Devon Avenue, located on the northern edge of the city of Chicago, is a cultural crossroad. It is a marketplace for immigrants from South Asia, Central and South America and Russia. Jewish, Anglo and Croatian groups continue to use this street. Basement mosques and prayer rooms scattered along this street cater to local South Asian Muslim residents and cab drivers from Jordan, Palestine, Iran, and West Africa. There are Mexican taquerias and grocery stores catering to Latin customers across from Devon Avenue and Ridge Avenue. A few blocks to the north, Saint Jerome Roman Catholic Church and Mision Cristiana Elim Pentecostal church cater to Hispanics from Mexico and Central American countries and from Haiti. Stores owned by immigrants from Russia have replaced the post-World War II Jewish landscape along Devon Avenue. Orthodox Jewish communities live in the neighborhood, especially on California Avenue between Devon and Touhy Avenues, their synagogues and cultural centers are interspersed with Traditional, Conservative, Reform, and Lubavitcher centers. Parochial non-profits and community-funded organizations offer social and medical services to the various communities who frequent this neighborhood.
The street has a long multi-ethnic history replete with stories that are diverse and layered. In order to give you a glimpse of its complexity we suggest four ways of seeing and experiencing this street using different temporal scales, or timescopes —the lens of historical time, the microscopic lens of everyday life, the instantaneity of embodied perception, and the telescopic lens of geological time. Of course, these timescopes are interrelated. They coexist and the ways we experience our world often result from an intertwining of these multiple ways of seeing.
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The street has a long multi-ethnic history replete with stories that are diverse and layered. In order to give you a glimpse of its complexity we suggest four ways of seeing and experiencing this street using different temporal scales, or timescopes —the lens of historical time, the microscopic lens of everyday life, the instantaneity of embodied perception, and the telescopic lens of geological time. Of course, these timescopes are interrelated. They coexist and the ways we experience our world often result from an intertwining of these multiple ways of seeing.
You may send us your feedback at here.
SITES
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As scholars of vernacular architecture, we have mastered the technique of reading our world based on how it looks, who built it, and cultural traditions of building. Buildings may be organized by classificatory systems that focus on facade, form, layout and construction systems. But classificatory systems are not sufficient when we interpret the world of contemporary immigrants. Contemporary immigrants adopt the buildings along Devon Avenue, Chicago. Almost all these buildings were built during the first half of the twentieth century. The new immigrants do not share the values and interpretations of the past builders and hence they may not subscribe to the social values and symbolism invested in the layout and façade designs of these buildings. This fact may be painfully evident to a preservationist who stands in front of the Viceroy of India restaurant and finds, much to his dismay, that a particularly fine example of “significant Moderne building…originally built as the Cine Theater in 1937” is no longer preserved. The reuse of the post WWI commercial building types by Indians and Pakistanis do not reflect assimilation, Americanization or cultural hybridity that some vernacular architecture scholars claim for older immigrant groups. Rather while using buildings that are available and affordable, recent immigrants make subtle atmospheric changes to accommodate their cultural practices. They built a new world inside this preexisting physical shell. The immigrants may value these spaces in ways that are divergent from a native-born preservationist. This may explain their apparent disregard for cultural, architectural, and stylistic values handed down from the past. In order to experience the recreated world of the new immigrants, we focus on smells, sounds, and sights of Devon Avenue and engage our senses in ways that are simultaneously perplexing and enchanting, familiar to some and alien to others. The palpably sensory overload of Devon Avenue serves a social function—it orders and evokes complex, overlapping, and intertwined worlds occupied by different social groups. The somatic order of this street sustains these multiple worlds. Individuals belonging to different groups, religions, occupations and cultures navigate intangible boundaries by negotiating subtly different sensate orders defined by smells, sounds and interior layouts— and in doing so they maintain their own worlds, albeit entangled, intertwined and inextricably connected to the worlds of others around them. While vernacular architecture scholarship in the last 30 years has made tremendous strides in exploring methods of documenting the material world around us, few have integrated, within that flourishing cannon, aspects of the intangible, experiential, affective and ephemeral that animate that world. Dell Upton suggests a method where we explore the seen as well as the unseen aspects of the landscape and explore the relative roles of “vision and the intangible in the interpretation of landscape” by carefully interpreting and analyzing everyday practice, movement, and affective behavior. Our focus on sensory experience and performance suggests that places are never stable. Not only meaning and interpretations, but also, the very condition of place changes with people, context, activities and interactions. By foregrounding a protean idea of embodied placemaking in understanding the cultural landscapes of Devon Avenue we hope that this tour will further our understanding of the mutually constitutive and reflexive engagement between people and their built worlds.[i] We hope the four intertwined tours will bring back to life J. B. Jackson’s call to examine a sense of place and a sense of time, rekindle a folklorists quest for an “ethnography of speaking,” remind us of an environmental historian’s attempt to rethink the connection between nature and culture—and then, overlay these “ways of seeing” on to a more popular post-structuralist documentation of grammar and form in vernacular architecture. _______________________________________ [i] The term “embodied placemaking” allows us to focus on the role of the human body in the reproduction of material worlds. Embodied placemaking is the primary mode by which societies and social systems reproduce themselves. Arijit Sen and Lisa Silverman, Making Place: Space and Embodiment in the City, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). |