Last summer was my first in my new apartment. I’d moved into the building in the fall, several weeks into a cool Vancouver November. The trees were bare, and our famous winter rain had set in for its months-long stay, but I stood on my balcony, looking out over the cityscape and mountains behind it, and thought: This will be heaven in summer.

Buildings in the Pacific Northwest are built for cold, despite our relatively mild winters. They’re made of wood and insulated, or of concrete, which retains heat naturally. Mine, a big block complex in a dense urban area, was concrete, completed only a year prior. When the building manager handed me my apartment keys, she explained the heating system. I asked about air conditioning, and she said the building didn’t have it, but that it wouldn’t be a problem. We were in Canada, after all.

Five months later, I received a notification on my phone’s weather app: An extreme heat alert was in effect for British Columbia. A spring heatwave was headed for the province, with temperatures expected over 30 C (86 F), nearly 20 degrees above the seasonal average. On May 14, I awoke in the morning from a fitful sleep and checked my thermostat: 29 C (84 F). An uncomfortable indoor temperature for a Southern Californian, but hell for a Northwesterner. My concrete home had become a sauna. That afternoon, I encountered neighbors in the elevator carrying box fans and portable air conditioners; the higher the floor they were stopping at, the more their agitation level seemed to rise. It unsettled me, but I still believed my building manager: I could survive the summer heat.

I was born in Vancouver in the late 1980s and have lived in the city most of my life. Vancouverites regularly bemoan our dreary climate, but anyone who’s lived in the Pacific Northwest long enough knows what makes living here worth it. When the rain finally lifts and the trees turn green, our corner of the planet transforms into a northern paradise. Summer’s long, light-filled days—even if they have historically lasted only a couple months—are enough to forgive the rest. When a cool ocean breeze blows in at 10 p.m. on a July evening, the sky still filled with color, anything feels possible.

Summer was always my favorite season here. As a child, I anticipated it with mounting excitement each spring, certain of its transformative potential. Summer meant freedom from school and the confines of a world determined by adults; it meant water parks and beaches, crushes and bike rides late into the night.

Two decades later, I feel differently. Like many in the Northwest, I’ve come to dread summer.

Solastalgia is a word many of us have learned, as the places we grew up in and the seasons we spent there have been irrevocably altered by climate change. It’s a word drawn from the past (the Latin solacium—“comfort” or “solace”—and the Greek algos: “pain”) to describe our present. It holds both our current grief for what has been lost and anticipatory grief for a world that will be even more changed.

Where Vancouver summers were once associated with clear afternoons and gentle temperatures—a calling card that made the Pacific Northwest a promising option for climate apocalypse preppers—they’ve become seasons of extreme heat, fires, and smoke. June, July, August, and increasingly even May and September now often bring long, scorching days and the distinctive orange haze of a smoke-blanketed sun.

For many British Columbians, the summer of 2021 was a psychological turning point. Fifteen years ago, I can’t remember a June day in Vancouver reaching anywhere near 30 C; in fact, between 1976 and 2005, the city averaged just one day over 30 C per year. But in late June 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat dome that saw inland temperatures soar to nearly 50 C (122 F), shattering heat records, killing hundreds of people, and sparking fires across the province, one of which destroyed the entire town of Lytton within hours.

In Vancouver, temperatures hovered at nearly 40 C (104 F) for days, with wildfire smoke adding to the suffocating claustrophobia. Public libraries became cooling centers, and stores across the province sold out of air conditioners. Climate data analysis suggested that the event would have been 150 times less likely without human-induced climate change.

Last year, while I baked in my apartment during the May heatwave, parts of British Columbia and neighboring Alberta again burned—an early start to a Western wildfire season that would be Canada’s worst yet. In June, Canada made international headlines when smoke from wildfires in Quebec traveled south, enveloping New York City and large swaths of the Northeast for days. By the fall, flames had scorched 16.5 million hectares.

I couldn’t afford the expensive air-conditioning units my neighbors had purchased, so I spent June, July, and August in a state of chronic sleep deprivation and mental stress. I didn’t realize how much the summer’s heat had affected me until late August, when the smoke started to roll in from British Columbia’s devastating inland fires, forcing me to keep my windows closed and my air filter running to mitigate it.

Being shut in in 30-degree weather undid me. I caved and purchased an air conditioner—on sale, to mark what would usually be the season’s end. I’m glad I did. September in Vancouver was also hot and smoky. Being able to cool down inside my home provided immeasurable relief.

This year, I’m better equipped psychically as well. As Canada emerges from the warmest winter in the country’s history, and drought fuels fires that have already forced thousands to evacuate in the West, I’m planning for the likelihood of days spent indoors, avoiding the heat and smoke. I know I’m privileged to have an escape. Like many Pacific Northwesterners, I’ve had to accept our new reality: Summer is no longer a time of freedom.

My solastalgia encompasses my grief not just for the climate I knew and how it has changed in my lifetime, but how I have changed in tandem. I mourn the Vancouver summers of my childhood but also the version of me that associated summer with pleasure and joy, instead of anxiety and danger.

I hope there will still be days when the sun sinks late over the Pacific on a cool evening and the future feels expansive, but I’ll experience them differently, knowing they’re a reminder of a fading season. The future they conjure will likely bring a different version of summer with it.

The post An Elegy for Vancouver Summer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In 2019, an unassuming package arrived at my front door.

Inside was a sooty 2-by-4-foot scrapbook filled with candy wrappers over 70 years old. On the surface, a piece of trash—one that in fact came from a dumpster, saved from oblivion during the move of Necco (the New England Confectionery Company) from its Cambridge, Massachusetts factory to nearby Revere in 2003. After the company went bankrupt 15 years later, it traveled 2,950 miles to La Verne, California, to the ranch house my husband Joe and I call home.

Why am I now its keeper?

I’m curator of the Candy Wrapper Museum, my online “roadside attraction.” Here I share my 50-year collection of little slips of paper, designed to be torn and thrown away. Why? Because these ephemeral objects serve as time machines, opening an emotional portal to the past.

I was 15 years old when I started collecting, inspired by friends with cool collections like beer bottles from around the world. I wanted to start one of my own, but of what? I usually spent my few coins on candy at the 7-Eleven. The candy shelves were a wonderland of tasty treats with colorful wrappers and names, all clamoring: Pick me! Big Hunks, Milk Duds, Jujyfruits, Choco’Lite, Lemonhead … How could a girl decide?

