PLATFORM: Paul Groth: A Festschrift

To honor the contributions to the study of the built environment of Paul Groth (1949-2022), the late professor emeritus of geography and architecture at the University of California, Berkeley — and mentor to several of PLATFORM’s editors and authors — PLATFORM organized a virtual Festschrift, inviting former students, colleagues, and others to contribute short pieces sharing a few thoughts about how Paul’s work — his writing, his research methods, his teaching, his mentoring — has shaped theirs. In an effort to offer distinct pieces that go beyond general discussion of Paul’s many wonderful qualities, these articles, assembled here, each focus on one lesson that the writer learned from Paul: one aspect of Paul’s writing, research methods, teaching, or mentoring that informs their practice. For a conversation between Paul and PLATFORM Contributing Editor Sarah Lopez click here.

Dell Upton

Paul Groth, a child of the local John Deere dealer and a music teacher, was born in Mayville, a small farming town in eastern North Dakota. That is the important thing to know about his career and his life. As a son of the Middle Border, Paul’s viewpoint is grounded in a pride and deep understanding of his rural roots. He offered countless students a sympathetic view of the economic and practical realities of agricultural life, as well as of the social nuances of farming communities, a world increasingly alien to students at universities such as Berkeley.

At the same time that Paul fiercely advocates the importance of such places in the American cultural landscape, his relationship to it is ambivalent. He still subscribes to the Mayville newspaper and remains in contact with his high-school classmates, but he has also been heard to say that “the best view is in a rearview mirror” and he chooses to live in and study cities. Similarly, Paul earned undergraduate degrees in architecture and music, and he remains engaged by both. He is a regular symphony goer, and he always knows what is current in the architectural profession, but his closest attention belongs to ordinary people’s lives and landscapes. It is difficult to overstate the fundamental nature of his book on hotel living (he lived for a time in a San Francisco SRO while doing his research) and his essay (with Marta Gutman) on working-class housing in Oakland, both of which radically challenged architectural historians’ normative views of domesticity and the nature of “the” American house at the same time that they offered significant insights into the development of cities.

Figure 1. Great Northern Railroad Depot (1897), Mayville, N.D. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 2. West Main St., Mayville, N.D. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 3. Mayport Farmers Co-op Grain Elevator, 3rd St. SE, Mayville, N.D. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 4. First National Bank (1889, enlarged 1900, 1915), Mayville, N.D. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 5. Bank of Mayville (1898), Mayville, N.D. Most small towns in the Dakotas were served by two local banks in their heydays. With the towns’ declining populations and the corporate consolidation of banks, most are lucky still to have one. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 6. West Main St., Mayville, N.D. The grain elevator and the former bank mark the financial heart of Mayville. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 7. Mayville Public Library (William C. Albrant, 1900), Mayville, N.D. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 8. Paula’s Café, Mayville, N.D. A local gathering spot and the source of Groth’s insistence on mid-afternoon pie during field trips. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 9. Miller’s Fresh Foods mascot, Mayville, N.D. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Figure 10. Former John Deere dealership, Mayville, N.D. When John Deere consolidated its dealerships, Mayville’s outlet was closed. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2019.

Paul and I began teaching at Berkeley in the fall of 1983 — me as a new assistant professor in architectural history and him in landscape architecture, an appointment that reflected his status as heir to the mantle of J. B. Jackson, his unofficial mentor. Our shared age and similar interests meant that we immediately became close friends. Over the ensuing decades of endless conversations and field trips, I have learned more from him than I can recount. The most illuminating has been his way of noticing connections and reading stories in the least prepossessing landscapes.

Figure 11. The Hotsy Totsy Club in Albany, Calif., established in 1939, is one of the many bars on San Pablo Ave. between Albany Village and the shipyards in Richmond. The allusion to the Confederate flag is probably intentional. Photograph by Dell Upton, 2012.

I will end with a recent example. The building where Paul now lives stands on the site of Albany Village, which was until recently a rickety collection of wooden buildings put up during World War II to house workers in the shipyards in Richmond (and then Berkeley graduate students). I never noticed — and wouldn’t have, had I not learned to do so from Paul — that the half-mile or so north of Albany Village, on the way to the former Kaiser shipyards, contains a remarkable number of liquor stores and small bars that obviously dated from the mid-twentieth century. To those without benefit of Paul’s way of seeing, these are unremarkable individual businesses. Those of us who learned from him can see a whole landscape where war workers let off steam.

Dell Upton is professor emeritus of art history at University of California, Los Angeles and professor emeritus of architecture at Berkeley.

Richard Walker

Paul and I arrived at Berkeley's Geography Department about the same time in the mid-1970s: he as graduate student (with an architecture degree) and me as raw assistant professor. While launched on different trajectories, we have orbited near each other ever since, with a gravitational pull and push from both sides. Paul was firmly in the cultural geography camp and I was steeped in Marxist economic geography but we shared a love of cities, urban landscapes, and field trips that kept tugging us along in tandem.

Four moments stand out. The first is Paul’s wonderful “AC15” guide to downtown Oakland. I was trying to develop field trips of my own through Oakland for Urban Field Geography, a course I had inherited from James E. Vance, Jr., circa 1980. I boldly said I could do it, without knowing much at all about the Bay Area or urban landscapes. Paul’s meticulous tour not only educated me about the riches of Oakland (“a great American city”) but also provided clarity on how field trips can function as teaching tools. Paul was the master.

The second moment was when Roger Montgomery, Dean of the College of Environmental Design, asked me on the sly to read Paul's book, Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels, and advise him on whether Paul was worthy of tenure. I was rather surprised that he would ask a young and controversial colleague for such input. I gave the book a rave review and, more importantly, learned a huge amount from it. That book changed the way urbanists viewed hotel and apartment living.

The third key event was when Paul invited me to give a talk at a conference he organized with Todd Bressi on J. B. Jackson’s work: a conference that was later published in the foundational text Understanding Ordinary Landscapes. I was surprised by this, too, since I was persona non grata in cultural geography. My talk and essay reflected the alienation I felt at the time, but also my belief in the potential for mutual understanding across the intra-disciplinary gulf — the kind that Paul and I nurtured. I deeply appreciated being welcomed by Paul into a new world of scholarly inquiry and started writing seriously about the cultural landscape of the Bay Area.

A fourth moment came when I moved to the deep flatlands of Berkeley in 2002. I invited Paul to join me in a walk around the neighborhood to survey the streetscape and talk about houses. By that time, I knew a good deal about styles and humble working-class housing from Paul's writings (particularly about West Oakland). Nevertheless, Paul's vast knowledge and discerning eye wrested insights from the vernacular that I continued to learn from.

Of course, there were many other encounters with Paul over the years. He was always present, door open to welcome students, colleagues, and questioners. Paul's influence on landscape studies was significant, to be sure, and let's not forget the thousands of students whose eyes he opened to the wonders of the urban cultural environment.

Richard Walker is professor emeritus of geography at Berkeley.

Figure 12. Cover “AC 15: Oakland as a Cross Section of America’s Urban Cultural Landscapes, A Visit by Bus, Foot & Armchair By Paul Groth,” 1980. Photograph by Elihu Rubin.

Daves Rossell

In section four of a ten-page set of directions for writing an essay, a set of guidelines he pointed out was longer than the essay required, Paul plainly listed the criteria to be used in evaluating the essays. His second criteria after the subject itself was “Respect.”

Seemingly nebulous, Paul gave a list of basic elements that would make respect clear in the essay, including “balanced background reading, tenacity in research, careful observation, skillful selection of evidence and examples, and the ability to follow format requirements.”

I would argue that this sense of respect underlay every aspect of Paul’s excellence as a scholar and a teacher and a model of generous humanity. He respected the ordinary landscape and the extraordinary stories it told. He respected his scholarly setting and the camaraderie of diverse faculty and students. He respected the craft of working out expression and understanding in writing and lectures. This respect showed through in his avuncular cajoling manner so engaging to undergraduates and graduates alike, and his almost saintly benediction of the leading scholars he introduced, and in his very high expectations of the work that could be done with creativity, a bit of bravery, and some of the hard work and steady effort he exemplified.

Figure 13. Paul’s slide of a flat field of sunflowers next to a wooded hillside. Photograph by Paul Groth.

