{"id":540,"date":"2024-06-03T13:26:22","date_gmt":"2024-06-03T17:26:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/?p=540"},"modified":"2025-02-08T14:59:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T19:59:32","slug":"a-philly-freedom-trail-but-for-whom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/2024\/06\/03\/a-philly-freedom-trail-but-for-whom\/","title":{"rendered":"A Philly Freedom Trail, But For Whom?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[A response to Stephanie Farr’s “Boston’s Freedom Trail is annoyingly great. Could Philly do the same by 2026?<\/a>“]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[Update: a revised version of my respose appears as \u201cWhen History Tourism Puts Profit Before the Past,\u201d TIME<\/em> (August 1, 2024), https:\/\/time.com\/6998433\/freedoms-trail-boston-history-tourism\/<\/a>.]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a recent op-ed, Stephanie Farr pitches a Freedom Trail for Philadelphia in time for the nation\u2019s 2026 semiquincentennial celebration. She, like millions of Americans, was inspired by Boston\u2019s wildly popular Freedom Trail, an actual red line drawn on the ground that since the 1950s has led tourists to the city\u2019s most iconic historic sites. What Philly needs, Farr insists, is its own red line to knit together lively pedestrian spaces full of buskers, just like in Boston.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I too was impressed by Boston\u2019s Freedom Trail. I was so impressed, in fact, that I wrote a book about the history of the trail and the people who made it. Here\u2019s what I learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Freedom Trail wasn\u2019t drawn by historians, it was drawn by a backroom confab of businessmen and real estate developers. Their goal, amid Boston\u2019s broken postwar economy, was to make the past profitable by luring well-heeled white tourists from out of town. In their mind, that meant drawing the line carefully AWAY from historic sites where tourists might encounter poverty or ethnic and racial difference. They didn\u2019t include a stop at the site of Boston\u2019s famed Liberty Tree, for instance, because it was just too close to Chinatown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Freedom Trail didn\u2019t knit together lively public spaces, it carved them out often with forced evictions. Those pedestrian-only plazas that Farr is so fond of were once filled with the homes of Boston\u2019s working poor. Amid postwar urban renewal, the Chamber of Commerce leveraged the trail as a justification for demolition and \u201cslum clearance.\u201d Yes, preservationists did insist that Boston be more gentle in its dislocations than Philadelphia had been with, say, Independence Mall. But the coziness they wanted in Boston\u2019s Italian North End was designed to recall Longfellow, not Sacco and Vanzetti.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Freedom Trail succeeds as public history only by making us forget that little about it is actually public. Chat with the folks who struggle to keep history nonprofits alive along the trail, or the tour guides who\u2019ve organized against the Freedom Trail Foundation for a living wage, or the descendants of Black Bostonians who know all too well what red lines really mean in American cities. Talk to these people and you find out quickly that the kind of fun Farr had on the Freedom Trail is only available to those of us who\u2019ve profited from the legacy of postwar renewal. In Boston, just like in Philadelphia, history for profit always obscures the past. No matter how good the buskers are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seth C. Bruggeman
Professor of History and Director, Center for Public History, Temple University. For more on Boston\u2019s Freedom Trail, see Bruggeman\u2019s Lost on the Freedom Trail: The National Park Service and Urban Renewal in Postwar Boston<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[A response to Stephanie Farr’s “Boston’s Freedom Trail is annoyingly great. Could Philly do the same by 2026?“] [Update: a revised version of my respose appears as \u201cWhen History Tourism Puts Profit Before the Past,\u201d TIME (August 1, 2024), https:\/\/time.com\/6998433\/freedoms-trail-boston-history-tourism\/.] In a recent op-ed, Stephanie Farr pitches a Freedom Trail for Philadelphia in time for … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “A Philly Freedom Trail, But For Whom?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2638,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-540","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2638"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":553,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540\/revisions\/553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.temple.edu\/sethbruggeman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}