Then inspiration struck. Instead of throwing away those wrappers, I would save them. I would create the Candy Wrapper Museum, where I envisioned that the wrappers would one day be enjoyed as art, nostalgia, and humor. I had a plan: I would collect these wrappers throughout my lifetime, then open up the museum as a roadside attraction in my “old age.” I chose my first pieces, Nice Mice and Cinnamon Teddy Bears, and so began this journey. Friends caught the spirit of fun and donated pieces. Collecting became an affordable, novel way to explore the world around me, one that could turn even a mundane shopping trip into a treasure hunt.

In 2002, inspiration struck again. Why wait until retirement? Why not open the museum right now on the internet, the ultimate “superhighway”?

Building the online museum was a massive six-month, one-person project. First, I curated roughly 650 of my favorite wrappers into themes such as: Celebrities, Classics, Holidays, Big Eats, No Fun, and Vices. I scanned everything that was flat, photographed the rest (shot on film), scanned the prints, cleaned all the now-digital images, then wrote lighthearted commentary to provide each visitor with my “personal tour.” Then, I bought a book on how to write HTML and built the site myself.

When it launched, I had no expectations. Would anyone even be interested in this quirky endeavor? To my surprise, without any promotion, the site went “viral,” even getting selected as Yahoo’s “Funny Site of the Week.”

The sudden burst of popularity inspired bemused comments, like, “A candy wrapper museum? Now we’ve heard everything.” But mostly people wrote in to thank me, sharing how the sight of a long-gone favorite candy bar proved to their friends that they weren’t delusional. One person asked if I had a wrapper from the 1930s that his 90-year-old mother fondly remembered enjoying as a child. He later told me that the images I sent flooded her with emotion, rekindling the feelings of being a little girl again.

This is when I knew I was doing something important. We think of collections as “things,” but we also collect special moments that may not stay front of mind, but never fade from our hearts. A rush of joy returns when we reconnect with them through objects of the past. In fact, this was how my now-husband Joe and I first met: He was in search of a cherished childhood candy, Nice Mice—the very first item I’d collected. To this day people come to me with questions about ephemera they can’t find anywhere else, hoping I can help uncover connections to cherished memories around candies from their past.

Through collecting I’ve learned how quickly history is lost. The history of candy is particularly difficult to trace back. Most companies preserve little of their history, especially after an acquisition. That’s why we’re fortunate when organizations or individuals do take care to save history, like in the case of that scrapbook that arrived at my door.

Vintage Necco candy from The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

1970s candy from The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

Nice Mice and Cinnamon Teddy Bears, the first pieces Darlene collected for The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

The Candy Wrapper Museum when it was launched in 2002. Courtesy of author.

Darlene Lacey as a teenager in the 1970s when she started The Candy Wrapper Museum. Courtesy of author.

It was sent by Jeffrey S. Green, who was Necco’s vice president of research and development before the candy company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Necco had launched the U.S. candy industry back in 1847 when its founder, Oliver Chase, invented the first candy manufacturing machine. But by 2003, to remain competitive in an industry now dominated through consolidation by giants Hershey, Nestle, and Mars, Necco needed to sell its landmark 1927 factory and expand to a new facility. The sale kept the company going for ten more years. When Necco shuttered, Green did his best to keep as many irreplaceable artifacts as he could; understanding the importance of this company, he had already done his best to save items during the initial move and now, with the company no more, he purchased more items at auction, and even salvaged whatever he could from the Necco dumpster.

Green wasn’t interested in keeping these items forever in his basement. Instead he sought out “forever homes” for these artifacts, which is how he found the Candy Wrapper Museum online. He contacted me in March 2019, eight months after Necco closed, asking if I would like to have the scrapbook. Of course, I instantly said “Yes!”

When the scrapbook arrived, Joe and I were astounded by the treasure inside. Within its yellowed pages, we found a meticulously annotated time capsule of packaging, promotions, photos, and ephemera spanning Necco’s 171-year run. Most of these items had not been seen by the public since they appeared in A&P, Shop-Rite, and Star Markets 70 years ago or more.

The more I dug to discover the history behind these artifacts, the more stories I uncovered about the generations of people who worked together to bring us sweet treats. I learned how many belonged to the Quarter Century Club with tenures of 25 years or more, how they kept making their candy with pure cane sugar even through the Depression, and how they transformed 60% of the factory into the electronics production for World War II. Necco’s rich history even resulted in Joe and me publishing two books to share its story in a safe, permanent place.

It pains me that our world is in an ever-increasing rush to throw everything away. We may never realize the value of what was lost until it’s too late. Hotel room “do not disturb” signs, plastic food, milk bottles, and even scents and sounds are just some of the artifacts saved by collectors who see their value.

I know that only a dreamer would try to save it all. Most institutions have a hard enough time trying to save the “big stuff”—works of art, landmark documents, antiquities, and even V.I.I.s (very important insects). The Smithsonian Institution alone holds a staggering near 156 million objects, and that is still a fraction of all the significant objects that have come and gone.

But even though we can’t save everything, imagine the richness of history that we could preserve—stories of family, community, and culture—by appointing ourselves caretakers of the little things that matter to us the most. Such simple, individual actions, like, say, collecting hundreds of items of candy ephemera, can be a precious gift for future generations, offering them a larger and deeper understanding of who we are, where we came from, and where we’re going.

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The postcard selection on Vis, Croatia’s most remote island, was not terribly appealing. I considered a card adorned with a photograph of boats in the old harbor. Surely, I thought, the photograph I had taken the previous night of the pink sunset over the harbor in Komiža was more beautiful than the seemingly hastily composed postcard image of the same scene.

Postcard courtesy of author.

Later, I posted my pink sunset to Instagram Stories with a humorous caption. The act fulfilled the historic function of the postcard—to swiftly and cheaply share an illustrated message.

Screen grab courtesy of author.

Seen by over 100 people over the next 24 hours, the story represented the efficiency of current communication technology, as well as its transformation. While a postcard usually travels to one specially selected destination, my Instagram traveled around the globe to be shared, but not saved, both by people I hardly knew and my dearest friends.

Still, before I left the island, I dutifully slid two postcards I’d purchased—one of the aforementioned harbor and the other a vintage photograph of the town square—into the mailbox at the bus station. I can’t say this was an efficient way to deliver my messages: It took about a month for the postcards to reach their recipients. In the interim, I called, visited, and sent dozens of texts. But I sent them to express gratitude and love in a slower, indeed snail-like, mode of communication.

