[Update] Bunker Hill: Resurrecting a Lost Community
Cindy Olnick 00:00
Hello, Save As listeners. Cindy Olnick here. We’re bringing you another Encore episode from our very first season. This one’s about a project called Bunker Hill Refrain. It’s super cool. But before we get to the episode, producer Willa Seidenberg has the update on the project with one of the coordinators. Here’s Willa.
Willa Seidenberg 00:20
Thanks, Cindy. Well, it’s been almost two and a half years since we brought you that original episode about Bunker Hill Refrain, a project by USC professors, researchers, students and volunteers. It’s exciting that the project is not only still going, but that there have been lots of great developments. And so before we get to that original episode, I have Meredith Drake Reitan here who is going to give us an update on what’s been going on since we last spoke. Welcome to Save As, again!
Meredith Drake Reitan 00:57
Thank you, it’s great to be back and two years, and a couple of months later, so much has changed. But happy to give a good update.
Willa Seidenberg 01:06
So just for people who have not heard the episode, and hopefully will listen after this quick update, just give us you know, the top line explanation of what the Bunker Hill Refrain project is.
Meredith Drake Reitan 01:21
So, in 1939, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) did a survey of the city of L.A. for the Housing Authority. At the same time, the WPA built a model of downtown Los Angeles for the Bureau of Engineering. And so the Bunker Hill Refrain project is connecting the data that was collected in that survey to the model that we’re digitally recreating. The survey data is available in the University of Southern California Special Collections; the model is housed at the Natural History Museum. So we’re connecting these two primary sources and thinking about reimagining Bunker Hill as it was before demolition. As part of the survey, there were a number of survey cards that had a huge amount of information on them. And we’re linking that digitally to a recreated model of Bunker Hill as it was in 1939.
Willa Seidenberg 02:33
For listeners who don’t know about Bunker Hill, please, please listen to the episode because as Meredith said in the episode, the demolition of that neighborhood was such a scar on L.A. So in these two years, more than two years now. What kinds of changes have happened with the project itself?
Meredith Drake Reitan 02:56
I think probably the biggest one, I mean, with the Ahmanson Lab at USC, we were involved in a collaboratory project where we worked with a small group of students from across the university, and Curtis Fletcher, director of the Ahmanson Lab to develop a virtual reality version of the model.
Willa Seidenberg 03:17
Wow, that’s great.
Meredith Drake Reitan 03:18
It is super fun. So you can actually put your goggles on and walk down the streets of Bunker Hill. I think we’ve built about 15 or 16 blocks at this point; the whole Community Redevelopment Agency area was about 32 blocks. So it’s a little bit of a slow process. But you know, block by block, we are rebuilding Bunker Hill digitally, and also tying in information about who was living in each of these houses as you’re doing it. So there’s a massive shift in the technology that’s happened in the last two years that’s enabled us to really move forward and in ways that I don’t think we’d expected when we actually started.
Willa Seidenberg 04:05
So in the original episode, we talked quite a bit about Zooniverse, an app that was presenting the information in the card in a digital form, and uploading that information required human input, But now you’re using machine learning to capture that data. What is gained by using the machine learning and what is lost by not having human labor?
Meredith Drake Reitan 04:34
That’s a really great question. So much has changed in the area of computing since we initially launched the project. I think Zooniverse still works really well when you’ve got a lot of handwritten text to transcribe. But the WPA census cards are a mix of checkboxes and boxes with very minimal text. So for example, an enumerator would have been asked to check a box describing an occupant’s race, and then have another box, they might have entered the date of construction or the number of rooms by hand. And so computers can now read most of that info, both the checkmarks and the short text. So I think our work shifted from a transcription project to the technical challenge of designing a computer program that would capture what we needed. And so to get back to your question about what is possibly lost in that transition, I think Zooniverse offered a community of transcribers. And there’s something really powerful about that kind of public engagement. But when the transcription is done automatically, you lose a connection to this kind of larger collective. But at the same time, the speed that we can now do it, means that the data gets out there more quickly. And this allows us to focus more specifically, perhaps on the community of individuals who were displaced from Bunker Hill. And that’s really what remains, kind of the vital part of the larger project.
The other really amazing thing that happened is, there were a hundred boxes of this original collection that had not been digitized. So I went back in and just rifled through those boxes. And it turns out, there’s something that the WPA called a family schedule. And what this family schedule is, for any structure that they identified as substandard, they then went back and asked additional questions. And some of the additional questions that they asked was who was living there. So now we have the names, we have family relationships ,we have where they worked, we have how much money they made. All of these additional data points that really go to locate the specific individuals who were living in this space at the time. So the census cards, which is what we were originally looking at, was kind of general survey information that had general demographic information. The family schedule has names and relationships, did they own a car? There’s also notes written on the back of some of them, like this family was very interested in public housing, you know, it was a really different set of documents. So that is also now going to start becoming part of the bigger picture.
