This Used To Be My Playground

Exactly twenty years ago, Madonna hit number one on Billboard's Hot 100 chart with her single "This Used To Be My Playground" from the film A League of Their Own. The song's title seems to be a fitting way to begin a blog updating the situation regarding the Popular Culture Building at Bowling Green State University.

As I noted in my previous blog entry, efforts have been afoot to try to save the building.  Those efforts have produced a wealth of new information about the house.  Most significantly, thanks to the work of kit homes expert Rosemary Thornton, we have learned that the house is not just a standard Montgomery Ward kit home, as had been believed.  Rather, the home appears to be a kit home produced by Montgomery Ward but in a special request to look like a Sears pattern.  For more on the home and its history, please check out Thornton's Sears Homes blog, which features several posts about the Popular Culture House and other Sears homes in Bowling Green, Ohio.  Also, check out other folks (such as here and here) who know about kit homes and have weighed in on the matter.  In all, the apparent history of this house has made it so much more rarer than initially believed that it's becoming increasingly more difficult to argue against its historic value.

At the beginning of efforts to save this house, I said that as a piece of popular culture, the house was a symbol of the kind of work that popular culture studies does and, thus, as the kind of work that occurred in the home for nearly four decades.  Now, the attempts to save the house have made it more than a symbol.  It is now a physical embodiment of that kind of work, as the attempts to save it have shown just how worthwhile having physical examples of cultural artifacts can be.  In this case, the ability to go into the house and identify characteristics of the house and markings within the house helped provide the basis for reinterpreting the story of the house and its significance.  This a key aspect of popular culture studies, and it's a key component of the importance of material culture to the study of history, culture, and society.  We can learn from interpreting material artifacts, and we can learn even more by having them available for reinterpretation.

Unfortunately, decision makers at the university feel differently, and as you can see in the picture above, the process of removing the house has begun.

Twenty years ago, while Madonna was hitting number one, this building was my playground, while I was a student at Bowling Green State University working on my Bachelor's Degree in Popular Culture.  Several years ago, it would be so again, as I was a faculty member in the department for two years.  It has been one of the places in which my intellectual play has met my intellectual work, where my imagination was able to grasp new connections in the study of culture and come to thicker understandings of the many phenomena that I witness.  And I am not alone, as many other individuals studying popular culture have passed through it on their journeys of intellectual play as well.

It still could be a playground.  Indeed, some of the proposals that have been offered for saving the house have suggested setting up a museum and/or center of popular culture studies in the building.  Yet, again, these proposals have been met with little, if any, consideration, and so this, in all likelihood, will soon cease to be the kind of wonderfully productive playground it has been for folks like me for several decades.

The 1989 song "Open Letter (To A Landlord)" by the band Living Colour begins with the lines "Now, you can tear a building down, but you can't erase a memory.  These houses may look all run down, but they have a value you can't see."  The Popular Culture House has many kinds of value, for the reasons I have indicated here as well as other reasons.  In a fashion that is so severely disappointing that saying so doesn't seem to do it justice, some folks apparently don't even want to see that value.