Postcards were an instant sensation when they first appeared in the late 1860s. By the year 1900, 90 million postcards were in circulation in Russia; 1 billion traveled through German post offices in 1903. Historian Lydia Pyne posits that they served as a precursor to today’s fast and free forms of communication, setting the expectation that one should be able to send a message with speed for little money.

This success surprised early critics. Unlike the letter, the postcard did not conceal its message from prying eyes with an envelope. Its fusion of text and image, however, was a hit with consumers. The postcard became the souvenir par excellence of the 19th and 20th centuries, coinciding with the rise of leisure tourism. Addressing you directly and personally, the postcard brought faraway places into your home and allowed you to hold them in your hands.

Because of this, the most obvious association of the postcard has always been travel. But its connection to place isn’t neutral.

Artist Zoe Leonard’s installation You see I am here after all (2008), which displays several thousand vintage postcards of Niagara Falls, opens up a dialogue about what souvenirs, like the postcard, memorialize.

Indeed, standing before Leonard’s monumental work myself, I wondered, what exactly does she suggest is still “here after all”?

Perhaps she is referring to the connections that the medium preserves. Or to the power of a place like Niagara Falls, which asserts its presence, despite being fragmented into an uncountable number of tiny cards and distributed around the globe. At the same time, perhaps the exact opposite holds true: that the mass-produced image of the falls, reproduced again and again on disposable postcards, might be more enduring and unchanging than the falls themselves, so transformed by the touristic landscape that surrounds them.

Postcards, as Leonard’s project suggests, are not only souvenirs of place, but also—and today, mostly—souvenirs of time.

The nature of that time has shifted since the postcard’s invention. The history of the postcard charts a poignant trajectory of the 20th century: embodying the utopic and futuristic promises of its first decades, it transformed into a relic of a slower and seemingly more stable world of connection by its close.

Now, if we encounter old postcards, they provide a window into past networks, connections, and temporalities.

This was what I had in mind when I made my own series of paintings and drawings about postcards in 2016.

I produced Unsent Postcards in Vienna over the course of a week on blank postcards that I purchased at the art store. I wanted to create souvenirs to preserve my experience of strolling through the city, reflecting on the dissolution of a relationship with increasing lucidity as my thoughts gained clarity against the backdrop of the former Habsburg capital.

Art courtesy of author.

It was this intangible process that would be my souvenir, and that I therefore wished to document and give material form. Whereas I typically send postcards to reaffirm relationships, I hoarded these for years. In this way, the unsent postcards represented an ending, as well as the possibility, or threat, of restoring relationships not only to another person but to different versions of events and of the self.

Art courtesy of author.

When I explained this project to a friend over drinks in Paris, she worried that it would reek of sentimentality. Postcards are, after all, sticky with nostalgia.

But as cultural theorist Svetlana Boym showed us, there are at least two forms of nostalgia. The type of nostalgia that prioritizes emotional ties over critical thought is what Boym called “restorative nostalgia.” From this perspective, the form of the postcard might reflect a desire to recreate an idealized world that no longer exists (and perhaps never did).

But the postcard can also correspond to “reflective nostalgia,” which focuses on the longing for a time that cannot be resurrected. In contrast to restorative nostalgia, which is at the heart of today’s powerful, nationalist ideologies, reflective nostalgia brings the past into the present in order to critically engage with the relationship between the two.

At least initially, my postcards considered a personal catastrophe. Ultimately, however, Unsent Postcards helped me to consider the potential power and shortcomings of nostalgic gestures, particularly in moments of crisis. Because just as restorative nostalgia can trap us, reflective nostalgia can also provide an antidote to the claustrophobia of conventional, unrelenting, and irreversible linear time by allowing us to travel into alternative temporalities.

The ways we imagine and long for the past shape possibilities for the future. That’s why engaging with this seemingly obsolete technology might encourage us to look beyond a narrative of newness to the unrealized possibilities in the past. It might likewise allow us to examine and expose the uncritical longing for an idealized past that pervades our political world today.

The beauty of the postcard is that it invites us to ruminate on those alternative possibilities, share them, and hold them in our hands—all for little more than the price of a postage stamp.

Art courtesy of author.

The post In Praise of the Postcard appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Again, we find the ’90s on our minds.  We ride a wave of nostalgia, seeking solace in those pre-COVID, pre-smart phone times. People and groups often feel nostalgic for the past when current circumstances are deficient, leaving us with a sense that something valuable has been lost, an unsettling discontinuity between past and present. Nostalgia often gets a bad rap: Critics dismiss it as regressive or reactionary, a sign that our view of the past is uncritically monolithic, making it easy to adhere to a rigid ideology. However, as those of us who study nostalgia can attest, it is also a complex, ambivalent emotion that can improve our personal and social wellbeing. In times like ours, immersing in a classic ’90s movie like Reality Bites may be a sign of emotional and psychological health, and a way of moving forward.

That millennials and Gen Xers are nostalgic for the 1990s is to be expected—we are typically nostalgic for the times in which we came of age. But the current ’90s nostalgia craze is a broader cultural phenomenon. Members of Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, are nostalgic for this decade that they didn’t even live through. Such “displaced nostalgia” is easily triggered by the way particular eras are represented in popular culture. Today we are awash in ’90s nostalgia, as evidenced by the resurgence of Friends and reboots of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Wonder Years, Saved by the Bell, and Sex and the City, among others. In the world of fashion, grunge has returned—witness the prevalence of distressed jeans—along with graphic tees, platform shoes, and cropped tops. Bands from the 1990s are also making comebacks: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls. And books are dedicated to the decade.

In the early 1990s, my dissertation advisor, Jerry Markle, and I conducted a study that asked over 200 college students the question: “If you could step into a time machine and press any year to go to—forward, or backward in time—what year would you pick and why?” The majority of students, young Gen Xers at the time, chose decades they never knew firsthand, the most popular being the 1960s. Respondents, likely reacting to the ways that decade had been mythologized in pop culture, perceived the 1960s as a time when young adults had more freedom. As one student, who chose 1969, told us, “This was a time where it was acceptable to be lost and confused and not have an understanding of where tomorrow is going. We can’t do that today.” Students’ comments showed they associated the 1960s with music, free love, and drugs. A student who selected 1968 did so because “there was love in the air, lots of good drugs and the Grateful Dead had just begun…also, there was no AIDS and everybody was having sex.”

