for visitors a past that still
speaks to the present, and how that message is interpreted by site managers. These
sites are not considered in the same light as sites of atrocities, such as European
concentration camps, or other memorial sites that commemorate death. Rather, they
are sites whose physical neglect reflects the marginalized nature of their former
inhabitants and the lack of interest in commemorating the complex histories of the
14
sites. Like most sites of memory, these three sites are interpreted through the lens of a
contemporary moral message that seeks to alert the present to the shameful or less
their abstract quality when thousands of visitors begin to visit the sites, whether as part
to engage visitors with historical lessons that resonate in the present. But in evaluating
and genocide, Edward Linenthal poses the question: "How can we assume these
1 o
memorials lead to social engagement rather than a lust for vicarious immersion?
The answer may lie in part in the interpretive methods sites use to present their
negative impact on the integrity of the site. David Lowenthal notes that the
history:
Heritage is also chided for hallowing the horrific and selling souvenirs
of catastrophe and scenes of slaughter. The Kennedy death site is
'* 1"'
Linenthal, "September 1 and After."
15
gore, prize Nazi insignia, and gloat over jackboots.... Heritage tourism
touts locales of classic infamy: Paris sewers, Welsh coal mines, slave
auctions, concentration camps.'
tourist attractions, Lowenthal characterizes the public interest in these heritage sites as
"historical self-flagellation." Yet there are two sides to the public interest in sites of
uncomfortable history. Although tourism inevitably turns the sites into a form of
entertainment for travelers, the interpretation of infamous sites also offers visitors the
opportunity to reject official versions of past events that fail to take into account any
view but that of dominant groups. The opening of these lieux de memoire allows the
sites to remain a part of the public consciousness, and allow the public to participate in
that the sites may engage in a theatrical presentation that ultimately entertains rather
than edifies.
commemorated. In order to involve the visitors in complex lessons of the past, the
sites must engage as well as inform. Sites of conscience in particular must maintain a
delicate balance between the need to engage the visitor and the mandate of historical
accuracy and site integrity. The interpretive tools of narrative and storytelling are
deployed in varying degrees at the three sites discussed in this study. The attendant
16
obligation of the sites to maintain equilibrium between interpretive methods and ethical
The ethical standards applied to the interpretation of each site also extend to the
curators' and visitors' assessments of the "authenticity" of each site, hi reaction to the
authenticity at historic sites. Dean MacCannell theorizes that tourists seek "real"
experiences, but can never be certain if their experiences are in fact authentic." If
much of tourism today is motivated by a quest for authenticity, then tourism at decayed
three sites of conscience evaluated in this study were each transformed from abandoned
sites into heritage sites. What was rejected as part of America's cultural heritage was
visitors' perceptions of the absence evoked by the decay. At Eastern State Penitentiary
Historic Site and Manzanar National Historic Site, the sites' dramatic states of decay
dispel the notion that the visitor is gaining any understanding of prison life as it was
actually lived at the sites. Similarly, the empty "ruins apartment" at the Lower East
Side Tenement Museum presents an empty vessel: the room as it was after being
abandoned in 1935, not during its occupancy by immigrants. Yet the decay of each of
these three sites creates a different sense of authenticity: because the sites are presented
"'
Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999), 91.
17
as having been untouched since they were last inhabited or dismantled, they gain
authenticity in that nothing is "staged" for the visitors. The obvious decay of the sites
Yet whereas the sites themselves may appear to be undisturbed in their decay,
the visitor does not have an unmediated experience: preservationists and curators make
choices about the presentation of the sites' histories that focus on some aspects and
obscure others. The curators may have fewer illusions about the accessibility of
"authenticity," and likely understand that every fact is mediated by its presenters and
its observers. The professional standards of authenticity that have been established to
assist in the preservation of site integrity, and the application of these standards to each
of the three sites in this study, will be discussed within the context of each site in the
Because the interpretation of each of the sites in this study relies, in part, on the
visual impact of the deterioration of their built environment, each site will be evaluated
in terms of the ways in which it gains or loses power from the presence of decay, and
how frankly this is acknowledged in the interpretation of the site. The complex
interpretation of decay at sites not previously considered part of the nation's shared
heritage relies in part on the changing cultural perceptions of decay, which are the
18
Chapter Three: The Interpretation of Ruins
Historic sites that have been rejected as part of the nation's shared
another layer of meaning to the sites, since their decay serves as a symbol of rejection,
is reinforced by the need for distance between the past and the present that allows
visitors to face and comprehend the commemorative value of the site. Some sites
"remain in limbo before American society comes to terms with their meaning and a
past marred by violence and tragedy."^^ The decayed states of the three sites examined
in this study may serve as symbols of deliberate gaps in public memory. However,
the degree of curatorial intervention, the type of narrative presented, and the
acknowledgment of the decay as either a central or marginal component of the site and
its history.
Even when not presented as a part of the site's interpretive program, images of
decay and ruin at historic sites evoke varying and complex responses fi-om visitors.
time, distancing the viewer from the history of the site, or may encourage visitors to
link the abandonment of the site to the marginalization of its former occupants.
^^
Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America 's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1997), 35.
^'
Walter Benjamin, quoted in Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001),
208.
19
Changing cultural and aesthetic perceptions of decay and individual sensibilities all
influence visitors' reactions to ruined sites. This chapter will attempt a brief overview
of the changing perceptions of ruins in Europe and the United States, and assess how
this history shapes the current cultural interpretation of the three decayed sites that are
nostalgia, and admonition. Visitors to ruins today may still experience "sensations of
were excited by the viewing of ruins. Ruins may also symbolize memory and
forgetting to those seeking lessons from the past. Florence Hetzler suggested that the
experience of ruins offers the possibility of a sublime unity: the intersection of the
ruined structure and landscape, the active forces of nature, and the viewer's
structure; the fragmentation that evokes the abandonment that necessarily anteceded
nature's encroachment. At the end of the twentieth century, ruins of destruction like
the battlefields, memorials, and bombed buildings of two world wars have left an
imprint on the American imagination that inevitably conflicts with the romantic
melancholy of the Picturesque tradition of ruins. More pervasive, the urban decay
resulting from the abandonment of urban cores or the creation of industrial wastelands
^^
Thomas Whately, Observations on Modern Gardening (1770). quoted m W.E. Krumbein et al.,
20
similarly tempers the view of nature reclaiming the built environment. Ruins of sites
than nostalgia. They bespeak the transience of memory as well as the transience of
The ruins of war have provoked reflection for centuries; as early as the second
century B.C. poets elegized the ruins of defeated Corinth."*' hi contrast, the
appreciation of ruins that evolved after the Renaissance in Europe was linked less to
concepts of war and defeat than to attitudes toward the historic past. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, at the apogee of their popularity, ruins were considered
through both historical and aesthetic lenses: as documents of the classical architectural
transience of life and the vanity of human endeavors. Decay as a metaphor for death
and despair gained sway over the more romantic melancholia popularly evoked earlier.
The changing attitudes toward ruins and decay were evident in art, landscape design,
and literature. Despite the shifting symbolism of ruins, their power to inspire reflection
remained an integral element of their meaning. Thomas Whately suggested, "At the
sight of a ruin, reflections on the change, the decay, and the desolation before us.
^*
Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London; Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953), 5.
Paul Zucker, "Ruins —
An Aesthetic Hybrid," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20, no. 2
(1961): 120.
Stephen Copley and Peter Garside, eds., The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and
Aesthetics Since 1770 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994), 196.
21
naturally occur. .."^^ The popularity of Picturesque and Romantic conceptions of decay
coincided with the advance of industrialism. Wojciech Lesnikowski theorized that the
travelers, and landscape designers used ruins as vehicles for philosophical and aesthetic
ruminations that carried them beyond the swiftly changing and contradictory modem
world.^°
The societal transformation affecting urban and rural society also influenced
changing conceptions of man's relationship with nature, and the opposing powers of
the manmade and the natural world, hi Europe, popular interest in historic ruins during
this period was accompanied by an interest in landscaped gardens with artificial ruins,
which allowed aristocrats to meditate upon the transience of human endeavor and the
triumph of nature in carefully cultivated gardens. Yet, artificial ruins also reflected a
triumph over nature, since the landscapes "included a controlled expression of nature's
"^'
reclamation of the constructions of man.
context of the triumph of and triumph over nature. Whereas the American sensibility
at the time allowed for an appreciation of natural wonders, which served as evidence of
the passage of geological time and the scope and greatness of the continent, the ruins of
22
earlier civilizations contributed little to the growing nation's ideals of discovery and
with the deterioration of things past. David Lowenthal suggested that nineteenth-
century America's "devotion to recency" allowed little space for the representation of
the past. He quoted a canal builder who expressed the American idyll of progress in
1825:
Entranced by the myth of the frontier, Americans at the time were less likely to see
ruins as romantic than as symbolic of decline and Old World moral decay.
escalated in Europe, and theories on the appeal of decay became intertwined with the
classical and medieval past continued to decay, some believed restoring the buildings
to their original condition was possible and necessary, while others considered the
deterioration of buildings to be inevitable and natural. The debate crystallized into two
opposing camps: the restorationists and the anti-restorationists. The most famous
restoration as follows: "To restore an edifice means neither to maintain it, nor to repair
it, nor to rebuild it; it means to reestablish it in a finished state, which may in fact never
23
have actually existed at any given time."^^ Viollet-le-Duc sought to prescribe and
proscribe which evidence of the past should remain visible, either through
gap between the artists and builders of the past and the present, by denying the
the progression of time and nature, and that imposing a contemporary sensibility on
icons of the past destroyed their integrity. He wrote in The Seven Lamps of
Architecture:
Neither by the public, nor by those who have the care of public
monuments, is the meaning of the word restoration understood. It
true
means the most destruction which buildings can suffer: a
total
or beautiful in architecture.
William Morris's "Principles of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Building"
'^
Nicholas Stanley Price, M. Kirby Talley, Jr., and Alessandra Melucco Vaccaro, Historical and
Philosoplncal Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation
Institute, 1996), 314.
