Syllabus / At Play in American Cities
Arch 279X, F’2007 / Page 19
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AT PLAY IN AMERICAN CITIES:
SOCIAL SPACES OF RECREATION AND LEISURE, 1850-2000
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This draft of the syllabus: August 22, 2007
Architecture 279X: Seminar in Architectural History / CCN: 03961
Fall Semester 2007 / Wednesdays 10-1 in 270 Wurster Hall / 3 or 4 units / UC Berkeley
Waverly Lowell and Paul Groth, Instructors
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Participants in this seminar will examine the building types, social histories, and cultural geographies of recreation in the American city since 1850. The primary focus will be on settings for commercial leisure, including the activities, social relations, and ideas behind fairly well-known environments such as theaters, bars and saloons, department stores, expositions, sports venues, amusement parks, cinemas, parks, gambling, and vice districts to less-well-researched settings such as cycloramas, public halls and lodges, dancehalls, museums, bowling alleys, dime theaters, public swimming pools, drive-ins, and weekend resorts. Non-commercial public spaces such as local and state parks will also be investigated. Related and overlapping issues will include the tensions between home leisure with familial supervision versus commercial leisure in public social settings; recreation’s roles in the crossing of or reinforcement of lines between racial and ethnic groups, age cohorts, genders, and social classes; informal use of settings, such as hanging out at the mall, compared to the meanings of highly specialized settings; shifts from walking and streetcar access to automobile access; links between growing individual and personal freedom and cultures of leisure consumption.
Readings will include classic studies as well as recent work. Students taking the course for four units will be expected to complete a 20- to 30-page research paper, or a section of an on-going thesis or dissertation on a related topic. Students taking the course for three units will do the readings, discussions, and short assignments but no research paper. Upper-division undergraduates will be admitted as space permits, by permission of the instructors.
Signing up on Telebears is appropriate but only preliminary; actual enrollment will be decided during the first class meeting. Students from outside the Department of Architecture are heartily encouraged to join us.
Waverly Lowell is the founding Curator of the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley. She has worked as an archivist in a number of Bay Area research collections as well as published research and presented numerous exhibits and courses on research methods and Bay Area history.
Paul Groth is Professor of U.S. built environment history in the Department of Geography and the Department of Architecture. He is the co-editor of Everyday America, and is currently at work on a study of work, home, and leisure in West Oakland, California.
ASSIGNED BOOKS
All books are in paperback editions; prices listed are full prices given on Amazon.com in August 2007.
Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986; reprint edition 1987) $23.95
David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993; paperback ed., 1999) $21.50
William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991; paperback ed, 1996) $24.95
Books have been ordered at Ned’s Berkeley Bookstore at 2480 Bancroft Way. The book total cost is $ 71. In addition, there will be a “group xerox fee” of approximately $30 for articles xeroxed during the course of the semester.
OFFICE HOURS AND CONTACT POINTS
Waverly Lowell
Office: 280 Wurster Hall, in the Environmental Design Archives
Office phone: 510-643-5655
E-mail:
For appointments: call or E-mail.
Paul Groth
Office: 597 McCone Hall
Office phone: 510-642-0955 Home phone: 415-695-1544
E-mail:
Office hours: Thursdays, 2-4, and for seminar students, by arrangement if necessary
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THE COURSE AT A GLANCE
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Aug 29 1. The scheme of the course, and its participants
Sept 5 2. Recreation in general: an overview of issues and questions
Sept 12 3. 19th century theater, music, and museums: vaudeville to opera
Sept 19 4. Recreation sites as real estate
Due: Presentation of Sanborn Map exercise (all students)
Sept 26 5. The three D’s: drinking, dancing, and dating
Due: Abstract and bibliography for individual research papers (4-unit students)
Oct 3 6. Forbidden fun: vice districts, gambling, prostitution, and sex
Oct 10 7. The movies: peep shows and dime theaters to suburban multiplexes
Oct 17 8. Along the street and highway: lodges, shopping, dining, and strip
Oct 24 9. Private home amusements as challenges to public leisure
Oct 31 10. Vacations and tourism: getting away
Halloween costumes optional
Nov 7 11. Venues for community and professional sports
Nov 14 12. Parks, playgrounds, and “waterside” activities
Nov 21 No class on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving Day. See Dec 11.
