AVENUE OF AMERICAN HISTORY

ORIGINAL CONCEPT STATEMENT

 

 

 

Concept Highlights

 The Avenue of American History is a radically new vision of an American History museum. The initiative calls for each generation to write its own history and for the collection of histories to be recorded in a chain of individual buildings, each representing a quarter century of our nation’s history. Every twenty-five years another building is added to the end of the chain, thereby creating an Avenue of living accounts of American life created by those who lived it. Choosing what to include, celebrate, hide or ignore will be the central challenge in this incremental museum as each generation, starting with our own, composes its own legacy.

The Avenue consists of three integrated and interdependent areas. Area one embodies the Avenue’s central reason for being, which is starting a tradition of creating generational legacies. The tradition will begin with our generation writing its history of the period 1976-2000 and preserving it in a Hall of History expressive of our times. Our Hall of History will have exhibits of recent contemporary culture that will reflect the findings of a national debate generated by efforts to determine what constitutes the essential spirit of the past quarter century. We expect this debate to be widespread, as school children, historians, and all Americans are challenged as television brings the discussion directly into the nation’s living rooms.

Area two is an open landscaped zone on the Avenue of American History adjacent to our Hall of History and set aside for future generations to build their Halls. In this respect, the Avenue is open-ended both physically and conceptually, its value increasing as our society continues to evolve.

The third area is the section of the Avenue of American History that provides a way of introducing historical perspective into the complex. Here a critical mass is established that will more likely assure the continuation of the Avenue’s development in the future. Area three covers the period between 1626 and 1975 and consists of 14 Halls of History, one for each twenty-five year period. These structures and the exhibits they contain are necessarily historical suppositions and will be so identified. The retrospective section will contain our generation’s best guess as to what each past generation’s view was of the most important events, personalities, social changes, and cultural products that occurred at that time. However, if one focuses on this retrospective section of the facility, one is not appreciating the central thrust and goal of this enterprise. This project really deals with starting a new tradition, that of creating an on-going series of contemporary accounts of historic events. To our knowledge this has not been attempted anywhere in this country or in the world.

To create yet a broader perspective, each Hall of History will contain two special rooms, one in which a vision of the world one hundred years in the future is presented by the generation that creates each hall, and another room in which subsequent generations are invited to appraise the history written by the people who actually experienced it. These rooms should foster a continuing dialogue about the past presented with the benefit of hindsight and changing social values.

 

Physical Layout

The layout of the AVENUE is organized around an open-air promenade. Free standing buildings and gardens are situated on either side of a promenade, much like buildings facing one another across a Main Street.

Because of the lasting cultural value of the AVENUE, the complex will be constructed within a landscaped, walled compound. A Gateway building will allow entrance at one end of the compound while a temporary, decorative fence at the other end will invite speculation as to the shape of buildings and historic events yet to come.

The Avenue of American History could be planned for a site somewhere in the Philadelphia area. An interdisciplinary development team is attempting to develop this cultural, educational, and recreational attraction in a location that will spur urban revitalization, create jobs, and provide support for the city’s new convention center now under construction.

 

Our Hall Of History

The stories to be told in HALL FIFTEEN (1976-2000) may start with the nation’s efforts to celebrate the U.S. Bicentennial during the closing years of a tumultuous period of civil unrest and social change. Important changes in attitude regarding women, minorities and the family unit might be presented, as well as the growing new concern for the environment. The Carter, Reagan and Bush administrations will likely be highlighted for their achievements and their shortcomings. Other topics may include the Iranian hostage crisis, the eruption of Mount St Helens, the first launch of the space shuttle Columbia, the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court, the AIDS epidemic, the emergence of genetic engineering, the disintegration of the communist hegemony, the savings and loan crisis, the Rodney King verdict and the riot and devastation in Los Angeles.

And who knows today how our generation’s era will come to a close eight years from now at the end of the century and which of the above developments will be chosen for presentation on the Avenue. But whatever the rest of this decade holds in store for us, and whatever our generation deems to be central to our age, the story will be told with passion, sadness, hope and dismay as we, in our multi-faceted vision, saw it, felt it, and shaped it.

 

Whose Voice?

 Who will decide what messages and what objects are preserved in the Halls of History? Will the rich speak or the poor? The majority or minority? The powerful or the weak? The idealists or realists? The Northerners or Southerners? Those on the east coast, the west coast, or the plains states? The Conservatives, Liberals, Democrats, or Republicans. At different times through history, different segments of society had a stronger voice than others. To some degree, what our society today is all about is its sensitivity to finding a voice that includes us all.