^''
John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; reprint, London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1956), 199.
24
It is for these buildings, therefore, of all times and styles, that we plead,
and call upon those who have to deal with them to put Protection in the
place of Restoration, to stave off decay by daily care, to prop a perilous
wall or mend by such means as are obviously meant for
a leaky roof
support or covering, and show no pretence of other art, and otherwise to
resist all tampering with either the fabric or ornament of the building as
it stands; if it has become inconvenient for its present use, to raise
another building rather than alter or enlarge the old one; in fine to treat
our ancient buildings as monuments of bygone art, created by bygone
manners, that modem art cannot meddle with without destroying."
Although debates over reconstruction and restoration continue today, by the end of the
romantic view of decay and ruins. Alois Riegl, in his 1903 essay "The Modem Cult of
value of monuments gained cultural power in the twentieth century, mins no longer
evoked the "Baroque pathos" of the seventeenth century. Rather, they represented to
the viewer the inevitability of natural law. Physically deteriorated stmctures, which
render visible the passage of time, serve as "catalysts which trigger in the beholder a
sense of the life cycle, of the emergence of the particular from the general and its
gradual but inevitable dissolution back into the general." According to Riegl's theory
of "age-value":
'*
Price, Talley, and Vaccaro, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conserx'ation of Cultural
Heritage, 319.
^*
Stephan Tschudi Madsen, Restoration and Anti-Restoration (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1976), 16-17.
25
Just as monuments pass away according to the workings of natural
law —and it is precisely for this reason that they provide aesthetic
satisfaction to the modem viewer —so preservation should not aim at
historical value, which emphasizes the monument's status as an artifact that should be
preserved. Historical value "singles out one moment in the developmental continuum
of the past and places it before our eyes as if it belonged to the present." A third value
also rejected the restoration of monuments as an action incompatible with the natural
^'
Alois Riegl, "The Modem Cult of Monuments," Oppositions 25 (1980): 32.
26
because we know this would constitute a pretentious act of pride and
^^
ignorance.
which the work of art is appreciated in its material form and in its historical and
aesthetic duality, with a view to transmitting it to the future." His theory of the
preservation of ruins emphasized simply preserving the status quo, since any other
intervention would return the "ruin" to a unified building, thus undermining its status
the fragments as physical evidence of the historical past, however, conservators still
passage of time. She argued that allowing the passage of time to continue to affect the
ruins, which effects the sublime transformation of the viewer described by ruins
physical vestiges of the past.'*^ The approach to preserving ruins influences the
viewers' interpretations of the ruins, whether they are presented as historical artifacts
27
In the twenty-first century, ruins are less likely to have the romantic
connotations common in earlier eras. Rather, they may serve as reminders of despair,
death, and the transience of human life. Yet ruins and decay still have the power to
provoke reflection and effect the transformation of the viewer. Ruins created through
abandonment and the subsequent invasion of nature are likely interpreted in a different
way from those ruins created by destructive acts of war or natural disaster that leave a
The ruins created by the Second World War have exerted a tremendous
influence on modem conceptions of the link between ruins of war and the preservation
during foreign bombing campaigns during the war have been allowed to remain
standing because of their symbolic power for the collective memory of those events.
Near the end of the war, the Dean of St. Paul's in London advocated that some of
open-air worship, meditation and recreation, as national war memorials of this war and
world.""' The incorporation of ruins as war memorials into an urban planning and
landscaping scheme may seem to de-emphasize the ruined churches' power as lieiix de
memoires, but the proposal's commitment of the ruined churches to multiple civic
purposes may reflect the radical nature of recommending that this non-traditional war
"'
W.R. Matthews, "Save Us Our Ruins," Architectural Review 95 (January 1944): 13.
28
battles. Similarly, in Japan in the post-war period, some modem architects
incorporated the concept of ruins into their designs in order to acknowledge the
Some of the most dramatic commemorations of the Second World War are the
decayed sites throughout Europe that are now Holocaust memorials. At concentration
camps and train stations, sites of horrific atrocities deteriorated over time. At those
sites that have not opened visitors centers with interpretive guides and programming,
visitors walk unguided through sites whose decay evokes absence and loss. Author
Svetlana Boym described the effect of such a site's decay in a passage worth quoting at
length:
If you come to the Grunewald station and walk all the way to the last
platform, you find the track covered with gravel and weeds and a few
sickly birch trees growing through the rails. There are no trains here,
only iron memorial plaques on the platform with dates and numbers.
They tell you the number of Jews transported to the camps and the exact
dates. The past is stored here in its unredeemable emptiness. It is, in the
words of John Ashbery, a 'return to the point of no return.' This most
striking kind of commemoration is not about building monuments but
about leaving unfunctional spaces, beyond repair and renewal. The
history here is not housed in a museum but open to the elements. In the
The "unredeemable emptiness" of Holocaust sites such as this does not need narrative
interpretation; it is the decayed landscape that evokes the irrevocability of the past.
"^
Riichi Miyake, "The Afterimage of Ruins," Japan Architect 359 (March 1987): 6-9.
*^
Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, 194.
29
—
The power of this site derives in part from the visitor's impHcit knowledge of the
events being commemorated. Yet it is possible that at historic sites that use decay to
represent the unredeemable events of the past, decay may lose its narrative power as a
commemorated. For those visitors, the ruins may represent picturesque melancholy
Auschwitz II-Birkenau, only the bombed ruins of the gas chambers, the gatehouse, and
railway tracks remain at the isolated, marshy site. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, in
their study of "dark tourism," noted that at the site "the opportunity to reflect without
those who manage the site that visitors' conclusions can move in only one direction
Assumptions about the narrative power of decay are perhaps most strongly held
at sites of atrocities and horror. But all sites of conscience that have decay as an
element of the site must consider the effect of decay on visitors, and consider visitor
expectations when planning the interpretive narratives of the site. Historians Michael
H. Frisch and Dwight Pitcaithley assessed the visitor reaction to Ellis Island through
this lens of implied narrative, and their assessment is relevant to the three historic sites
discussed in this study. Ellis Island, which processed immigrants and deportees from
1892 until 1954, was abandoned for decades before the National Park Service reopened
John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London:
''''
30
the former immigration center as a historic site in 1976. The intervening years were a
period of neglect and deterioration. Frisch and Pitcaithley visited the site before the
restoration of the immigration building, assessing the degree to which a group touring
The historians analyzed the tension between an audience invested in one particular
narrative of the site and the interpreter's mandate to present an inclusive history.
Visitors were led on guided tours of some of the derelict buildings on the island,
weeds growing through the floors, sunlight or rain pouring in the roof in
places, abandoned equipment and random pieces of furniture strewn
about. Little has changed. There are no exhibits, labels, text, or other
indications of the history-viewing present; the sense is that one is
looking at a site that has not much been touched since occupants
departed and operations ceased many years ago, leaving a sort of
institutional ghost town through which visitors are permitted to wander
in silence.
Because there was no interpretive programming on the site during this period,
the visitors were guided only by the interpretive dialogue of the tour guide, who led the
group through a story of immigrants being processed at the immigration center. The
interpretive tools evident during the historic tour were "the narrator's description of
anecdotal experience, the ghostly image of the now-empty spaces, and the audience's
imagination." Some visitors found this formulation of the tour so evocative that they
*'
Michael H. Frisch and Dwight Pitcaithley, "Audience Expectations as Resource and Challenge: Ellis
Island as Case Study," in Past Meets Present: Essays About Historic Interpretation and Public
Audiences, ed. Jo Blatti (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), 161.
31
regretted that the restoration of the buildings would preclude future opportunities to
tour the site as a ruin. Frisch and Pitcaithley noted that the simplification of Ellis
Island's complex history eliminated mention of those elements that did not fit
comfortably within most visitors' preconceived ideas of the story of the site. The guide
focused on the immigrant experience, and did not mention the site's subsequent use as
a detention center for deportees during the Red Scare. The guide's interpretation relied
upon the assumption that the audience possessed a certain body of knowledge, and
^
expanded imaginatively upon, but did not challenge, this pre-existing fi-amework.
Visitors to Ellis Island during its period of ruin, like visitors to all decayed sites
of complicated and contentious history, bring with them their own knowledge of the
past. Their visceral or intellectual reaction to the decay of the site is shaped by this
pre-existing conception of the place as well as by the narrative power of the silent
ruins. At the three sites that are the subject of this study, the state of ruin may help or
hinder the visitors' ability to imagine the events that took place and the people who
inhabited the sites. Some of the sites have been partially restored in order to more
effecfively communicate the historical narrative. Each site's negofiafion of the balance
between allowing the decay to serve as an element of theatre in the interpretation of the
site and the programmatic need to facilitate visitor understanding through the re-
creation of certain aspects of the past will be discussed in the chapters that follow.
The three sites examined in this study were neglected through absence; they
were not built as memorials, and were never intended to serve as reminders of the past.
Ibid., 153-165.
32
Recent interventions, including the selective absence of intervention, have created their
centuries, has been translated in these sites into a different kind of transformation.
These sites may encourage reflection on the transience of life and human effort, just as
ruins inspired in the past. But these ruins may also invite the visitor to reflect further
on the gap between the past and the present, and on the period of abandonment during
which the sites and the people who inhabited them were not commemorated. Edward
effected by the powerful intersection of the reflection sparked by ruins and the
collective memories and implied narratives visitors bring to the sites. Whether the
ruins become vehicles for bringing the past into the present, or ultimately disengage the
visitor from the history presented at the sites, and how the visitors' perceptions of the
authenticity of the sites is influenced by the state of decay are questions that will be
addressed in the next three chapters, which focus on the commemorative value of
decay at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, the Lower East Side Tenement
33
Chapter Four: Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site
ruin. The prison was built in 1829 to isolate criminals; today, it is open to the public,
and the alienation, solitude, and confinement experienced by prisoners at Eastern State
Penitentiary from 1829 to 1971 are interpreted through multiple media. The managers
of the historic site encourage visitors to link the past to present-day issues, and examine
prison reform through a historical lens, through historical exhibits and site-specific art
installations that bring contemporary issues into the prison. The Board of Directors of
Making the site a locus of reform is in keeping with the site's historic origins.
