Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty: The

33 Paul R. Mullins accessed from the ground level or a second-floor Lewis C. Jones walkway that extended into the yard, where the large outhouse loomed over the neighboring outbuildings and even some of the nearby homes. Archaeologies of Race and The outhouse remained in the yard until just Urban Poverty: The Politics after 1955, when it was finally dismantled not of Slumming, Engagement, long before most of the block itself was razed. In 1970 an administrator at Indiana University- and the Color Line Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI) described the outhouse as an “architectural and engineer- ABSTRACT ing marvel,” but by then the outhouse had been dismantled for 15 years and its brick foundation For more than a century, social reformers and scholars have sat beneath a university parking lot. In the sub- examined urban impoverishment and inequalities along the color sequent years the outhouse has fascinated faculty, line and linked “slum life” to African America. An engaged students, and community members, but most of archaeology provides a powerful mechanism to assess how urban-renewal and tenement-reform discourses were used to that fascination has revolved around the mechan- reproduce color and class inequalities. Such an archaeology ics of the tower, fostering a string of jokes about should illuminate how comparable ideological distortions are which campus constituency deserved the upper- wielded in the contemporary world to reproduce longstand- story seat (Gray 2003:43). The superficial humor ing inequalities. A 20th-century neighborhood in Indianapolis, in the outhouse discourse reflects understandable Indiana, is examined to probe how various contemporary constituencies borrow from, negotiate, and refute long-established wonder about the structure as an engineering urban impoverishment and racial discourses and stake claims feat as well as curiosity about such a seemingly to diverse present-day forms of community heritage. alien sanitary mechanism. Yet the outhouse jokes also betray many of the ways in which historical Introduction: Reimagining the Slum experiences are evaded or even misrepresented for particular contemporary purposes. For exam- Soon after the turn of the 20th century, a ple, the outhouse is sometimes inelegantly offered massive wooden tower rose in the Indianapolis, as a symbol evoking neighborhood poverty and Indiana, backyard at 458–460 Agnes Street. The celebrating city and university progress. A 2004 tightly packed near-Westside neighborhood had volume comparing historical and contemporary been quickly built up after about 1870, when Indianapolis photographs of the same spaces used waves of European and Southern immigrants this approach, borrowing stale slum-clearance settled throughout the area and built homes along terms that when placed beneath a 1941 image of the city’s western edge. As in many late-19th- the outhouse refer to the outhouse’s neighborhood and early-20th-century neighborhoods, residents as “poverty stricken” and “blighted.” The grainy and landlords soon built extra stories, expanded black-and-white picture of the Agnes Street into yard spaces, and even converted stables and outhouse contrasted radically with a picturesque alley outbuildings into makeshift homes. Con- contemporary campus image on the facing page structed in the 1870s as a single-story double, that proclaimed: “Out with the outhouses, in with the home on Agnes Street had been expanded IUPUI, one of the nation’s largest urban cam- upward into a four-unit residence just after 1900, puses. The site of the former outhouse is now and the household expansion demanded additional the $32 million IUPUI library” (Price 2004:89). outhouse space. While surrounding residents dug, The outhouse (which was not actually under cleaned, and redug a patchwork of outhouses the library) was excavated in 2003, and the throughout their ever-shrinking yards, the resi- dynamic and often-contested interpretations of dents at 458–460 Agnes Street erected a com- the archaeological assemblage, the neighbor- paratively colossal two-story outhouse (Figure 1). hood’s history, and the outhouse itself reveal the The brick-lined privy, 8 ft. to a side, could be complex heritage claims made in most cities. Historical Archaeology, 2011, 45(1):33–50. Permission to reprint required. 