These questions about “Whose Voice” are at the very heart of the project; this issue of Whose Voice? is the project’s significance and challenge. The development team does not have answers to all these difficult questions but as some of the issues are addressed, the basic value and excitement of the endeavor is confirmed. A critical part of our proposed study deals with developing a conceptual strategy that will permit our generation in our own Hall of History to speak with as fair and balanced a voice as possible.

However, it should be appreciated that what will be presented in all the Halls of History, by the nature of this project and by human nature, will to varying degrees be incomplete and biased images whose message will very much be dictated by the value systems operable in each quarter century. Different from what one would find in an ordinary museum, the main exhibit spaces in this project’s retrospective Halls of History will not represent what some of our best historians, looking back, might choose to say about what happened but rather what our best historians believe the people of the time would have chosen to say, given their time-anchored view of events.

Of paramount importance in understanding the special nature of this project is that no generation’s presentation will go unchallenged. There will always be an invitation for future generations to present another point of view in the special spaces provided in all the Halls of History. This feature is what makes the Avenue of American History distinctive and value building.

 

Native Americans

 In starting the complex with the period 1626 to 1650, and consisting of essentially British and European settlements, it should not be assumed that the earlier history of Native Americans will be disregarded. Quite to the contrary; the civilization of Native Americans will be presented, possibly at the head of this complex in a special Gateway building, in a way that captures both the spirit of the Native American way of life and the imposition of a foreign people on their culture.

 

Significance And Character Of The Concept

 Our Development Group views the Avenue of American History as a new and compelling educational tool in which the uniform time periods and the ongoing dialogue between past, present, and future will draw in youngsters and enable them to see their place and their potential in the flow of events we call history. We also see the Avenue as a place of entertainment, as a visually stimulating, attractive, and emotionally stirring place to visit. We anticipate the project will be a dramatic and integral part of Philadelphia’s growing hospitality-based economy, a tourist attraction that will significantly boost the City’s and the region’s reputation nationally and internationally. We believe the local economy will be improved by the jobs created in designing, constructing and operating the core facility and by all the possible secondary development projects that may be attracted to the site.

We also envision the project illuminating the very process of recording history. For history in the eyes of many is no longer viewed as a body of immutable facts, free of bias, but as an on-going activity that is subject to both deliberate and inadvertent distortions because it is, in the end, a self-referential endeavor. History, as a narrative created after the fact, rather than the body of source events themselves, is in its simplest terms both a story about the past and the act of telling the story. It is therefore always subject to revision. The Avenue will help reveal history as a constantly changing reflection of ourselves mirrored in the reflective surface of our own humanity.

 

Centerpiece Of Celebration

During the summer of the year 2001, the nation will be celebrating the end of the Twentieth Century and the start of the Twenty-first. It will also be celebrating the beginning of a new millennium. A grand opening of the AVENUE OF AMERICAN HISTORY in Philadelphia could be a centerpiece of the nation’s celebrations.

 

Relationship To The Cultural Infrastructure Of Philadelphia

The Avenue of American History, wherever presented, meets with almost universal, enthusiastic approval. We envision that a project of this scale and appeal can only help other local institutions by drawing more tourists, conventions, residents and businesses to the area. We believe that this positive attitude is rightly based on the view that this proposed project will and must attract most of its funding from outside of the Delaware Valley because of the project’s national theme, scope, audience, and appeal. Consequently it is our view and intention that the project, by attracting new resources from around the country, will enhance and strengthen the area. Part of this proposal therefore deals with investigating, in a preliminary way, the perceived and the anticipated impact that this endeavor will have on Philadelphia’s cultural infrastructure and the potential for attracting funding from sources outside the region.

A radically innovative and appealing visitor attraction, as this will be, will keep the city of Philadelphia in the news every quarter century as our society first struggles to define itself and then expresses the conclusions it reaches in a new landmark building with state-of-the-art exhibits.

 

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Our Development Group believes the AVENUE OF AMERICAN HISTORY will encourage the self-evaluation of a people. In turn, each person may be inclined to measure his or her role in society. Our differences in this melting pot of immigrants will be poignantly illustrated; so too will the accommodations that must be worked out between those of differing views. Hopefully a greater sense of tolerance for the dissimilar views and lifestyles of others will be fostered as a result of seeing that some of the battles have been won in the on-going effort to allow our differences to flow as adjacent currents in a broad and common mainstream.

Youngsters walking with their parents on the AVENUE OF AMERICAN HISTORY may be inclined to ask: “What ideas and things will we put in our Hall of History? What will we leave behind?”