Built in 1 829, Eastern State Penitentiary was a radical experiment in the reformation of
for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons (now called the Pennsylvania Prison
Society —which initially collaborated with the historic site managers on programming).
34
These philanthropists sought to replace the prison system in use at the Walnut Street
Prison, which housed criminals together regardless of the nature of their crime, with a
instruction. After several years of debate, authorizing legislation for the creation of
innovative interior design suitable for the Quakers' reformist ideals. Eastern State
Penitentiary's Building Commissioners stated the desired effect of the prison design:
Haviland's plan of seven cellblock wings radiating from a central rotunda and
observation tower allowed for the surveillance of guards as well as prisoners (see
Figure 1). His design of individual cells with adjacent enclosed exercise yards ensured
that prisoners made no visual or auditory contact with each other. The first three
cellblocks constructed had no doors connecting the cells to the corridors; instead a
small opening was made in the wall, through which guards passed food and work
supplies. Prisoners entered their cells through the doors that led to the exercise yards.
"'
This chapter's discussion of the early history of Eastern State Penitentiary draws extensively on
Norman Johnston, Kenneth Finkel and Jeffrey A. Cohen's excellent and exhaustive history of Eastern
State Penitentiary; Crucible of Good Intentions (Philadelphia; Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1994).
"*
Report and Documents, on the Penal Code, from the President and Commissioners Appointed
Letter.
to Superintend the Erection of the Eastern Penitentiary. Adapted and Modeled to the System of
Solitary
Confinement (Hamsburg, PA: S.C. Stambaugh, 1828), 13, quoted in: Johnston, Finkel, and Cohen,
Crucible of Good Intentions, 32.
35
Although this awkward system was later altered to allow for entry from the corridor,
and subsequent cellblocks were built with doors to the corridor as well as the exercise
yard, the original design conveys the stark isolation the prison was designed to enforce.
Skylights, called the "eyes of God" by some guards, lit the cells from above, while an
innovative plumbing and heating system was connected to each cell. \n subsequent
years, as the prison population grew, several cellblocks and outbuildings were added to
While the radical Quaker reform agenda was reflected in Haviland's innovative
interior design, the castellated Gothic exterior of Eastern State Penitentiary was typical
high walls to create an imposing fa9ade that conveyed authority to citizens outside its
walls as well as to the prisoners within. The Building Commissioners of Eastern State
Penitentiary noted:
misery which awaits the unhappy being who enters within its walls.
Within the prison, the inmates were required to follow strictly enforced rules,
the Sabbath.^' The prisoners were encouraged to look within themselves; their
isolation was not intended to be a passive confinement, but rather a deprivation that led
36
to religious and civic transformation and transcendence. Whenever led to or from their
cells, prisoners wore hoods to ensure they made no visual contact with either captors or
other captives and did not gain any familiarity with the layout of the prison. In order
to maintain complete silence in the wards and detect any efforts at communication
between the prisoners, guards wore socks over their shoes and muffled the wheels of
^^
the food carts.
other crafts within the solitude of their cells. Any inmate who refused to work faced
punishment or the deprivation of privileges. Although Eastern State did not use
corporal punishment, the use of restraint was accepted as part of the exertion of control
over prisoners who violated the prison rules. The iron gag, a device that restrained a
prisoner's hands and legs by an iron chain connected to an iron bar placed in the
mouth, killed one inmate at Eastern State in the early nineteenth century. The
movement and using restrictive and uncomfortable coercion, the irmiate would avoid
future punishment by not repeating the infraction. Although these restraints were not
^^
1834 investigation publicized the abuse.
thousands of tourists, emissaries from foreign countries, and scholars who visited
37
Eastern State Penitentiary to compare the Pennsylvania system of solitary confinement
with its philosophical competitor: the Auburn system, which differed from the former
in allowing communal meals and labor and the use of corporal punishment. To some
visitors, Eastern State represented a radical reform effort; to others it was a cruel
and redemption, the institution was criticized for the punitive nature of its complete
fi-om its inception, its design was adopted by prison planners in the United States and
abroad, making Eastern State Penitentiary the "most widely copied prison in history."
changed again. By 1900, the increased population of prison inmates made separate
prison's Quaker founders. By the 1930s, the penitentiary "was no longer a monument
bureaucracy, a warehouse for the state's toughest convicts. Little of the founders'
optimism about human nature or the philanthropic tenor of its original governance
survived."^^
no systematic maintenance, the site deteriorated rapidly. Decaying and collapsed roofs
'*
Norman Johnston, "John Haviland, Jailor to the World," Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 23, no. 2 (May 1964): 101.
" Johnston, Finkel, and Cohen, Crucible of Good Intentions, 81-82.
38
contributed to the collapse of some exterior cell walls. Trees grew into some cells and
the former exercise yards, and interior plaster walls crumbled (see Figure 2). The
thirty-foot high walls protected the buildings from trespassers, but not from the
encroachment of nature.
Although the site was not maintained during this period of abandonment, the
historic significance of the site was not in question. As early as 1942, three prominent
criminologists asserted:
The site was designated a historic site by the City of Philadelphia in 1958, was
added to the Register of National Historic Landmarks in 1965, and was placed on the
Despite the local, state, and federal recognition of the site's significance, the
feasibility of its preservation was uncertain. In 1977, the City of Philadelphia took title
to the prison, and by 1984 transferred the property to the Redevelopment Authority to
solicit adaptive use proposals for residential and commercial use. All the
'*
Harry Elmer Barnes, Negley K. Teeters, and A.G. Eraser, Report on Penal and Correctional
Institutions and Correctional Policy in the State of Pennsylvania (State College: Pennsylvania State
College, 1944), 10, quoted in Johnston, Finkel, and Cohen, Crucible of Good Intentions, 94.
" Julie Courtney and Todd Gilens, Prison Sentences: The Prison as Site/ The Prison as Subject
(Philadelphia: Moore College of Art and Design, 1995), 19.
39
radical alterations to the buildings to accommodate new construction. However, the
prison's historic status and its advanced decay contributed to the perception that a
demolition of some of the site, local residents, planners, and historians created the
Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force, which advocated an approach sensitive to the
preservation of the site, and sought to open the site to the public.'*^ Today, despite the
absence of heat, running water, or electricity, the site is open to visitors who explore
the decayed hallways, take historic tours, view historical exhibits and art installations,
or experience "Terror Behind the Walls," an annual haunted prison tour that has
The contemporary use of Eastern State Penitentiary for historic tours, art
exhibits, and the annual Halloween tour has transformed the prison into a stage for
various spectacles. Because the site has been irrevocably altered by decay, the twenty-
first century audience perceives the architectural spaces in a different way from the
Nineteenth-century visitors may have sought to satisfy their curiosity by crossing the
boundaries of the site's high walls, knowing they were free to leave at will. Today,
visitors' perceptions of the echoing, unoccupied radial wings and cells are mediated by
the incorporation of art, theatre, and historical analysis into those spaces.
^*
Milton Marks, "Eastern State Penitentiary: Community vs. Preservation," Historic Presen'ation
Forum 7, no. 5 (1992): 50-52.
40
The decayed site blurs together the different eras of incarceration, and in an
unmediated visit to the prison, the decay itself becomes the primary point of interest.
Executive Director Sally Elk noted that the decay is relevant to the interpretation of the
site in that the decay "points to the notion that ideas once embraced as noble can then
be abandoned."^'' However, the prison's decay can evoke the abandonment of ideals,
the failure of reforms, and the marginalization of the people who were the subject of
this "holy experiment" only through interpretation, since most visitors do not bring
the prison's historical context, most tourists are drawn to the site because of its
deteriorating state and its image as abandoned and haunted. The romantic decay of the
lost world of crumbling cellblocks and empty guard towers." The characterization of
the prison as a lost world reinforces visitors' conceptions of the site as a romantic ruin,
forbidding landscape of authority are tempered by its abandoned state, although the
effect of the architecture on passers-by may have changed little since George W.
The design and execution impart a grave, severe, and awful character to
the external aspect of this building. The effect which it produces on the
imagination of every passing spectator, is peculiarly impressive, solemn,
and instructive.... This Penitentiary is the only edifice in this country
''
Sally Elk, Executive Director, Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, interview by author, 29 January
2002.
41
which is calculated to convey to our citizens the external appearance of
those magnificent and picturesque castles of the middle ages, which
contribute so eminently to embellish the scenery of Europe.
a solitary experience that prompted reflection on the transience of life and the
inevitable reclamation by nature of all things created by humans. Today, the ruins of
Eastern State Penitentiary offer to some visitors a visual experience that provokes
reflection. Contemporary artist Eileen Neff contemplates the "hard facts and strange
today Eastern State Penitentiary's contrasting decay and regeneration and evocation of
absence and isolation have inspired artists to create site-specific art installations that
explore the prison as a setting within which to explore the past and present of the site.
In the 1995 exhibit "Prison Sentences," artists used Eastern State Penitentiary as the
presentation and analysis" and ask how objects and places are imbued with history.
The contemporary mission of the historic site was reflected in many of the exhibits.
''"
George Washington Smith, A Defense of the System of Solitary Confinement of Prisoners
(Philadelphia, 1833), 21, quoted in Negley Teeters, They Were in Prison: A History of the Pennsylvania
Prison Society, /757-7Pi7 (Philadelphia: The John C. Winston Company, 1937), 179.
*'
Courtney and Gilens, Prison Sentences, 22.
42
which explored concepts of aUenation, soHtude, and confinement. Art critic Lucy
Lippard noted that art in the context of the prison "can reflect on the social meaning of
constriction, freedom, violence, and claustrophobia."^" The crumbling cells, some with
bed frames and benches still in place, bespeak a terrible isolation and sensory
deprivation.
