Where is history growing?

Shelia, thanks for your commentary on the issue of history making...

Journalists most definitely create a very valuable record of our history and even sometimes make history themselves.

 Tomorrow on Sept 25th at 10am, the Lake Street Council and officials from the City of Minneapolis will be officially dedicating the "Museum of the Streets" project which consists of historical markers placed in various locations on or near Lake Street.   Indeed the subject of the markers is the history of the "winners", the white, European immigrant community that defined the Lake Street of the late 19th and early 20th century.

Politics seems to have played a role in the placement of the Park Avenue and Pauline Fjelde house markers...which are on 29th and Park instead of 30th where they belong.  

In regard to Wendy Knox's question...about the important of creating an archive of her vital and provocative and intelligent theater's work...yes, we care and so will future generations.

Wendy of course, may remember that she "stands on the shoulders" of Martha Boesing and Phyllis Jane Rose who created the vital and provocative feminist theater, "At the Foot of the Mountain."    They created and performed extraordinary work in a black box theater on the West Bank of the University of Minnesota in the 1970s.

The archives of that Theater were donated to the Performing Arts Archives at the University of Minnesota.     If a book on the theater and its work has not been written it should be and you are just the person to write it.    Plenty of people would contribute funds to such a project which should also be grant funded.

Martha Boesing still continues her work!

http://marthaboesing.com/

At the Foot of the Mountain Theater records, 1974-1991.
At the Foot of the Mountain (Theater : Minneapolis, Minn.)
1974
Available at UM TC Andersen Library Mss (Perf Arts Archives) (PA 45 )
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Title: At the Foot of the Mountain Theater records, 1974-1991.
Author/Creator: At the Foot of the Mountain (Theater : Minneapolis, Minn.)
Subjects: At the Foot of the Mountain (Theater : Minneapolis, Minn.) -- Archives ; Theatrical companies -- Minnesota -- Minneapolis
Description: restrictionsThe collection is open and available for use.
summaryThe collection includes production files, administrative and financial records, and a collection of videotapes of productions and audio tapes mostly used in productions. Also included is a collection of clippings, mounted in scrapbooks.
biographyAt the Foot of the Mountain Feminist Theatre opened its doors in 1974 as an experimental theater by and for women. It was opened by Martha and Paul Boesing who originally had opened the theater in Cambridge, Mass., and Atlanta before laying roots in Minneapolis. Martha Boesing was the writer and producer of many of the plays with help from Phyllis Jane Rose and other members of the company. Before its closure in 1991 it was known as the oldest continuously-producing women's theater in the United States, and the longest-running professional women's theater in the country. Plays on issues such as rape, prostitution, addiction, war, and musicals about Nancy Drew were among the numerous plays that AFOM produced during its almost 17 years in production. The plays were performed by both professionally and academically trained members, and were often performed in front of sold-out crowds.

Hi Sheila
In the 1970s, I was project architect for the Milwaukee Avenue redevelopment. At this time, almost 40 years later, I am writing a book, "Saving Milwaukee Avenue in the 1970s." Here is an excerpt, with the last line relating to your article about realizing one's involvement in history:

Chapter Twenty- “A lost cause - but we had no other options.” Harold and Connie Fournier