If we were to conduct that survey today, what would we find? What explains Gen Z expressing displaced nostalgia for the 1990s? Popular culture again may give us clues but there are other factors that explain the trend. Consider the key events that have shaped Gen Z: the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; the Great Recession of 2007-2009; gun violence (Gen Z has been called the “School Shooting Generation”); weather disasters caused by climate change; extreme political polarization; and COVID-19. Faced constantly with disaster, it’s no wonder young people seek escape beyond their times.

They also seek escape beyond their technological milieu. The 1990s were the last decade before the internet and smart phones took over people’s lives and changed the way we consume culture. We still made mixtapes for ourselves or our friends, taking great pleasure in compiling songs onto cassette tapes. There was also more excitement in chance encounters—when you heard your favorite songs play on the car radio, or when a particularly juicy, train-wrecky installment of Behind the Music aired on VH1. Today, with streaming, we can binge almost any television program over a weekend. The built-in anticipation of waiting to watch your favorite shows on a particular night of the week is gone.

Technology has transformed face-to-face interactions and relationships, too. MIT social psychologist Sherry Turkle has warned of technology’s deleterious effects on our ability to meaningfully communicate with one another and build empathy. As much as our technological devices can do, they are no substitute for authentic human relationships, which feature raw emotion, complex verbal and nonverbal cues, and genuine concern about others’ wellbeing. Our young people, the born-digital generation, experience a great deal of digital stress.

In recent years, during class discussions about technology and stress, many students in my sociology classes have expressed a desire to opt out of social media platforms, and to put away their phones for a while. They report feeling an obligation to be reachable, all the time. And the inevitable social comparisons that social media platforms facilitate has concerning implications for mental health, as well.

A big part of the appeal of Friends, and perhaps a reason for its huge resurgence, could very well be the novelty of seeing young adults navigating relationships and experiences with one another, and not through digital devices. When the characters meet at Central Perk, their local café hangout, they interact face-to-face. In real life today, coffee shops are often filled with atomized individuals tuned into their phones or laptops. Cell phones have become a ubiquitous “involvement shield”—sociologist Erving Goffman’s term for a social cue indicating that the individual is not engaged in the physical space they are occupying. Surely, the (over)use of digital devices has adversely affected the vibrancy of public spaces, the sense of shared community with others, and awareness of what is happening in one’s surroundings. Perhaps the current nostalgic turn to the ’90s can facilitate an intentional rejection of being so glued to our phones.

Social psychological research shows that nostalgia can facilitate continuity of identity, protect against loneliness, and promote healthy connections with others. In times of great uncertainty, it may be healing to put on some ripped jeans and a baggy t-shirt, invite some friends over, and play your favorite mixtape (which probably features songs by Nirvana, Boyz II Men, and R.E.M). Nostalgic reverie can give way to a future-directed nostalgia that envisions a brighter future. It may be that we can all find some inspiration in looking back.

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With this neologism, Hofer was describing the deep melancholy—a “wasting disease”—of students and soldiers, “principally young people and adolescents sent to foreign regions.” These fledgling travelers wandered international campuses, landscapes, and cultures, encountering new experiences that changed how they viewed the world.

Like so many college freshmen today, sometimes they got homesick, wishing for some semblance of stability and normality amongst a tumult of new things and ideas. But even when they returned home (nostos, in the Greek) they were often confronted by the painful (algos) realization that they could never really go home again. Because things had changed.

Most contemporary accounts of nostalgia forget these origins. Instead, nostalgia conjures images of wistful old men: “Back in my day …” Sometimes it’s imagined as tyrannical, circulating repressive pasts (e.g. President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” jingoism). Or it’s trivialized as spinning the muddy wheels of pop culture (endless film remakes and BuzzFeed listicles recounting “28 Things That’ll Make Every ’90s Kids Say, ‘Wait, I Had That In My House Too!’”).

Often, nostalgia is mocked, as in this commercial for the Cree LED light bulb: “The light bulbs in your house were invented by Thomas Edison in 1879. Now think about that with your 2013 brain. Do you still do the wash down by the crick while your eldest son keeps lookout for wolves? No. You don’t. This is a Cree LED bulb. It lasts 25 times longer. Nostalgia is dumb.”

Seen this way, nostalgia is stupid, regressive, stuck in the muck. And yet ingenious potentials sprout from that grime if we only think back to the transformed horizons of Hofer’s intrepid young travelers. Their stories remind us that nostalgia is often about change.

In fact, most contemporary social psychologists argue that nostalgia isn’t just the homesickness that Hofer depicts. It’s the full balancing act people perform when they are faced with instability and must consider their past, their present, and their future possibilities.

Whether switching jobs, confronting political turmoil, or traveling abroad to study, people facing existential flux look back to secure ideal pasts and the identities therein. In this light, true nostalgia is a tool of wellbeing. It’s also omni-temporal. That is, nostalgia is simultaneously a pride for the past, a feeling of loss in the present, and a hopeful longing to recover an ideal future.

My work over the last decade has focused on the final link of this chain—the recovery of lost futures. I’ve unearthed the ways designers (from computer programmers who knit to ER physicians who negotiate patients’ values) have communed with nostalgia, wandering through the ashes of lost ideals, traditions, and timelines in order to forge better futures. Such nostalgic design inspires creativity because it provides opportunities for innovators to question the inevitability of the current form of things and to explore alternative ideal pasts and the new futures that might stem from them.

Let me give you some examples:

In 2013, the cloud platform Heroku held its Waza developer conference in San Francisco. Waza, Japanese for art and technique, featured the typical motivational talks, demonstrations of novel coding methods, and philosophical musings on new kinds of programming. But the event also juxtaposed these high-tech discussions with hands-on sessions of nostalgic making.

Participants communed at tables across the San Francisco Design Center and learned from experts at origami, quilting, woodblock printing, book binding. Attendees, that is, were invited to wander nostalgically through the creative making of the past.

“Why do we care about crafts?” Heroku COO Oren Teich asked in his opening address. “Because I want you to be thinking not just about ‘how do I write the best line of code,’ but ‘how do I open myself up to world of what’s possible.’ … If you’re just working with what you know, you have a very narrow view of the world, but if you can look at origami or printmaking, you’re going to be a better programmer.”

Essentially, Teich was priming his audience to use longing for the slow care of handicraft to rupture their everyday fast-tech beliefs and see their programming in a fresh light. Innovation + tradition = revolution.

Though this formula may seem lofty—and Teich’s conference might sound like empty Silicon Valley bullshit—such ruptures have often borne ingenious fruit. We could ask, for instance, what if traditions of Japanese origami had transformed aerospace engineering in the 21st century?