Willa Seidenberg 07:29
So with all these developments, has the way you’re thinking about both the project and what happened in Bunker Hill changed over time?
Meredith Drake Reitan 07:39
Yeah, I think at the core, I’m still and I think the project is still interested in that kind of everyday social world of Bunker Hill. At the same time, I think I am even more convinced that there are contemporary policy implications for the things that we’re doing right now. One track is obviously we’re interested at the moment in this idea of soft densification. Right, the idea that adding additional dwelling units behind existing houses or you know, how do you infill and densify a city. Many of them were single-family houses that were converted into multiple apartments. So it gives us one way to think about the idea of soft densification, which is kind of a new concept in planning. The other part of it is to really think about the displaced, and whether there are ways that we could reconnect a community. Now, I think originally, we were thinking we were digitally recreating this community that we would do this in the virtual world. There are now policies that I’ve learned about in San Francisco, that are going beyond just reconnecting digitally. They’re actually trying to reconnect communities physically. So there’s a program in San Francisco that is tracing the displaced from the Community Redevelopment Agency in San Francisco, and they’re offering housing. So there are definite policy decisions that could be made based on conversations about the sort of historical events and how you could recreate communities.
Willa Seidenberg 09:27
Well, thank you, Meredith, for your work and for giving us this update. And hopefully, we can check in with you in another few years.
Meredith Drake Reitan 09:36
Absolutely. And there’s if there is one thing I want to put on everyone’s calendar in April, as part of USC’s Visions and Voices, the Bunker Hill Refrain team will be hosting a digital exhibition so you can come wear the goggles, and then we’re going to follow that exhibition with a discussion with community organizers and activists and students to start thinking about how we might use this as a policy launchpad going forward.
Willa Seidenberg 10:05
Thank you. We’ll put a link to the Visions and Voices site on our website and people can check that out next year. Thank you again, Meredith. And good luck.
Meredith Drake Reitan 10:16
Thank you.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:25
This is Save As a podcast that glimpses the future of heritage conservation through the work of graduate students at the University of Southern California. I’m Trudi Sandmeier, Director of Graduate Programs in heritage conservation and an associate professor of practice in architecture at USC.
Cindy Olnick 10:40
And I’m Cindy Olnick, a communications pro with a passion for historic places and a mission to help people save them. So Trudi.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:48
Cindy?
Cindy Olnick 10:50
Today, we are talking about a subject near and dear to the hearts of many, the area of Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles.
Trudi Sandmeier 10:58
Yeah, most people who see Bunker Hill today have really no idea that it used to be this incredible neighborhood of Victorian homes filled with people. And that has now shifted into a major skyscraper hub filled with office buildings and cultural buildings like Walt Disney Concert Hall and things and it’s just completely transformed since its original construction in the 1800s. You would have no idea.
Cindy Olnick 11:32
Yeah, yeah. And it continues to change today. You may have seen Bunker Hill in films like The Exiles, and the great 1950s war movie Kiss Me Deadly, many more movies were shot there. But my favorite is Kiss Me Deadly because it was the film debut of the great Cloris Leachman. But the project we’re talking about today, Bunker Hill Refrain takes another look at the neighborhood in a very specific way that can actually help us think about its future.
Trudi Sandmeier 12:05
So thanks, Cindy. And I’m really looking forward to hearing this conversation. And welcome back. We’re excited to have you back hosting again.
Cindy Olnick 12:13
Oh, thanks, you guys. I missed you. But you did a really you know, you did a pretty good job without me. But don’t get too comfortable.
Trudi Sandmeier 12:24
That’s right. It’s not possible.
Cindy Olnick 12:28
All right, so let’s get into it. So welcome to Save As everyone. I’m here with the masterminds behind this project, Bunker Hill refrain. Can you each introduce yourself?
Meredith Drake Reitan 12:44
Meredith Drake Reitan. I’m an Associate Dean in the graduate school at USC. But I also teach planning history in the Price School of Public Policy and Heritage Conservation in the School of Architecture.
Suzi Noruschat 12:57
I’m Susie Noruschat and I am the Southern California Studies librarian in Special Collections at USC Libraries.
Andy Rutkowski 13:07
My name is Andy Rutkowski. I’m the visualization specialist at USC Libraries.
Cindy Olnick 13:11
Well, we are thrilled to have you and I’m excited to talk about this project. So much has been said, studied, written, portrayed about Bunker Hill. It’s really L.A.’s version, our tale of urban renewal slash removal in the mid 20th century. So Meredith, for our listeners who might not be familiar with it, can you tell us just a little about Bunker Hill.