Harold and Connie Fournier today seem relaxed and content. Their rehab at 2204 Milwaukee Avenue represents the epitome of the 1970s historic preservation house rescue – a faithful obedience to exterior restoration, with the inside spaces blown away of room-defining partition walls to create modern architectural three dimensionality, with spatial configurations accommodating their new living patterns. On Milwaukee Avenue, they became the embodiment of that quote by Winston Churchill that many architects love to repeat: “We create buildings, they create us.” For Harold and Connie, there is a double meaning: the architecture they created at 2204 not only defined how their sensibilities affected, and were affected by how they designed their dwelling; but likewise in their ensuing professional lives – Connie as a deputy director of Minneapolis Department of Building Inspections, and Harold who began work as a carpenter for Kraus Anderson Construction Companies - later to become one of its superintendents for multi-million dollar building projects.
And for Harold and Connie, Churchill’s word ‘create’ works better as ‘recreate.” The pair began their house rehab in 1977 by pulling away veneer brick from the exterior house shell, then tore off the house’s rear section, whose wood framing was too rotted to drive nails into, then reconstructed over half of the house’s original structure.
Over a year earlier, in 1976, the newly-wed couple moved from their hometown of Duluth to Minneapolis, where Connie began her public agency career, while Harold entered the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. A year later, their cramped cheap-rent apartment unit, with a bathroom down the hall, became unbearable, so Connie and Harold had to take action. Both Harold and Connie grew up with carpenter fathers who built the houses in which they each grew up. Each of them had helped their fathers and knew a few things about house building. So it was somehow in their bones, or encoded genetics, to be collaborative builders of their own shelter. But how could they build their own house when they didn’t have any money?
By that time, Connie was the only one of the two with a job, and Harold had just finished his first year in architecture school, which he decided was his last one. He found occasional work doing carpentry. But the desire to build their own home grew strong, and Harold began to drive his Volkswagen Beetle around the city to look for condemned houses. One day he happened to glance down Milwaukee Avenue, which was lined with what looked to Harold to have many shabby vacant houses. He stopped his Volkswagen in front of a vacant structure at 2204 Milwaukee, looked at it, then wrote its address in his notebook, followed by the words, “A lost cause.”
But Harold sensed a certain spirit in this street, and he talked to a few people working on a house rehab, and asked how he could find out how to buy one of these empty houses. A few minutes later, Harold was in the Seward West Project Area Committee (PAC) office and met staff member Jeri Reilly, who explained the Seward West PAC lottery system. Each of the available vacant Housing and Redevelopment Authority (HRA)-owned houses had multiple applicants, and the next lottery to take place was over a month away. Harold mentioned to Jeri that if he wasn’t selected, he would have to wait, and again take a chance he wouldn’t have to wait for the next one. Then Jeri told him there was one house available that nobody had applied for in the last few open house events, and if he was interested, he could be selected as the applicant right away - pending a credit and income report. Harold asked the address and Jeri responded, “It’s 2204 Milwaukee.”
Harold and Connie decided this was their only option to have their own house. When they asked Jeri how much income they needed to qualify, Jeri told them they need some income but shouldn’t have too much, so they could fit into a low income category. Eventually, the Fourniers qualified for a $15,000 city loan at 8%, a federal Section 312 loan for $15,000 at 2%, and a Minnesota Historical Society grant of $6,000. On July 7, 1977, when their paperwork was ready to finalize for their redevelopment agreement, an HRA land sales officer told Harold and Connie they needed to write a check for a specified percentage of existing land value, which put the check value at $108.00. Connie thought hard about this – she knew public agencies typically did not cash checks a day after receiving them, but if HRA cashed her check the next day, their account balance would not cover it. Friday, two days later, was payday. Connie handed over her check and hoped for the best. This was the event that changed their lives.
Here the story needs a temporary fast forward: over five months later on December 20th of that year, their rehab well underway, Connie received a letter from HRA stating the accounting department had somehow lost her $108 check, and requested she resubmit that amount to them.
Harold unlocked the HRA padlock, and went to work with his crowbar to jerk away lath and plaster, then scoop up the debris and threw it in a dumpster outside a first floor window opening. It didn’t take long for Harold to become absorbed into the Milwaukee Avenue confederacy of individual rehabbers, with its processes of sharing tools, newly-discovered rehab techniques, and parts of houses such as newel posts, trim pieces and clawfoot bathtubs. Somebody’s wheelbarrow became a community materials transport vehicle, and somebody’s well-worn pickup truck could be borrowed for trips to the lumber yard. Their carpentry, the building materials they used and their home-grown barter system made them self-assigned outcasts of the conventional new construction-based marketplace, in which 8 foot ceiling heights, modern 2 ¼” ranch mold trim, and floor coverings of shag carpeting reigned supreme. Their own stock market commodities of old house parts, as Connie observed, made a Milwaukee Avenue re-use center. Many of these houses today bear parts from other nearby houses. “And where else could this happen?” she asked.
As Harold put his recently-acquired carpentry skills to work during the day, Connie worked her career job. After work she rode her bicycle to 2204 to join Harold. In their two person carpentry work procedure, Harold made the measurements and scribed the cut marks on the wood member, and Connie sawed the piece. Harold held one end while Connie nailed it securely into place.
The rehab process on Milwaukee Avenue and other parts of Seward West had begun somewhat earlier before Harold and Connie began working on 2204. Harold remembered his occasional moments of doubt - unsure if he was doing the right carpentry method for the task at hand, but he was tempered by realizing, in his words, “We needed less faith that we could succeed, than those who were the first rehabbers.”
A few of these early rehabbers, like Harold, were one-year-and-out architecture school students, and became innovators in design. They could integrate modern architectural ideas and newly available products into historic contexts – introducing skylights that could appropriately fit flat on roof pitches perpendicular to the street and not readily noticeable. The front facades of these houses kept strictly to original historic character, as did side walls in public view, while rear areas could accommodate modern design ideas, such as a plentitude of windows, for which there was a very practical reason. As Harold and Connie noted, the typical Milwaukee Avenue houses were originally built with small rooms, apparently for the purposes of providing some measure of privacy to households of large families. Small windows in side walls on these narrow lots inhibited sunlight, and the typically limited illumination of lighting fixtures resulted in relatively dark interiors. Larger rear windows provided opportunities to bring more light into these houses, which were designed with open floor plans.
During their construction process, Harold and Connie would find themselves talking to people who once lived there when they were young children, as well as some who left notes about remembering when they lived in this house. One morning Harold came to work and found a shoe box cover with the penciled message: “Those were happy days when I lived here – thank you for fixing my house.”
Harold and Connie felt their forebears on Milwaukee Avenue set up the experience base, which drove everybody else’s experiences. Somehow the matrix that held everyone together was their unblinking ability to face their unknowns. In Connie’s words, “We were too naïve to know how everything would work, but what else could we do in our circumstances? And what we somehow did know, was this was a historical time, and we were part if it.”