Recently, I pulled my winter quarter 1982 ED169A reader off the shelf. For me, it’s the one with the back pages worn off, and with more highlighting and underlining than in any of my other school materials. It’s the one sitting next to an equally vintage ED169B reader as well as their counterparts in full semester versions from 1994–5.

Leafing through these treasured volumes, perhaps nowhere was Paul’s sense of respect more evident than in his “Midterm Preview” sample four-minute slide identification answer in the 1995 169B reader. The slide was described as “a flat field of sunflowers next to a wooded hillside.” The answer:

This shows field use typical in the Victorian era, after adoption of horse-drawn equipment (i.e. McCormack reaper). Only flatter fields are used; hillsides have reverted to trees. This specialization is typical of monomic landscape orders. J. B. Jackson’s article on the engineered countryside would lead us to expect these sunflowers to be a new hybrid variety that matches the height of a mechanical picker.

Remarkably, in only sixty-four words, the model answer identifies, or pays respect to the era, the landform, human agency, business, technology, science, and scholarship. All this was brought to mind with just sunflowers and a wooded hillside shown.

Did Paul write this answer? We’ll never know, but we do know that he taught it. And he followed it up stating:

Remember that multiple working hypotheses do exist. For each single view there are SEVERAL possible good identifications, explanations, and connections to ideas in reading. This is true not only in the exam, but also in everyday experience after the exam.

This is respect, so generous of praise and possibility, so open-ended and optimistic, so appropriate for a premier spokesperson of American cultural landscape.

Daves Rossell is professor of architectural history at Savannah College of Art and Design.

Figure 14. Paul working in his office in McCone Hall, 2008. Photograph by Sarah Lopez.

Aaron Wunsch

Part 1: Theory

“There are no boring landscapes, only landscapes we haven’t learned to see.” Thus spake Paul during his last lecture, in Berkeley’s Wurster Hall, in 2015. Except that, to honor him, I shouldn’t use words like “thus” and “spake,” which are all well and good for the likes of Nietzsche (who also believed in the value of walking, looking, and thinking) but less so for mere mortals, much less for graduate students who have never trod "the magnificent road to Zoagli" (though they would surely see new things there), who haven’t earned the right to call themselves nihilists (a dead end in any case), and are rightly skeptical of ideal types such as that of the Übermensch. Paul himself is, after all, both a mensch and, by most measures, the antithesis of an Übermensch, which I mean as the highest compliment. But more on that anon, er, below.

Like his mentor, J. B. Jackson, Paul leaves his students with useful epigrams and brilliant essays. A brief search of my hard drive reveals that I have repeatedly assigned “Streetgrids as Frameworks for Urban Variety" (1981), “Lot, Yard, and Garden: American Distinctions” (1990), and “Frameworks for Cultural Landscape Study” (1997). Of course, Paul wrote longer things, and I’ve also assigned those. But these short ones stay in my pocket, and I polish them like gems. Will I ever write anything as good? Will I ever be able to see the ordinary landscape as well, to pick out the underlying patterns, to describe them in clear prose, to convey the excitement and importance of doing so to my students? Probably not. Paul taught me these skills, but, alas, I’m no better at shedding self-doubt than he is.

Part 2: Practice

Strike “alas.” Ask yourself: is it really doing useful work in that sentence? The answer is: no. The same applies to “utilize,” which I’ve underlined several times in your paper. What is “utilize” doing that the word “use” couldn’t do just as well? Choose your words carefully. Confused writing shows confused thinking, not theoretical sophistication. Of course, a little mystification is fine. Accordingly, consider substituting “materialist” for “Marxist” in a few of the instances I’ve flagged. Above all, keep your writing lively and engaging. Yes, “the landscape is a political place,” as we’ve discussed in ED169. But your readers will appreciate that better if you invite them in (courtesy matters) than if you rub their noses in it or beat them with clichés and leaden proclamations. Would you like some examples? There are excellent ones in Landscape magazine, which Brinck edited and published beginning in 1951. He was a master of inviting prose, into which he slyly inserted a fair amount of theory.

Further investigation of my hard drive reveals that Paul won the Faculty Mentor Award in 2006. I know this because several of his students, I among them, nominated him for the same award in 2010. No matter that Berkeley avoids repeats in this category; he deserved it again and still does. Which brings us to recent history. In my capacity as a dread-filled organizer of the 2019 VAF conference, I wrote to Paul about a type of business conferencegoers would see en route. His response is a model of precision, generosity, and humility:

What I know about wig shops is written down in the Oakland tour book, AC 15. It’s a short passage, ‘D-1. Wig Shops: Low-Investment Retailing,’ on pages 77-78, about 10-13 lines. . . . My source on this, not cited, is a personal tour of Oakland in 1977 with my Ph.D. advisor James E. Vance, Jr. . . . He based the work on exhaustive field work, walking every block of the study areas. I don’t think his wig shop comment was ever put in print. I should have given him credit for the observation — if I remember correctly he told me not to quote him.

Our quotations can outlive us, especially if they have the ring of truth. The one untrue thing Paul ever said to me (as I was facing my qualifying exams) was a reassuring paraphrase of Billy Pilgrim’s epitaph: “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” What it lacked in honesty, it made up for in warmth, wisdom, and irony.

Aaron Wunsch is associate professor of historic preservation at University of Pennsylvania.

Figure 15. Paul delivering his last lecture at Berkeley, 2015. Photograph by Dell Upton.

Greg Hise

Reflecting on Paul’s life work sends me to a folder that’s been on my desk, or in a file drawer close by, for decades. The card stock is soft from use. The label, in pencil, circa 1984, is barely legible. “Urban pattern diagrams — Groth.” The contents are a timepiece. A graduate seminar handout, “How to Read Street Plan Histories in Three Easy Steps,” is a primer for studying grids from the “isonomic parent” to the “maxi-grid” with its “specialized mini-grids.” Matrices illustrate landscape types, land use patterns, and connections as these developed over time. The graphics are hand drawn and lettered as are the refinements and revisions, much like a Sanborn insurance atlas, one of his favorite sources.

Figure 16. Paul’s course handout “How to Read Street Plan Histories in Three Easy Steps.”

Paul’s fundamental source has been the built environment, an advocation he impressed on generations of students in ED169A and ED169B. Note the invitation in the handout. You can do this, and in a mere three steps. What is “it”? “AC15” (the “experimental edition” of which Paul was producing concomitant with “How to Read Street Plan Histories”) and related compendiums are how-to guides for those venturing out to conduct fieldwork in “the American city.” Were I to re-label the Groth folder the title would be a version of “Urban Sleuths: The Art of Formulating Questions.” Re-reading “AC15” I was surprised to find but one statement of a principle I have understood to be a foundation for Paul’s research and teaching: “learn to ask questions.” Fieldwork is visiting, not touring. You ask your hosts what they value in the environment, how they view outsiders, why they have invested in a place. I can’t recall Paul associating his practice with cultural anthropology but “AC15” is a call for ethnographies of cities.

That light touch of learning has been Paul’s mode as long as I’ve known him. While examining folk designs that professionals occlude from view, he admonishes readers to be mindful of structural systems (recall the quote from Clifford Geertz on the ED169 syllabus: “Believing, with Max Weber, that humans are animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be . . . an interpretive science in search of meaning.”). When I read “AC15” thirty plus years ago, it was with an eye for residential development and state policy that shaped city building in metropolitan hinterlands. Paul’s observations, distilled in the diagrams, provided a guide. Good texts reward episodic reading. My current questions informed the most recent re-reading. This time the margin notes highlight economic geography. I hadn’t thought of Paul as a student of investment capital, opportunity costs, land assembly, property valuation, and petit rentiers yet there it is.

“AC15” concludes with suggestions for further research. Though at times a fallback move, here it is another manner of formulating questions. Specifically, Paul’s advocacy for studies of informal front yard commerce, the space below elevated freeways, ethnic group foodways, regional transit systems, and shopping malls to note a few, has had results. More to the point, he has been an advocate for scholars who pursued these subjects. Now we have a monograph or more that examine these topics, a historiographic legacy Paul can be proud to have made.