34 HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 45(1) FIGURE 1. In September 1941 realtor Howard W. Fieber took this picture of the two-story outhouse at 458–460 Agnes Street. (Photo courtesy of IUPUI University Library Special Collections and Archives, 1941.) Slum caricatures that long legitimized urban dis- and social identity. Mayne acknowledges that placement through references to race, space, and slum discourses certainly were self-interested affluence are today relatively untenable, yet the rationalizations that were not necessarily espe- Agnes Street outhouse is still routinely invoked cially reliable representations of material context. as a symbol that risks distorting the community’s Nevertheless, urban narratives have always been heritage, placing poverty at the heart of commu- profoundly shaped by these frameworks for defin- nity heritage, and rationalizing the neighborhood ing, framing, and discussing poverty, space, and residents’ mass displacement. Selective incorpora- race on urban landscapes. Archaeology provides tion of slum history has furthered a vast range of a mechanism to examine reflectively the concrete contemporary material and social interests in many material conditions of urban marginalization, but similar communities, turning many former slum especially interesting insights still come from landscapes into gentrified neighborhoods and urban examining the ways in which contemporary university campuses while linking “slum” identities stakeholders, ranging from former residents to the to community heritage and the color line. university, define and claim the near-Westside’s Archaeology offers one mechanism to dissect community heritage, often reacting against slum such discourses, but slum narratives should not stereotypes even as they borrow from or accept be reduced simply to misrepresentations that are forms of impoverishment in such narratives. contradicted by the historical and material reali- These stakeholders have conflicting visions ties revealed through archaeology. Alan Mayne of community, much like a century of urban (2007:321) champions a complex notion of reformers, slum ideologues, and residents before slum stereotypes that acknowledges the concrete them. The contradictions within neighborhood effects of the bourgeois imagination of space historical discourses and archaeological material PAUL R. MULLInS And LEWIS C. JOnES—Archaeologies of Race and Urban Poverty 35 culture reveal how history has been wielded the Agnes Street site in 2003, elders who lived along various lines of inequality, so it makes little in the near-Westside were interviewed about sense to attempt to resolve dissentious notions of life in these neighborhoods that local histori- community and heritage and replace them with a cal discourses simply reduce to slums. Former monolithic archaeological narrative or an imposed residents acknowledge the material realities of notion of community. In this discourse on com- impoverishment, but they paint poverty in ways munity heritage, the Agnes Street outhouse figures that reveal it to be an important but not deter- as a multivalent symbol. For instance, defining ministic backdrop to their lives, much as racism the outhouse as a material vestige of “slum life” is often portrayed. Elders sometimes use poverty hazards reproducing stale stereotypes and posing as a rhetorical foil to underscore the magnitude an ambiguous notion of urban improvement; of their ambitions and accomplishments and that is, the outhouse is used to demonstrate the stress that the black community’s distinctive reader’s contemporary distance from poverty while contemporary character reflects shared African it ignores the roots of present-day social privilege. American negotiations of material scarcity and Other constituents may be uncomfortable with color-line segregation. This position is less a linking the outhouse to poverty’s social stigma- refutation of poverty than it is a rejection of tization at all, but the outhouse demonstrates a ideologically loaded slum caricatures that present profound color-based inequality in the very recent urban poverty as a reflection of essential African past, and evading the realities of impoverishment American attributes or a structural framework sidesteps these inequalities in favor of a transpar- that determined the lives of African Americans. ent American Dream story. Still other university The contentious history of the neighborhood’s constituencies are simply dismayed that an aca- landscape, the discourses over urban space, and demic institution with significant scholarly accom- the apparently prosaic materiality of the outhouse plishments and ambition has its heritage repeatedly promise an interesting, if complex, picture of the tied back to an outhouse instead of many other intersection of race and heritage. more appealing histories. Since 2000, archaeological excavations have “Slumming” and the Aesthetics been conducted in Indianapolis’s near-Westside of Urban Poverty to illuminate the displacement of neighborhood residents and examine how archaeological insight Privileged thinkers have routinely “slummed” might temper the stereotypes that rationalized it in urban neighborhoods, using forays into urban renewal and continue

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