Meredith Drake Reitan 13:34
So Bunker Hill was probably LA’s first Anglo elite residential district, settled about 1860, 1870s. As early as the 1920s it was described as an impediment to progress, you know, as the city was moving south and west. Bunker Hill is sort of a very large geographic hill right in the middle of that kind of downtown development. And so starting in the 1920s, it experienced a period of disinvestment for much of the 30s 40s it was the densest neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles. In 1958, it was declared the city of L.A’s first urban redevelopment zone, and fairly quickly thereafter, the hill and all of the housing on top of it was demolished and cleared. And while we don’t know exactly, the estimates are that anywhere between six-thousand and nine-thousand people were displaced in this urban redevelopment project.
Cindy Olnick 14:43
Yeah, it was huge, huge news and you know, a lot of conversation about moving the last buildings away in trying to save those last Victorian homes, but much less said I think about the people of Bunker Hill. And that’s what this project is about. So how did the idea for this project come about?
Meredith Drake Reitan 15:06
So I’m an urban planner by training. And so Bunker Hill has always kind of loomed large in our imagination as, in some sense, the dark side of a profession that I think has the potential to do a lot of good, especially in L.A., the mythology of Bunker Hill has been very much about these last Victorians. And so part of what this sort of Bunker Hill Refrain project is doing is, you know, what happens when you recenter the story to the everyday lives of the individuals who are living on the hill both before and after redevelopment? And so it’s got a couple of different kinds of questions that we’re asking, one of which is, can we tell a different story of urban renewal in L.A.? And then can we think about the social cost of urban renewal compared to the architectural loss, which we acknowledge is equally important, but sort of a different conversation. And then part of what we’re doing is using digital tools? Can we actually reconnect a displaced community? Can we think about a different kind of planning practice that might emerge if you have these conversations? And I think one of the important things to consider is, we’re not simply talking about the past when we’re doing this project, especially as we now sort of debate and consider large infrastructure projects. We’re starting with a snapshot moment, in 1939, when the Works Progress Administration, came to Los Angeles and did this extensive survey of the city of LA. And then the second piece of it is putting that snapshot in motion. So using that WPA as kind of a launching pad and contextualizing through other primary sources, the lives of the individuals who are on the hill at that particular moment.
Cindy Olnick 17:06
Yeah, I love how this goes from, I mean, it’s super high tech now, but it started really low tech, I had no idea about these cards. So Suzi, what is the deal with these cards?
Suzi Noruschat 17:18
It’s a very, very large collection of cards that, as Meredith just said, were created and collected in 1935, as part of this WPA kind of census survey of the entire city of all households in the city of Los Angeles. And they have certain questions on each side of the card. And then the enumerators or census takers, filled out the cards by hand, of course.
Cindy Olnick 17:51
Rght. So these guys would walk around, these enumerators — C. Brown in the card I’m looking at right now — would walk around the neighborhood, go door to door and then ask the residents questions. And they’re, I mean, they’re very specific.
Suzi Noruschat 18:05
Yes, I mean, down to the level of how many bathrooms are in each household. How many people live in the household, the ages of the people in the household.
Cindy Olnick 18:16
And how many cards did they end up with for Bunker Hill roughly?
Suzi Noruschat 18:22
There are about I believe, 5,000 cards for the Bunker Hill neighborhood. But the total number of cards for the city itself is about a half a million cards. And at this point, the libraries have about 160,000 of those cards digitized and available.
Cindy Olnick 18:43
How’d they end up at USC?
Suzi Noruschat 18:45
So this archive of household survey or census cards actually came to USC about 30 years ago, and it came to the university as part of a project initiated by a relatively new professor of history at USC, a Phil Ethington. So Professor Ethington began a project called the Information System for Los Angeles or ISLA. And the aim of this project was to build a digital archive or database that gathered together and made available to researchers, documents about the history and the communities of L.A., telling stories that kind of went beyond the usual stories or myths of Los Angeles, such as say, you know, that L.A. is the home of the entertainment industry, and his team papers, manuscripts, maps and other kinds of original documents. So, really, as part of this larger effort, Professor Ethington and his students became aware of this trove of WPA survey cards, which apparently were in danger of being lost or discarded. And they brought them to USC to be digitized and incorporated into this larger ISLA project. So in the years since the WPA cards came to USC, the USC Libraries has developed a very robust digital library, which at the time in the 1990s, did not exist.
Cindy Olnick 20:35
When did you start this project? Had you been thinking about it for a while? Did you trip over the cards one day and say, We got to do something with these cards?.