Greg Hise is professor emeritus of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Figure 17. Paul and Greg Hise, Culver City, Calif., 2007. Photograph by Lisa Padilla.

Margaret Crawford

There are so many things that I admire about Paul. As a professor, he wrote about unexpected but important topics, his research techniques were famous for being both exacting and creative, he was a meticulous and generous editor, and, as an advisor, he turned out a remarkable number of outstanding scholars. As a human being, he had integrity, possessed a delightful sense of humor, and was overly modest. But if I have to choose his major contribution, it would be his undergraduate teaching.

For over thirty years, in his legendary lecture course, American Cultural Landscapes, taught in the landscape architecture, architecture, geography, and American Studies departments, and in smaller seminars, Paul exposed students to a new way of looking at the world. Every slide he showed and every statement he made was the product of his own extraordinary fieldwork, as he traveled countless miles across the country documenting local environments. These trips furnished the raw material that he used to uncover the logic and meanings of ordinary places, both familiar and unfamiliar. He showed students how land patterns, towns, urban neighborhoods, farms, factories, houses, and even signs were clues that could reveal something important about the American economy, society, and culture. Although I was never able to attend the class consistently, I dropped in enough times to be awed by the depth of his knowledge and enlightened by his explanations.

However sophisticated and nuanced his interpretations, Paul’s work always started in the landscape itself, a lesson he taught his students. He created field trips along city bus routes, with students carrying guides explaining what they would see from the windows. For many years, I carried a photocopy of his detailed guide to the San Francisco financial district in my car in order to examine, with his help, the history of each block. These field guides are local treasures and need to be published.

When I first arrived at Berkeley as a professor, I often asked students about their favorite faculty member. The answer was often Paul. As one student put it, “he made me see everything in a new way.” Teaching us this way of seeing was Paul’s mission and he accomplished it brilliantly.

Figure 18. Paul and PhD students, left to right, Seth Lunine, Clare Robinson, and Sarah Lopez, 2008. Courtesy Sarah Lopez.

Margaret Crawford is professor of architecture at Berkeley.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty

For fourteen years, Paul and I were colleagues at Berkeley. His book Living Downtown, appeared exactly halfway through that period. This meant that I heard a great deal about its contents, as well as the process of producing it, before I finally read it, but I was also around long enough to see its impact on the students we shared who knew him personally (since arriving in Ireland I have smiled particularly broadly every time that a colleague or a student has cited it, often describing what a key text it has been for them).

I learned many things from Paul about being an architectural historian, a teacher, and a colleague, but here I would like to focus on what I learned from him about cultural geography, a field to which I had had minimal exposure as a student, as it was not offered at any of the universities where I studied. Paul taught me that I and my students could only really understand cities, or indeed the scale of the human impact upon the rest of the environment, if we thought not only about buildings but also about land use. My students and I have read Living Downtown together, but also William Cronon and David Harvey, and the work of my Irish geography colleagues, Anngret Sims and Niamh Moore Cherry.

Moreover, I learned from Paul’s approach to cultural geography to think a lot harder about how class and ethnic identity shape how we experience landscapes, including the ones tilled by the customers of his father’s John Deere dealership and the carefully tended parks through which I walked during lockdown.

As I think now about the way in which architect Chloethiel Woodard Smith’s collaborations with landscape architect Dan Kiley contributed to the livability of her housing in Washington D.C.’s Southwest urban renewal district in the 1960s, or the rural locations of the Black Baptist churches dotting rural roads outside of Richmond to which Ethel Bailey Furman, the first Black woman who described herself as an architect to work in Virginia, added choir rooms and pastors’ studies, I rely on lessons learned from Paul about the relationship of buildings to their sites that come from his truly interdisciplinary and quietly understated understanding of the intersection of architectural history and geography.

These are places that, like Paul, are subtle and do not shout. Thus, their importance is often overlooked. Upon careful inspection, however, they too prove to have important stories to tell about the intersection of aesthetics and capital, class and race. Paul helped broaden our discipline and my own approach to it to encompass these.

Kathleen James-Chakraborty is professor of art history at University College Dublin

Figure 19. Paul’s mother in front of a John Deere tractor in Paul’s home town, Mayville, N.D., n.d. Photograph by Paul Groth.

Phil Gruen

It was 2003. Still a graduate student at Berkeley with an incomplete dissertation, I was eager to accept a visiting post where I could develop courses, hone my teaching, and use whatever time remained to more accurately label thousands of analog slides: “office building, Cleveland?” and “collapsing fence, maybe Oregon” — their subject matter, not their geographical imprecision, inspired by Paul’s desire to find anything in the landscape worthy of our attention. Though I pursued jobs in architectural history, I wished someday to teach a course similar to Paul’s inimitable ED169A and 169B on American cultural landscapes, which I audited at Berkeley in the late 1990s.

When I accepted a one-year job at Washington State University (WSU) in remote eastern Washington state, Paul — who had never visited the university himself — encouraged me to live “in town.” Not that I really had a choice: the town was a tiny place called Pullman, population 20,000 (perhaps 5,000 without students), surrounded by endless, rolling wheat fields. If I didn’t live in town, I’d probably be leveled by a combine. I knew what Paul meant, though. No matter how ordinary, the place mattered.

Figure 20. Flyer for Paul’s course American Cultural Landscapes 1900 to Present (ED169B), n.d. Courtesy Margaretta Lovell.

Through his methods in the study of the cultural landscape, Paul had taught me — perhaps all of us — to care about all places: to explore their streets (or fields), to search for clues in the environment, to dig deep, to hear the stories in the land. In Pullman, I listened to a grain elevator, railroad lines, an empty pea warehouse, and an equipment shed, objects I passed by regularly and all of which made it into a little walking tour brochure my students compiled in 2014.

Ours was hardly “AC15,” Paul’s brilliant, illustrated tour of Oakland, peppered with his characteristically witty, yet sharp, prose which cast a suspicious eye towards official, bureaucratic culture and the spaces it had wrought. Yet Paul’s methodological stamp shaped it: in its wide selection of building types, its sketches (though done by students, not me), and its attempt to read the town as a cultural landscape — one where buildings and landscapes were not categorized by style or era but swept into a larger narrative about the municipal and regional landscape.

Had I chosen not to live in town, I would never have undertaken the project, and I would have become less invested in Pullman’s well-being. Although the internet has long ago cast aside my slide re-labeling project, Paul’s methods reinforced the vitality of this place, which helped lay a foundation for my attention to all places.

I’ve now been in Pullman for almost nineteen years. And, though I don’t teach an equivalent of 169A nor 169B, I’ve imparted the cultural landscape into all my work. In this way and others, Paul’s impact runs deep.

Phil Gruen is associate professor of architecture at Washington State University.

Figure 21. Paul in the field, photographing, Manti, Utah, 2009. Photograph by Sarah Lopez.

William Littmann

Last summer, I rode my bicycle across the United States. My hope for this trip was that it would help me appreciate the richness of the American built landscape and, in this time of extreme political division, to listen to and understand my fellow Americans.

The number and variety of QAnon banners that I saw and stories about the “stolen election” that I heard made me realize that I will never comprehend the psyche of American voters. I had better luck with the landscape. All thanks to what I remembered from Paul’s American Cultural Landscapes course, or during car trips he and I took throughout the West.

Each evening, after cycling eight hours, I yearned for Paul to explain the panorama of outbuildings, crops, driveways, main streets, and fairgrounds that I’d flowed past. I remembered fragments of Paul’s axioms for understanding agricultural landscapes. They helped me comprehend how the irrigation systems worked, the arrangement of farmsteads, and, strangely, one of the most urgent questions: why it was so hard to find a place to pee in rural Kansas.

Let me explain. The temperatures were often above 90 degrees. The heat compels you to consume a lot of liquid. As a result, one spends much time scanning the landscape for a place to take a bathroom break — searching for an untended section of a farm or collection of shrubbery, an abandoned shed, or even a pile of trash.

Figure 23. Grain bins near Henrietta, Mo., 2021. Photograph by William Littmann.