Many artists have used the cell skylights as an evocative focal point. As
symbols of hope, sources of "divine light," and a reminder of the passage of time and
the constraints on an inmate's freedom, the skylights remain an evocative icon amidst
the crumbling cells. In his 2000 exhibit "Daylights," artist Richard Torchia installed
camera obscuras in the skylights of cells in Cellblock Two. Torchia's exhibit recalls
the past for the visitor, since the projections of the camera obscuras evoke the absent
prisoners evoked as both subjects and objects. While the decayed state of the cells
calls attention to the time that has passed since the cells were occupied, the reliance of
Torchia's exhibit on the cycles of sunlight passing through the camera obscuras at
different angles evokes the repetitive cycle of days passed within confinement.
Visitors view the images projected by the camera obscuras on cell walls and
floors as if viewing individual works of art framed by the cell door. The art installafion
thus places the absent prisoners on the stage, with the art-viewer as the audience. Yet
the projection of images from outside, such as the sky, passing clouds, or trees in the
prison yard, into the cell also allows visitors to imagine a prisoner's perspective.
Torchia's installation allows the visitor to gaze into the cell upon a silent, decayed
"ibid., 4, 19.
43
tableau of the present while simultaneously imagining the outward gaze of the absent
prisoner. This experience is especially felt in those cells in which the visitor is
required to step inside the cell in order to see the projection on the entry wall. Torchia
evokes the gaze of authority in the cell exhibit entitled "(Watching) The Watchtower."
In this cell, the camera obscura projects an image of the guard-tower onto the vaulted
ceiling of the cell. As the title suggests, the visitor, occupying the space of the inmate,
watches the watchtower, the image of which evokes the gaze of the watching guards,
who are no longer present. The artist described the installation as an experience that
occurs when viewing images absent any accompanying sound, the art exhibit installed
in an adjacent cellblock broke the stillness of the prison with sound recordings and
laser images. Artist Ilan Sandler, in his 2001 multi-media work "Arrest," explored the
impact of the unsolved murder of his sister upon his family. One cell was filled with
sounds recorded at the site where her body was found: the dull hum of traffic, an
" Richard Torchia, "Daylights: Camera Obscura Projections and Other Interventions at Eastern State
Penitentiary" (2001).
44
occasional bird. In the next cell, the voices of his parents talking about his sister
emerged from the dark room. Sandler's art installation brought inside the walls of the
prison the victims of crime, people who have an enduring and unseen connection to the
criminal convicts who changed their lives. In this exhibit, the prison setting evoked the
isolation and solitude of people outside the prison walls, who were represented only by
violence, and solitude, using Eastern State Penitentiary as both a setting and as a
component of their artwork. Lucy Lippard noted: "Artists can raise historical specters,
reinstate and criticize reality, and educate through visual seduction a public that would
not sit still for a history lesson."^'^ While the visual stimulation of the art exhibits may
make history lessons more palatable, the site is also developing an auditory interpretive
tool that will be incorporated into the prison's historic tours. Beginning in 2003,
Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site will offer audio tours, based on the award-
winning audio tour in use at Alcatraz, that use the voices of former inmates and staff to
allow visitors to imagine the site as it was when fully occupied by thousands of inmates
and guards. Although the audio tours will break the quiet that evokes the enforced
silence and isolation of the prison's early years, they will likely allow visitors a better
understanding of the history of the site by collapsing the time and distance between the
45
The extensive interpretive program currently in place at the site seeks to close
the distance between the past and the present by placing current issues within the
context of historic events. The prison museum exhibits a collection of found and
items. Curators display the artifacts in order to "bridge the gap between the empty
prison and the social history that led to its construction and guided its operation."
Prisons, 1790 to Present," an exhibit that explored the similarities between nineteenth-
"Strangers in Our Midst: Race, Ethnicity and hicarceration" examined attitudes toward
different ethnic groups as immigration trends changed the composition of Eastern State
Penitentiary, and analyzed the diverse ethnic and racial populations in prisons in the
1990s.
significant role in fulfilling the site's mission, the site also offers ahistorical
interpretive programs that take advantage of the abandoned prison's imposing Gothic
fa9ade and decay. The annual haunted prison tour, "Terror Behind the Walls," takes
advantage of the eeriness of the site's image as a nineteenth-century Gothic ruin, but
unlike the historic tours and art installations, the theatrical staging of a "haunted
1995, the tour grew when its financial potential became obvious. It is now the site's
*'
Elk, interview.
46
largest fundraiser, and revenues allowed the site to increase its staff from one to three
full-time employees.
The terrors experienced by visitors to "Terror Behind the Walls" are not evoked
by the imagined lives of former inmates, rather the spectacle exploits the sense of
transgression visitors feel when entering the walls of the prison. The tour exploits the
decay and an exaggerated version of the prison's history in order to elicit fear. Its
organizers turn the prison into a dark stage set, taking advantage of the spookiness of
the darkness and decay of the massive spaces. The Halloween tour is not intended to
present a picture of historical reality; rather it uses spectacle and staged theatre to
The haunted prison involves costumed actors portraying gory ghosts of dead
inmates and guards. The introduction to the "haunted" prison mimics a prisoner's
orientation, which is followed by the visitors being pushed through narrow hallways,
sometimes simply walking through cellblocks, at other times walking through spaces
constructed within the prison. One such space is the "Insane Asylum," a dark gallery
in which temporary walls make navigation through the hall difficult. Interpretive staff
dressed as ghosts of prisoners act "insane" and accost and threaten visitors. Although
the presence of mentally ill prisoners is a part of the history of Eastern State
Penitentiary, the Halloween tour fabricates a myth of insane criminals that has more to
do with contemporary horror films than the history of the prison that serves as the
spectacle's setting. In the nineteenth century, before overpopulation led to the sharing
^ Ibid.
47
of cells, critics accused that the prison's system of solitary confinement caused mental
instability in some prisoners. Disputing the idea that isolation led to insanity, prison
administrators usually claimed that any prisoners who exhibited symptoms of insanity
holding a legless, armless, eviscerated man who engages the crowd waiting for
admission to the next gallery. This "medical experiment" gone awry is an exaggeration
for dramatic effect of the fact that prisoners at Eastern State Penitentiary were paid
were often oblivious to the nature and consequences of the experiments, and were
gruesome victim of experimentation that greets visitors at this stage of the Halloween
tour is more a standard haunted house character than a symbol of the abuse of
prisoners.
The organizers of the Halloween tour take measures to ensure that this use of
the prison site for entertainment and fundraising does not affect the integrity of the
Neither the high flow of traffic nor the theatric installation affects the
historic fabric of the building. The Halloween installations are not
attached to the building. As far as the route, people walk on the stone
* Were
Teeters, They in Prison, 246.
*^
See generally, Alan Homblum, Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison: A Story of
Abuse and Exploitation in the Name of Medical Science (New York: Routledge, 1998).
48
floors of the prison cellblocks, or on plywood floors build for the
tours.""
Thus, the tour does not conflict with the Code of Ethics of the American
Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, which focuses on the
authenticity.™ Although the use of Eastern State Penitentiary for this type of spectacle
does not cause significant damage to historic fabric, it does undermine the public's
understanding of the history of the prison, and may encourage visitors to the
shocking medical experiments, and sadistic guards, that have some basis in truth but
sponsored by Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site. The Bastille Day street festival
features French food and people dressed as French revolutionaries who storm the fi-ont
gate of the prison carrying muskets and singing "La Marseillaise," while a woman
dressed as Marie Antoinette throws packaged cakes to the crowd. Recently, however,
the site has begun to scale back on the Bastille Day celebrations since the Halloween
Elk, interview.
™ See The American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, Directoiy: The American
Consen-ation of Historic and Artistic iVorks 1997 (Washington, DC: 1997), 24-31.
Institute for
" Judith H. Dobrzynski, "For a Summer Getaway, a Model Prison," New York Times, 1 1 July 1997.
'^
Elk, interview.
49
Visitors to Terror Behind the Walls and the Bastille Day event seek neither an
authentic experience nor a history lesson; they seek to be entertained. The museum's
administrators do not claim that the purpose of these tours is to provoke thoughtful
reflection on the role of prisons in society; rather, the Halloween tour raises funds that
are used toward overhead and the creation of the historical exhibits and art
installations.
is being negotiated at sites similar to Eastern State Penitentiary as prison sites become
and prisons like Alcatraz, Devil's Island in French Guiana, and Robben Island near
Cape Town, all abandoned, are now open to the public. Historians Tunbridge and
Ashworth note that the interpretation of these prisons as historic sites is only possible
because they are no longer viewed as part of the present, or through the lens of human
suffering:
...the passing of time may remove much of the horror, leaving only a
compelling story from a distant past to be related as entertainment....
The elapse of time may not only soften the events themselves but aher
the responses of visitors who are no longer personally involved in the
Linking the past to the present at sites such is these is particularly challenging.
Although prisoners were still housed at Eastern State Penitentiary as recently as 1971,
the crumbling nineteenth-century architecture of the buildings evokes an earlier era and
50
Nonetheless, the use of historic exhibits and art installations do much to link the history
of the prison to contemporary issues, fulfilling the historic site's mission to provide a
public forum for civic dialogue on issues of corrections and justice. While the decay of
the echoing cellblocks contributes to the theatrical interpretation of the space, the
solitude and silence of the abandoned prison also create a contemplative space that
likely evokes for visitors some insight into imprisonment past and present.