Meredith Drake Reitan 20:46
So I actually was familiar with the cards actually, through Phil Ethington, while I was writing my dissertation, sort of many moons ago, had made a valiant attempt with an Excel spreadsheet to sort of do something with this data. Of course, I sort of gave up at some point, but they’d always sort of been in the back of my mind. And I always sort of knew that there was this potential. So Susie and I used to travel the Gold Line together. And as part of our brainstorming on the bus, you know, we started to think about Bunker Hill. And, you know, what could you do with these cards. And then, of course, Susie pulled Andy in, and that was when we sort of squared the circle, and had a team who could bring a historian’s perspective, an archivist’s perspective, and a strong sort of data science and visualization specialist into the mix. And that’s how you ended up with a team that actually is greater than the sum of its parts. We were very fortunate to receive funding from both USC Libraries, and the USC School of Architecture, which enabled us to hire a team of students. And they were sort of instrumental in getting us moving over the course of the last few years.
Cindy Olnick 22:02
And who named it? Why refrain?
Meredith Drake Reitan 22:04
So refrain. I am married to a musician. And so the idea of the refrain, the chorus that repeats, it’s this sense that if you look again, at a place that we think we know so well, maybe we will see something different.
Cindy Olnick 22:24
How did the project become part of the Heritage Conservation, Policy and Planning [class]?
Meredith Drake Reitan 22:29
Yeah, so I’m teaching the 550, which is the heritage planning, and we’ve used it as a way to ground heritage policy in both the historical events that happened in the city of L.A., but also thinking about how you might introduce heritage conservation into sort of a digital realm as a digital public history project.
Cindy Olnick 22:57
So at what point in this project did the did the pandemic come along? And, you know, how did that change things?
Meredith Drake Reitan 23:04
I think it was simultaneous. I think we, in some sense, it became a pandemic project. Personally, you know, I would send it to my mother who was desperate for something to do. And she’s been entering and transcribing all these cards, because for her, it’s like, Finally, I’ve got something that will fill my time. So I think it actually became a lot of people’s pandemic projects to keep connected and keep working on sort of history.
Cindy Olnick 23:37
Yeah, yeah. So let’s talk about that. How did you, you’ve got everybody involved, right? Faculty, staff, students, and members of the public, and even family members. How have you found and engaged these people? And what roles do they have?
Meredith Drake Reitan 23:50
So we’re grateful to the Millennials of our team. And we have a sort of, a strong Instagram account, we have a Twitter account. We’ve been inviting people to both be volunteers to do the transcription. But also to tell the stories about Bunker Hill. People are always kind of talking about Bunker Hill. I mean, there’s, there’s so many memories on this particular site. You know, I’ve had a lot of different people reach out and like, I can’t believe you’re talking about this, my grandparents stayed there in the 1920s, and all of this kind of great stories. So we do have a hashtag, #OurBunkerHill. And we’re encouraging people to connect with us and to tell these stories. And they will be built into this kind of larger website that will be developed that includes the work of both the students in the heritage conservation program, but also the results of the Zooniverse transcription.
Cindy Olnick 24:52
So Andy, you’ve been on this dream team from the beginning. So, how did data visualization become part of this project? And why did you pick the platform that you did?
Andy Rutkowski 25:03
This particular collection is one that I’ve sort of been looking at and have worked with, for quite a while. What really excited me about it was that this idea of actually kind of taking some of the data out of it, and starting to actually really be able to look at it and process it. And what we’ve kind of, you know, thought about, is using this crowdsource platform called Zooniverse, which makes this collection accessible to the community and sort of also really allows people to engage with each card. Working in Zooniverse is almost as close as you can get to actually kind of picking up the cards one by one, and sort of really looking at the information and you know, interacting with it, reading it slowly. And in that process, transcribing and putting in the data, you know, on the one hand recreating a data set, but at the same time, we’re really humanizing that process for each participant to really kind of sit down with these cards, walk through it. You know, we found the Zooniverse platform, which is really just a huge community of individuals who are interested in working on sort of these types of historical projects. It also really kind of gives that connection to the data and kind of oriented to sort of figuring out, you know, what are the stories behind this data, what, who’s in these cards,
Cindy Olnick 26:25
It seems perfect for people who love history, because as much as the tech is helpful, we all have these, like visceral connections to the things. You know, I want to go through Rudolph Schindler’s hardware store receipts with white gloves on, you know, so it’s super great that you can still have that you might not actually have it in your hand, but you can really see it and interact with it.