Why was it so hard to find these particular features in rural Kansas? Paul knew. I remember him reminding me while we were driving near Parlier, California, to look at and admire the rigid organization of Central Valley farms. And as I cycled through the fields of Kansas, I passed through a meticulously ordered landscape that appeared as if every square inch was under the control of the farmer, with orthogonally situated buildings, straight rows of crops, even straighter driveways, and lines of ornamental flowers — all arranged as it were out of a Richard Diebenkorn painting. Not only did this landscape signal that there were to be no transgressions by desperate cyclists, but also the strict order suggested that I was always under the surveillance of the farmer.

If I had called Paul, he would have told me that I had to wait for county, state, or federal insertions into the rural landscape — the highway overpass, the irrigation channel, the state transportation department yard — knowing that these would be less organized and monitored than private farms.

Figure 24. Paul and William Littmann at Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake, Corinne, Utah, 2009. Photograph by Sarah Lopez.

Even though Paul might be disappointed in my inability to remember the definition of a “monomic landscape order” or much about “rural interchangeability,” he should know that he gave me the right questions to ask about what I was seeing, and that he was with me each day of my ride.

William Littmann is a Senior Adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts.

Marilyn Novell

A modest building on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood housing the Roxy rock club recently caught my eye. Two stories and covered in charcoal-colored stucco, it has a hipped roof verging on mansard, two small arched dormers, projecting pediments on the upper story, and a Deco-like theater marquee. A little research yielded a photograph of it shortly after construction, when the main tenant was a grocery called the Westside Market. Even then it exhibited a mix-and-match of various styles — French, American Colonial, and Georgian revival — following the pattern set by earlier upscale commercial properties along this stretch of Sunset Boulevard, known as Sunset Plaza. Further research revealed that the grocery was converted to a burlesque/strip club called the Largo in the 1950s, when the Moderne marquee replaced the market’s sign and the colors were changed to white and lavender. In the 1970s, the Roxy took over, and windows and other architectural details were covered in stucco.

My fellow preservationists dismiss this kind of renovation. They think that stucco applied in this way ruins the “integrity” of a building. But applying Paul’s logic of cultural landscape formation and his belief that “everything is information” reveals that it has its own meaning.

Figure 25. The Roxy, 9009 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, Calif. (1933, renovated since). Photograph courtesy Google StreetView, 2017.

Live music, centering on this stretch of Sunset, experienced an unprecedented period of creativity and innovation in the 1960s, made infamous by the "riots on Sunset Strip,” also known as the "hippie riots”: a period of civil unrest in the 1960s during which neighbors rose up in protest against the large crowds gathering inside the nightclubs and, more important, spilling onto the streets. The police intervened and imposed curfews, and gradually audiences abandoned the small live music clubs for larger venues, leading to a period of economic decline. Still, the Roxy, along with a few other clubs, endured.

Stucco is a cheap cover-all material. Owners use it when they can't afford to maintain a façade, or when they desire a more modern look. There are entire neighborhoods in South Los Angeles of century-old Craftsman bungalows, for example, that are coated in stucco, including the wood brackets, rafter tails, and porch columns. Forgoing aesthetic judgment, and employing Paul’s methods of reading the cultural landscape, these blankets of stucco tell a story about history and culture in their own right.

Marilyn Novell, a former student of Paul, is a preservationist in Los Angeles.

Alexander Benjamin Craghead

I know Paul through graphite. His penciled comments sit on the margins of many of my grad school papers and numerous drafts of my dissertation. The marks are light yet studied. I can still imagine him making them, never pressing his pencil so hard as to accidentally overemphasize a suggestion or correction, never moving so quickly that his meaning would be lost in haste.

I have always envied this about him. The margin notes I now make for my own students are restless to the point of impenetrability. His, by contrast, displays a kind stewardship even in admonishment. Paul's care for the written word — manifest in his marginside feedback — are reflections of his care for his students.

So are his stories. He frequently told his students about the Berkeley past, about times when, as he put it, "giants walked among us." He unfailingly passed to us good advice he had received from others, always crediting it, always making it clear that we depended upon the works and the kindnesses of others. When I faced the decision of what to research, Paul said to follow counsel he had once received from the late Larry Levine, acting out Levine's part, raising up his arms to say "follow your bliss!"

Another story was about his graduate student days, and an office-hours encounter with J. B. Jackson. After a bit of conversation, Jackson used a phrase to the effect of "people in our field," as if Paul were already his colleague. Yet the story, like many of Paul's, continued to a gently self-mocking point: Years later, while serving as Jackson's teaching assistant, Paul heard Jackson address an undergraduate with the exact same turn of phrase. I thought then that Paul's story was meant to encourage us, his anxious and ambitious students, to remember humility. I now see it differently, as a model of how Paul himself approached his students as colleagues in the making, as a part of something larger and greater. Above the many things he taught me about architecture, geography, and the history of the vast and varied American landscape, it is such subtle acts of teaching that continue to challenge me most.

Figure 26. Big tractor parade in Paul’s home town, Mayville, N.D., n.d. Photograph by Paul Groth.

Can I do this? Can I slow down enough, be deliberate enough, to convince my students that what they do is worth care, just as Paul did for all of us who were his students? The green ink that I leave smudged at the edge of last semester's undergraduate papers (much less on my own research) is a synecdoche of how lasting his example remains. Each comment, underline, or strikethrough that I make is a remnant of him, of my struggle to live up to his example. As a writer and a teacher, it is Paul's care for the word, and the greater meaning behind that care, that continues to shape me and (by extension) countless students and readers whom he will never meet.

Alexander Benjamin Craghead is a lecturer in American Studies at Berkeley.

Eric Sandweiss

Few things interest scholars more — or their audiences less — than their own intellectual genealogies. The threads tying our work to that of our mentors do more, I think, than explain a career’s origins. More selfishly, they also validate, for the members of a notoriously insecure profession, our worth. “My ideas might not always take off,” we think secretly, “but at least I learned from the best.”

I sought out the guy who “does rooming houses” on a fall day in 1985. I’d come to Berkeley after living in the San Francisco Tenderloin, where, I noticed, I was poised either to rise or fall. Up the hill from our Post Street apartment, buildings got fancier: their residents better dressed, their doorways better maintained. Down the hill, a different scene: residential hotels, corner bars, soup kitchens. Paul knew this social and architectural hierarchy well. Seeing in the naïve newcomer, perhaps, a potential fellow traveler down the Stranger’s Path (to borrow the title of one essay he asked me to read), he offered readings and weekly conversation tailored to channel my as-yet ill-informed interest in the geography of the American city.

Those conversations soon connected me to Paul’s own intellectual threads, which led back to the geographer James E. Vance, Jr. (still working on the other side of campus), and more especially to a character dimly familiar to me: J. B. Jackson, author of “A Stranger’s Path.” A thin thread, as it happened, had already tied me to Jackson. It led through John Stilgoe, my undergraduate tutor of a few years earlier, and the man who’d inherited Jackson’s Harvard lecture class. In Stilgoe’s (previously Jackson’s) shadowy office in Sever Hall, I’d come indirectly upon Landscape’s founding editor as the quirky observer who cast light on the pre-modern cultural meanings of the lonely road, the dark forest, the solitary grain mill. But here, over coffee in Paul’s well-lighted Wurster cubicle, I met what seemed like a different Jackson, this one pointing out the factory, the ranch house, the strip mall.

In years to come, I came to see Groth and Stilgoe as creative inheritors of distinct corners of a single, copious intellectual legacy — disciples distinguished not only by their temperament, not just by their respective attachments to Jackson’s twin intellectual poles of Berkeley and Harvard, but also by the manner in which each rechanneled his mentor’s ideas. I, one intellectual generation removed but now tied up in enough threads to unspool for a career, would have to learn to do the same.

Today, my own teaching days mostly behind me, I wonder if I’ve given my students half of what Paul offered to the young stranger at his office door. If not, I’ll take solace in saying — and not just to myself this time — “at least I learned from the best.”

Eric Sandweiss is professor of history at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Marta Gutman

In 1994, when I was a PhD student, Paul asked me if I would like to visit West Oakland with him. We were about to start working for the Cypress Freeway Replacement Project, invited by Adrian and Mary Praetzellis to consult on their historical archaeological investigation. After it collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, the state agreed to move the freeway, a mamouth concrete-frame, double-decker structure that had bisected the African American community since the 1950s. The Praetzellis’s project, required for environmental impact review, unearthed thousands of artifacts and revealed the stories of hundreds of people who, starting in 1869, lived near the heart of the area’s industrial machine, the Southern Pacific’s sprawling railyards. As Paul already knew and I would quickly understand, some historic structures remained standing; many others had been unceremoniously cleared.

