In November 2021, photographer Sahar Coston-Hardy and I completed a research trip following Green Book sites along Route 66, funded by a grant from Women Photograph. More on that project and the multi-media publications coming forthwith on the Spaces in Between Project page.
I wrote an essay and five encyclopedia entries for the SAH Archipedia, an encyclopedia of architectural and landscape history published as a joint project of the University of Virginia and the Society of Architectural Historians. Why do we need this when we have Wikipedia, you ask? Archipedia is peer reviewed and written by architectural historians, which means you’ll get a degree of nuance and context you might not get in a google search, as well as, hopefully, a level of confidence in the facts. “Black Travelers On and Off the Road,” a thematic essay on the Green Book accompanied by five entries on historic sites associated with Black travel guides: Wink’s Panorama in Pinecliff, Colorado; Rock’s Rest near Kittery, Maine, The Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles, The Murray Hotel in Livingston, Montana; and Threatt Filling Station in Luther, Oklahoma. Threatt has recently gotten some good news and Wink’s Panorama was included in The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s 2021 LANDSLIDE campaign, Race & Space.
I wrote landscape histories of Dupont Circle, the modernist Capital Park development, and Pershing Park, in Washington, DC., for SAH Archipedia. Still waiting for Capital Park’s landscape history to go online…
I was asked to be on a publications prize committee for the Society of Architectural Historians in 2020. We awarded Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Book Award, which recognizes scholarship in the history of landscape and garden design to Gardens of the Roman Empire, edited by Wilhelmina F. Jashemski, et al., a landmark achievement by any measure. In 2016, I was on the committee for the Abbot Lowell Cummings prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum and we chose Tom Carter’s Building Zion. Attending the event and reading the statement we wrote to honor this work remains one of my favorite moments among my fellow historians.
I wrote a ton of things for the magazine over the last two years, but probably the thing that stuck with me was this short piece on the efforts to preserve the work of Taro Akutagawa, a Japanese American landscape designer who was detained in a camp during World War II and built an influential landscape design practice in the desert Southwest. Props to the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation and the Tucson Historic Preservation Foundation for steering me toward this story.
Mapping the Green Book
Mapping the Green Book is a project to document the landscape of race and travel through "The Negro Motorist's Green Book" and other travel guides. It is a platform for public access to research and collaboration on a project that deals with race, architecture, and landscape in the post-World War II period.