Meredith Drake Reitan 26:50
So imagine there are 5,000 handwritten notes about houses on Bunker Hill — dates of construction, dates of conversion, the race and ethnicity of the inhabitants, whether they have a gas stove or not. And so what the volunteers and the Zooniverse are doing is transcribing that. That becomes a database that we will make publicly available. And once it’s publicly available, we’re hoping that other scholars, researchers can access it, and do all sorts of new and different things that perhaps, you know, I or, you know, the students that we’re working with didn’t think of.
Cindy Olnick 27:32
How many volunteers do you have?
Meredith Drake Reitan 27:34
So, at the moment, we have close to a hundred. And they have completed about 300 cards out of the 5,000. We’re still in a Beta phase. There are about two million volunteers in the Zooniverse. And, we we can’t wait to meet them. So part of what we’re doing now is that we’ve recently just kind of downloaded the first set of data, looking at that and making sure that we have everything kind of ready and available to turn it into the Excel spreadsheet that I really wanted, you know, 10 years ago, we’re basically going to have this lovely Excel spreadsheet.
Cindy Olnick 28:18
Fantastic. Okay, let’s talk to two of the people who are knee deep in this project. Jessica and Brannon, could you just quickly introduce yourselves?
Jessica Rivas Acuna 28:29
Sure. I’m Jessica Rivas Acuna. I am a Master’s of Heritage Conservation student. And I have been working a lot on the Zooniverse side of things on the project.
Brannon Smithwick 28:38
My name is Brannon Smithwick. And I’m a Master of Urban Planning student and Master of Heritage Conservation dual degree student.
Cindy Olnick 28:45
All right, so. So Jessica, tell me a little bit about how you’re working with Zooniverse. And tell me what you’ve what you’ve learned, what are these cards saying to you?
Jessica Rivas Acuna 28:56
I kind of took the reins on the Zooniverse project, and not necessarily intentionally, I was just like, I need to figure out how this works. And so I just started putting together a test workflow. And then next thing I know, I’m building the entire workflows. And, uh, you know, what you publicly see is sort of just two very clean, polished versions, and there were many less polished versions before that. And so what we’re sort of publicly displaying now is a nice tidy version of that. What the volunteers see is sort of, or what we’re asking them to transcribe at the moment is a very specific set of information on the cards. But if you spend time kind of looking at the cards and really delving into them, it’s really quite amazing. The information that you find there, a lot of the cards are very similar. There’s a lot of, I don’t know, kind of what you expect to find on the cards, perhaps the more you think about Bunker Hill, and then you find these anomalies, and those are the ones that are just so really fascinating to spend time with.
Cindy Olnick 29:59
What would you think you would find in these in these carts about Bunker Hill?
Jessica Rivas Acuna 30:03
When you think of a subdivided unit, and that’s so much of what was on Bunker Hill, you imagine it’s going to be one to two people in a really tiny space. And so that’s kind of what you see that’s the general trend is one occupant, two occupants in one or two rooms with a fairly low rent. Maybe there’s a, one out of two has a flush toilet. A lot of the residents are listed as white, which again, is very consistent with what you kind of think. The questions are very specific. And so there’s a very specific answer. And there is you know, how many people, dates ,those are concrete items. And then there’s one question on the cards that just fascinates me, and that is condition of the building. And it’s such a subjective question. And it’s, I imagine all of these different thoughts going through these enumerators heads, and what exactly was good condition versus, you know, slight or minor repairs? Like, what is that scale for them? And how did that affect how people eventually look at Bunker Hill?
Cindy Olnick 31:04
Yeah, I’m looking at this card now. And it’s from 1939. First of all, the rent is $3.50. But there’s no fridge. And it’s just, you know, I could see an economist going through these at one point and just you know, going to town on the on the rent and then you know, here’s another one that’s like $11, which seems so exorbitant. Brannon, tell me tell me what you’re doing with these cards.
Brannon Smithwick 31:31
I feel like I went rogue pretty quickly in the class. My background is in oral history. And so I was really fascinated by the cards, but I also just wanted to get to the root of who might still be around that we could talk to. So I talked to Meredith and she put me in touch with Nathan Marzak, and Richard Schave and Kim Cooper, who are kind of the the reigning Los Angeles historians when it comes to Bunker Hill, and they put me in contact with Gordon Pattison, who is, as we know it right now, kind of the last remaining living person, Angeleno that lived on Bunker Hill. So I got in touch with him. And I, you know, I said, Would you be interested in doing an oral history to tell your story? And you know, it was really sweet. He was like, I’ve been waiting, you know, 40 years for someone to come along and be interested in our stories. Of all the people to kind of capture the story, I feel like he was the best person because his grandmother owned the Castle. And his great uncle owned the Salt Box. And they actually, his family owned a lot of other buildings on his dad’s side on Bunker Hill. So they had quite a bit of real estate ownership that they were subletting to a lot of the renter’s that lived in the area by the time the neighborhood had been demolished. So he has a lot of family history there and a lot of personal history there. So we talked, I think it clocks out to being about a four-hour long interview.
