Faculty and Grad Research: Foodways Texas Symposium

This past weekend, graduate students in Elizabeth Engelhardt's "American Food" class took part in the second annual Foodways Texas Symposium here in Austin. At this year's event, Dr. Engelhardt's class presented work from an oral history project they are doing in partnership with Foodways Texas and the Texas Restaurant Association. In small groups, the students visited four "iconic" Texas restaurants to interview their owners, snap photos, and gather ephemera, and they shared these stories and images at a well-attended afternoon panel.Dr. Engelhardt notes that "these restaurants have great stories, represent the diversity of the Texas food and restaurant culture and celebrate the racial and ethnic diversity of our state." Marvin Bendele, Executive Director of Foodways Texas, comments, "We view this oral history project as an opportunity to highlight the diverse food cultures of the Lone Star state by way of its thriving and storied restaurant industry. We expect that through our partnership with the Texas Restaurant Association, we will be able to create an extensive oral history archive that will be utilized by future generations interested in our food and foodways history."Stay tuned tomorrow for more on this exciting oral history project (and some beautiful photos!). In the meantime, check out this great write-up on the symposium by Addie Broyles on the Relish Austin blog over at Austin360.

Grad Research: Reconsidering the Interstate Highway System

The following post comes to us from UT AMS Ph.D. student Brendan Gaughen:

"Life doesn't happen along the interstates," wrote William Least Heat-Moon, "It's against the law."  The quote comes from his first novel-travelogue Blue Highways: A Journey Into America (1982), and he is not alone in his view.  The Interstate Highway System has been blamed for a number of things such as physically dividing urban communities along racial lines, slowly choking the enterprise in rural towns, and shifting our perception of distance from miles to minutes.

Heat-Moon's disdain for Interstates has been consistent since his first work.  Part Kerouac's On the Road (minus the stream-of-consciousness wanderings), part Steinbeck's Travels With Charley (minus Charley), Blue Highways explores the American landscape and people as seen by driving the nation's small roads, the narrow sinews once connecting travelers to mostly rural destinations -- roads that formerly appeared light blue in the Rand McNally road atlas.  (Heat-Moon would likely lament the fact that it is not the local roads but the Interstates that now appear blue in the road atlas.)  He has since written a handful of other books demonstrating his fondness for the American landscape as experienced by avoiding the Interstate Highway System: covering Chase County Kansas on foot (PrairyErth: A Deep Map), crossing the continent by boat (River Horse: A Voyage Across America), and exploring different regions by rural road (Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey).

Heat-Moon isn't the first, nor the last, to prefer a slower, earlier version of automobile transportation.  John Steinbeck, writing in the late 1960s, said, "When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing."  Charles Kuralt, who spent nearly three decades wandering the United States and reporting on his findings for CBS News, wrote, "The interstate highway system is a wonderful thing. It makes it possible to go from coast to coast without seeing anything or meeting anybody. If the United States interests you, stay off the interstates."  Humorist Bill Bryson offered in Made in America, "In less than two decades, America's modern interstate highways drained the life from thousands of towns. No longer was it necessary - and before long not even possible - to partake of the traditional offerings of two-lane America."These authors, like many Americans, romanticize rural towns, the places often bypassed by Interstate highway construction.  These are the places that exist in the public imagination in a particular way -- the mythic "Main Street", ideological opposite of Wall Street, a symbolic landscape that is the home of traditional values, of the tenacity of a nation to withstand hard times, of places untouched by progress, of simpler times.  These are the out-of-the-way places many city-dwellers like to visit as curiosities but would cringe at the thought of breaking down and getting stuck -- the kinds of town that each claim notoriety for having the world's largest ball of twine, world's tallest coal shovel, being the birthplace of someone now barely remembered, or if none of these, the home of past state champion high school sports teams.

Whereas the older small town is perceived as traditional, simple, and slow-paced, the Interstate crossroads is efficient, modern, running 24-hours -- a distinction between the general store and its single fuel pump against the city-in-itself truck stop.  These authors do not hesitate to point out how technological progress has come at a great price, and prefer to avoid the superhighways altogether.  With the entire highway system covering nearly 47,000 miles, avoiding Interstates can be difficult to achieve.  They carry traffic to, through, and near every major city in the nation and to every capital in the lower 48 states except Dover, Delaware.  Texas alone has 17 different routes comprising over 3000 miles of Interstate highway.

Urban Interstates are designed to maximize efficiency -- getting the highest volume of traffic as far as possible in the shortest amount of time.  Unfortunately they seem today more like reminders of an aging infrastructure with no room to accommodate a growing traffic problem.  They have been criticized as primarily serving the middle and upper classes at the expense of the poor, of carving up once-thriving neighborhoods and displacing low-income residents, and of compromising the health of those living nearby.  Existing primarily for high-density traffic flow, there really isn't anything notable about most urban interstates except perhaps the 21-lane wide stretch of I-5 on the north side of San Diego, or that sections of Los Angeles' 405 carry nearly 400,000 vehicles per day.Outside the metropolitan area, the older Federal Highway System was bound by geography, covering the contour of the land, the rise and fall and twist and bend.  For the most part, the Interstates take the shortest route possible, unbound by geographic restraints.  This can mean carving away hillsides, tunneling under mountain passes, or crossing swamps where earlier highways avoided such shortcuts, demonstrating an unwavering faith in progress and technological solutions.  In one notable example, a proposal for routing I-40 across California's Mojave Desert, fortunately rejected, involved detonating atomic bombs to level the Bristol Mountains as part of Eisenhower's Atoms For Peace program.  35 years after the first stretch of concrete was laid in mid-1956, the Interstate Highway System was declared "complete" (with some additions being since made or currently in progress), in what proved to be the largest construction project in human history -- and at an estimated $425 billion (2006), the most expensive.

