Unnerving: Recognizing the Fake War Zone

So, I get that movie producers often use real places to set the scene for their film. However, when the movie is about kids living in "a war ravaged neighborhood," it's weird when you recognize the place.

Apparently, Riverside Plaza -- a cluster of high-rise apartment buildings near downtown Minneapolis -- is the setting for "Ana's Playground", a film made by students at Augsburg College, which is right next to the apartments. The brutalist buildings themselves are distinct -- although some of the structures are bland concrete, most of them are clad in colorful paneling that screams "this happened in the 1970s!"

The apartments were built as mixed-income buildings, but the reality never matched the dream. If I remember correctly from a presentation I've heard on the complex, Ralph Rapson (head of the U of M architecture school from 1954-84 and designer of the old Guthrie, RIP) hoped it would be a catalyst for social change in the area, where white-collar workers could live alongside new immigrants, and frolic among the fountains and eat in restaurants below. However, even though they were supposedly where Minneapolis' fictional Mary Tyler Moore lived, they never really attracted the white-collar workers, and they quickly became not a city solution, but part of the problem. In the end, only about a fifth of Rapson's entire plan was built. The fountains don't work. Locally, some people call them the Crack Stacks, because they're known for some unsavory behavior.

However, they're also home to a lot of Augsburg students and a large Somali community. And, while they are pretty gaudy on the MPLS skyline, they speak to the era in which they were built. However, to put them in another context — a post-war context — caused me to look at them with a whole new lens. Scrolling through the film stills, I recognize what I remember from visiting Lviv, Ukraine, where the communist-built structures encroached on the Austro-Hungarian center-city. It felt foreboding, depressing. Ugh. Really — there was this feeling of utter despair, and that's the feeling the filmmakers give to Riverside.

I guess they accomplished what they wanted, but it sure doesn't help the neighborhood's image in my mind.

The Value of Stability

Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy-Cons and a cultural commentator now working for the John Templeton Foundation on the online magazine "In Character", shared a piece yesterday (via his Blog) about his sister Ruthie Leming, who was recently diagnosed with Stage Four cancer. He described her "little way" of virtue, and commended the outpouring of generosity and support from people in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where Ruthie and her family live, and where Ruthie has lived all of her life.

Dreher went on to reflect on the "role of place" in the support Ruthie is receiving from her community. Excerpt:

I'm not talking about the virtues of our hometown, though those are present. Nor am I talking about the virtues of a small town, necessarily, because what I'm interested in can be present just as well in a big city. No, what interests me is the part taken by what the Benedictines would call stability.

Monks of the Benedictine order take vows of "stability," meaning that they promise to remain in the monastery where they took their vows until the end of their lives, barring an extraordinary intervention. The idea is critical to the Benedictine way, because it commits the monks to living with, celebrating with, and suffering with, each other, in community, and in turn with the community of laypeople they serve. In my sister's case, she chose to stay in our hometown (indeed, she and Mike are raising their girls right across the field from our parents' house, where we grew up), not out of a sense of duty, but because she loved it there. It always felt like home to her. With the exception of the four years she was in Baton Rouge at college (only 30 miles away), she's lived in St. Francisville all her life. People know her there; they always have. They've seen her character show itself over the course of 40 years. They know who she is; in most ways, I think, they know who she is better than her own brother, who is not (he hopes) a bad person, but who simply hasn't been there to see all the little acts of charity and kindness that amount, over a lifetime, to the habit of virtue.

Now, had Ruthie lived in New York City, and developed through her church and neighborhood institutions a web of friendship, she might be in the same situation today: surrounded by a dense network of people showing her and her family love, and carrying them through this dark period in their lives. So it's not just a small-town thing, at least I don't think it is. What it is, however, is a matter of stability. We are such a hyper-mobile society, and think nothing of picking up and moving all over the place for the sake of career. I am a perfect example of this. Because of this, though, we cannot develop the kinds of thickly and deeply rooted relationships that we might if we had stayed in one place. Some of us lie to ourselves about this, in the same way that working parents tell themselves that they can adequately compensate for time away from their children by making sure the time they do spend with the kids is "quality time." But in truth, there is no substitute for being there.