We hopped in Paul’s car. This would be the first of many trips, and I remember the day vividly, the bright sun, clear air, and luminescent sky that is so characteristic of the late fall in northern California. We drove through the neighborhood, seeing backyards dotted with holes (archaeologists at work!), and discussing buildings that we would write about. We stopped at the corner of Peralta and Fifth Streets, two blocks north of the railyards. Peralta, platted as a seam between two tracts, is a storied place in the history of West Oakland — the route to and from work for railroad workers, the site of woman-run charities, and the location of the headquarters of the Black Panther Party. That day it was empty of life.

The reason became startlingly clear when we looked west: we faced the parking lot of the enormous U.S. Post Office Sorting Facility, built in the 1960s. I tried to imagine the social settlement house that once stood across the street; in this low-rent district (a concept I learned from Paul) modest buildings faciliated innovation by wealthier women who were determined to mitigate the burdens placed on working-class families by an indifferent industrial capitalist economy. I went on to learn that this settlement house, opened in an altered worker’s cottage in the 1890s and expanded over the years, served women and children through 1950s, when demolished to make way for the sorting facility.

In due course, Paul would help me to document the history of this egregious intervention and dissect the reasons why the state drove an architectural stake through the heart of a vital, if impoverished, Black community. That afternoon, he insisted we continue to study the landscape itself, to paraphrase Paul’s mentor and close friend J.B. Jackson.

Paul directed my attention to the east side of Peralta, with a row of workers cottages and other modest structures. The landscape order (another concept I learned from Paul) was completely different, and the architectural character — low-scale, worker-built, wood-frame — bewildered me. Paul knew that, and this is how his patient tutoring began. He pointed to a bulky, two-story building; the windows were boarded up; the uneven plaster façade was cracking and poorly patched, the trim needed scraping and painting. The building seemed unremarkable, and I was baffled by Paul’s excitement. I listened and looked again, following his counsel to give close attention to the entries — there were four — and the prominent bay window on the second floor. He surmised that this structure was built as a saloon and rooming house: one entry for roomers; one to the kitchen, for the proprietor; two to the saloon; the bay window advertising the business and distinguishing the proprietor’s apartment. Siting was also key to Paul’s analysis of the production of space — the building was positioned to capture the market for inexpensive housing and alcohol; each day, railroad workers passed by, walking to and from the yards.

I was astonished, and I was also hooked. Paul’s abiding interest in the everyday settings of older American citiesbecame my own, sustaining my fieldwork, interviews, and archival research. Paul taught me to shed my preconceptions and grapple with the urban landscape on its own terms. I learned the industrial landscape of West Oakland, riddled with the effects of social inequality and racial prejudice, was not a neutral backdrop but an active player. Paul also taught me to investigate how in different historical circumstances people harness opportunities in the built environment to make better lives. James Davidson was one of them; he was the carpenter who built the saloon and rooming house that Paul singled out on that sunny November day.

Marta Gutman is the interim dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York and professor of art history and earth and environmental sciences at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Figure 29. James Davidson’s Saloon and Rooming House, southwest corner of Fifth and Peralta Streets, Oakland, Calif. In the late 1880s, a canopy would have shaded the corner entry into the saloon. Photograph by Marta Gutman, 1997.

Ocean Howell

When I began graduate school, I was a theorist. I had written about skateboarding, defensive architecture, and surveillable space, interpreted through the lens of Foucault and Lacan. As my work progressed, I found myself less interested in interpretative frameworks, and more in the spaces themselves. Then I enrolled in Paul's walking-tour class. On the first day, we walked down Telegraph Avenue. On the first block, we stopped in front of the old Rexall drugs. The façade was late 1950s/early 1960s though the building was 1920s. Buildings change, Paul explained, especially retail space. And the way they change says a lot about our economy and culture, about ideas of prosperity and modernity. Look closer. What are the materials? Where were they fabricated; by whom? Where did the raw materials come from? "If you wanted," Paul said, "you could tell a global history just by explaining the materiality of this storefront." This observation struck me as profound, but in typical fashion Paul interrupted my epiphany: "well maybe that's taking it too far." I disagreed then, and I disagree now.

I had many revelatory moments with Paul but this one stands out. It was my introduction to the man, a brilliant and self-effacing scholar. It was also when I started to come around to the idea that the best way to tell a big story is to tell a small one with care and attention. That thought has guided everything I've done since. I wrote a book about neighborhood groups in San Francisco's Mission District. Anyone who reads it will learn all the archives have to offer about those groups. But they will also learn about racism in the labor movement, federal home finance programs, urban renewal, the Great Society, and more. All of these stories are anchored in the built environment.

I now teach a walking-tour course modeled directly on Paul's. I am always gratified to see students' faces light up when they realize that ordinary spaces hold fascinating and important histories. I may never read the built environment as well as Paul — and eagerly await his corrections to my dating of Rexall — but the effort is endlessly rewarding.

Paul exerted a great deal of influence not just on my intellectual development but my personal. I am a first-generation college student and, in fact, a first-gen high school grad: the son of a shutter maker and a florist. At Berkeley, I developed a kind of impostor complex that went beyond the garden variety. But Paul was the son of a John Deere tractor salesman from North Dakota. He spoke openly about the difficulties of being an outsider, but also the pride he took in his accomplishments. Paul allowed me to believe that I could also have a place in the academy. He came from an ordinary environment and worked hard to show people that it is often the most humble artifact that has the most interesting story to tell. I can think of no better way to spend a career.

Ocean Howell is associate professor of history at University of Oregon.

Figure 30. The old Rexall drugstore on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley and its evolution. Clockwise from top left, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2021. Courtesy Google StreetView.

Rachel Brahinsky

Paul taught me how to see the city. Where I used to see streets, sidewalks, buildings, and public art, I learned to see capital, migration, history, and ultimately political struggle. Where I had once considered apparently static things like walls and bridges as solid markers of urban time, I began to look for the processes that made them, and for the ways they revealed the material, and often terrible, solidity of cultural and economic history — from cycles of demolition and dispossession to layers of rebuilding and community repair.

The field of human geography pushes us to investigate the ways in which place itself is made through relational or dialectical events. Paul taught me to see these relationships in very concrete ways, through the carefully detailed and wonderfully specific examples that have been the building blocks of his work, like the intriguing cultural pairings of the urban landscape (e.g. those doughnut shops with great Chinese food, or storefronts that cling to far older identities than the changing cityscape around them). Or the inclinations of too-high fences or tilting facades, which in Grothian terms, were coated not just with a thick veneer of paint, but with an aspirational bent, seeking to surmount class boundaries and cultural barriers through color and form.

This gift of sight is practical and generative. I’m thinking of moments in which I rediscover with students the historical mysteries held in, for example, branching-lattice streets. A student’s question about this surprising pattern in the landscape inevitably leads to a conversation about how the streetcars that once rolled there were pillars of a capital scheme that reshaped the urban fabric, and which sought to bury evidence of what came before. The vernacular landscape is a text that reveals the dreams of the past, an archive of the tensions between capital and the grassroots.

Figure 31. Paul taking a break from touring, Butte, Mt., 2009. Photograph by Sarah Lopez.

In addition to the practical application of cultural landscape theory, training with Paul meant receiving excellent advice on how to organize life and work. Among other important lessons, Paul conveyed the importance of a good meal (with pie), access to public bathrooms when structuring a field trip, the power of an interpretive dance to punctuate a lecture, and the value of good humor and humanizing friendships in making academia matter.

Rachel Brahinsky is associate professor of urban studies and politics at University of San Francisco.

Mary Ryan

It was sometime around the year 2000 when a mobile classroom roamed around the San Francisco Bay Area, from North Berkeley to West Oakland to Union Square, with Paul as our guide. Novices like me as well as advanced graduate students with architectural credentials were all treated to a syllabus full of indelible images of the built environment.

