"Houston, we have lift off"

Please excuse the cheesy title for my first post but it was the first thing to pop into my head. Upon the urging of my advisor, Dr. Seth Bruggeman, I've created a blog which I'd use as a tool to chronicle and process what I'm doing this summer. What is it that I'm doing you might ask? Great question. As a student in the Public History program at Temple, an internship is required for completion of the degree so I am interning for Dr. Amy Hillier in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Throughout the course of the summer I will be working on a variety of different projects. I have two main projects for this summer.

The first project is in conjunction with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). They are currently working on an amazing neighborhood history project, PhilaPlace. This project fuses together history, memory and place into a web-based project which also has a corresponding neighborhood tour. At this point the project is focusing on the Northern Liberties and South Philadelphia sections of the city. My charge has been to review the interviews HSP conducted and identify a few themes which can later be mapped. The first theme I identified from the interviews was movie theaters and given the fact that most of the interviewees are older Philadelphians, this will be a strong generational theme. I'm still working on identifying a few more themes. The second project will be further research into the proposed Crosstown Expressway which was to travel along the length of South Street. I'm not sure what I'll exactly be doing but when my partner returns from China, we'll get to work.

Watching the interviews was just incredible because it gave me the opportunity to take a glimpse into a different era in Philadelphia. I always find myself wondering what certain areas of the city used be like. Who lived there? What did they do? Do we still have any remnants this bygone time? As historians we have to think about 'change over time' (that always sounds like a math equation to me) and the interviews did just that. They allowed me to compare 'what is' to 'what was'. One Northern Liberties story stood out. A man who was raised in the neighborhood during the '50s and '60s talked about how a pig slaughtering factory would occasionally provide entertainment. Every once in a while, a pig would escape while being unloaded from trucks and the factory workers would have to chase the pig around the neighborhood. The slaughterhouse is no longer there, and for those of you who know Northern Liberties, chances are a $750,000 house has taken its place.

Eventually, those type of memories disappear. While a story such as that doesn't have the same weight and many of the other events in Philadelphia's history, it provides a texture which has made the city what it is today. Projects such as PhilaPlace are invaluable because it looks to catalog everyday stories which one could argue are just as significant as monumental events.

Future postings should be a bit more sophisticated but I wanted to give a bit of a rundown of the past two weeks. I think pictures will make it on the postings as well. I'm heading back to playing with Google Map.