Dolores Hayden is Professor of Architecture, Urbanism, and American Studies at Yale University. Her previous
books include The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and
Cities; and Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life.
Review
"The Power of Place is a well-timed, well-reasoned call for fusing history and the environment to create
a more democratic and inclusive interpretation of the places in which most of us live and work. Ms. Hayden greatly
strengthens preservation with arguments that give the historic environment a critical dimension beyond beauty and
rarity."
--The New York Times Book Review
MIT Press Web Site, December, 2000
Summary
The Power of Place is a well-timed, well-reasoned call for fusing history and the environment to create
a more democratic and inclusive interpretation of the places in which most of us live and work.Ms. Hayden greatly
strengthens preservation with arguments that give the historic environment a critical dimension beyond beauty and
rarity."
-- The New York Times Book Review
Based on her extensive experience in the urban communities of Los Angeles,historian and architect Dolores Hayden
proposes new perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicity to broaden the practice of public history and public art,
enlarge urban preservation, and reorient the writing of urban history to spatial struggles.
In the first part of The Power of Place, Hayden outlines the elements of a social history of urban space
to connect people's lives and livelihoods to the urban landscape as it changes over time. She then explores how
communities and professionals can tap the power of historic urban landscapes to nurture public memory.
The second part documents a decade of research and practice by The Power of Place, a nonprofit organization
Hayden founded in downtown Los Angeles. Through public meetings, walking tours, artists's books, and permanent
public sculpture, as well as architectural preservation, teams of historians, designers, planners, and artists
worked together to understand, preserve, and commemorate urban landscape history as African American, Latina, and
Asian American families have experienced it.
One project celebrates the urban homestead of Biddy Mason, an African American ex-slave and midwife active betwen
1856 and 1891. Another reinterprets the Embassy Theater where Rose Pesotta, Luisa Moreno, and Josefina Fierro de
Bright organized Latina dressmakers and cannery workers in the 1930s and 1940s.A third chapter tells the story
of a historic district where Japanese American family businesses flourished from the 1890s to the 1940s. Each project
deals with bitter memories -- slavery, repatriation, internment -- but shows how citizens survived and persevered
to build an urban life for themselves, their families, and their communities.
Drawing on many similar efforts around the United States, from New York to Charleston, Seattle to Cincinnati,
Hayden finds a broad new movement across urban preservation, public history, and public art to accept American
diversity at the heart of the vernacular urban landscape. She provides dozens of models for creative urban history
projects in cities and towns across the country.
This book synthesizes two "themes in contemporary urbanism -- the diversification of historical memories
and the active recuperation of places in which this history can be explored -- with an evocation of changing histories
in Los Angeles. Hayden . . . {combines a} range of arguments in a . . . presentation that {attempts to} link theoretical
debates and community action. Her initial chapters situate space and place as fundamental features of a variety
of historiographies and preservation efforts. Subsequent Los Angeles illustrations, often drawing on the organization
Power of Place, treat multiple cityscapes of work, the life of early black midwife-philanthropist Biddy Mason and
its commemoration in public art, labor history and an unsuccessful attempt to save the Embassy Auditorium, and
Little Tokyo. Finally, . . . {Hayden reflects} on the city's 1992 riots." (Choice) Index.