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Palimpsest

Frank A. Mills

In the last post, "Rain, Poems, and Alleyways: Framing Space," we looked at framing space through cognitive perception. Last week, while wandering about Buffalo, Wyoming, population 4290, another framing tool, palimpsest, made itself evident. Palimpsest, strictly speaking, refers to parchment that has been written on, erased, and then written on again, with some part of the original writing still remaining legible, although covered over. By extension, then, palimpsest is a place, object, or area that reflects layers of history. Founded in 1879 Buffalo offers serves up a cornucopia of palimpsest. While much of it is rather easy to discover, a substantial portion is hidden in the town's nooks and crannies, best explored on foot. Buffalo, being a small, compact town, that is what I did early Saturday morning for several hours.

As I wandered about, letting my senses lead as they would, I was constantly reminded of the town's history, although not in a preserved sense. Yes, there was the prerequisite museum, but most of the reminder was "layers written over"— layers of faded, peeling painted advertisements and store names on building walls, an almost unrecognizable railroad station, sans track, converted into a home, an alleyway to nowhere disappearing into an angling crevice, even a Rexall Drugstore sign hanging over the doorway of what was soon to become merely a soda fountain cum gift shop. There was the Occidental Hotel (founded in a tent in 1789, the same year that Buffalo was founded) where Owen Wister's Virginian finally got his man (if you ask, the proprietress will show you the room where Wister wrote). Still a hotel, but much different than it once was with its back-door brothel. The door, and its narrow steps to the second floor are still there; the brothel is not. Look over the door and there are still traces of its previous purpose. On the front, if one looks closely, the faded names of the old first floor stores are still legible, now a hotel restaurant and bar. All in all, contemporary Buffalo is an interesting mix of evolved restoration with little historic preservation (the most notable preservation effort is nearby Fort McKinney, three miles to the west). The Occidental Hotel is the perfect example of a building's evolution, not covering over the past entirely, but building over the years in a way that allows the building to evolve with the environment while leaving the palimpsest legible.

Today, in our urban cores and neighborhoods, palimpsest is in danger of becoming irrevocably lost. Those of you who are regular readers of Urban Spaces | Urban Places are well aware of my insistence that for urban revitalization to be sustainable, it must flow from the history of the place. Yet, as new development comes into place, we are rapidly losing all sense of palimpsest, and in my opinion, our urban cores and neighborhoods are none the better for it.

There is, fortunately, a new breed of urban planners on the threshold; different to the point of calling themselves "Radical Urban Planners." Neither New Urbanists or Modernists, Radical Urban Planners range over a broad spectrum of planning philosophies and disciplines. However, one discipline that seems to be common to all, is urban psychogeography. Psychogeography, the evolved offspring of the turn of the 19th-century flâneur, or wandersmänner, is a postmodern discipline that studies the "precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviors of individuals," especially within a geographic context (Guy Debord, "Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography," Les Lèvres, No. 6, 1955).

The primary tool of psychogeography is the dérive, or drift. Although appropriated by "urban explorers" wandering about urban ruins (and often leaving their graffiti mark) the drift is the primary tool of the psychogeographer. The drift discovers hidden stories within the urban environment by playfully combining all of the senses, including the imagination, with technical analysis to discover both neighborhood narratives – of people, buildings, landscape, and infrastructure – and the core behaviors embedded in them. For psychogeographers, the drift makes plain the palimpsest in a way that assists in understanding how the past evolved creates the present. Psychogeography does not peel off the layers to reveal the past, but rather sees the past in the present. Palimpsest is not the removal of more recent layers to reveal the past, but individual layers legible through later layers.

Psychogeographers understand that palimpsest – as history revealed in the present – is an essential part of the geographical environment, a part that is crucial to understanding both the evolution of the environment and how that evolution affects the behaviors of present day residents. Psychologically, palimpsest provides the necessary sense of connect to the past. A future not rooted in the past is no future at all. New development can uproot the past through total disregard for it. It can rootlessly approximate the past through nostalgic reproduction or preservation. Or it can sink its roots into the past, building new, but allowing the past to be legible. Only the latter can be fully sustainable; not that it will forever remain in its current built form, but in that it is built to evolve with the environment.