51
Chapter Five: The Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Historian Carl Becker said, "The actual past is gone; and the world of
itself, the facts, do not say anything, do not impose any meaning. It is the historian
who speaks, who imposes a meaning."^'* At the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in
New York City, historians, curators, and tour guides imaginatively recreate the daily
largely fictitious, it is based on historical sources and serves the purpose of bringing the
past to life in order to help visitors connect the past to the present.
today, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum is one of the few historic sites in the
United States where the concept for the museum predated the determination of the built
site where that concept would be implemented. The museum's founder and president,
Ruth Abram, sought to establish a museum that would tell the untold stories of
tenement house that represented the "urban log cabin." Abram 's efforts reflected a
visitors into contact with an important part of their nation's past and present:
'"
Carl Becker, quoted in Michael A. Tomlan, ed., Preservation of What, For Whom? A Critical Look at
Historical Significance (Ithaca: The National Council for Preservation Education, 1997), 89.
52
offer the comfort which comes from the knowledge that as immigrants
"
Ruth Abram intended the new museum to stand as a "vibrant beacon for
tolerance."^^ hi 1985, Abram and curator Anita Jacobson began to search for a suitable
tenement to house the museum. Their hunt ended in 1988, when the storefront at 97
Orchard Street on Manhattan's Lower East Side became available for rent. The
tenement building had twenty apartments, all vacated in 1935 when stricter housing
codes prompted the landlord to evict tenants and close the residential portion of the
building. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum moved into the building's
storefront in March 1988, and opened a few months later to begin serving its mission
of "honoring the trials and triumphs of poor and unheralded families." In 1992, 97
Orchard Street was added to the National Register of Historic Places, hi 1998, the
museum was designated an "affiliated area" of the National Park Service, linking it to
other local sites commemorating immigration, including Ellis Island and the Statue of
Liberty.^^ Today, the building is a National Historic Landmark, visited by more than
At the time of its founding, the museum intended to use fictional narratives and
ultimately decided to present the stories of the former inhabitants of 97 Orchard Street
''
Abram, "Planting Cut Flowers," 6.
'*
Lower East Side Tenement Museum, A Tenement Stoiy: The History of 97 Orchard Street and the
Lower East Side Tenement Museum (New York: Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 1999), 9.
"ibid,, 5, 12.
'^Ibid., 18.
53
rather than a composite of tenement dwellers. Museum researchers used census
material, court and voter records, oral histories, and archaeological research to learn
about the lives of former residents. Research revealed that nearly 7,000 people from
more than twenty countries lived at 97 Orchard Street between 1863 and 1935. In
order to give a broad overview of the historical patterns of the neighborhood, the
museum chose to tell stories through period room installations that illustrated the lives
of tenants with diverse religions and national origins who had lived in the building
during different periods of its history. ^° Curator Steve Long noted the importance of
When we were first getting started there was a lot of concern about not
restoring the building all to a particular moment. Because what's so
amazing about this as a preservation project is the building is all about
change. The family groups who lived in the building changed, and the
law changed, leading to forced alterations in the structure of the
building and how it was used. If we had just picked 1863 and restored
the building to the date when its doors opened, we would have missed
out on all that change.^'
The building's physical structure reflects the evolution of the New York City housing
code. The Tenement House Act of 1901 mandated increased ventilation, light, and
included the opening of an airshaft, the addition of two toilets in the halls on each
floor, and interior windows to allow light into back rooms in each apartment. The
54
L
including improved ventilation, fire-proofing, and additional toilets, that were too
costly for many landlords, who evicted their tenants and closed their buildings. As a
consequence of the landlord's inability or unwillingness to comply with the new law,
century tenement apartments in the building, site managers stabilized the first floor; the
second floor was stabilized in 1997. The site managers planned to leave two
apartments in a state of ruin, and restore two apartments on each floor. They decided
to leave the entry hall and the hallways on each floor largely as found, since there was
insufficient physical evidence of the original fabric and no clear period of significance
to direct the restoration.^^ Although the halls were not restored, one of the two
decorative wall paintings in the entry hall was cleaned, while the other was left
obscured by layers of soot and dust. The contrast between the two paintings allows
visitors to glimpse the transformation over time of decorative detail added to the
building after the installation of gas lighting at the turn of the century.
Currently, the first floor features the recreated apartment of the Gumpertz
family, immigrants fi-om Germany, as it may have appeared in 1878. Other apartments
include the Rogarshevsky family. Eastern European Jews who moved into the building
in 1910; the Confinos, Sephardic Jews fi-om Turkey who lived in the building between
1913 and 1916; and the Baldizzi family from Sicily, who lived in the tenement from
*^
Lower East Side Tenement Museum, A Tenement Story, 36-37, 28.
" Steve Long, Curator, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, conversation with author, 28 June 200
55
the late 1920s until 1935 when the building closed. The most recently recreated
apartment represents the home of the Levine family, who lived in the building at the
turn of the twentieth century and operated a garment factory in their home.
The curators of the museum set aside one apartment, which they labeled the
the building fell into a neglected state while it was still inhabited, some parts of 97
Orchard Street began the process of ruin even while the building was still occupied.
However, the "ruins apartment" does not represent conditions as tenants experienced
them. Rather, the apartment serves as a negative space, an empty stage that allows
docents to show visitors what the apartments in the building looked like before they
were restored by the museum. In the ruins apartment, visitors encounter the building in
the same way it was initially experienced by curator Anita Jacobson in 1988.
Describing her first walk through the empty building, Jacobson recalled, "It was as
though people had just picked up and left. It was like a little time capsule." In order
to preserve the decay that has occurred since the building's abandonment in 1935,
curators pin peeling wallpaper to the wall to prevent it from falling off This visible
intervention is evidence of the present-day use of the room, and reminds the visitor that
the ruins apartment is neither exactly as it was in 1935, when it was abandoned, nor as
it was in 1988, when it was re-opened by the museum. Rather, the apartment is an
amalgam of its past and present uses, and plays a part in telling the story of the creation
of the museum as well as the story of the history of 97 Orchard Street. One museum
56
docent noted that the niin "serves as a reminder of the condition we found this place
in... the blank canvas we had to work with. Here, you can see the various layers of
human history."
The museum's decision to leave the ruins apartment vacant was based in part
the changing inhabitants and uses. Curator Steve Long recalled the concern of some
historians that by restoring the building to specific periods the museum would erase the
evidence that the building had been closed due to housing reforms, and eliminate the
of ruin, but on the other hand, to give visitors a sense of what these
homes may have looked like, or at least our best guess of what they
looked like based on our research. Leaving part of the building in a
state of ruin lets the visitors understand there is change over time; and
that these spaces are monuments.
The image of the ruin can evoke for some the image of what once was, before
the destructive effects of time altered the structure. M.W. Thompson stated that ruins
appeal to us because they "stimulate our imagination and reconstruct in our mind's eye
the structure in its original state."^^ Guides in the Tenement Museum offer visitors a
glimpse of the ruin, stimulating their imaginations, and then complete the image of the
past hinted at in the ruin by leading visitors to rooms in which the ruined dwelling has
been restored to an "original" state. The ruins apartment serves as negative space.
*^
Joel Ferree, Docent, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, conversation with author, 8 February 2002.
*^
Long, interview.
*^
M.W. Thompson, Ruins: Their Preservation and Display (London: Colonnade Books, 1981 ), 17.
57
where visitors are allowed to picture for themselves what life was like in a tenement
apartment. This empty stage, upon which visitors impose their own vision, precedes
the theatrical displays visitors subsequently view in the recreated spaces of the
museum.
The ruins apartment and the other interpreted apartments are presented as "time
capsules," frozen moments in the former tenants' lives. As visitors move from room to
room, they pass from one era to another, and glimpse tableaux of lives of immigrants
of diverse ethnicities (see Figure 4). The concept of restoring rooms to an "original
state" is a complex one at the Tenement Museum, since the interpretive rooms use
representative examples of decorative arts rather than artifacts original to the site. The
exception is the Baldizzi apartment, which benefited from the memory of Josephine
Baldizzi Esposito, who lived in the apartment as a child and recalled for the museum
curators the layout and fiimishings of her family's home, and contributed several
Museum, the period rooms are used more as a mechanism to encourage visitors to
think about contemporary issues than as a study in decorative arts. The fiction of the
58
class material culture has not
on
been preserved in the way that it has for
more wealthy families.
ultimately distract visitors from the narrative of the site, and during three site visits by
the author the docents did not discuss the distinction between original and non-original
elements in each apartment, or the fact that the apartments chosen for re-creations are
knowable past by frankly presenting period rooms as stage sets. Critic Paul Philippot
stated:
Yet the interpretation of the Tenement Museum does not frankly acknowledge
typically de-emphasize the fact that all interpretation of the past is ultimately a product
of the present. However, at the Tenement Museum, the presentation of the ruins
apartment as a "blank canvas" in some ways does frankly acknowledge the role of the
museum staff as creative interpreters who impose their vision upon the site. The
*'
Long, interview.
Price, Talley, and Vaccaro, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural
Heritage. 273.
59
experience of walking through the museum. Each apartment presents a historical
snapshot rather than a cohesive illumination of one family during one period, as is the
case in most historic house museums. Allowing visitors to walk into and through the
rooms in each apartment, rather than cordoning the rooms off and only allowing them
to be seen through the doorway, reinforces the visitors' involvement in the displays,
ultimately emphasizing that the visitors' responses to the site are as important to its
specific month and year; in some rooms the docents even cited a specific day that is
being interpreted. Rather than suggesting that the inhabitants' lives are so well
documented that this level of specificity is possible in the historic interpretation of the
apartments, the use of specific dates to create portraits of tenement families' lives may
serve to emphasize the role each apartment plays as a stage set. Steve Long stated,
"Focusing on a really specific story that took place on a particular day helps us in the
recreation. We're guessing this is what happened on that particular day. Mainly we're
interested in telling a story, not creating a carbon copy of what the home looked like."
The primacy of the story is evident in the museum's newest tour of the recently
constructed Levine apartment. The tour, called "Piecing It Together," focuses on the
garment industry in New York. Although the Levine family, who lived in 97 Orchard
Street at the turn of the century, is the subject of the tour, during a February 2002 tour
by the author the docent focused on the garment industry's present as well as its past.