Nov 28 13. Fairs, expositions, theme parks, and festivals
Dec 5 14. Course summary and course evaluations
Due: Your list of 3 favorite and 3 least-liked reading
Dec 11 15. A recreation symposium: oral presentations of student research
Written papers are due by 3 PM Friday, Dec 14th (4 unit students only)
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DETAILED COURSE SYLLABUS
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Aug 29. Meeting 1. The scheme of the course, and its participants. A reading and research seminar as group exploration. Looking for questions as well as answers. Paul Groth's and Waverly Lowell’s own methods as “selective eclecticism.” Why we have chosen not to explore the important and large literatures of theory about leisure, consumption, and commodification. Quick exercise: definitions of recreation and leisure.
Some overarching questions: How should we define recreation and leisure? Why do these settings often fall between the cracks of historical studies? Is there, in fact, a “fall” of public life and amusements, as so many of our authors claim—and if so, what does it connote, and what contradicts this sense of loss? What do we need to know about American cities in general in order to understand leisure and recreation space? Other questions as phrased by Prof. Sabine Haenni of Cornell University, for a similar course: What are the connections between play and work, play and everyday life? How do play spaces allow us to negotiate the traumatic experiences of modern life?
The assignments: In addition to the readings and discussions, and one Sanborn map exercise, each week students will write a short (5 lines to no more than a third-of-a-page) reaction to the readings, with copies for everyone in the class. More information on the assignments is included at the back of the syllabus. As noted in the description, four-unit students will write a 20 to 30 page research paper, with abstract and source list due 5th week.
Sept 5. Meeting 2. Recreation in general: an overview of issues and questions. The challenges of social and cultural interpretation. Recreation and play spaces as temporary ideal worlds. General roles that recreation spaces have played, and how those roles have changed. The common notion that (a) there was a golden age of public recreation, and (b) that the golden age ended about 1930. The issue of social and political control over recreation; how free is free time?
Seminar sign-up sheet is hammered out: commitments to duties and schedule
Quick start-up exercise: how guidebooks over time have defined recreation
Robert D. Putnam, “Informal Social Connections,” ch 6, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000)
Kathy Peiss, chs 1-3: “The Homosocial World of Working Class Amusements,” “Leisure and Labor,” and “Putting on Style,” Cheap Amusements (1986)
William Taylor, “Introduction,” Inventing Times Square (1991)
David Nasaw, chs 1 and 17 “Introduction,” and “Decline and Fall,” Going Out (1993)
(a) How do these different authors and editors phrase and frame their assumptions about the rise and fall of public recreation?
(b) What are the relations between work time, home time, and leisure (public and private) as shown in Putnam’s recent survey, and as compared with those that Peiss outlines?
(c) Peiss introduces the issues of gender, age (stage in the life cycle), relative income, the relations between work and leisure, and the ways that leisure gives meaning to life—all of which will be important throughout the course. How would these issues be different for people in middle-class families?
(d) Beneath the surface of these readings, in what ways do we see agreement or disagreement with Jürgen Habermas’s thesis that the bourgeois public sphere unravels early in the 1800s, and that from 1870 to 1900 there is what Ph.D. student Ocean Howell calls “a devolution of publicness from the bourgeoisie to the ‘unpropertied’ classes, to various competing counter publics.”
Sept 12. Meeting 3. Nineteenth century theater, music, and museums: vaudeville to opera. The roles and forms of cultural and social hierarchy, as acted out and reinforced by recreation activities. Tensions that ethnic differences, social stratifications, and social class introduce into recreation settings. Theater of all types as a mirror of contemporary societies and cultures. The shifting nature of what Levine calls “the perimeters of our cultural divisions.” Roles of racial and ethnic stereotypes as portrayed in theater and entertainment. Music as event. Going to art, history, and natural history museums and galleries.
Examples: Vaudeville theaters and Main Street “opera houses”; concert halls like SF Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall; so-called “legitimate” theater houses. Storefront museums versus official “palace” style museums. Nineteenth century cycloramas (often traveling displays) and buildings built for them.