What a revelation it is to watch the community care for Ruthie and her family! One day, when this drama is done, I'm going to write more about this. I am only sorry that I can't see it every day, because it's a beautiful thing. I expected Julie to return sad from her four- day trip down there, and she was, but it was that bright sadness I wrote about -- sorrowful over Ruthie's suffering, but also glowing from the radiant love surrounding my sister and all those attending her. You can't easily generate that spontaneously. It takes time, and stillness, and patience.

The entirety of Dreher's beautiful reflection is worth a read.

The Break-In

It’s somewhat ironic that the day I start writing about a sense of place is the day my house is broken into. My roommate called to let me know that her husband (my other roommate) had arrived home to find the front door ajar, with its century-old beveled glass busted through. He called the police, and they went through the house. The intruder basically took what he could carry and fled out the back door. I arrived home shortly after and spoke to the last cop to leave. He said that it looked random, and that this wasn’t part of any string of neighborhood robberies. Basically, we were just the wrong house at the wrong time.

There were glass shards scattered throughout the entry, evidence the intruder used blunt force to bust through the half-inch pane. The rest of the house looked normal, until I got to the bedrooms. My roommates’ dresser drawers were dumped; clothing and jewelry were tossed on the bed. My room, which is upstairs, was the same. A candy dish of random earrings, batteries and hardware was spread on my floor. A basket of hair products and lotions was overturned. A drawer with boxes of costume jewelry was awry.

But nothing was gone. Even my ipod and camera — which were in plain sight — were untouched. (Thank God that I had taken my laptop with me today; I had planned to write a paper for class.) My roommates had two old, rarely used laptops and two rings taken, but other things of value were blatantly overlooked. It feels so bizarre.

It didn’t take us long to be giggling about how disappointed the thief must have been; how unrewarding to break into the house of 20-somethings! We don’t even have a television, and he obviously deemed our stereo of little value.

However, as we described the damage to the next-door neighbor, she sighed, and said, “Then you were completely violated.” Another friend called and said, “You must feel so violated.” And my mom said the same thing.

Violated.

Yeah, I guess. As I type this while sitting on my bed, it’s weird to think about someone being in this room only hours ago, rifling through my drawers, intending to steel something from me. I mean, he saw my rumpled quilts, and my underwear, and my messy desk. He ransacked a space that is mine, this little alcove in the top half-story of a 1920s bungalow.

But “violated” seems to suggest a space has been intruded so deeply that it is forever altered. That it was pillaged beyond recovery. That it has lost its feeling of safety.

And this place hasn’t.

I will sleep well tonight, after I finish the homework that’s been pushed aside as I clean up the mess. I don’t think anyone will slice through the tape that’s holding our door’s jagged window together. I may hide my laptop when I’m at work from now on, but I don’t feel powerless.
I wonder what my reaction says to my sense of this place — if it is a healthy response to a place where I feel safe, despite the break-in, or if it reflects the fact that this is merely a place I’m currently renting, that that I’ve never intended to make this my dwelling for more than a few years.

Maybe it will become clear to me as time goes on. Right now I’m just hoping we can make that damaged Victorian door as beautiful as it once was.

The beginning

Ahh, how to start a blog. It seems as momentous — and as daunting — as the white, unwrinkled page in a new leather journal, just without the benefit of a pencil eraser. What I put here, they tell me, will last forever.

Well, so be it.

As a budding architectural historian and a newspaper reporter, I’m intrigued with the concept of a “Sense of Place.” Any writer worth his ink will tell you it’s foundational to a good feature story. And any historian — architectural or otherwise – knows that the context of an event (or building) gives it its meaning. Without place, it’s nothing.

As a Catholic, place takes on an entirely different level of meaning. The absurdly prolific Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton wrote, “I have become a pilgrim to cure myself of being an exile,” which speaks to the human condition, as understood as Christians. It is heaven, not this life, which is our destination. However, because the Catholic faith is incarnational, we believe that the things of this world have profound meaning. Thus, place — in an actual, material sense — is essential. That’s why, historically, Catholic churches have been beautiful, well-crafted and well-positioned structures.

I intend this blog to address Place in these three manners: the physical, as in buildings and city planning; the metaphysical, as in the atmosphere that one associates with physical places (what is often called “a sense of place”); and the spiritual, which transcends the senses though it is perceived, and speaks to the larger questions in which we often ascribe “place-like” metaphors, which as “Where are going?” and “What is home?”

This thing isn’t intended to be too heady, but it I hope it is interdisciplinary.

Welcome to Place + Meaning.