60
The tour began on the street outside 97 Orchard Street, where the docent pointed out
sweatshops operating a few doors down from the tenement building. Compared to
tours of the Tenement Museum taken by the author in 2000 and 2001, this tour placed a
greater emphasis on contemporary issues. This is in keeping with what Steve Long
between the past and the present. At the beginning of "Piecing It Together," the docent
noted:
One hundred years ago this area was the center of New York's garment
industry. Today, there are still more than one hundred garment factories
in the area... today, we will address the questions: Where do consumers
"
fit into the garment industry? And how do we approach the problems?
These questions were addressed most directly in the first apartment visited by the tour:
the ruins apartment, where the docent played pre-recorded voices of individuals
involved in the garment industry today. This empty room served the purpose of setting
the stage for the discussions about the garment industry to follow. Visitors were
subsequently led to the Levine apartment, which was restored to November 1897,
when Julia Levine was about to give birth to her third son. In the three-room apartment
the rear bedroom is furnished as if used for garment work and in preparation for
childbirth. Visitors were led through the kitchen and living area, where piece work and
cut garments fill the rooms, while the docent described the long hours and
sweatshop. The tour ended with a visit to the Rogarshevsky apartment, which is
61
decorated according to Jewish mourning rituals, with the mirror covered and a
mourning meal laid out on a table. The head of the family, Abraham Rogarshevsky,
died of tuberculosis and was buried on July 14, 1918, the date to which the apartment
is restored. The docent described the assistance the Rogarshevskys likely received
from a mutual aid society, and concluded the tour by discussing the relevance of
problems in the garment industry one hundred years ago to problems today: "Today,
conditions in the garment industry are going backwards... as unions are losing their
new period apartment, the museum first considers a contemporary issue they are
interested in exploring, and then researches that issue in the historical context of former
interested in finding an Irish immigrant who was involved in the American Civil War,
1"^
Since September 1 it has become a cliche, but people are questioning
what it means to be a patriot, and what it means to be loyal to your
country. Many of the same kinds of issues were being raised 150 years
''
By encouraging each visitor to connect the past to the present, and to consider
the lives of the tenement dwellers through the lens of his or her own experience, the
Lower East Side Tenement Museum may serve to challenge the implied narratives that
"'
Ibid.
Long, interview.
62
visitors carry into 97 Orchard Street. In addition to creating a better understanding of
the Uves of immigrants today, the museum seeks to correct the myths of nineteenth-
One of the things that shocked me about walking into 97 Orchard Street
was thathad read about the seamy underbelly of the city, and that the
I
tenement was in effect the holding tank of this lowlife part of New
York, and I came to find out that it's a much more interesting story. I
was astounded by the paintings, use of wallpaper, the design we
discovered on the ceiling, and all the decorative elements in the
Their programs include teaching English to students who graduate by giving a tour of
the museum in English, and include their own immigration experience as part of the
tour.''*' When the Tenement Museum opened in 1988 the site managers created a fifty-
seat storefi-ont theatre for interpretive programming. The ancillary programs of the site
include theatrical presentations, readings, and art exhibits, which all serve the
which brings people into tenements with a checklist of legal obligations and laws to see
if the buildings are up to code. The project seeks to foster awareness that tenements of
varying condition are still inhabited today, and are not simply a part of America's
immigrant past.
''
Ibid.
'^
Liz Sevcenko, Vice-President of Programs, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, conversation with
author, 28 June 2001.
63
Although much of the Tenement Museum's programming focuses on involving
the community in the history of immigration in the neighborhood and the relevance of
the past to the present, the museum also has an international focus. Ruth Abram,
interested in exchanging ideas and support with other historic sites addressing similar
issues, formed a coalition in 1999 that includes the Tenement Museum and eight other
members: the Gulag Museum in Russia, the District Six Museum in South Africa, the
Terezin Memorial in the Czech Republic, the Slave House in Senegal, the Workhouse
Bangladesh, and the National Park Service in the United States. Abram explained her
their museum, while others seek greater awareness of human rights violations and
" Julia M. Klein, "How Historic Sites Can Matter in the Here and Now," New York Times, 10 December
2000.
'*
Ibid.
64
emphasizes that the difficult conditions of the past can still be found in parts of the
world today, and advocates using the "power of place" to confi-ont these issues.
The Lower East Side Tenement Museum seeks to broaden the concept of
heritage to include the connections between immigrants of the past and those of today.
history in which the story is paramount, acknowledging what historians Tunbridge and
."'
requirements of the consumer not the existence of the resources. . The museum's
the past, while the decayed ruins apartment serves both as the blank canvas upon which
stories are imposed and as testimony to the passage of time, making clear that the
period of abandonment was significant in the history of the building. Historian Kevin
Often the heritage display, with its denial of process, and its emphasis
on the synchronous spectacle, removes any idea of change through time.
The spectacle represents the isolated event; we are removed fi-om
history.
By frankly acknowledging change over time, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum
encourages visitors to recognize the links between the past and the present. Ultimately,
the museum's focus is on the present and the future, rather than the past. The
''
Sevcenko, conversation with author.
'°°
Tunbridge and Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage, 9.
'°'
Walsh, The Representation of the Past, 137.
65
apartment reconstructions and theatrical presentations are a means to an end; they
accomplish what Ruth Abram described as "putting history to work" by using history
66
Chapter Six: Manzanar National Historic Site
etween the creation of Manzanar War Relocation Center in 1942 and the
housed thousands of Japanese- Americans for four years during the Second World War.
The almost complete erasure of the camp was followed by a similar erasure from
public memory, as post-war Americans did little to acknowledge the displacement and
site, the emotive power of the decay of the built environment is compromised by the
fact that the history of the Japanese-American internment during World War II has
been repressed in public consciousness to such a degree that some visitors fail to bring
with them an implicit knowledge of the site's history. The site managers are currently
planning some restoration and limited reconstruction of structures in the camp in order
103
Frank Hays, Superintendent, Manzanar National Historic Site, interview by author, 2 April 2002.
67
.
In 1935, the chief historian for the National Park Service described the
organization's interpretive mission as "to recreate for the average citizen something of
the color, the pageantry, and the dignity of our national past.""^'* The National Park
Service's perception of its role has changed considerably during its eighty-six-year
history. Today, National Park Service historic sites, monuments, and parks such as the
Trail of Tears National Historic Trail, the Central High School National Historic Site in
Little Rock, Arkansas, and the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail seek to
difficult history into the national heritage is most obvious at Manzanar National
Historic Site, where the National Park Service oversees the controversial interpretation
of what is seen by many as one of the darkest hours in American history, with the
complete suspension of the civil liberties of U.S. citizens who were singled out by their
race. Addressing the question of the National Park Service's commemoration of sites
Each of the 367 units of the National Park System... has a unique
mission, and each be interpreted so that visitors may comprehend
is to
104
Kamrnen, Mystic Chords ofMemoty, 465.
68
Education is best done with examples. These examples must include
that which we regret, that which is to be avoided, as well as that for
which we strive... If this premise is correct, we cannot omit the negative
'°"^
lessons of history.
men, women, and children, most of whom were U.S. citizens, did not begin with the
bombing of Pearl Harbor. Racial disharmony on the west coast was widespread well
in California's 1913 Alien Land Laws, which banned Japanese aliens from purchasing
land, and the 1924 Immigration Act, which barred immigration from Japan into
America. "^^ After the United States declared war on Japan following the attack on
Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066. The
Febmary 19, 1942, act authorized the Secretary of War to "exclude citizens and aliens
from designated areas along the Pacific Coast in order to provide security against
sabotage and espionage."'°^ The head of the Western Defense Command, Lt. General
The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third
generation Japanese bom on U.S. soil, possessed of U.S. citizenship,
have become 'Americanized,' the racial strains are undiluted.
'"^
Robin Winks, "Sites of Shame," National Parks 68 (March/April 1994): 22.
John Hersey, "A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions," in Manzanar. John Armor and Peter
Wright (New York: Times Books, 1988), 28. For a comprehensive history of Manzanar from 1942 to
1996, see Harlan D. Unrau, The Evacuation and Relocation of Persons of Japanese Ancestry during
World War 11: A Historical Study of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, 2 vols (Denver: U.S. Dept. of
the Interior, National Park Service, 1996).
'"'
Unrau, Evacuation and Relocation, l:xxv.
'"*
Linda M. Rancourt, "Remembering Manzanar," National Parks 67, no. 5-6 (May/June 1993): 31.
69
In May 1942, the government forced Japanese- Americans to gather in cities before
relocating them to concentration camps under the authority of the War Relocation
'°^
Authority, a newly created civilian agency. Not charged with any crime, Japanese-
Americans were forced to pack and dispose of all their belongings and property with
property and lost income as a result of the relocations. They were sent on trains, some
with blacked-out windows and patrolled by armed guards, to interim assembly camps,
which were located at racetracks and fairgrounds. After living in makeshift quarters or
Approximately 1 10,000 people were exiled from their homes from 1942 to 1946. The
"Trail of Tears," President Andrew Jackson's forced removal of more than 15,000
Cherokees from the eastern United States, offers the only precedent in U.S. history for
Manzanar, one of ten camps created by Roosevelt's order, was located 212
miles northeast of Los Angeles, at the base of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in
California's Owens Valley. The area was once home to Paiute and Shoshone Indians,
who were driven off by white settlers in 1863. Named Manzanar by early Spanish
settlers because of the apple orchards that once dotted the area, the land lost its value
for settlers and ranchers when the area's water supply was drained by the City of Los
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998), 68; Winks, "Sites of Shame," 22.