Despite the justifiable criticism of the Interstate Highway System, it is an important part of American society.  Its construction has transformed the way Americans move, firmly entrenching long-distance continental travel from rail to highway.  And despite the claims of the authors mentioned in this post, there is plenty to see. Over the next few weeks, I will be introducing you to my favorite 5 stretches of interstate highway, which I've selected as being particularly scenic or notable engineering marvels.  Stay tuned for the first installment, coming soon: I-8 Alpine CA -- Ocotillo CA.

Grad Research: Bombs and Belvederes

Last week, I introduced a collaborative project that I've been working on for the past few years, Mystery Spot Books. This week, I submit another bit of writing from our first book, Mystery Spot Vol. 1, on buried cars in Tulsa and hydrogen bombs hiding in plain sight in New Mexico.Sandia Base was a field test area for nuclear weapons run by the U.S. government that operated from 1946 until 1971. The former test site lies southeast of Albuquerque amidst a seemingly unbroken expanse of dry mesas and their tributaries of dusty roads. In May of 1957, at what is now called the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site, a 42,000-pound hydrogen bomb fell through the closed bay doors of a plane that was approaching Kirtland Air Force Base to the south. The plutonium pits were safely stored on the plane, but radioactive pieces of the bomb were scattered across the mesas. In 1996, the Center for Land Use Interpretation placed a descriptive marker at the site to commemorate the incident. The marker is a wooden post that stands in the middle of a field and holds a plaque describing the 1957 event. The Air Force cleaned up the site in secret, but if you visit the Mark 17 Broken Arrow site today, you can still find radioactive pieces of the hydrogen bomb hiding in the sagebrush.Six hundred and fifty miles east of the Sandia Base, also in 1957, the city of Tulsa buried a brand new Plymouth Belvedere in an underground bunker designed to withstand nuclear fallout. The car was a time capsule, slated to be unearthed during Oklahoma’s centennial celebration in 2007. The concrete enclosure was intended to protect the car from decay, but a defect in the design of the bunker allowed water to seep in over the years and severely damage the Belvedere. A second car, a Plymouth Prowler, was placed in an above ground vault in 1998 and will be sealed there until 2048. If you visit Tulsa in 2048, you might see a well-preserved 1998 Plymouth Prowler emerge from its sepulcher, or perhaps a design flaw will allow time to do its work on this time capsule as well.Some things get buried so no one can find them; some things get buried so everyone remembers them. But things don’t always stay buried. What you find if you visit the Broken Arrow site or Tulsa, Oklahoma, is more than the radioactive scraps of a destroyed bomb or a bizarre representation of local pride. One way or another, things come to the surface, and what is revealed when they do is not simply the contradiction between what we hide and what we honor, but the fact that the latter is often a mask for the former.

Grad Research: Mystery Spot Books

One of the most exciting projects I have had the opportunity to work on in the past few years is a collaboration with an artist and good friend in Minneapolis. Due to our shared interest in cultural geography and the weird and wonderful tourist landscape, we began to create book-length publications that explore ideas of land, site, history, and American material culture. These publications are printed in limited editions of 100-250 and include photography, drawings, essays, documentation of site-specific installations, and other artifacts from our travels. We currently have four titles in print, made possible by a generous grant through the Minnesota State Arts Board. The following is a short piece I wrote for our first book project, Mystery Spot, which has become the first volume in an ongoing series.Preservation and EntropyThe Winchester mansion in San Jose, California, was once an eight-room farmhouse. Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune, purchased the property in 1884. By 1906, the year of the San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake, the house had grown into a seven-story mansion. After the earthquake it was reduced to its current four-story height, but construction continued for as long as Sarah Winchester was alive. It is said that on the day of her death in 1922, when carpenters heard the news, nails were left half-driven. In a house with 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens, this is just one of the apocryphal stories that has accumulated at the four-acre property in the Silicon Valley.Tours of the Winchester mansion are offered to the public every day of the year save Christmas. The preservation process, like the building process, is perpetual. 20,000 gallons of paint are required to cover the exterior of the house, and the painting process takes so long to complete that by the time work has finished it is time to begin again. Much of the woodwork and many of the original fixtures are cordoned off or behind glass, and various collections of period furniture have been brought in to replace Sarah Winchester’s belongings, which were auctioned off after her death. One wing of the house, however, has been kept empty and in the state of disrepair brought on by the 1906 earthquake. Here, as in the rest of the house, guide ropes and carpeted paths maintain the distance between visitors and the attraction. Unlike the rest of the house, however, these rooms are billed as a “frozen moment in time,” as if entropy itself could be preserved.The Winchester tour guide monologue focuses on the peculiarities of the owner’s ever-changing and enigmatic design and on the incredible arithmetic of the house itself. But something is missing from the hour-long tour. The eight-room farmhouse that stood on the site in 1884 has been all but lost in the process of building and rebuilding. While standing in one of the mansion’s many kitchens toward the end of the tour, visitors are informed that they may be standing in a section of the house near where the farmhouse once stood, but the location and dimensions of the oldest rooms are unknown. In a house that was renovated upwards of 600 times, a set of steps and a sentence of tour monologue are all that remain to represent the original structure.The Mystery Spot Books website is in the works, but you can get updates on new projects (and see more images from the books) here.