We don’t have to look too far for an answer; the career of physicist Robert J. Lang illustrates such a trajectory. Lang, who has experimented with origami since age 6, received a PhD in applied physics and then worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Plying an origami-based nostalgic design, he then consulted with the German manufacturer EASi to make a better folded airbag and collaborated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on folding a football-field sized telescope into a small rocket.

But such nostalgic design works both ways. Lang has also used his mathematical know-how to transform traditional origami, becoming a world-renowned master for his intricate works from scaled fish to cuckoo clocks. His ability to hold tradition and innovation in his mind simultaneously, each sculpting the other, makes him a virtuoso of both.

Latvian mathematician Daina Taimina’s groundbreaking work on non-Euclidean geometry is a similar example of the power of nostalgic design. For almost two centuries, mathematicians struggled to find ways to model the abstract concept of non-Euclidean hyperbolic space. But it wasn’t until 1997 that Taimina had a eureka moment: she could use crochet to craft durable non-linear planes. Taimina’s crochet (now housed at the Smithsonian) allowed students to touch a form of mathematics they previously could only picture in their heads; it sparked interest in geometry in female fiber artists across the world; and it highlighted the systematic exclusion of women’s ways of knowing from the sciences.

Mathematician Daina Taimina with her non-Euclidean crocheted organisms. Courtesy of Tom Wynne.

This last point shouldn’t be underestimated. Nostalgic designers like Taimina, Lang, and Teich are driven by listening for lost, undervalued, and excluded peoples’ ideals. We might call this a neostalgic ethic, longing for futures that could have been. Along this path, nostalgia becomes a form of expertise: the ability to creatively navigate an adaptable repertoire of temporal lifeworlds (craft and coding, origami and engineering, geometry and fiber art) rather than keeping them artificially separate.

In contrast to such temporal adaptability, one of the core models of innovation over the last 40 years has been Everett Rogers’s diffusion of innovations curve, which charts who adopts new tech, why they do it, and what designers can learn from them. Rogers calls his ideal users “innovators” and “early adopters”—the bleeding edge consumers who experiment with the latest tech, influence others to purchase it, and give feedback on changes that might make it better. Inventors listen to early adopters incredibly carefully.

But there’s another set of users who are ignored in this model: those citizens Rogers bluntly labels “laggards,” whose decisions not to adopt shiny new tech “are often made in terms of what has been done in previous generations.” By overlooking these people—a population who often can be a combination of working-class, older, disabled, or minority users—innovators leave the transformative worldviews of innumerous peoples and cultures on the cutting room floor. Such a model excludes a huge swath of the population from the future.

Conversely, Taimina, Lang, and Teich each embody not only the benefits of nostalgic design but also the cross-cultural interlacing of ideal traditions and innovations. Preferably, such layering puts disparate communities, cultures, and peoples directly into conversation.

Take the rise of makerspaces in U.S. middle school and high school libraries. As reported by the School Library Journal, “About three-quarters of librarians overall say they coordinate maker activities with other teachers.” As these high-tech spaces proliferate, however, the traditional “makerspaces” of the public school—woodshop, autoshop, and trade programs—are fading. In California, for instance, three-quarters of high school shop programs have disappeared since the 1980s.

By the logic of nostalgic design, rather than replacing autoshops with maker labs, we would do better to host them in the same space, layering innovation and tradition. And, as Taimina’s crochet work hints, we might add a Home Ec lab for good measure.

The value of these merged spaces would lie less in the equipment (technology goes out of date so quickly) and more in the collaborations among people there and the social bridges built as a result. The networks of cross-cultural friendship, giving, and trust that could emanate from such places are increasingly important in an era where digital echo chambers and political filter bubbles breed ideological isolation.

We need spaces where different people from different traditions can wander, wonder, and work together to produce different thinking. This is innovation. This is how we use tradition to rupture our way into the future.

“Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, a cure,” wrote the late Svetlana Boym, the artist, playwright, novelist, and Harvard comparative literature professor, who launched contemporary nostalgia studies. “But it is up to us to take responsibility for our nostalgia and not let others ‘prefabricate’ it for us.”

It’s up to all of us, that is, to use the past to wander into new futures.

The post Nostalgia’s Ingenious Potential appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A middle-aged Cuban man, the friend of a friend of a relative, picked me up from the airport and took me to Walmart to buy some basic goods to take home with me. Unsurprisingly, the topic of Venezuela’s current situation came up. He said he remembered back when Caracas was an important metropolis—he had visited it in the late ‘70s—and Miami was a small, backward town in comparison.

The man took out his phone to show me a video of a 1985 Christmas greeting from RCTV, the Venezuelan TV network that was closed down by government pressure in 2007. With all the glitz 1980s South American television could offer, the network’s stars—most of them unknown to me—paraded around cartoonish backdrops of folkloric Christmas vignettes surrounding a minimalistic manger while lip-syncing a Christmas-style song about how RCTV is part of your family.

Every now and then, they were interrupted by a lion, the network’s mascot, dancing.

As much as I tried to relate, that Venezuela was foreign to me. The video was made 6 years before I was born and I wouldn’t exactly call tacky Christmas messages a cornerstone of my national identity. I’ve spent two-thirds of my life under the Bolivarian Revolution initiated by Hugo Chávez, and I’ve long been outraged and shed tears about my country. But I also have learned to pick my battles and measure my frustrations. So it was bizarre to sit stoically and nod while this person I just had met cried and ranted for my own country, my fallen country, my kidnapped country, my corpse of a country, which I was preparing to return to while continuing to keep myself afloat.

Nostalgia is powerful. For migrants, refugees, and any group forced to abandon home, nostalgia is not only a way to connect to their roots, but also a tool for preserving part of their own identity. For Venezuelans, nostalgia manifests in a variety of forms with different, contradictory meanings. It can be a respite, an obsession, and a painful reminder of missed chances and losses. At its most extreme, nostalgia becomes the only reality people can face: The present is bleak, the future is uncertain, only the past is safe.

But nostalgia today is not the private experience it once was. This is particularly true in Venezuela, where a constant stream of videos and images shared from dozens of social media accounts focused on the country’s past is difficult to ignore. Many of these accounts are linked to institutions such as the prominent newspaper El Nacional or the Archivo de Fotografía Urbana. Others are focused solely on a medium like television or a place like Caracas.

Many of the most popular, such as GFdeVenezuela, lack any specific theme or time span beyond the sharer’s mood. Today it could be about Christian Dior opening shop in Caracas in 1953. Yesterday, it was Charles de Gaulle’s visit in 1964, or hotel architecture in 1930s Maracaibo, or the commercial hub of Sabana Grande in the early ‘80s.

