New and Old #104
Friday roundup and commentary
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I looked for fun articles for this roundup that touch on the main beats I follow at this newsletter: urbanism, food, retail, and the sort of culture writing that mixes these things together. Enjoy.
In recent decades, there’s been a growing movement towards deconstruction instead of demolition. Rather than flattening an old building, deconstruction opts to carefully disassemble a building instead, saving what’s salvageable from the landfill for reuse instead. This is exactly the mission of Minneapolis’ The Birch Group demolition company and Scrapbox Salvage reuse store.
I worked, briefly, for an architectural salvage store in the D.C. area in grad school. It was fun, like volunteering in a thrift store but with a much wider range of materials that you rarely see outside of Home Depot. (Habitat for Humanity runs similar stores, but much smaller.)
Based on the relatively limited experience I have with this sort of thing, these stores and businesses are tough to run profitably. Based on this bit, the whole enterprise might, all told, not be profitable at all:
Hennepin County, where Minneapolis is located, offers property owners and developers up to $5,000 in funding to incentivize building projects that use deconstruction techniques to salvage materials from the destruction, alteration or renovation of a building. These building reuse grants, the county explains, are meant to “help offset the additional time and labor costs associated with deconstruction.”
But it also seems to me that there’s a tremendous amount of value to be wrung out here, with the right processes/experience/expertise. And the more this kind of thing grows, the more smoothly it will all work. Good stuff.
Where Have All the Fragments Gone?, Lapham’s Quarterly, Elizabeth Della Zazzera, November 5, 2019
In a reply to one of my recent pieces about discount department stores, somebody recalled Zayre, or a similar store, selling little fragments of the Berlin Wall back in 1989. So of course, I had to go down that rabbit hole. I found this interesting piece on the post-fall history of the wall, which notes that it ended up everywhere from memorial gardens (large slabs) to souvenir shops (usually small chunks.)
That accounting includes only intact segments. Parts of the wall left Germany in more portable chunks, either gathered during its demolition or purchased in the years since at the souvenir shop at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum (a small piece is available on the museum webstore for €21.76; extra-large pieces go for as much as €179.90). Many of these purchasable pieces of the wall have been touched up with spray paint to look more like what people imagine the wall to look like—even if the untouched bits of concrete were closer to reality than their bedazzled brethren. Between memorials, museum collections, and souvenirs, there is more wall outside Berlin than inside it.
It’s an interesting long piece, but I kept looking for the American department store bit. It turns out a lot of stores sold the fragments as collectibles, all over the United States, from K-Mart to Service Merchandise to Bloomingdales. And take a look at this detail:
Robert W. Schnur, vice president of finance for Hyman Products, said the company obtained the chunks of wall from a source friendly with officials in East and West Berlin. The concrete portions are being delivered to Hyman Products’ warehouse in chunks or slabs and are being cut down and then hammered apart into pieces weighing about 2 ounces each. Each will come with a certificate of authenticity.
Apparently, in later years, interior chunks of the wall without any of the iconic graffiti were all that was left, and to juice sales, dealers (no longer American stores) spray painted them to simulate the appearance of the “prime” pieces.
I’m too young to have seen these in stores, and I’d never heard of this before. Interesting bit of retail history.
Everything I, an Italian, thought I knew about Italian food is wrong, Financial Times, Marianna Giusti, March 23, 2023
[Alberto] Grandi’s speciality is making bold claims about national staples: that most Italians hadn’t heard of pizza until the 1950s, for example, or that carbonara is an American recipe. Many Italian “classics”, from panettone to tiramisu, are relatively recent inventions, he argues. Some of DOI’s claims might be familiar to industry insiders, but most are based on Grandi’s own findings, partly developed from existing academic literature. His skill is in taking academic research and making it digestible. And his mission is to disrupt the foundations on which we Italians have built our famous, and famously inflexible, culinary culture — a food scene where cappuccini must not be had after midday and tagliatelle must have a width of exactly 7mm.
Grandi, channeling Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, calls it the “invention of tradition.”