As we mounted the Berkeley Hills, Paul pointed to an out-of-place ranch house astride a broken street grid and surmised that it had once been the site of a turnaround for a lost trolley line. In West Oakland some weeks later, Paul stopped the procession outside some tiny Victorian cottages and unpeeled the layers of decaying paint so we could see within. His research in local historical records had resurrected the identities of Portuguese immigrants and the migrants from the American South who succeeded them during World War II. Moving on a few blocks to a public housing project from the 1930’s, then undergoing restoration, we applauded the socially conscious architects of the past and present, then quickly were reminded by a local resident of the inequity still embedded in the landscape: he greeted our camera-toting band with the taunt that roaches seemed to be invading his neighborhood.

Paul’s version of the cultural landscape was not sugar-coated in nostalgia. But neither was it encased in the amber of academic cynicism. At the end of the semester, Paul took a class photo underneath the imperial obelisk at Union Square. It was raining but everyone was jubilant. Among them were a number of Paul’s students who are now continuing his work in universities, colleges, firms, and nonprofits across the United States and beyond. The senior member of the entourage was so rejuvenated that she waved an umbrella as if she were Gene Kelly. To learn with Paul is to join a joyous, enduring excursion through the material world.

Mary Ryan is a former colleague of Paul and professor emerita of history at Johns Hopkins.

Figure 32. A walking tour led by Paul at a public restroom along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, n.d. Left to right: Larry Levine, Mary Ryan, and Paul. Courtesy Margaretta Lovell.

Margaretta M. Lovell

Hundreds of Berkeley undergraduates took Paul’s legendary course, American Cultural Landscapes; all of his graduate students served as teaching assistants; and a few of his colleagues, including Kathleen Moran and myself, audited both semesters of the class. A must-take triple crosslist for students in architecture, geography, and American Studies, the first achievement of the course was to put these three disparate constituencies into dialogue, or trialogue as it turned out. Paul taught me about the pioneering J. B. Jackson, while laminating his knowledge of the Midwest onto the precepts, theories, and slides bestowed on him by his mentor.

In the course of the lectures, and in conversations, we learned about Mayville, North Dakota, Paul’s place of origin and a lodestone to which he returned almost every summer, usually en route to somewhere new. I have never been to Mayville but I feel as though I know it. It has a Carnegie Library, a corner café, and a classic Main Street, but it is unique. Not exactly Lake Wobegon, Mayville is, nevertheless, marked by its Scandinavian origins with its Norway Lutheran Church, its Viking Bridge, and its twenty-one-meter ski jump.

Figure 33. Main Street in Paul’s home town, Mayville, N.D., 1976. Photograph by Paul Groth.

Every year Paul traveled with his camera and notecards at the ready in his breast pocket, to record new landscapes, land use patterns, and conversations with the people he met. Paul and others, mostly those hired as junior faculty in the 1980s with an interest in American cultural landscapes and who met in those early decades and continue to meet monthly today to discuss pre-publication work, took short weekend excursions to all kinds of places — San Francisco, Santa Cruz, the posh gated community of Blackhawk, and nearby malls, just to experience how these communities were being created, or altered, designed, and lived.

On an extended research trip to the mid-coast region of California I was fortunate enough to ride shotgun with Paul as we passed up the drama of Big Sur to learn about Chowchilla, Los Banos, and Atascadero. We also learned how many prisons had sprung up in California, massive building projects so new they were not on our maps — we kept bumping into their razor-wire perimeters. I learned about these structures, each the size of U. C. Berkeley and staffed by as many employees, and I started imagining each massive community as somehow the dark twin of a university. If that investment were made in education up front, could we avoid this massive and seemingly unproductive incarceration strategy? On that trip I also learned that it is possible and acceptable to make photographs through the driver’s windshield if the streetscape was intriguing enough.

Paul’s interest in the built environment began in Mayville as did his passion for music. Paul has taught me two things about music: that sitting over the timpani in San Francisco’s Davies Hall can be heart-stopping, and that “there are never ever too many cellos.”

Margaretta M. Lovell is professor of art history at Berkeley.

Elihu Rubin

I have been touring Oakland remotely. Not through Google StreetView or virtual reality, but with a bound photocopy of Paul’s “AC15,” first published in 1980, as way to “inject some urban material” into the survey course on American cultural landscapes, initiated by J. B. Jackson, that Paul had begun teaching at Berkeley.

Oakland exhibited typical urban patterns and provided an object lesson in visual literacy. Close observation of the local built environment encouraged students to make the leap between the specific (individual, place-based examples) and the generic (forms and processes that applied to the American city at large), one of Paul’s core pedagogical strategies.

Figure 34. Paul’s slide of Chowchilla, Calif., shown at his last lecture at Berkeley, 2015. Photograph by Marta Gutman.

The tour, which includes ninety-one stops, is organized by the AC Transit #15 bus route. Paul used the first stops to describe “basic elements of urban streets forms and ways to see growth and change over time,” where “street jogs” indicated uncoordinated streetcar buildouts and the expanding Children’s Hospital exemplified “plot assemblage.” But because the tour stops are organized in geographical and not conceptual sequence, the guide advances with a lively, spontaneous quality.

Apprehending scale of agency in the built environment is a central field-reading lesson that Paul transmitted to all of us students. Once trained to recognize it, seeing landscape agency is intuitive and deeply impactful: each contribution to the built environment represents power; and the ability to occupy space represents the exclusion of alternative programs. It’s one reason why places like the area surrounding the bus depot — “no one is excluded here” — were so important, if often overlooked.

In the context of urban agency, “good architecture,” as Paul might call it, had a specific role to play. I think of his use of “fancy” and “fussy” as architectural adjectives. “Fancy” meant that the client had real money and was showing it off with rich materials or pedigreed designers. “Fussy” described cheaply or poorly rendered versions where overwrought ornamental flourishes protested too much against cultural insecurity.

It strikes me now how my own sensibilities are reflected in the text of “AC15,” having absorbed so many of Paul’s views and frameworks. It is an “opinionated guide,” and I agree with nearly all of the opinions. The fact that it’s more than forty years old has not voided its relevance (despite the fact that the AC15 line was canceled during the Great Recession). On the contrary, time has amplified the soundness of its insights, despite dramatic changes to Oakland. Paul made it clear that there was plenty of there there. And there still is.

Paul once wrote that many of his students were “frightened and ignorant” about cities. “AC15” encouraged them to takes these places seriously, even as Paul recognized the challenge of sending relatively privileged outsiders into other peoples’ spaces. But it was a calculated risk that expressed his mission to teach visual literacy to a broader public, starting with his own students. Many of us teaching in urban institutions confront ways in which spatial stigma is perpetuated in official university communications. “AC15” is inspiration for faculty to develop alterative public documents that build empathy and appreciation.

Elihu Rubin is associate professor of architecture at Yale.

Figure 35. Interior pages of “AC 15: Oakland as a Cross Section of America’s Urban Cultural Landscapes, A Visit by Bus, Foot & Armchair By Paul Groth,” 1980. Photographs by Elihu Rubin.

Jessica Ellen Sewell

Paul taught me new ways to see the world. As a kid, I rode across the United States multiple times, watching the landscape roll by and collecting postcards of highways and landmarks like Cozad, Nebraska’s 100th meridian sign. At twenty-one I took a Greyhound bus round trip across the country, seeing it in a new way. But it was not until Paul introduced me to both the idea of cultural landscapes and details of America’s landscapes that I began to understand the significance of what I saw: the skyscraper-like grain elevators (not silos!) in midwestern towns; the jogs in the road where, Paul told us, “the earth curves” (correcting the Land Ordinance of 1785 U.S. grid to account for the curvature of the earth); the countless small-town streets named after “useful trees;” and the variety of town squares.

I learned that every element of the landscape matters. Landscapes tell us how the people who shaped that space thought about the world, where they came from, and how they organized their society. Landscapes also tell us about structures of power, about the ideology of the powerful and the resistance of the rest. I learned to look at the built environment and changes to the natural landscape and ask why.

I am now trying to answer some of those questions about the cultural landscapes of Suzhou, China, where I lived and taught for nearly four years. My aim with this research is to introduce more people, especially in China, to the richness and wonder that comes from looking closely at the ordinary environment. Why are there upholstered chairs along many alleys? Why do the city’s narrow pedestrian shopping streets nearly always run north-south? Why are historic shops and walls rebuilt in concrete?