Cindy Olnick 32:55
And for those who don’t know, the Castle, and the Salt Box are familiar names of the the two last remaining Victorians on Bunker Hill that were carted off in ’69, I believe, and taken up the road to what became Heritage Square Museum. And they were going to be saved and reused at this museum. And then they were they were burned in an arson fire. So, tragic story. There’s a lot written about those two buildings in particular, and as you said, Brandon, Gordon has a very close connection to that.
Brannon Smithwick 33:31
Yeah, definitely. He has some some really heartwarming stories about both of those buildings, having lived in the Castle himself, down the street from the Castle and kind of managing the building with his parents when he was really young. So he has a lot of really interesting stories. And ironically, he was actually a student at USC when those two buildings were burned. So he recalls driving down, you know, to go check them out, and you know, see them in Heritage Square. And then, you know, within only a few months, he said he was driving by one day, and they were gone. So there’s a lot of kind of heartwarming and heart wrenching stories that he told me.
Cindy Olnick 34:11
So what’s the information telling you?
Brannon Smithwick 34:14
It’s like you have this information, but then there’s all these, there’s kind of the subcontext, this read between the lines. So in, during class time, we’ve done a lot of transcribing, and going back and kind of looking at where these people might have come from that were living there and doing a lot of visual mapping in class. And so it’s just interesting to kind of see, for me, I think visually what parts of the country a lot of these people had come from. You have a lot of transient migrants who had come from the Midwest and from the South, and just kind of getting a glimpse of what that might have looked like, landing in Los Angeles, landing in Bunker Hill and what your life would have been like. So again, I kind of I veer back toward these individual stories and just wishing and wondering that we could know more about who these people were and where they came from and where the ones left that had to leave when the demolition came around in the 60s.
Cindy Olnick 35:06
Any chance of finding their descendants?
Brannon Smithwick 35:09
Yeah, so, that’s been kind of part of the oral history side of it. I know that there have been a few of us students who were really interested in kind of the personal stories that have been trying to track people down, track down descendants of people and do some some investigation with that.
Cindy Olnick 35:25
But Brannon, your work with the oral histories is so closely connected to maybe not the cards themselves, but the whole notion of giving voice to the people who just had to leave and we don’t know where they went or where they are. But you know, we’ve we’ve got one way of telling their stories, at least.
Brannon Smithwick 35:46
Yeah, definitely. Gordon made a really good point. One thing that I really, again, heart wrenching to hear him talk about was the term Solistalgia, which is kind of a combination of solace and desolation and nostalgia.
Gordon Pattison 36:01
But I think it perfectly describes what happens to people who are displaced by urban renewal. There’s a feeling not just of loss, but of a loss of identity, a loss of a sense of belonging to a particular place. There’s the stress, kind of homesickness, you know, I still go down to Bunker Hill, and I walk around or drive around the streets are the same, but it’s not, but you’re just drawn back to those places.
Brannon Smithwick 36:32
I think it’s really sad to think about, you know, where these people might have gone, especially these older people who were toward the end of their lives and uprooted and it’s definitely something that we want to work more toward figuring out, you know, and making a little bit of reparation, at least through collective memory about, you know, what might have happened.
Cindy Olnick 36:50
Yeah, so Bunker Hill was not just a transient community, it was a longtime community, people lived there for many years. And you’re right, a lot of older people who had no nowhere to go. All right, Jessica, you helped set up this site. And are you working with the volunteers helping them enter the data as well?
Jessica Rivas Acuna 37:07
We have had a couple of block parties through Zoom to kind of get the project rolling and really get this first set of almost one hundred volunteers working with the site. And with the data cards, it’s fun to kind of sit there and during the block parties we’ll discuss an interesting card that might come up. But there are talk boards on Zooniverse, where volunteers can type in questions or engage with us, any of us on the team actually, to bring up a question that maybe they have, or some interesting fact, even just tell us a little bit about themselves and why they’re interested in the project. And once we move out of Beta and do engage with those two million worldwide, Zooniverse volunteers, then hopefully, these boards will be more active, and we can really engage. And maybe we might be able to find more of these oral histories and these connections with past residents in that way. So that’s kind of why we’re so excited to move past Beta and into this larger Zooniverse pool. But we also are trying to engage in different ways. Part of you know, Kaylie set up a Spotify playlist for us to go with the Bunker Hill Refrain project,.
Cindy Olnick 38:18
No way.
Jessica Rivas Acuna 38:20
Just to sort of yeah, bring it all together.
