Can You Find My House?
What Do You Think You're Looking At? #90
Sometimes, I come across something that I really wish I’d written. Case in point:
This is a fascinating piece of detective work and history. That was the first tweet in this thread. This is the last one:
All I can really tell you is click through and read the whole thing!
But here’s the gist of it: these little buildings were workers’ cottages at a Pullman development, where construction workers lived at a brickyard. The workers’ cottages were sold off and moved around the city—mostly nearby—once construction had ended. Few still remain standing.
This Chicago sleuth noticed a structure that looked uncannily like one of these somewhat famous cottages, but it was not listed anywhere as one of the surviving buildings. He did the work, with records, Sanborn insurance maps, and more, to see if this tiny cottage far away from the century-old construction site could be identified as a lost Pullman workers’ cottage.
It couldn’t be positively identified—some records simply do not exist—but every available piece of information points to it having been moved without a paper trail, and being an undocumented surviving cottage. This despite the fate of these buildings having been tracked by many people over the years.
This reminded me of my article about a non-standard Pizza Hut, which led to the unearthing of a largely forgotten local fast food chain, which originally built the building.
I wrote:
There’s a term in digital preservation and music called “the deleted years,” referring to the fact that huge numbers of files, from personal photos to digital music libraries, effectively disappeared in the mid-to-late 2000s. Much of it resides on broken portable devices, obsolete and retired computers, or inaccessible web accounts. In some ways, America’s first couple of generations of suburbia is a period of “deleted years” for the built environment. Aside from property records and old memories, very little of this landscape’s workaday history has been preserved in any centralized fashion. 50, 60, 70 years out, the simple question “What did that used to be?” is already becoming difficult to answer.
Piecing this sort of thing together now, even something as seemingly mundane as the history of an unremarkable old building, requires doing history. Some history is done in universities. And some is done on Twitter.
Related Reading:
Kinney Shoes’ Architectural Afterlife
Dollar Stores and Retail Evolution Revisited
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