These purveyors of images have formed a community of dedicated, anonymous individuals obsessively collecting and sharing material from all sorts of sources. A vast majority seem to come from public archives and publications, such as TIME, or from commercial stock. Exactly how accurate these images are is a matter of contention, particularly since many of them are now taken as fact, especially when they reaffirm popular opinions about better days gone by.

Spend enough time falling through this social media rabbit hole, and nostalgia becomes something soothing, an analgesic to a home you no longer recognize. This is understandable. In a way, it’s a logical counterweight to the ever-present reports of inflation, scarcity, violence, and government abuse.

Paradoxically, it’s also a source of pain to remember when our nation was not a bogeyman or a cautionary tale but a regular country with regular problems. It’s especially bitter to recall Venezuela at its best, as something of a beacon of progress, democracy, and stability in a continent beset by hunger, poverty, and military regimes.

But nostalgia is not really history; it’s more an evocation of the past, which may explain why it’s usually born from the most mundane, unsuspecting things, like eating hallacas at Christmas surrounded by family, a TV ad for a toilet cleaner, or old foreign newsreels showing a radiant Caracas that now looks so dim and dismal.

The YouTube comments on the Christmas video I watched in the Miami parking lot are proof of that. “This revolution ended our country. Even Christmases are sad,” said one. “We didn’t see the disaster that was coming,” said another. “How not to cry seeing this? My beautiful Venezuela! You will return! You will reborn!”

One of the most repeated sentences in the comments was: “We were happy and we didn’t know it.” Over the years this expression has become a motto of sorts for this bittersweet variant of nostalgia.

This broad, incoherent limbo where the quaint 1950s Caracas, still with its red-tiled roofs, coexists with the sprawling city filled with skyscrapers from the ‘80s. The opulence of the booming ‘70s merges with the austere ‘90s. All of these past, pre-Chávez Venezuelas are compressed into a simplified composite Venezuela that is both very intimate and easy to relate to.

And whose Venezuela is this? My grandparents’ generation still wants the country where they lived most of their lives; those of my parents’ age want the nation that could have been but wasn’t. My generation inherited a second-hand nostalgia—the evocation of a past that isn’t ours. The youngest, who have spent their entire lives under Chavismo, get conflicted feelings, a strange mix of pride and shame, but ultimately this past is mostly alien.

Ultimately, when a whole country spends so much time admiring these different images and moments from the past, the question of when we took the wrong turn arises. Was it in 1998? 1983? 1958? Nostalgia then can be an efficient tool not only to stir emotions, but also to create narratives, lead minds, and control people.

It’s interesting that one of the first sites to take advantage of Venezuelan nostalgia on social media was Venezuela Inmortal. At first glance, it appeared to be just another source for pictures and videos from the 1950s, particularly newsreels and publicity stills of large construction projects built under the right-wing dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez (1952-1958): Housing projects, highways, cable cars, and the Rockefeller Center-like Simón Bolívar Center.

But if one paid enough attention, you would notice videos of military parades and speeches of general Pérez Jiménez—a chubby, dull little man who was friends with Perón, Trujillo, and Franco. And next to those were comments portraying the democratic governments that came after as corrupt unpatriotic populists who caused Venezuela’s decline. Unsurprisingly, Venezuela Inmortal has connections with fringe far-right movements.

Another Pérez Jiménez admirer, at least in his early years in politics, was Hugo Chávez himself. He even invited him to his swearing-in in 1999. Perhaps, Chávez was simply capitalizing on a general disappointment in the bipartisan democracy that had been established in 1958 but came to be considered self-serving and out-of-touch by the early ‘90s.

Like Pérez Jiménez, Chávez saw Venezuela through the lens of nostalgia; for him, the rule of Simón Bolívar as a long-gone Heroic Age. So Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” sought to reframe the century and a half between the country’s independence and Chávez’s tenure as one long dark age of exploitation and injustice—with very little difference between dictatorships and democracies.

In this understanding of history, Chávez was a redeeming figure, seeking to fulfill an updated version of Simón Bolívar’s dream. Complex and pragmatic historical figures and events were clearly divided between good or bad, while a couple of figures were rescued from the dustbin of history to fit the official narrative. Simply having a sense of history was to subscribe to one pole or another: The Chávez revisionist history, or all the histories that came before that.

Venezuelan historian Manuel Caballero, in his book Contra la abolición de la historia (Against the Abolishment of History), argues that the process of reducing history to a straight line between its original, founding myths and the current power figures robs history of its living, collective essence, in the service of creating new, inalterable legends.

Caballero points out that the Chávez movement was hardly alone in using a historical redemption to justify itself. Movements across the political spectrum, from far-left guerrillas to right-wing dictators like Pérez Jiménez, also employed the same narrative—a glorious past, the decadence and corruption that led to the present, and the need to restore that moment of glory, that golden age.

In this way nostalgia, and its simplification of the past, can be dangerous. Instead of being just a shared reminiscence, nostalgia becomes a rock upon which we can crash our feelings of frustration and discomfort with the seemingly unsolvable problems of the present. This surrender to nostalgia is all but a declaration of hopelessness about the future, as if to say that Venezuela, where over 27 million people still live, is only worth existing as a memory.

Now that I am back in Venezuela, my mind often goes back to that Cuban man showing me that nostalgic video in the Walmart parking lot. Of course, it wasn’t his nostalgia, and the truth is that it is not mine either.

I don’t know what’s going to happen in Venezuela in a year or even a week but I deeply hope my people will learn from the past instead of idealizing it. And I wish that, when the time comes, we help each other build a new, better country. One where we can focus our admiration and our hopes on the future, once again.

The post Why Rising Venezuelan Nostalgia Makes It All the Harder to Imagine a Future appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Two things are funny about this: First, I didn’t actually experience Andrew, because I didn’t move to Florida until 1993. Second, that was the extent of hurricane preparations back then—duct tape to be sure that if the windows shattered, the glass would stick together, instead of splintering into tiny and dangerous little pieces. When you’ve grown up with hurricanes, their memories—like the tape residue—never quite go away.

My first real hurricane was Erin in 1995. Then nine years old, I had no idea what to expect, but figured that all hurricanes were the same and this one would tear my house apart. So I took matters into my own hands. I got that green plastic mover’s wrap you can find at U-Haul, fully wrapped the 13-inch CRT television I’d negotiated having in my bedroom, and put all of my books, Barbies, and beanie babies in plastic storage bins.

