Downtown Utility Wraps Feature Historic and Interpretive Panels

Have you checked out the interpretive panels mounted on the utility vaults around town? Especially downtown there is the start of a good density of historical markers, and if you take the time to imagine it, it's possible to extend yourself not just in space but also in time. The possibilities are very rich!

On the panels there does not seem to be any coherent narrative yet, and maybe there shouldn't be. History is always fragmentary, we can't know everything, and it is also multiple and contested. Still, there are places where more interpretation might be helpful.

But overall, the utility wrap project is great to see.

Probably the most important of the interpretive panels are ones related to our Chinatown. It's a part of Salem history that is not told in any detail, and what details we have had, up until the work on the shrine in Pioneer Cemetery, have relied on mid-century accounts which were limited and themselves biased. This telling of history is a chance to make visible what had been invisible, and more importantly make visible what had been deliberately erased in some cases.

"Chinese Funerary Traditions
at the Salem Pioneer Cemetery"

In Pioneer Cemetery, on a vault that really looks out of place, an instance of technology and infrastructure out of character with the other monuments and graves, there is a moving pair of panels on burials and funerary practices. There are so many layers of loss and deliberate forgetting here, and it is fit to have started the recovery and remembering project.

The greatest act of erasure is not referenced on the panels in the cemetery, however; it is noted at the very top of the wrap at High and State Street. "Chinatown Condemned," we see in the headline from 1903.

"Salem's Chinatown" at High and State

The panel notes that

Anti-Chinese sentiment was evident in Salem for many decades. The Salem City Council condemned the entire China town in 1903 and developers eventually pushed out the last of the Chinese from downtown by the early 1930s.

There's a lot going on there, and it may not be possible in a brief caption on an interpretive panel to give more context and properly to assign agency. The passive voice of "was evident in Salem" mystifies a little. Racism was popular! It wasn't just City Council or bad developers. It was most every Salemite.

Part of an editorial on the "yellow peril." (August 7, 1919)
It is not part of on the utility wrap project,
but it brings together so many racist themes
that are still in use and shows the scope of the problem.

The panels soft-pedal some things that probably need a firmer underscore.

side panel of "Salem's Chinatown"

On the Chinatown side panel is a tremendous quote that is so, so ambiguous.

I like Salem because all people treat me nicely. Then my children all grow up. They can vote but I have been here so long...I ought to be a citizen. I ought to be voting too....Why I be here fifty four years altogether, why I cannot vote....

What does this mean? The panel should have offered more context and explanation. Does it mean that he tried to become a citizen and was rebuffed? Did the Exclusion Laws still have an impact 50 years later? Does it mean that he didn't actually try to become a citizen, and is just joking, playing the clown for a white audience? Can we know anything about code-switching between the white audience and a Chinese audience in Chinatown? How much pain does this conceal? How was this speech received? Is this an accurate transcription, or has it been stylized for the white audience? And what about the tension between "anti-Chinese sentiment" and the claim "all people treat me nicely"?

To offer a quote like this without unpacking it seems like a real disservice to an actual understanding of history. It is not a text that can be taken merely at face value, or that a lay person can easily understand. In many ways there is much more subtext and context than the bare text. And if it can't be unpacked on a panel like this, maybe a different pull quote would have been better.

At the Library downstairs is another, temporary exhibit on Chinatown.

Library display on "Salem's Historic Chinatown"

It seems to have been written by a different person or at a different time. It does not reference "anti-Chinese sentiment" or "racism," and instead avoids the topic by talking about "difficult living conditions" and saying the 1903 condemnation originated in "health concerns." Showing the Sanborn map in color is great, but this caption is less truthful about the actual history.

Still, it is good to see some grappling with difficult matters in our public history. But there is more to do!

Other Signs and Panels

From the previous round of interpretive signs
at Liberty and State

As a whole, the project's design and style breaks with the previous group of interpretive panels, installed on the "welcome" maps and way-finding kiosks downtown. It might have been interesting to tie them more directly together. Perhaps budget was a factor. The projects also originated, I think, in different sections of City staff, who might have used different designers. So I suppose there might be multiple reasons they have a different look. This may not matter very much, but it is interesting to register. Indirectly it highlights the fragmentary and multiple nature of a history.

Other wraps focus on buildings that have been moved.

"Salem's Moving Past" at Church and Court

Another is on downtown theaters, and the "night and day" contrast makes this one the most visually impressive of the bunch. The role of electrification is rightly highlighted. Larger forces like this, the ones that really shape the city, may not receive enough interpretive force from panel to panel.

"Salem's Theatrical History" at High and Court

One on public amusement.

"Public Amusement in Salem"
at Liberty and Court

And on Mission Street, highlighting Lord & Schryver. (Here are some additional notes on a different erasure in the way we are treating their history.)

"The History of Mission Street"
at High and Mission

All in all, it is very nice to see these and to see the ways they make visible some of the different layers of history. Hopefully, as with the acknowledgement of "anti-Chinese sentiment," with future wraps and panels they will not avoid conflict and injustice, and avoid leaning into a Panglossian or Pollyannaish reading of Salem history.

(Previously, notes on the first installation in SESNA, and at Salem Reporter "Utility box panels give passersby a chance meeting with local history.")

More on Autoism?

Here, obviously, I would like to see more on the role of cars. It's another large force that shaped the city.

Over on FB a commenter conveyed a popular version of autoism:

We experienced downtown blight in the late 70s when Lancaster Mall was built and siphoned away shoppers who didn't want to plug the parking meters. Taking out the meters, putting in a free parkade (at the loss of some lovely old buildings, alas), and building the Nordstrom mall saved it. But there are still lots of empty buildings, and more work to do along Front Street across from the park. Personally, I'd like to see more buildings downtown occupied with new businesses and some good and inexpensive downtown living much more than I'd like to see more strip malls along Lancaster.

But we do not adequately grapple with the loss of buildings and residences and residents for parking structures and parking lots. It is far from clear that free parking "saved" downtown. Free parking also depleted downtown.

Against this reassuring myth of autoism, we might set the words of Ada Louise Huxtable, written about those 1970s:

Some day, some American city will discover the Malthusian truth that the greater number of automobiles, the less the city can accommodate them without destroying itself. The downtown that turns itself into a parking lot is spreading its own dissolution.