I’m Italian, and I’ve learned over the years that most Italian food in America is an Americanized sub-cuisine, much the way Americanized Chinese food is a distinct cuisine from what’s eaten in China. I also learned that a breakfast egg dish my mom used to make for me, which her mother made for her—little fritters made of scrambled egg mixed with Italian seasoned breadcrumbs—is in fact not a breakfast dish, but an old recipe for mock meatballs, hailing from Italian peasants in the southeast of Italy. In America, meat was plentiful and cheap. Hence spaghetti and meatballs.
So it’s not surprising to me that some actual Italian dishes might not be actually Italian, or that a lot of “classics” are much newer than you might think. But then, what does a phrase like “actually Italian” mean? Food is fundamentally evolutionary; chilies aren’t native to Asia and tomatoes aren’t native to Europe (and therefore Italy), for example; “Indian food” in America and the UK is largely a small, restaurant-style subset of Indian cuisine. The dumplings of Russia and Eastern Europe are thought to be descended from Chinese dumplings.
Sometimes discussion of “authenticity” gets bound up with arguments over political correctness. A more useful way to think about all of this, I think, is to understand that cuisines are not created; they have evolved. While it might seem counterintuitive, the fact that post-World War II Americans in Italy, or Italians influenced by them, invented carbonara, just underscores the evolutionary point.
So I suppose I half-agree with this excerpt:
Panettone is a case in point. Before the 20th century, panettone was a thin, hard flatbread filled with a handful of raisins. It was only eaten by the poor and had no links to Christmas. Panettone as we know it today is an industrial invention. In the 1920s, Angelo Motta of the Motta food brand introduced a new dough recipe and started the “tradition” of a dome-shaped panettone. Then in the 1970s, faced with growing competition from supermarkets, independent bakeries began making dome-shaped panettone themselves. As Grandi writes in his book, “After a bizarre backwards journey, panettone finally came to be what it had never previously been: an artisanal product.”
Grandi is sort of being a culinary creationist; I’d say the old panettone was the archaeopteryx, and the new one is the bird. The mix of continuity and lack of continuity goes together.
Here’s to me one of the most fascinating examples of this sort of thing:
Parmesan, he says, is remarkably ancient, around a millennium old. But before the 1960s, wheels of parmesan cheese weighed only about 10kg (as opposed to the hefty 40kg wheels we know today) and were encased in a thick black crust. Its texture was fatter and softer than it is nowadays. “Some even say that this cheese, as a sign of quality, had to squeeze out a drop of milk when pressed,” Grandi says. “Its exact modern-day match is Wisconsin parmesan.” He believes that early 20th-century Italian immigrants, probably from the Po’ region north of Parma, started producing it in Wisconsin and, unlike the cheesemakers back in Parma, their recipe never evolved. So while Parmigiano in Italy became over the years a fair-crusted, hard cheese produced in giant wheels, Wisconsin parmesan stayed true to the original.
(My emphasis). Read the whole thing! There’s a lot more.
Shot Chaser, Washington City Paper, Darrow Montgomery, March 16, 2023
We’re living in an era of abundance: We can buy spirits by the liter at Costco along with a big-screen TV, pounds of coffee, and snow shovels, or venture to McLean for deals on bottles at Total Wine. Tiny liquor stores are forgotten, and as our habits and routes through town change following the pandemic, it’s hard to know which ones will survive. Even the analog clock outside Target Liquor on Kennedy Street NW seems out of date. (It is, however, correct twice a day.)
I’ve seen some of these small liquor stores, or at least ones like them. There are a lot of intersections in D.C. where one corner has an old-school liquor store and another has a ramen shop. Two different eras. In some ways, two different worlds.
I’m a Total Wine shopper, and not much of a spirits guy, but I’ve been inside plenty of independent liquor stores, including a handful of these urban ones. They might make you think of big malt liquor cans and wine coolers, but I’ve been surprised that decent wine and craft beer is for sale in a lot of these places these days. The stores sell what’s on the market, and the market itself has changed.
It’s a photo essay heavy on photos, and they’re great. Check it out.
I’ll also show you a neat D.C.-adjacent liquor store in Langley Park, Maryland, a working-class community that straddles Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties. It’s been closed for several years and I never did get my own photo of it, so here’s Google Maps.
A local news story noted, “The store has a sordid past.”
Related Reading:
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