Though conceived and recorded as novelty, Francis Whiting Hatch's 1965 LP Urban Redevelopment and other Swan Songs of Old Boston (Bert & I Records) captured a transitional moment - at the ground level - for one of America's oldest and most contested cities. Hatch came from a prosperous Boston family, growing up in Medford and attending Harvard University while the Great War surged across the Atlantic. After a career working for an insurance agency, he retired to a drastically changing city following World War II. He'd been writing jingles and light-hearted poems for local press and radio for years, but as he faced retirement, he started writing nostalgic piano ballads that sought to capture distinct moments of his youth and young adulthood in a city that, despite its outward-facing obsession with history and preservation, had taken a wrecking ball to so much of itself.
Every song on the LP exemplifies varying social and historical conflicts in greater Boston. "Some Coward Closed the Old Howard" and "Bronze Memorial Plaque" criticize the city's inability to preserve (or even properly memorialize) its bawdiest landmarks. "God Save the Bricks on Beacon Hill" intertwines classism, preservation, and religious sentiment. "Vote Early and Often for Curley" takes a nostalgic look at the Irish-Catholic ascent to City Hall and cultural dominance. "Dear Old Radcliffe Moon" and "I've Lost My Key to the Park in Louisberg Square" see Hatch narrating from perspectives of young women, making inadvertent statements about class and gender in Boston/Harvard society. This talk will take a critical look at this album and similar documents as historical artefacts, arguing for music’s crucial role in searching and archiving urban palimpsests under neoliberalism. It will also discuss Boston’s greater centrality to the global study of Urban Geography of the past century.
Tyler Sonnichsen, a Boston native, is Senior Lecturer in Geography and Geosciences at the University of Vermont. He is a cultural geographer with interests in music, transit, and media history. He published the book Capitals of Punk: Paris, DC, and Circulation in the Urban Underground (Palgrave) in 2019, and in 2022 founded Postcards from Irving, a zine chronicling the travels and vaudeville career of his great-grandfather. He most recently published on the relationship between bootleg CD markets and urban mobility in early-2000’s Madrid.
He completed his PhD in 2017 at the University of Tennessee, before moving to the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Central Michigan University in 2019. While there, his teaching specialties included Environmental Justice, Gender, and Popular Culture, publishing an interview with former Flint Mayor Dayne Walling on the 10th anniversary of the Flint Water Crisis. While at CMU, he also served as an adviser for the Clarke Historical Library and on the non-profit Board of Trustees for the Broadway Theatre, a local 1920 movie house. There, he produced a variety of events to bridge the university and local communities: theater shows, movie screenings, and comedy showcases. More information on Tyler is available at SonicGeography.com.
- Speaker
- Tyler Sonnichsen
- Venue
- MacRobert Building, MR055
- Contact
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Please contact Dr Christina Ballico (christina.ballico@abdn.ac.uk) if you wish to join the event via Teams.