During Erin, every window in our home was covered with plywood, so inside the house it felt like it was 2 a.m. even during the day. I plopped down to watch the living room TV, but all broadcasts had the same information on loop until the next National Hurricane Center forecast was released (every 6 hours). After several hours of this, I decided that my house was not going to flood and that I could unwrap my bedroom television and go back to watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

I don’t mean to be flip—I know that hurricanes can kill people and destroy entire regions, and, when response and relief are slow to arrive, the aftermath of these storms can be even deadlier, as Puerto Rico is tragically experiencing right now.

The author as a child in front of her family home in Davie, Florida, October 28, 1994. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

But for those who have lived in hurricane-prone places, these epic disasters can come to feel routine. For me ever since Erin, hurricanes have been business as usual to me. Floridians rarely flinch at anything weaker than a Category 3. You go through the motions: put plywood on the windows, get enough water and non-perishable goods, fill every car you own with gas to the brim, and hope for the best.

As a kid, I always hoped the hurricanes would come during the week so school would get cancelled. If we were really lucky (which I was a few times), the storm would hit on a test day and I’d have a few extra days to study.

The familiarity of the pre-hurricane procedure was, in its way, comforting. My family would sit on the couch and flip between The Weather Channel and Spanish news. My mom would go up to the TV and point to all possible trajectories, always deciding that we’d be a direct hit. My dad would then reason with her. But we were all experiencing it together.

The feeling that this was a holiday continued during the lull after the storm passed through. It almost feels like Christmas morning, where everything is quiet, and no one is in the streets yet and riding their bicycles.

The storms, like birthdays or holidays, eventually become part of the way you remember life.

In 2004, there was Ivan, which made me late for my first day of college in Chicago. The airport didn’t reopen until an hour after my flight was supposed to take off. Similarly, Ernesto in 2006 made me one week late to my study-abroad program in Paris.

I remember Katrina. My mother’s prediction of our home being a direct hit finally came true in August 2005 when the eye of Katrina made its first landfall just north of Miami as “only” a category 1. It was nothing compared to what happened in Louisiana, but it still managed to leave a million Floridians without power and cause $630 million dollars’ worth of damage.

In the lull after that storm, sitting in my bedroom, I managed to write to one of my dorm mates from college, who lived in New Orleans. I warned that as a category 1 storm, it’d been very powerful, and hoped he’d be careful. He wrote back to confirm he and his family had evacuated to north Florida. When we got back to school a few weeks later he let us know that his home was under 6 feet of water and was a total loss.

That same season was when I experienced my first hurricane from afar. Wilma ripped through Florida later in 2005. It was one of the latest-forming storms I can remember, hitting in late October. Comfortably welcoming fall in Chicago, I talked with my parents every day. They called to say they were safe and had a generator to power the fridge. Within a few days, my dad had run hundreds of feet of extension cords to power our three neighbors’ refrigerators. It took three weeks for their power to get restored.

A map showing the author’s family home during Hurricane Irma, September 6, 2017. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

I still visit often, but I haven’t lived in Florida since 2005. As it happens, no major hurricane since Wilma in 2005 had made direct landfall in Florida, until this year. Over the last 12 years, my family had dealt with warnings and evacuations, and my parents, instead of scurrying to Home Depot for plywood, replaced those outdated jalousie windows with some double paned windows with beautiful colonial grilles. To protect them, they invested their tax refunds on accordion shutters that take no more than 5 minutes per window to close.

But Irma brought the hurricanes back home. From Los Angeles, where I live, I started tracking Irma as soon as it became a category 5 storm. On Monday, my mom texted “Looks like pinche Irma is coming.” Harvey had just destroyed Houston, and this was poised to be an even stronger hurricane, so there I was again, every six hours looking for the next National Hurricane Center forecast update.

On Tuesday, I asked my mom if they wanted to evacuate, and volunteered to book their flights. She said they’d wait and make a call on Thursday. On Wednesday, I sent my mom a graphic of the latest trajectory, which showed Irma blowing directly through their house. I asked again if they wanted to evacuate.

On Thursday my mom said she wanted to evacuate but my dad didn’t want to. My anxiety and frustration grew. That night I had a dream that the roof of our home tore off. On Friday, I took action and told mom that the safest place in the house was in the bathroom (most inner, central place in the house, without windows). I wasn’t sure if that’s true or not, but it made me feel better.

On Saturday, my aunt, uncle, and cousin came to my parents’ house—they live in a mobile home and those are always unsafe. Curfew started at 4 p.m.

On Sunday, as soon as I woke up and still in bed, I texted my mom to check in, but my iMessages were not going through. That meant they lost power and/or cell service. I started to panic. I texted everyone else in the house: Mom, Dad, brother, cousin, aunt. Nothing. Finally, after what seemed like the longest 20 minutes of my life, a message finally came through. All were safe. Relief.

Through the whole process, every ounce of me wanted to be there, in the storm with my family.

The post Longing for the Softer Side of Hurricanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Of course, as we argue in our Inquiry, Why Libraries Will Shape the Future, the purpose of libraries and librarians—to disseminate information—is more relevant than ever in the internet age. But what of the physical spaces, which Mark Twain called “the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them?” Will these institutions that once helped define communities still exist? And why should they?

In advance of “Do Libraries Have a Future?” a Zócalo Public Square event in partnership with WeHo Reads, we asked eight writers to reflect on the most memorable library they ever visited, what it meant to them, and whether it should exist in 100 years.

The post Why Libraries’ Survival Matters appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Tucked into black paper tabs,
a photo of an atomic cloud
marks the page of an album.
I guess it’s OK now, he said, meaning
giving it away. It will not make you
close your eyes. It does not match
the famous image—fireball
ballooning up, top split from the stem.
Our photo shows an intact, darker
column a breath—blink,
swallow—sooner. Tick, tick, tick.
Whose? Another official shot.
I imagine a page of language
that appears to be woven
from platinum—each verb glinting.
The surface itself would be an excerpt
knifed from the hem of a priest’s robe.
A priest’s body is on loan
in one museum, the placard explaining
how under the lid of the sarcophagus
a scribe copied the glyphs of a prayer
too old for him to understand:
vertical bars patterned with eyes,
another line like a fret glued
to a guitar. Did the garble
protect this body from history?
Is that what language does?
I kneeled at the bottom of its glass
case & stared. Here are the chapped feet.

