Season 3, Episode 8

Reinvesting in a Rosenwald School

What happens when a community takes its educational future into its own hands? Funded by local advocates and a generous grant from the Rosenwald Fund, the Allen-White School served the African American community in Whiteville, Tennessee from 1920 until 1974. With thousands of graduates, the school helped shape the lives of multiple generations.

Now, despite a 2012 arson attack, the alumni are working to restore the school buildings to once again serve the community. USC alumna and Tennessee native Brannon Smithwick dug into the stories of this influential school and the efforts to conserve it in her recent thesis Educating Generations: The Legacy and Future of the Allen-White School Campus, A Rosenwald School in Whiteville, Tennessee. Through copious archival research and oral history interviews, Brannon learned firsthand the impact that one place can make.

January 27, 2023

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Season 3, Episode 7

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Bearing Witness: World War II “Comfort Women” Stations

Warning: This episode features the difficult topic of sexual slavery during World War II.

Producer Willa Seidenberg talks with recent graduate Hanyu Chen about her thesis, “Our Bodies, Their Battlegrounds”: The Conservation of Comfort Stations in China. Before and during World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army forced women and girls into sexual slavery for the military in its occupied territories. Their captors called them “comfort women” and their prisons “comfort stations.” Two of the few remaining former comfort stations are in Hanyu’s hometown.

In this episode, Hanyu discusses how the “comfort women” system developed, why these crimes took so long to reach the public eye, and why conserving the few former stations is critical to reclaiming these women’s stories.

November 10, 2022

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Season 3, Episode 3

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The Postwar L.A. of Gin Wong

Chinese American architect Gin D. Wong, FAIA (1922-2017) defined what it means to achieve the American dream. He immigrated from China as a boy and went on to have a 60-year career as a successful architect in Los Angeles. He played a key role in the design of post-World War II L.A., with projects including LAX, CBS Television City, and the iconic Union 76 gas station in Beverly Hills. In this episode, new alum Nirali Sheth discusses her thesis, A Silent Legacy: The Influence of Gin D. Wong’s Work on the Los Angeles Built Environment. She talks with co-host Cindy Olnick about Wong’s life and work, how credit can elude architects in big corporate firms, and how she researched her subject without access to his archive.

October 20, 2022

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Season 3, Episode 2

Posted in Episodes, and Season 3

Feng Shui as Cultural Heritage

This episode delves into global heritage conservation, as producer Willa Seidenberg talks with recent grad Haowen Yu about his thesis, Examining Feng Shui as Tangible and Intangible Cultural Heritage. Many Americans consider Feng Shui primarily an approach to arranging space. Yet it’s a far more complex system of knowledge, practice, and tradition that has spanned more than a millennium. Feng Shui underlies virtually the entire built environment of China, but it hasn’t (yet) been designated as a form of cultural heritage. Haowen discusses why he’s not so sure it should be, and how Feng Shui has been viewed in China and around the world.

September 28, 2022

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Season 3, Episode 1

Posted in Episodes, and Season 3

Surf, Sand, and Self-Determination: Jim Crow-Era Leisure for Black Angelenos

We said “so long” to summer with a trip to the Santa Monica beach with historian Alison Rose Jefferson, whose work at USC launched a deep dive into African American recreation areas in the Golden State. Her master’s thesis on Lake Elsinore led to her widely acclaimed book, Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites in the Jim Crow Era.

Alison shares some of the struggles, successes, and legacies of Black leisure spaces in early twentieth-century SoCal. We also hear from an oral history with the late Verna (Deckard Lewis) Williams, who experienced fun in the sun—and racism from white beachgoers—firsthand.

May 18, 2022

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Season 2, Episode 15

Posted in Episodes, and Season 2

Is Leimert Park L.A.’s Most Significant Neighborhood?

Is Leimert Park the most significant neighborhood in Los Angeles? Katie Horak thinks it might be. “I don’t think there’s any neighborhood in the city that tells so many different important stories about our history as a city, and that really has the integrity to still tell that story,” she says in this episode of Save As. A USC alum, principal at Architectural Resources Group, and adjunct professor, Katie took her students out of the classroom and into the neighborhood to document Leimert Park’s remarkable architectural and cultural heritage.

We also talk with three of Katie’s students—Zongqi Li, Emily Varley, and Kira Williams—about what they found on their adventure. They unraveled a mystery about how Leimert Park developed, saw how persistent racism affected African American and Japanese American residents, and traced the evolution of schools and churches. You’ll hear why Katie considers Leimert Park so important—and you might even agree.

Last chance for the season! Take our 3-minute survey and enter to win a Save As mug!

May 5, 2022

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Season 2, Episode 14

Posted in Episodes, and Season 2

Boots on the Ground: Archaeology and Community at Manzanar

Last month, about ninety volunteers spent a weekend excavating the former hospital site at Manzanar, a World War II incarceration camp about 225 miles north of Los Angeles. Some of those volunteers were students in Mary Ringhoff’s Cultural Resource Management class. One of those students was Save As producer Willa Seidenberg, who interviewed people on site about why they travel from near and far to care for this site of tragic memory. In this episode, we dig into the study of archaeology with Mary, hear Willa’s great reporting, and talk with student Dani Velazco about what she got out of the experience (besides getting very, very dirty).

April 21, 2022

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Season 2, Episode 13

Posted in Episodes, and Season 2

Tabula Raza: A New Table for People-Centered Conservation

As a kid, Laura Dominguez would sit under the kitchen table during tamale season, listening to family stories as the grownups handed her corn husks to play with. Now she’s one of the people setting a new table for heritage conservation, with community as the centerpiece. In this episode, Laura shares the personal roots of her professional path, her doctoral research into the origins of conservation in Los Angeles, and a glimpse of the future she’s helping to shape.

Tag: history

Is Leimert Park L.A.’s Most Significant Neighborhood?

Boots on the Ground: Archaeology and Community at Manzanar

Tabula Raza: A New Table for People-Centered Conservation