In my teaching in the United States I encourage students to examine the ordinary environment for evidence about power and ideology as well as culture more broadly. Why is there a Black church right next to the highway? Why are the sidewalks in Charlottesville so narrow? Why are public bathrooms segregated by gender? Why are kitchens increasingly continuous with the living/dining/great room?

I keep driving across the country with my family, visiting sites like the world’s largest railroad classification yard in North Platte, Nebraska, and the salt mines in Hutchinson, Kansas, which provides the road salt to Chicago. I keep asking why because there is always more to learn from ordinary places.

Jessica Ellen Sewell is associate professor of urban and environmental planning at University of Virginia.

Figure 36. Paul with Elizabeth Cromley (center) and Catherine Bishir on a road trip to Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma following the annual meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum in Lawrence, Kan., 1996. Photograph by Dell Upton.

Arijit Sen

Twenty-eight years ago, on a damp and foggy San Francisco day, I took a fieldtrip to Potrero Hill as part of Paul’s graduate seminar on urban cultural landscapes. I had recently joined the PhD program at Berkeley after a decade of studying and practicing architecture. We stopped in front of ordinary workers’ flats as Paul pointed out rainwater downspouts, lean-to construction, and raised foundations as material evidence of lifeworld and real estate practices of upwardly mobile working-class families.

As he “read” this ordinary landscape for its human stories, I confronted a totally new form of knowledge and experience. Fieldtrips are common in architecture schools and I had expected this to be yet another show-and-tell of noteworthy buildings, but as I discerned a complex landscape of labor (both industrial and domestic) within a scene that Robert Woods and Albert Kennedy called zones of emergence, I discovered a new analytic strategy to interpret the everyday built world. I learnt to shift perspectives and interpret the scene across multiple scales and systems — cities, streets, buildings, and porches. I discovered the joy of uncovering stories that I wouldn’t find in most history books and archives. Everything that used to be solid and familiar to me — building materials, mechanical systems, or façade ornaments — dissolved into a terrain of unfamiliarity.

As a non-white immigrant from a different culture, I had always encountered the knowledge offered in U.S. classrooms with respectful distance. Neither Trachtenberg nor Kostof described what I experienced in my life or drew me into a history that I had lived. Even Paul didn’t believe that I could handle the knowledge of American cultural landscapes. I had convinced myself that I was capable of only reading the diasporic world of people who looked like me, while the architecture of white and Black Americans seemed out of bounds. But from Paul I learned to read the ordinary landscapes of U.S. cities. Since then, the sheer excitement of reading the ordinary landscape has consumed my research and teaching.

That walk is now touching multiple communities. In 2012, I started the Buildings-Landscapes-Cultures Field School in Milwaukee, where community residents, students, scholars, and I collaboratively read the segregated world of the city’s Northside. We walk together and, through deep listening, exchange ways of seeing the built world. I have also taken these methods to Calgary, Canada and Kerala, India.

Figure 37. Paul with a class of graduate students in geography on a field trip to the Central Valley of California, at the main canal in Gustine, fall 1997. Photograph by Dell Upton.7

In 2021, our urban field school model was adopted by Wisconsin Humanities with support from Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation and the Wisconsin Library Association for a state-wide project called Community Powered. During the 2021-22 pilot, we will work with four communities from different regions of the state, hire and train four recent college graduates, and pair each with a local librarian. With the library serving as the anchor organization, we will train these young people and their librarian partners in cultural landscape studies, public humanities, and digital media skills, and support them as they collaborate with local nonprofit organizations, businesses, and citizens to write relevant histories.

Arijit Sen is associate professor of architecture at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

Paula Lupkin

Paul’s Living Downtown has inspired me for over twenty-five years. His path-breaking work on hotel living, social reform, single men, and urban domesticity was a foundational precedent for my dissertation and first book, Manhood Factories: YMCA Architecture and the Making of Urban Culture.

From my perch in art history, both then and now, the importance of Living Downtown extends beyond the alignment of our work on nontraditional housing and progressivism, to its highly creative research, interpretation, and presentation. Encompassing palace hotels and SROs, prescriptive literature and oral history, his book smashed the traditional binaries and hierarchies of both architectural history and vernacular architecture studies, modeling a historical approach to the urban fabric that addresses not just high and low, but everything-in-between. Living Downtown helped pave the way for me to explore the middle ground: the common landscape of American cities.

Even now, scholarship about both elite and vernacular architecture often interprets buildings as figure-ground diagrams: dark lines and mass swimming in a sea of white. With Paul’s work as my guidepost, I was able to think instead in terms of textiles, with spaces, structures, and people woven together as warp and weft. His multi-disciplinary fusion of deep archival work, statistical analysis, activism, supported by gifted storytelling, mapping, and generous use of historic photographs, reveals the patterns and threads of the fabric and powerfully advocates for the interpretation of society through a spatial lens.

Figure 38. Paul and Paula Lupkin in southern New Jersey at the annual meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2014. Courtesy Paula Lupkin.

Living Downtown persuaded me, and I suspect many others, to investigate the complexity of urban environments around us as a fundamental form of human expression and experience, an endeavor of great importance to us not only as scholars but in our roles as educators. Thanks to Paul’s landmark monograph, I have been able to explore and promote a much broader and more nuanced interpretation of the built environment in projects on the YMCA, the impact of lager beer on the urban landscape, and railroad regionalism. Even more importantly, it has guided my teaching with students in art history, the studio arts, and art education, and in work with the broader public. Focusing on local research, urban fieldwork, and historic preservation, I strive to share with others what Paul’s scholarship gifted to me: spatial curiosity and the skills to interpret the high, low, and everything-in-between.

Paula Lupkin is associate professor of art history at University of North Texas.

Abigail A. Van Slyck

Years ago, Paul taught me a lesson that has never left me: that professional expertise is anything but and that claims to objectivity often serve to normalize middle-class values. Those were not his exact words, as it was not Paul’s style to be dogmatic. Instead, he told a parable of sorts, gleaned from the archival research on residential hotels that underpinned his magisterial, Living Downtown. He recounted how some well-meaning New Deal program had created paid work for otherwise unemployed realtors by sending them out to conduct what amounted to a housing census; how those realtors had dutifully counted single-room occupancy (SRO) hotel rooms as housing units; and how the professional “housers” to whom realtors reported their findings had “corrected” the field notes, deducting the SRO rooms from their careful tallies because these kitchen-less accommodations did not meet the housers’ purportedly objective definition of what constituted a “proper” housing unit.

As Paul explained, the ramifications of that simple act were long-lived. It was bad enough that the Wagner-Steagall Act of 1937 established a policy of “equivalent elimination” that prevented the newly-created United States Housing Authority (USHA) from increasing the country’s housing stock. Thanks to the actions of housing experts, the USHA started from a flawed census that dramatically undercounted the real number of housing units. When SRO hotel rooms were demolished, there was no acknowledgement that they had been lost and certainly no mechanism for replacing them. Housing experts and their conviction that the kitchen was sine qua non of any proper housing unit had actually exacerbated the homelessness crisis they were trying to address and that has continued to plague the United States in the intervening decades.

Figure 39. Sonoran Streetscape, El Presidio, Tucson, Ariz., 2005. Photograph by Abigail A. Van Slyck.

In truth, I cannot remember exactly when or where Paul first imparted this lesson, although it was at Berkeley in the mid-1980s when I was a rather naïve graduate student whose world view was being rocked on a nearly daily basis by my faculty mentors. Whatever the venue, the story of the professional houser and the SRO shaped my subsequent research and teaching. When a Progressive-era librarian reported the “misbehavior” of working-class kids, I worked to suspend that judgment — to ignore the “mis” — and to read instead a description of behavior, something that helped me understand how young readers experienced Carnegie libraries in their predominately immigrant neighborhoods. When I joined the University of Arizona faculty, in 1989, Paul’s parable helped me engage my students in a discussion of the role of professional objectivity in the decision to eradicate a vibrant Hispanic neighborhood to make way for the Tucson Convention Center. The problem? The houses sat right on their property lines without the setbacks that Anglo planners associated with decent housing.