The post Personal History appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

But there are stories of renewal here, too. In 1992, the bakery chain that defined Northeastern Ohio became the latest business to close its doors. As it turned out, that wasn’t the end of the story, but the beginning of mine.

At its height, Hough (pronounced “Huff’s”) Bakery was a $25 million business with 1,000 employees and some 81,000 square feet in operating space spread over 30 locations across our region. Hough’s bakeries were beloved for their cakes, butter cookies, coconut chocolate bars, and “daffodil” cakes, all of them made from scratch and with top-quality ingredients, not mixes.

The business began with Lionel Archibald “Archie” Pile, who was born on August 29, 1879 in Barbados and immigrated to New York City, where his brothers lived, at age 21.

In 1902, Archie Pile moved to Cleveland, Ohio, where he also had relatives living. He worked at a local grocery store on Hough Avenue, earning $8 per week. After saving $57, Pile made a down payment on what would soon become the first location of Hough Bakery.

On May 25, 1903, Pile opened his doors for business on Hough Avenue. Shortly after, he fell in love with and married Kate Welker. Together, they raised their six children during World War I. As their family grew, Hough Bakery also prospered, despite the ensuing Great Depression. The Piles’ four sons eventually joined the family business, and by the 1950s they led the operation with their father’s wisdom.

Archie Pile and I share a first name, and a devotion to quality baking. I was born in 1948 in Wildwood, Tennessee and grew up under the care of my grandmother. There were very few black families in the small rural area. As a young child without many other children to play with, I would watch my grandmother as she baked and helped out whenever she allowed me to. Seeing her make breads, biscuits, and pies fascinated me, and planted a seed that would eventually grow.

I visited relatives in Cleveland every summer and decided to move there in 1966, after I graduated high school. Once I arrived, I knew several people who worked at Hough Bakery, and they were able to help me get a job.

Customers form a line outside of a Hough Bakery in 1945.

My first position was in the sanitation department. As a black person, it was difficult to rise in rank and join the bakery’s production team. I was denied advancement and told I needed more experience—the very experience they were denying me. After I filed a grievance with the union, the Pile family became aware of my situation and immediately promoted me up to production. This was where my passion for baking reignited, and from that point on, I was unstoppable.

The bakers were very temperamental, and wouldn’t teach everything they knew right away. I had to gain the confidence of the two head bakers. So while one baker was off, I would tell the other one working how much more talented he was. Doing that with both bakers led to them teaching me secrets they wouldn’t ordinarily teach anyone.

After working in various departments, I finally landed my dream job as one of the head bakers in the Specialty Bakery department, a.k.a. the Swedish department. It had gotten its name from an old Swedish baker who worked there and who wrote most of his recipes in Swedish. When he left, it was a nightmare trying to translate his work, which helped the name stick around. The department handled all large-scale catering orders as well as any special requests that customers might have.

This was the department that handled the millionaires; we catered all of Bob Hope’s birthday parties back in the ’70s and ’80s. The largest dessert I created was a brownie cheesecake topped with fruit for an event at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, which served approximately 3,000 guests.

Shortly after the Canton party, Hough Bakery closed. The chain had become so large that when the economy took a turn for the worse, it couldn’t maintain. The original owners sold the brand to a Wisconsin company that promised to retain all our employees, but was ultimately unable to do so. They began to consolidate locations, and eventually the whole operation went bankrupt.

It came as a shock that August day, as we discovered our loss of employment on the six o’clock news. The labor union called a meeting for the remaining 400 employees. They wanted to assist us, but the local baking industry could not absorb that many jobs.

I had the idea to reopen Hough Bakery as an employee-owned company, which led to many meetings and the formation of committees. But, unfortunately, we couldn’t raise the capital needed to move forward. The assets of Hough Bakery were then sold in bankruptcy court. Kraft Foods bought the bakery division just so they could lock up the recipes. People had tried to mass-produce imitations of our most renowned desserts, such as our seasonal daffodil cake, but even at twice the price our original recipes kept customers loyal. Getting ahold of those recipes let Kraft remove some of their biggest competition from the market.

Our lack of success left me disappointed, but not distraught. I had always wanted to own my own bakery, so I went around to auctions buying used baking equipment, which I stored in my basement. To pay the bills, I worked part-time in various catering departments as well as doing odd jobs like planting flowers and washing walls. A few people I worked for took a liking to me, and one catering company even went so far as to give me a three-compartment sink for washing dishes, free of charge.

Things seemed darkest as I looked in vain for a place to open up shop. Finally, I stumbled upon an old, unused bakery that still had a working oven, located in the neighborhood of Collinwood on the east side of Cleveland. The area wasn’t that well off, but at the time was a haven for people of Irish, Italian, and Hungarian descent as well as many black families. As soon as I signed the lease, I became paralyzed with fear. Would anyone show up?

The day that I opened Archie’s Lakeshore Bakery in 1994, I knew things were going to be OK. Almost instantly, people flooded the place, many of them from the surrounding neighborhoods. They had feared they were never going to eat their favorite treats again and were grateful to me for keeping the tradition going. We still make everything from scratch and refuse to alter the quality of our ingredients.

Because Hough Bakery had been a much larger operation than mine, my recipes were cut down in size, making them just different enough from the ones that Kraft had purchased to allow me to legally use them. A few years later, Kraft lost the national rights to the Hough brand, at which point I stepped in and acquired the name for myself.

To date, our most popular dessert is undoubtedly our white cake, which blends the taste of almond with other flavors in a way that is only possible to achieve when you make it from scratch. We’re also known for our “Hungarian Delight,” made by sandwiching raspberry and fudge filling between two butter cookies. We can only make them in the colder months of the year, as the fudge will melt in the summer.

The bakery has been open at the same location for 22 years now. People come from all over to visit us, but the majority of our customer base is still from greater Cleveland. Customers often come to share memories about growing up eating Hough baked goods. (The town of Davidson, North Carolina, which is home to many ex-Clevelanders, has asked us to open an outpost there).

One time, a woman walked into our store and demanded that we allow her to cut into one of our white cakes, as she didn’t believe they were really Hough’s. I was working in the back when I heard a noise coming from the counter.

When I investigated, I found the woman in tears. I asked her what was wrong, and she explained that this cake was a part of her childhood, and that she never thought she’d get to taste it again.

But she had. At Archie’s Lakeshore Bakery, we’ve created a bit of magic of our own.

 
In “Beyond the Circus,” writers take us off the 2016 campaign trail and give us glimpses of this election season’s politically important places.

The post The Double Rise of an Iconic Cleveland Bakery appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.