70
Angeles in the late 1920s.'" The Manzanar Relocation Center was established as the
Owens Valley Reception Center, and was supervised by the U.S. Army's Wartime
Civilian Control Administration (WCCA) before coming under the control of the War
Relocation Authority (WRA). By mid- April 1942, 1,000 Japanese Americans were
arriving at Manzanar each day; by July nearly 10,000 people inhabited the camp (see
Figures)."^
Living conditions in the 576 one-story pine barracks were cramped, and the
region's climate offered harsh extremes of heat and cold. Prisoners were required to
grow their own food, and cultivated the fields surrounding the camp and nurtured the
The simple truth is the camp was no more ready for us when we got
there than we were ready for it. We had only the dimmest ideas of what
to expect. Most of the families, like us, had moved out from southern
California with as as each person could carry. Some old
much luggage
men left Los Angeles wearing Hawaiian shirts and Panama hats and
stepped off the bus at an altitude of 4,000 feet, with nothing available
but sagebrush and tarpaper to stop the April winds pouring down off the
back side of the Sierras... the enfire situation there, especially in the
—
beginning the packed sleeping quarters, the communal mess halls, the
'"
Todd S. Purdum, "U.S. Starts to Dust Off a Dark Spot in History for All to See," New York Times, 20
June 1998.
"-
Jeffery F. Burton, Mary M. Farrell, Florence B. Lord, and Richard W. Lord, Confinement and
Ethnicity: An Ch'en'iew of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites (National Park Service,
71
open —
toilets all this was an open insult to that
'"*
other, private self, a slap
in the face you were powerless to challenge. '
Photographer Ansel Adams visited the camp in 1943 and took photos of the site
that reveal the everyday life of the camp's inhabitants and the beauty in the harsh
landscape they inhabited (see Figure 7). In the introduction to his published book of
I believe that the arid splendor of the desert, ringed with towering
mountains, has strengthened the spirit of the people of Manzanar. ...
From the harsh soil they have extracted fine crops; they have made
gardens glow in the firebreaks and between the barracks. Out of the
jostling, dusty confusion of the first bleak days in raw barracks they
have modulated to a democratic internal society and a praiseworthy
personal adjustment to condifions beyond their control.'
camp authorities from photographing the guard towers that also ringed the camp. Born
Free and Equal found a limited audience, as numerous public book burnings greeted
By the end of the war, many prisoners had already left the camp to enlist in the
U.S. military or on professional work leaves. After the camp closed in November 1945
the barracks were disassembled and auctioned off to local veterans. The U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers bulldozed much of the complex in 1 946. Camp director Ralph
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1973), 25,29.
Armor and Wright, Manzanar. xvii,
"" Ibid., xviii.
72
distributed.""' However, the "distribution" of Manzanar effectively effaced the site of
a moment in American history that many of those involved wished to forget. The
dismantling itself is a part of the site's history; a period that is represented by the
empty spaces of the site and ruined remains of the structures left in place (see Figures 6
and 8). Today, all that remains of the original site are the traces of rock gardens built
by the prisoners, a sentry post, a guard post, and the camp auditorium.
historic preservationists advocated that portions of the Berlin Wall be spared the
widespread dismantling and dispersion, so that vestiges of the Wall would remain as
assessment that "in the future, the interest in this monument will be as much for its
demolition by the people, as for its limited physical presence""^ could be applied to
Manzanar as well. The site's dismantling and subsequent descent into ruins accurately
reflects American attitudes toward the site as temporary and the events that took place
there as outside the boundaries of national history. For those visitors who arrive to
Manzanar National Historic Site with an understanding of the site's past, the scattered
vestiges speak volumes about the lack of national attention to the temporary, forgotten
city in the desert. However, for those visitors who lack an implicit knowledge of the
events, the ruins and gardens in their natural setting, framed by mountains, may
'" Dubel, "Remembering a Japanese-American Concentration Camp," 95; Christopher Ross, "Return to
73
become picturesque, barely evoking the former presence of built structures. Michael
Roth suggested that in the wake of the Second World War, the contemplative gaze
seems empty or a lie in the wake of the extremities (and the threat of
Although the ruins of Manzanar may or may not sufficiently convey an idea of
the site's history, most conservators today are wary of the excessive reconstruction of
buildings.'^" The fi-agments of the former internment camp cover several acres. The
National Park Service report Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II
Only three of the over 800 buildings originally at the relocation center
remain. However, there is abundant evidence of relocation center
features, including walls, foundations, sidewalks, steps, manholes,
sewer and water lines, landscaping features, ditches, and trash
119
Roth, Lyons, and Merewether, Irresistible Decay, 20.
Price, Talley, and Vaccaro, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural
'^°
Heritage, 204.
'^'
Burton, et al., Confinement and Ethnicity, chapter 8.
74
Also remaining on the site is the monument to the dead in Manzanar's
cemetery. The monument is a large, white obelisk with Japanese inscriptions on both
sides. The translation of the east side reads: "Monument to console the souls of the
dead." The other side reads: "Erected by the Manzanar Japanese August 1943."
This memorial is now the site of an annual pilgrimage that began in 1969, when
commemorating the events that took place on the site during the Second World War.
Manzanar first received official recognition of its historic value in 1 972, when the site
controversy arose over the use of the term "concentration camp" on the historic plaque
at the site. The Historical Landmarks Advisory Committee preferred to substitute the
evidence of the fianction of the camp that convinced the Committee of the accuracy of
the term "concentration camp," and the text ultimately approved for the historic plaque
122
Ibid.
'" Nadine Ishitani Hata, The Historic Preservation Movement in California 1940-1976 (California
Department of Parks and Recreation, 1992), 169-172.
75
The controversy over language persists; as recently as 1998 an exhibit mounted
Ellis Island officials, and some Jewish groups who argued that the use of the term
'^^
"concentration camp" diluted its meaning. After meetings between curators at the
representatives of the American Jewish Committee, both sides agreed upon language to
be inserted in the exhibit program and displays explaining to the public the complex
associations of the term "concentration camp." The text pointed out the differences
between Nazi concentration camps and American concentration camps, and concluded,
"All had one thing in common: the people in power decided to remove a minority
"'^^
group from the general population, and the rest of society let it happen.
symbolic reminder that a nation of laws needs constantly to honor the concept of
freedom and the rights of its citizens," said David Simon, natural resources program
manager for the National Parks and Conservation Association.'^^ However, the former
prisoners at Manzanar did not receive an official apology from the U.S. government
until 1988, when President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Civil Rights Act, which
'"'
Somini Sengupta, "What Is a Concentration Camp? Ellis Island Exhibit Prompts a Debate," A'evv York
Times, S March 1998.
'"^
Somini Sengupta, "Accord on Term 'Concentration Camp,'" New York Times, 10 March 1998.
"''
Rancourt, "Remembering Manzanar," 30.
76
authorized a $1.25 billion settlement to surviving internees or their heirs.
' In 1992,
President George Bush signed into law an act of Congress creating Manzanar National
Historic Site, which was authorized to "provide for the protection and interpretation of
the historical, cultural, and natural resources associated with the relocation of Japanese-
Americans during World War II."''* The law also established the Manzanar National
internees.
fully dramatize the historical lessons of the site has been a contentious issue for the
National Park Service and for the Advisory Commission. Some members of the
explicit the structures of authority in place at the camp.'^° Superintendent Frank Hays
There is little but sagebrush and dust remaining of the internment camp.
Without these physical reminders it is difficult to explain to visitors that
this was indeed an internment camp.... When you visit Manzanar today,
you can be so inspired by the location's beauty that you miss the
important story told there. In fact, some visitors have mentioned that
because of the location near such beautiful mountains that the camp
'*
Unrau, Evacuation and Relocation, 1 :xxv.
'^''
Ibid., 2:828.
'^°
National Park Service, "The National Park Service and Civic Dialogue.'
77
. I
experience couldn't have been so bad. The camp has been Ukened to a
summer camp in the mountains rather than an internment camp that has
an important story of civil rights to tell.
Rogers, the National Park Service Associate Director for Cultural Resources, testified
I personally found when I was at the site that the most evocative feature
of the site is the extensive remains of landscaping work, stone
walkways, planting beds, walls, and modified landforms that had been
done by the internees in an effort to beautify and make more
comfortable their harsh desert environment. I also believe that the
camp itself, the buildings gone, the remnants blown over by sand —
find in that a metaphor for this whole point of this being a lesson, but
not something we want to be prominent in American society — a lesson
that we can learn from. .
Despite Rogers' recommendations, the General Management Plan for the site,
approved by the National Park Service in 1997, proposed the reconstruction of some
elements of the internment camp in order to interpret the site's use as a relocation
'"
Frank Hays, "The Role of Civic Dialogue in Management of Manzanar National Historic Site" (paper
presented at the workshop "National Park Service and Civic Dialogue," New York, NY, December
2001).
'^'
Unrau, Evacuation and Relocation, 1:829-830.
78
center during World War II. The National Park Service is currently attempting to
balance the demands of fulfilling the site's interpretive mission and the demands of
authenticity. Superintendent Frank Hays noted that the National Park Service does
certain icons of authority such as the perimeter fence and a guard tower, and the
General Management Plan was influenced by the input of the Manzanar Advisory
center, and the camp road system and some rock gardens and ponds will also be
rehabilitated. A Save America's Treasures grant, with matching funds from the State of
79
California, was allocated to the restoration of the perimeter fence and entry sign, and
the creation of an interpretive auto tour road adjacent to fence. Superintendent Hays
Restoration efforts are ongoing, and in 2001 the National Park Service budget
prison camp closed, Inyo County purchased the auditorium and leased it to the
Independence Veterans of Foreign Wars, who used it as a meeting hall and community
theater until 1951. The camp auditorium continued to be used for municipal purposes
until 1996, when the National Park Service purchased the building.'" Although the
auditorium will also acknowledge the longer history of the area. The Secretary of the
Interior's Report to the President identified interpretive themes for the Visitors Center
that included the history of the internment period and its connection to racism in the
United States; the challenge of balancing constitutional rights with national security;
the history of water use in the western United States; and the history of the successive
'^'
Hays, interview.
U.S. Department of the Interior, Report to the President: Japanese-American Internment Sites
'^^
80
displacements of Native Americans, white settlers, and Japanese-Americans by more
powerful groups.