This lesson and others I learned from Paul have made me a better scholar, a more effective teacher, and a more thoughtful citizen of our fragile democracy. For that, I am grateful.

Abigail A. Van Slyck is professor emerita of art history at Connecticut College.

Matthew Lasner

I first met Paul when I visited Berkeley in 1998, exploring PhD programs. I'd majored in urban studies and earned an MS in planning but I wasn't much interested in policy. I'd taken courses in architectural history but I wasn't much interested in form or style, either. Then I read Living Downtown. Here was a rigorous study of the U.S. city unlike any other. Meticulously researched and presented, it recovered an element of the urban landscape long overlooked. More important, it told us that what we knew about U.S. downtowns, housing, and hotels reflected a lack of curiosity, and was wrong. The approach wasn’t non-normative. Embedded in Paul’s writing is a call for a more just city, free of the middle-class prejudices that underpin social and spatial conformity. But Paul didn’t scold like Kenneth Jackson or Mike Davis, or propose utopia like Dolores Hayden; he trained our eyes on what was there all along but that we had failed to notice.

I was drawn to this approach, in part, because I’m gay. As a gay boy, I learned the art of self-concealment. Hiding who you are while sitting on the social sidelines, noticing the world's seams, teaches you that appearances can be deceiving and that there are unwritten rules that govern behavior and that favor some over others. I first detected this shared sensibility in others in junior high, when I stumbled upon the films of gay directors John Waters and Pedro Almodóvar. Living Downtown, with its hoboes and bachelors, YMCAs and moralizing reformers, resonated similarly. In college, I’d learned that New York and Europe were good; that the suburbs and Sunbelt were bad. Living Downtown didn't reject that particular hierarchical and oppositional pairing (though work by some of Paul's students would). But it wasn't concerned with them either. Its purpose, to my mind, was to reveal the gap between what people say and what they really do — where and how civic leaders, and historians, imagine Americans live, and where Americans actually live — while giving voice to marginalized people usually excluded from urban and architectural history. Deliberately or not, it queered the history of the city.

Paul's work, like that of many artists, historians, and theorists who were gay — or attentive to gay life — amid the urban decay of the late twentieth century (think: John D’Emilio, Iris Marion Young, George Chauncey, as well as Waters and Almodóvar), also framed the city not chiefly as a site of capital, immigration, labor, struggle, uplift, or innovation, but of pleasure and, especially, personal liberation. The history of hotel living is also a history of what constitutes a household, who should perform domestic duties, and how closely people should live together; in Paul’s words, “who (if anyone) should have control and surveillance over an individual’s activities. . . . and how committed Americans should be to private material possessions.” Hotel life, he continues, is anonymous: “virtually untouched by the social contracts and tacit supervisions of life found in a family house” or even post-Sixties arrangements like an apartment shared with roommates.

Even though I didn’t pursue my PhD at Berkeley, Paul served as a mentor, encouraging me to pursue taboo topics like the condo, while steering me to think about audience and job prospects by including a chapter on California in my dissertation. All the while, he served as my primary guide to cultural landscape studies. Over the past twenty-some years I have learned many things from Paul at conferences, at Harvard’s Charles Warren Center, at lunches in Berkeley, in his notes on manuscripts, and through his writings and edited collections. When to refer to building “types” rather than “typologies.” How to use big data to study a generic type. How to balance attention to the physical and geographical, social and cultural, economic and political. The value of good maps and photographs, especially of the mundane. The importance of being generous and kind to junior scholars. But first and foremost, and before we’d even met, to have faith in my worldview.

Matthew Lasner is associate professor of urban studies and planning at Hunter College.

Figure 40. Paul speaking about a fruit-processing facility in Fresno at the annual meeting of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, 2008. Photograph by Abigail A. Van Slyck.

Stephen Tobriner

I remember the first time I saw a syllabus Paul prepared. I can’t remember when it happened or even what course it was. I remember my reaction. I sat down to take it in. The elegance of the presentation and the meticulousness of every aspect of this simple teaching tool was beautiful to behold. I read it through. It was an aesthetic experience. I loved walking into Paul’s elegantly organized office and seeing those slide boxes. Inside their boxes I knew that each 35mm slide was nestled in its correct place, secure in its location, completely catalogued and at rest. I had to take pity on my own slides, shifting, half-organized, and pining for Paul’s organization, which I would never give them.

Figure 41. Postcard of the Hotel Victoria, San Francisco, Calif., n.d.

Paul brings the same aesthetic vigilance to whatever he does, whether it be his excellent lectures or beautiful and informative book, Living Downtown. The care which informs his work does not end in and of itself, but is the platform from which he teaches and informs us about meanings in the built environment.

Paul gave me a very personal lesson about my grandfather, Dr. Oscar Tobriner. My grandfather had the Newsom brothers build a house for his family on Jackson Street in San Francisco shortly after the 1906 earthquake and fire. When my parents married in 1939, my grandfather, a widower, moved into the Victoria Hotel on Bush Street in downtown San Francisco. I grew up in the Jackson Street house, and visited my grandfather at the Victoria. Until I read Paul’s book I never understood the dynamics of my family and my grandfather’s choice to live in a downtown hotel, which seemed so odd to me growing up. I appreciate Paul for all he has given us, both in his teaching methods and insightful reading of the built environment.

Stephen Tobriner is professor emeritus of architectural history at Berkeley.

Annmarie Adams

Paul’s writing, methods, teaching, and mentoring have had an enormous influence on me, since I was a PhD student in the late 1980s. With historian Mary Ryan, Paul was on my PhD dissertation committee led by Dell Upton. The topic was feminism, British housing, and health — not exactly Paul’s thing — but his commentary was steady, supportive, and inspiring. He cared about my work and helped me to produce better research.

In the thirty-some years since, we have stayed in regular touch by e-mail, visits to the Bay Area, and at Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) conferences. In preparing to write this, I re-read hundreds of e-mails. These are Grothian gems, full of self-deprecating humor, detailed lists, carefully considered recommendations, and creative writing. In 2007, for example, he sent Margaret Crawford and me a detailed list of rooms in Wurster Hall where we might teach as visiting scholars, and why or why not each was desirable for the courses we were preparing. His e-mail sign-offs with invented adverbs are particularly precious, such as “connectingly” and “arrangingly.” If he sent me a house plan or a syllabus (two things he often sent), then “forwardingly.” “Commentingly” was how he might close remarks on something I had written. My all-time favorite has to be “hierarchy-makingly.”

The real-time moments are harder to conjure. I recall his congested office, and feeling squeezed by filing cabinets. He loved to tease Daves Rossell and me about the physical geography course he insisted that we take (and I nearly failed). At my comprehensive exam, he asked about the spaces where people gossip. It still haunts me. Did I even answer? For years, and in the most endearing way, he confused Abigail Van Slyck and me. (He once failed to show up for a lunch date with me because he’d lunched with Abby two days earlier.) His strong and continuing role as an exemplar kicked in when, in 2016, I opted to transfer half my university position across faculties to Medicine (as he had in Geography). Struggling to decide I distinctly remember thinking: “Paul Groth would do this.”

We had a particularly poignant exchange on the final day of the VAF conference in New Jersey, in 2014. I was in the hotel lobby, and he came over to say goodbye. We had had several nice chats during the conference, and he put out his hand to shake mine. But I got up and gave him a big hug. He started crying. I have thought of that emotional farewell often, deriving great strength from it, like many encounters with my exemplary teacher and friend, Paul.

Annmarie Adams is professor, School of Architecture and Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University.

This article was originally published Jan. 10, 2022, before Paul’s death. It was updated Jan. 21, 2022.

Banner photograph courtesy Chris Wilson, 2006.

CITATIONS

entire article: Gutman, Marta, Matthew Lasner, and Sarah Lopez, ed., “Paul Groth: A Festschrift,” PLATFORM, January 10, 2022, updated January 21, 2022.

one author: author name, in “Paul Groth: A Festschrift,” ed. Marta Gutman, Matthew Lasner, and Sarah Lopez, PLATFORM, January 10, 2022, updated January 21, 2022.

Jan 10 Paul Groth: A Festschrift

Jan 10 A Conversation with Paul Groth

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