Echoes of the PAST
This issue of the Pioneer America Society Transactions (PAST) contains nine manuscripts from papers presented at the 2012 conference in Philadelphia, PA. The first of these, Lynn Alpert’s “The Philadelphia Corner Store,’” traces the history of corner stores in Philadelphia, focusing on the changes to one corner store in the Fairmount neighborhood. She pays particular attention to the façade alterations as the store transitioned from business to residential use.
Siobhan Fitzpatrick examines the architectural and design motifs found at the James Library in Madison, New Jersey in her article “The James Library: House of Knowledge,” and links these motifs to the broader mission of the library: the “desire to provide space for learning and educating the public.”
The influence of the landscape on how people organized their economic lives in 18th century southern Pennsylvania is the topic of Terry Necciai’s article “Indiscriminate Location: The Geography of Organic Farm Boundaries.” Farm boundaries, structures, and activities are shown to be inextricably bound to the land, and that rather than being ‘indiscriminate’, southern Pennsylvania’s farms were highly organized.
In the article “Philadelphia Encapsulated: Popular Prints and Photographs at the Library Company of Philadelphia,” Erika Piola notes the importance of a few key donations to the library, graphics of the built environment of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. For example, the commercial advertising graphics found at the library “provide both a micro and macro vision of Philadelphia cityscape at the dawn of its notoriety as the workshop of the world.”
Keith Sculle takes his examination of the American gasoline station in a new direction with “Social Memory and the Power of Adaptive Re-Use,” and concludes that gas stations may be among the most adaptable of commercial buildings and their reuse charts a new future while acknowledging the past. Further, he notes that “[h]ow people remember a specific building and associate it with a broader building type can help alter a landscape.”
As the granddaughter of Lebanon Valley College professor Paul A.W. Wallace — author of the wonderful Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission book The Indian Paths of Pennsylvania — Edie Wallace traces the Minquas Path from Wrightsville to Fort Manayunk (now the Philadelphia Airport) in her article “Following Grandpa’s Footsteps: Retracing The Indian Paths of Pennsylvania.” Although much altered over the intervening centuries, much of the path and the reasoning behind its specific course remain intact.
In “The Bethel Colony: Intersections of Culture and Built Form,” Janet R. White examines the built environment of a utopian community. Although communal in the broad sense, the built environment belies a certain degree of individualism within the family unit.
Arthur Lawton gives an in-depth review of the manners in which early structures could be designed and laid out without the use of scale drawings in his article “Pattern, Tradition and Innovation in Vernacular Architecture.” He then shows the usefulness of the ‘plan-net’ technique when applied to a series of historic vernacular buildings.
Wayne Brew offers an illustrated guide to the 2012 conference Philadelphia field trip in “Philadelphia: The Vernacular to the Spectacular, An Illustrated Field Trip of the City of Brotherly Love,” complete with a series of images of the locations that were visited.
This issue we have a new occasional section of PAST called Student Research, which highlights recent student research projects. The first of these is by Rebekah Johnston, whose article “A Cultural Landscape Report: Beaver, Pennsylvania and its Central Public Squares” documents the shift in public square use from open space geared primarily towards agriculture to public leisure space. She focuses her research on a single square, following its transformation over time and finds that the shift in use can be traced to a single event — the installation of a war memorial.
And finally, this issue of PAST would not be possible without the help of Deborah Slater. Her web and image editing skills give the journal a truly professional look that allows for the incorporation of graphics in a way that cannot be accomplished with traditional print media. I hope you find this issue of PAST as enjoyable as I have.
– Paul Marr, Professor of Geography, Shippensburg University