'^^
The site managers also plan to dedicate a portion of the exhibits to
139
contemporary issues.
national recognition of the site led to protests by some groups and individuals who
disputed that Japanese-Americans were held against their will at the camp. These
proponents of a revisionist history of the site claimed that the guard towers were
actually used as fire watchtowers, and that fences around the compound were only used
to keep cattle out, not to confine people within. National Park Service senior historian
Gordon Chappell noted that the revisionists cited as evidence historic photographs that
fail to show barbed wire, sentry posts, or armed guards. "The War Relocation
wanted to present the camp experience as more benign than was in fact the case,"
Chappell said. "It prohibited any photographs of the sentries or the sentry towers or
the military guards."'"*' One revisionist claimed, "The Park Service is heading in the
wrong un-American direction that will wind up in several resignations along with
another Enola Gay incident."''*' Whereas the Smithsonian Institution cancelled their
1995 exhibit "The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of Worid War II," which
"*
U.S. Department of the Interior, Report to the President.
'^^
Hays, interview.
Martin Forstenzer, "Bitter Feelings Still Run Deep at Camp," Los Angeles Times. 4 April 1996.
""^
''"
Robert A. Jones, "Whitewashing Manzanar," Los Angeles Times. 10 April 1996.
81
featured the Enola Gay, after protests by veterans groups, the site managers at
Manzanar National Historic Site have not allowed their interpretation to be influenced
by these revisionists' threats. Superintendent Frank Hays stated in April 2002 that
local opposition to the historic site seemed to be waning, while "many community
members have embraced the park and are excited to see development finally
,,142
occumng.
Second World War raises strong emotions for both those who were imprisoned and
those who deny the validity of the National Park Service's historic interpretations. The
town of Independence, several miles from Manzanar, has witnessed the conflicts
between different factions, and after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New
York City and Washington, D.C., demonstrated an awareness of the lessons of local
and national history when the Independence Town Council passed a resolution
activity. Many civil libertarians became alarmed at the potential for violations of
immigrants' constitutional rights, hi a September 24, 2001, New York Times article,
Association, claimed, "Under these provisions there is a much bigger danger than we
have ever seen in our history of innocent people being rounded up and held on
'''"
Hays, interview.
82
,143
suspicion that they did something and never having their day in court." Legal
scholars looked to a Supreme Court decision that still stands upholding the internments
of Japanese- Americans during the Second World War. In 1944, Fred Korematsu was
States, the U.S. Supreme Court approved the relocations as a wartime hardship.
University of California at Los Angeles law professor Jerry Kang said: "Some people
say we've learned the lesson from Korematsu and we would never do that again. I'm
The lesson of Korematsu and the commemoration of this period of shame are
not limited to the prison camp sites themselves. To commemorate this era in
two sculpted cranes, one trapped in barbed wire symbolic of the fences of the
internment camps, and the other aloft in flight. The director of the memorial, Cherry
Tsutsumida, stated, "This memorial celebrates the fact that our great democracy did
The National Japanese American Memorial, sited at the seat of power of the
United States government, uses the symbolism of the prison camp to convey the
lessons of the past. At Manzanar, site managers continue to seek a balance between
'"
William Glaberson, "War on Terrorism Stirs Memory of Internment," New York Times, 24 September
2001.
'''
Ibid.
'"'
Francis X. Clines, "A Memorial Addresses a Wrong," New York Times, 24 October 1999.
83
symbol and interpretation in their curatorial decisions about the level of reconstruction
of the site. Some visitors are able to witness the ruins of the former prison camp and
reconstruct in their own imagination the shameful episodes of the past. For others, the
scattered remains of the site may not be evocative of the past. One National Park
Service Superintendent remarked upon the effect the unreconstructed ruins of the
former camp may have on visitors. Ed Rothfuss, then Superintendent of Death Valley
important to be able to walk through and think about the people living
there. You can watch the sagebrush and the sand drifting and let your
mind creep and think about what happened.
Whether the subtlety of this interpretation will remain once certain elements of
the camp are reconstructed is still undetermined. Yet, it is likely that many visitors will
still see the meaning amidst the ruins and reconstructions that Jeanne Wakatsuki
Houston noted in her return to the camp years after her incarceration there as a child.
'**
Rancourt, "Remembering Manzanar," 46.
'*'
Houston and Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 166.
84
Chapter Seven: Conclusion
"f "every historic site tells two different stories about two different eras in
i;-the past,"'"^ both the moment of the events being commemorated and the
moment of commemoration, then the sites studied here tell an additional story, that of
the gap in between history and historicizing, during which neglect led to decay,
that the dark moments of the past define national heritage just as celebratory moments
do, and have resonance in the present and the future, that gap begins to close.
commemoration, ruins tell stories about two different moments: the imagined original
state of the building, as seen in the viewer's mind's eye, and the present state of decay.
The ruin itself is not simply a deteriorated building, but takes on a new identity through
What has led the building upward is human what gives it its
will;
'*'
Loewen, Lies Across America, 36.
Neal, National Trauma and Collective Memory,
''*'
x.
85
differentiated. Nature has transformed the work of art into material for
her own expression, as she had previously served as material for art.
The three sites discussed in this study acknowledge that the expression of the
passage of time in the built environment allows for a more complex understanding of
the history of the sites. In contrast, historian Paul Philippot criticized hidependence
Hall in Philadelphia for its meticulous reconstruction, in which "past and present
are... brought together on the same level with no depth of field whatsoever." He
argued that the fundamental problem of restoration is this lack of distance between past
and present:
An authentic relationship with the past must not only recognize the
unbridgeable gap that has formed, after historicism, between us and the
past; must also integrate this distance
it into the actualization of the
work produced by the intervention.'^'
Allowing decay to remain a fundamental part of the site, and including the decay
uncomfortable history, acknowledging this distance may allow visitors to correlate that
gap with the abandonment of the site, and its temporary exclusion from public
memory.
make the sites engaging, pressure from those who share in a collective memory of the
site to make the site authentic, and pressure from visitors to the site who seek to have
Kurt H. Wolff, ed. Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics (New York: Harper, 1965), 261-
262, quoted iii Roth, Lyons, and Merewether, Irresistible Decay, 44.
Price, Talley, and Vaccaro, Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural
Heritage, 225.
86
their group identity commemorated within the site. By negotiating a balance between
the theatrical and symbolic uses of decay, the reconstruction of ruined buildings,
and
narratives that encourage visitors to view the present through the lens of the past.
Ultimately, the power of decay lies in the eye of the beholder. Site managers at
each of the three sites studied here effectively use decay in different ways to stage their
interpretive programs at the site. At Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site, the Lower
East Side Tenement Museum, and Manzanar National Historic Site, the sites' decay
allows for the recognition of absence and the passage of time. It is this open
acknowledgment of the unbridgeable gap between us and the past that allows these
87
Illustrations
Figure 1: Samuel Cowperthwaite, convict number 2954, Tiie State Penitentiary, for the Eastern
District of Pennsylvania, 1855. Lithograph by P.S. Duval and Co. The Library Company of
Philadelphia.
88
Figure 2: Interior cell block. Eastern State Penitentiary, 2001. Photograph by Kate Daly.
89
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Figure 3: The ruins apartment, 1999. Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
90
Figure 4: The front room of the Gumpertz apartment recreated to circa 1878, photographed in
1999. Collection of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum.
91
Manzanar National Historic Site
Figure5: Entry sign, 1943, Manzanar War Relocation Center. Ansel Adams Photographs, Prints
and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
92
Figure 6: Entry sign, 1999. Photograph in Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War
IlJapanese American Relocation Sites, by Jeffery F. Burton, Mary M. Farrell, Florence B. Lord,
and Richard W. Lord.
93
Figure 7: High School Recess Period, 1943, Manzanar War Relocation Center. Ansel Adams
Photographs, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
94
'*««^3«^-^-dh?^4,-Jsf;
95
. .
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Index
BastilleDay, 49-50
Becker, Carl, 52 Goodey, B., 7
Berlin Wall, 73 Grunewald, 29
Birkenau, 12, 30 Gulag Museum, 12, 64
Born Free and Equal, 72 Gumpertz family, 55
Boym, Svetlana, 29
Brandi, Cesare, 27 Haviland, John, 35-36
Bush, George, 77 Hays, Frank, ii, 79, 82
heritage, 3, 5-9, 11-13, 15-19, 33, 65,
103
7
Kang, Jerry, 83
Koresmatsu v. United States, 83 Pearl Harbor, 69
Pennsylvania Prison Society, 34, 42
Lennon, John, 30 Philadelphia, 1, 34, 38-39, 41-42, 86
Manzanar National Historic Site 30, 32-33, 42, 56-59, 61, 65, 73-74,
Advisory Commission, 77 84
Manzanar War Relocation Center, 67, Ruskin, John, 24
69
marginalization, 2, 12, 19, 41 Sandler, Ilan, 44-45
memorials, 3, 10-11, 15,20,28-29,32 Save America's Treasures, 79
104
Second World War, 28-29, 67, 74-75, tourism, 3, 5-6, 8, 15-17, 30, 37, 40,
82 41,86
Selma to Montgomery National Trail of Tears, 70
Historic Trail, 68 Trail of Tears National Historic Trail,
September 11,2001,62, 82 68
The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 24 Tsutsumida, Cherry, 83
Simmel, Georg, 85 Tunbridge, J.E., 5, 50, 65
Slave House, 64
Smithsonian Institution, 11,31,81 Viollet le-Duc, Eugene-Emmanuel, 23-
Stanford, Caroline, 27 24
Statue of Liberty, 53
Walsh, Kevin, 65
Tenement House Act, 54 War Relocation Authority, 70, 81
Tenement Museum, See Lower East Whately, Thomas, 20, 21
Side Tenement Museum Winks, Robin, 68
Terezin Memorial, 64 Workhouse, 12, 64
Terror Behind the Walls, 40, 46-47, 50 World War II, 4, 11,67,69,71,74-75,
Thompson, M.W., 57 77-79,81
Torchia, Richard, 43-45
105
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