Cindy Olnick 38:23
Oh, my gosh, have to hear that. Okay, so where are the volunteers from, and they from all over the world, all over the country?
Jessica Rivas Acuna 38:30
Being in Beta, we’re not actively kind of searchable on the Zooniverse site. So a lot of our volunteers right now are coming from within our own team and the USC community, and the larger kind of L.A. community that are putting it out that this project exists. And so that’s where our current pool of volunteers, but again, they are sort of nationwide people looking at it, and transcribing with us, but that will definitely grow.
Cindy Olnick 38:57
So Brannon, how you’ve been involved with this project for a while, so tell me what you think about it.
Brannon Smithwick 39:02
I’m not a native of Los Angeles. I’m a lover of history, but I didn’t know much about Bunker Hill until I took her class. So for me, it definitely started out as a class project and an assignment. But the more we talked about it, and the more I kind of ventured down this oral hit history pathway, the more emotionally invested I became in the project. And so I felt really grateful and lucky to find out that I was going to have Meredith again this semester, where we’d be focusing more specifically on the kind of heritage conservation lens of the project. The more I dove into research over winter break and the more I started talking to Gordon, the more I just became emotionally invested in the project and it became less so of a class assignment and more of just kind of, hopefully my contribution to the overall project but also just the collective memory of Bunker Hill and how it can be preserved to some degree or preserved rather.
Cindy Olnick 40:00
As they say in the movies, now it’s personal.
Brannon Smithwick 40:03
Exactly, it became very personal for me. And I’m really hoping that we can track down some more people who would be interested in in telling their stories. So we can have that in in stone or you know, at least digitally.
Cindy Olnick 40:14
Terrific. Thank you. Okay, so Andy, so you’ve got the addresses and the latitude and longitude of these places, from the cards, can you connect them somehow with other place based resources, like I don’t know Sanborn maps or any of that?
Andy Rutkowski 40:34
Before we maybe get into the Sanborn maps, we also have an amazing set of maps that the WPA produced over five or six years. And these maps go building by building. They’re not quite as detailed as the Sanborn maps in terms of, you know, exact sort of building outlines because Sanborn maps, or fire insurance maps, and they really tried to be very true to the buildings because of these fire insurance purposes. But this WPA collection of maps that we have, this was sort of when we first started talking about the project, too, we saw right away that this is another way to kind of add a layer add context to this is sort of linking these cards to this map collection. And that was, again, like one of the very, very exciting pieces of this because we really haven’t done that we haven’t linked these two collections explicitly like this before. So there’s really going to be a lot of potential for kind of layering, bringing in these sort of historical map layers and in putting these pieces together.
Cindy Olnick 41:34
And so Meredith, all of the buildings that we’re talking about here are gone now, correct?
Meredith Drake Reitan 41:40
Yes, the houses are gone, the streets are gone. The hill is almost gone. So one of the things that I think the early maps that Andy did, he actually sort of overlaid the longitude and latitude on L.A.’s current street grid. And one of the things that you could actually see was the missing grid of Bunker Hill, because we know it as a completely different landscape. Now, I mean, it’s just a series of small little dots. But to me as a planner, that was a really moving way to sort of see what we now no longer know, we only know it in in our kind of memories or photographs. So yeah.
Cindy Olnick 42:29
We got to get social justice in here too. Because I mean, if you can look at all this, this history of displacement, it just seems like it’s got to be relevant somehow, to the conversations we’re having now.
Meredith Drake Reitan 42:40
Because of the 1940 census being available digitally, we are able to track and actually place individuals where they were born, and where they were five years previously. The 1950s U.S. census will be available next year in 2022. So I already know what I’m doing when the census is released next year, this is going to be a way to actually start logging the long history of individuals across not just the U.S. but you know, across the world, and then think about where they went afterwards. For example, there’s one street called Cinnabar, up on Bunker Hill. There were two houses, occupied, both by widows, and one of them had come originally from Sweden, through Canada to Montana, and then was living on Bunker Hill. The other woman was born in Tennessee, her son was born in Ohio. And then they moved to Bunker Hill. I was able to trace the son to a little bungalow in Norwalk in the 1950s. One of the things that you could say is this will be a story not just about urban planning, architectural history, but about the movement of people to the city of Los Angeles, and then how we sort of housed them over the course of the next, you know, 20 or 30 years. Some of them landed on their feet in a lovely little bungalow in Norwalk, that you actually can go to on Google Earth, and I typed in the address and the house is still there. But we don’t know where everybody else ended up and that’s really going to take a lot of time and love.
Cindy Olnick 44:40
Well, so you’ve got you’ve got all the time in the world. What’s next? Where do where do we go from here?
