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Chapter 7 Independence National Historical Park Recapturing Erased Histories Introduction Erased Histories A s I (Setha Low) drive Route 10 from Palm Springs to West Los Angeles, my personal history passes by inscribed in the landscape through places, institutions, and cultural markers. I am reminded of where I went to college, where I spent my summers as a child, and where I got my first job as I travel this Southern California highway. Physical reminders like these provide a sense of place attachment, continuity, and connectedness that we are rarely aware of, but that plays a significant role in our psychological development as individuals and in our “place-identity” or “cultural-identity” as families or ethnic and cultural groups (Low and Altman 1992). But what happens when your places are not marked, or even more to the point, when your personal or cultural history is erased—removed from the landscape by physical destruction? The redevelopment of Paris by Baron Haussmann and removal of buildings around Notre Dame in the nineteenth century is a classic example of the erasure of a working-class and poor people’s history in an urban landscape (Holleran 1998). In the United States we have been more subtle; for instance, the contextually complex, residential streets of Bunker Hill were “lost” in the modernist redevelopment of downtown Los Angeles (Loukaitou-Sideris 1995; Loukaitou-Sideris and Dansbury 1995–96). At the historical site of Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, there is no record of the people who built the buildings (African Americans),1 or who financed the Revolution (Jewish Americans), or who fed the soldiers (women—mothers, wives, and others). The processes of historic preservation , planning and development, and park interpretation recreated the colonial period as a white, male space. Further, documentation of lost buildings and physical context is missing when one searches for information concerning the histories of minority peoples during colonial times. African Americans in Philadelphia, however, have been fighting to reclaim their history by supporting research, setting up archives, and working to ensure that their history and culturally significant sites are marked throughout 150 R ETHINK ING UR BAN PAR K S the city. The African American community in New York has been successful in contesting the federal government’s claims to the African Burial Ground, demanding its commemoration and preservation, but has been less successful when it comes to preserving their political heritage, a case in point being the demolition of the interior of the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X was shot. Thus, even as histories are erased, they are re-searched and rediscovered so that they can be commemorated in the contemporary fabric of the city. This chapter presents the results of a collaborative research project that uncovered the erased histories of various ethnic groups living in Philadelphia and recaptured these histories through a rapid ethnographic assessment procedures (REAP) study of Independence National Historical Park. It tells the story of how the planning and design of the park over time unintentionally disrupted the cultural attachments of neighboring communities and excluded new immigrant groups. An understanding of the underlying processes that created this disruption and exclusion is illuminated by the application of the REAP. In the following sections, we review the methodology and discuss findings from the various qualitative methods. In the conclusion of this chapter, we address the importance of this type of research for understanding the impact of design and planning on the place attachment and cultural identity of local minority populations. We offer this case study as representative of the kind of research that can be undertaken to recover histories that have been scrubbed away during previous historical preservation or urban renewal projects. Further , we argue that understanding the intimate relationship between histories, cultural representation, and park use is critical to successful design and planning in any culturally diverse context. One note about our use of terms. Anthropologists argue continuously about the categories of ethnicity and culture. Ethnicity is a slippery term that evokes different meanings when used by the informant as an identity marker (“I am ethnically Jewish,” or “I am Italian American”) and when used as an analytic category (“The informant appears to be Asian American or African American ”). Culture is equally difficult to use. The term culture refers to local traditions or practices that define an ethnic group, while Culture refers to an analytic category with overarching, anthropological meaning. Further, ethnicity and culture covary with nationality and other political forms of identification...

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