For next week’s short exercise, review on-line Sanborn Map research and assign sites
Lawrence Levine, “William Shakespeare in America,” ch 1, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1986)
Joseph M. Siry, “Chicago’s Auditorium Building: Opera or Anarchism,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 57,2 (Jan 1998): 128-159
David Nasaw, Going Out, chs 2-5: “Dollar Theatres, Concert Saloons, and Dime Museums,” “ ‘Something for Everybody’ at the Vaudeville Theater,” “The Best Smelling Crowd in the World” [popular theater], “The ‘Indecent’ Others” [blackface or “coon” shows] (1993)
LeRoi Jones, “Classic Blues,” ch. 7, Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1999)
Stan Singer, “Vaudeville in Los Angeles, 1910-1926: Theaters, Management, and the Orpheum,” Pacific Historical Review 61,1 (Feb 1992): 103-113
(a) How are late nineteenth century theater and concert settings similar and different from early and late twentieth century music and theater venues? From current rock concert venues?
(b) For building lovers, Siry’s article gives wonderfully detailed building plans and sections of the Metropolitan Opera in NYC as well as Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Building in Chicago. How do Siry’s questions differ and dovetail with those of Levine and Nasaw?
(c) Many theorists note that specialization and separation—of time, activities, classes of people, whatever—are important aspects of the modernity that elites (and others?) were adopting after the mid-1800s. How was this true, or not true, of theater and music performance? How does the Auditorium building reflect modernity, and negate it?
(d) How do Nasaw’s short descriptive passages differ, in framing and intent, from Levine’s discussions of similar topics?
Sept 19. Meeting 4. Recreation sites as real estate. Center-city entertainment districts and their development (the case study of Times Square). Leisure spaces as future development plots; the urban morphology of recreation locations, and how leisure sites fare over time; comparative roles of urban connection and former edge-of-city locations. For those leisure spaces that survive, the alternative of preservation or adaptive re-use.
Examples of morphology issues: Quarries become parks; amusement parks become housing developments (Idora Park in Oakland); Emeryville racing track becomes light industrial park; New York World’s Fair site becomes, in part, Shea Stadium. Other fair sites become museums. Examples of preservation and adaptive use issues: movie theaters as a prime case, but race tracks to light industrial developments; turnverein club to Women’s Building in SF; gigantic, lavish German Club (on Polk Street, near SF City Hall) becomes California Hall and Culinary Institute; landmark Masonic Temple at Market and Van Ness to “One Van Ness” office, commercial, and theater spaces.
Due (in lieu of reading paragraphs): Each student does xerox handout and 3-minute report on a quick Sanborn study of a Bay Area recreation site and its change over time.
Waverly Lowell: half-hour presentation on quarries as recreation sites
David C. Hammack, “Developing for Commercial Culture,” ch 1, Taylor, Inventing Times Square
Betsy Blackmar, “Uptown Real Estate and the Creation of Times Square,” ch 2, Taylor, Inventing Times Square
Kristine Miller, “Condemning the Public: Design and New York’s New 42nd Street,” Geojournal 58 (2002): 139-148
(a) Hammack’s and Blackmar’s histories are an apt back-to-back set of explanations. How do they ascribe different levels of explanatory power to private transportation development (“transportation determinism”), and intersections between the needs of capital, private profit, and public activities and meanings?
(b) How are the vocabularies of the two authors different—especially their verbs—and what does this suggest about the linked roles of thinking and writing?
(c) According to Hammack or Blackmar (their analyses differ), who most effectively generates shared social and culture meanings of city districts?
Sept 26. Meeting 5. The three D’s: drinking, dancing, and dating. The issues of single-gender and mixed-gender settings, “controlled” crowds and settings that mix strangers. Commercial versus familial supervision of mores. How the commercial availability of alcoholic beverages affects the meanings and activities in social recreation places, especially (but not exclusively) for single people. Links between personal freedom and what Kathy Peiss calls the “cultures of consumption and heterosociability.” Once again, tensions of stratification and social class. Shifts from “music as event,” to “music as background.” Also once again: tensions between home leisure with familial supervision versus commercial leisure in public social settings.
Examples: Saloons, dance halls, ballrooms, dancing academies, and the “night out” for a young couple. Music halls, beer gardens, and other venues for popular music, such as San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall. During prohibition, speakeasys. Since 1930s, cocktail lounges, fern bars, brew-pubs. In 1920s, WW I Veteran’s Halls and other memorial buildings (as public halls) as proper settings for gender-mixing of the middle class: example on Grand Avenue at Lake Merritt in Oakland.