Visit to the Capitol Area District Library

Today, Riley and I went to the Capitol Area District Library in Lansing. Our goal was to try and find city council minutes in the local history part of the library which is only open from 5-7 on Tuesdays. When we arrived, the door was locked and no one was in there. After talking to the librarians at the circulation desk we found out that the people that were usually in charge of the place weren't there. Luckily, they were able to find someone in the building to help us. Because of budget cuts, people have to work in two places.

We didn't really have any luck in finding the city council minutes, even with some of the dates we wrote down from our timeline. However, the person that was helping us found some plans for the building of I-496 which included neighborhoods and specific lots where construction took place. Each street was broken down into different lots and listed in a table. We are trying to get scans or even just pictures of the documents to show the rest of the class and use for our project. As we get more information, we will update the class.

We also were directed towards a folder with newspaper clippings from the Lansing State Journal about I-496. We skimmed through the contents and found some new articles and photos that we thought might be helpful to our project. We will read through them for content and upload whatever is helpful to the wiki and Omeka. We also found out that the library has aerial photographs of the I-496 area including one dated around 1948 which is a great before picture. We are going to talk to the man in charge of the photos to see if we can get copies of those pictures.

All in all, I thought our trip was pretty successful. Although we didn't really find what we thought we were going to find, I think we found a good amount of material.

Library of Michigan

On Tuesday, Ed, Riley, and myself went to the Library of Michigan to begin our research into the planning of I-496. We enlisted the help of a librarian right away but there was a little miscommunication between us. At first, she thought we were looking into the highway I-96 which we repeatedly told her we were looking at I-496, specifically in Lansing. There just happened to be a folder labeled "Highways - 1950s and 1960s" on her desk when we got there because another librarian was using it earlier in the day for an unrelated question. We skimmed through the articles in that folder and didn't find very many that had to do with I-496 but we found out that there was a separate folder that had clippings exclusively on I-496. While Ed and Riley went to check out other stuff, I located this folder and began to skim through and make copies of some relevant articles and pictures that I thought could be useful for our project.

Copying the articles was a huge pain and I wish I would have thought about bringing my camera to make the copies which would have been much easier to do and upload to Omeka or the Wiki (and I wouldn't have had to deal with the lady that kicked me off the copier while I was using it, but that's a different story). I wasn't able to copy all of the articles in the folder that I wanted to because the Library was closing but I will go back and finish looking. After Dr. K scans in the articles as PDF's, I will read them for content and upload what I think is necessary to our project site at Omeka.

Research for the I-496 Project

For our class project I have been assigned to the research team. Tomorrow, the research group I am in is going to the Library of Michigan to begin looking at documents for our project. Ed, Riley, Michelle and myself are looking for planning documents for the highway including alternate routes that were debated. We are going to be looking for maps, documents, pictures, newspaper articles and anything else that might relate to our topic.

Tomorrow is just the beginning. Because of the limited hours, we are probably going to have to go back at some point to continue our search but we want to begin digging in to see what we find. We have looked at the background readings that everyone did for specific document names that might be helpful but I plan on asking the librarians there to help us out if we need it.

I will update later with what we find (which hopefully will be a lot!)

Behind the Scenes Look at the Michigan Historical Center

Last Thursday our class went to the Michigan Historical Center for the second time. I thought that this visit was very informative and helpful for our project on I-496. On our first visit, we didn't really explore the museum's exhibits. This time we got to walk through a couple and talk to Maria Leiby about how they were constructed and some of the problems that staff faced when designing the exhibits. I think this was helpful for our class because it gives us some background knowledge when we are working on our project. It raised some questions that we will have to negotiate as a group - what are we including, what are we not including, what are our goals for the exhibit, who is our audience...

I really enjoyed seeing the room where a lot of the artwork was constructed for the museum. It is incredible what people can create and restore and it made me realize how much work goes into creating an exhibit in a museum. It is so much more than just thinking of an idea and constructing it. You need to plan and design and create from scratch. It seems we have a lot of work ahead of us, but like the MHC staff said, all the work is done in groups so everyone helps each other.

Creating Chicago's North Shore

The book I read for background information on our project was Michael H. Ebner's Creating Chicago's North Shore: A Suburban History. This book focuses on the creation of Chicago's North Shore which consists of 8 communities: Evanston, Wilmette, Kenilworth, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, Lake Forest, and Lake Bluff. The book begins with a short history of the suburbs, including some reasons why people wanted to get out of the urban centers - overcrowding, dirtiness, lack of garden landscape etc.

The book focuses mainly on the impact of the railroad to the creation of these communities which were only settlements before the railroad laid tracks along Lake Michigan. The railroads made it easier for people to live outside of the city and still commute to Chicago. The book does mention that some people were opposed to these technological changes in transportation because they moved too fast, changed the landscape etc.

When skimming through this book, I was fairly interested in the topic because I thought it was interesting in finding out more about the formation of the suburbs and the impact that new transportation had on them. I used to live outside of Chicago when I was a kid, and my dad used to take the train to commute to work in the city. Chicago is a central hub for railroads and it's fairly easy to travel there by train. I have taken the train from Michigan to Chicago several times.

It was easy to get bogged down when skimming through this book by the descriptions of the different communities. Since this wasn't really relevant to our topic, I tried to stick with the sections that could be used when looking at the construction of I-496. The book doesn't discuss the construction of highways (it only goes up to the invention of the automobile) but for our project we can use the information about the impact of the railroads and the car on the creation of suburbs. The highway system relates to this idea because I-496 was probably constructed to make travelling easier and resulted in people moving out of the city because it was easier to commute.