Meredith Drake Reitan 44:46
Right. Where do we go from here? Well, I think it is one of these projects. But when Suzi and I were brainstorming on the bus, we had no idea. But we would, a year and a half later, be thinking bigger and bigger and bigger. And part of what we’re doing, I think is kind of setting up a project that potentially has replicability. We actually have data across the whole of the city of L.A. So what happens if we look at all of the other redevelopment agency sites? You know, could you look at Chavez Ravine? Could you compare it to South L.A.? Could you compare it to the San Fernando Valley? In some sense, I’m a reluctant, digital sort of historian. I very much feel that individual lives are what really matter. And so I’ve, in some sense, I’ve resisted this idea of big data. And so we’re doing the exact opposite. We’re taking individual small bits of data, but making a larger story from it.
Cindy Olnick 45:54
I love that small data.
Meredith Drake Reitan 45:56
Yeah.
Cindy Olnick 45:56
All right, how can how can people get involved? When can we see this? When can we get our hands on it?
Meredith Drake Reitan 46:01
So folks can actually volunteer, even in this Beta phase with the Zooniverse, it’s a fairly quick register on with Zooniverse. And then it takes you right to the cards, you can also send us your stories through our social media sites, either through Instagram or through Twitter, you know, we are thinking about, you know, there were those who lived on Bunker Hill, but there were lots of people who were associated with Bunker Hill, you know, the painters and the artists and, and writers and some of their families still in, in town and available to so we’re interested in all sorts of stories about Bunker Hill.
Cindy Olnick 46:39
Well, you will not be disappointed. It’s just so great that you’ve got a framework now, you know, to collect it all and use it.
Meredith Drake Reitan 46:46
Yeah, been a really interesting reminder to me, you know, as a historian, in some sense, coming from a more academic background, it’s like, well, everybody knows about Bunker Hill, I mean, why would we need to still be talking about Bunker Hill? But I think it’s an emotional scar, that still is part of the city of LA. And I think people really still want to talk about it and want to really connect and re-stitch together, something that was lost. And so for me, it is not about the past, it’s very much about the present, and kind of where we go from here.
Cindy Olnick 47:26
I would even say that it has something to do with shame. You know, I mean, reckoning with what we’ve done to people over the years. I wonder if Suzi, if you have anything else to say?
Suzi Noruschat 47:38
From a librarian’s perspective, it’s really great to see this kind of data that’s coming out of these cards, actually, being kind of compiled, so that stories can be told. And I think that’s very, very exciting to finally have all of this information that was kind of locked away, in some sense, unleashed. And I’m really excited to see how maybe this project will inspire other people to look at these cards.
Cindy Olnick 48:13
Wow, well, I cannot wait to to see where this evolves. And again, dear listener, you know, you’ve got some time on your hands. So go to the shownotes at Save.place, and go to the links for the social media, and the website and sign up on Zooniverse and help get some of those cards in. Thank you, everyone, for joining us today. This is a great discussion and really appreciate your important work on behalf of Los Angeles and the world.
Trudi Sandmeier 48:46
Oh my gosh, Cindy, that is so fun. What a fun project. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how this plays out. It’s just kind of at the very beginning. And I kept thinking as you were talking about this project and those cards, my grandparents are in those cards. I can’t wait to go look for them.
Cindy Olnick 49:03
What? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what?
Trudi Sandmeier 49:06
Well, they were here in 1939. Both sets of my grandparents. So they’re in there, right. And I can’t wait to go find those cards and see what it says about what they were doing.
Cindy Olnick 49:16
Oh my god, so not the Bunker Hill subset, but like the whole citywide, right?
Trudi Sandmeier 49:21
There’s thousands of these cards that cover all of Los Angeles. They’re just looking at the ones on Bunker Hill. And I keep thinking, oh my gosh, there’s so many other neighborhoods that we could do this really incredible deep dive into and learn about the city in a particular snapshot moment in time. It’s just thrilling to think about.
Cindy Olnick 49:40
Yeah, and for the cards with your grandparents on them. You could like save them a lot of time at USC by filling in the blanks and saying, you know, for instance, their great granddaughter is now running the Heritage Conservation Program at USC. And she is, that’s one of many things. We don’t have time to go through all of your many efforts and accomplishments. But yeah, it’s it’s super great. And I can’t wait to follow this project as it continues because once they get all that data in there, then they can start listening and seeing what the cards tell us about everyday life in Bunker Hill that we may not know yet.
Trudi Sandmeier 50:18
Well, I think the other interesting piece of this is that there are so many neighborhoods around the United States where, that have been erased. And for various reasons, whether it’s freeway construction, or urban renewal or racism, or any number of reasons why these communities have been erased, and this maybe is a model for thinking about how we might recapture some of those of those places.
