Playhouses and the architecture of childhood.
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Annmarie Adams:a continuing conundrum of how we design for vulnerable populations.
Marta Gutman:We don't have enough place for kids to play. Regardless of who's running the playgrounds, the dearth of open space for children to play of any age is remarkable and really tragic.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Every building built for children is built by adults. These buildings really do, reflect adult concerns.
Kate Solomonson:How have adults, elite adults, been, using their children as a way of advancing their position?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:My name is Abigail Van Slyke, Abby to my friends, and I'm the Dayton Professor Emerita of Art History and Architectural Studies at Connecticut College. I'm an architectural historian and the author of Playhouses and Privilege, the Architecture of Elite Childhood, published by the University of Minnesota Press. I'm joined today by three scholars whose work has inspired me in so many ways and who have been some of the most generous colleagues anyone could ever have. Ambry Adams, Marta Gutman, and Kate Solomonson. And while the publication of Playhouses and Privilege is the impetus for this podcast, I imagine that our conversation will take us further afield as we reflect on a range of scholarly interests that that we all have in common.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So maybe it makes sense for each one of you to introduce yourself, and then we'll take it from there. Do you wanna start, Anne Marie?
Annmarie Adams:Yes. Thanks. And thank you, Abby, for inviting me to be part of this. I'm Anne Marie Adams, a professor and architectural historian at, McGill University in Montreal, where I teach both medical and architectural students to assess the built environment. And I'm currently working on a book, I call it a spatial biography, of a pretty famous woman doctor through 10 spaces she occupied in her life.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Marta, I guess we're going in alphabetical order.
Marta Gutman:Hi, Abby. And like Anne Marie, I extend my thanks for inviting me to be part of this conversation. I am the dean, a dean, the dean, and a professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York, which is part of the City University of New York, a mouthful. When I'm not being a dean, or when dating permits, which isn't all that often, I'm working on a book about architecture, public schools, children, and racial segregation in New York City.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And Kate.
Kate Solomonson:Hi, Abby. Thank you for inviting me to be here for this. I'm Kate Solomonson. I'm an Emeritus professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota and an architectural historian. And currently, now that I have more time, I'm working on a study of the interplay between indigenous and settler spatialities in the region settlers call Dakota Territory during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Kate Solomonson:And related to this is a case study that explores how the processes of settler colonialism were intertwined with the formation of the modern architectural profession in the Trans Mississippi West. Now although Abby's topics and my topics might seem to be quite different, our interests, methods, and values concerning architectural history overlap. And it's my greatest pleasure to work with Abby on co editing a book series called Architecture, Landscape, and American Culture, published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Thank you, Kate. That was quite a start. And thank you for mentioning our book series because that has been one of the places where we've been in conversation most often about what we love about our work and what we find challenging about it. And it's great to think of this as a continuation of some of those discussions. Thank you all for being here.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I really consider this the dream team for a conversation about architectural history. But I thought to kick things off, I'd say a little bit about playhouses and privilege, and then we can open up the conversation from there. So I think of the book as a critical exploration of the role of architecture in the reproduction of social privilege, with a particular attention to children's cottages and playhouses. Overall, it charts the rise and fall of these small buildings as tools of elite culture. It starts in the 1850s with the Swiss Cottage at Osborne, built for the children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and it ends in the nineteen thirties with two playhouses gifted, one to princess Elizabeth, who went on to become queen Elizabeth the second, and another to Shirley Temple.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:In between, the book considers cottages and playhouses built for rich and powerful Americans, including the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, Henry Clay Frick, the heiress and daughter of George Pullman, the widow of John Dodge, the wife of Henry Ford. The argument is that these buildings served their families in several ways, Partly just keeping youngsters away from the great houses where their parents maintained and enhanced their social standing by entertaining other elite adults, in part by giving those parents a modicum of control over their children's social connections, And I think, crucially, helping those children internalize their own privileged status so that it felt natural to them. The nineteen twenties were a pivotal point in this history, in part because playhouses became highly gendered objects at that moment in response to the Red Scare of nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen. And also because playhouses were beginning to be built by stars of the stage and screen. And here I'm thinking of Harold Lloyd who hung from that clock in a silent film that you might have a mental image of.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And in this context, children's playhouses began to appear in fan magazines where they became objects of desire for middle class Americans and ultimately, in that process, really lost much of their effectiveness within elite culture.
Marta Gutman:Abby, thank you. So I will ask you this question by way of opening up, I hope, a rich and lively conversation. So your book puts to rest the notion that buildings made for children are solely about children. Would you explain how these structures advance adult values as delightful and playful as the buildings may appear to be?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Yeah, that's a great question because I think that may be what gets in the way of people studying the architecture of childhood. You know, I think when we think about that, every building built for children is built by adults. It's paid for by adults. Decisions are made by adults about everything, really everything about those buildings. And so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise to us that these buildings really do, reflect adult concerns.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:In part, I think adults are concerned to prepare their children to be effective adults as they grow. But I think there's lots of other things going on, at the same time. And one of the buildings that leaps immediately to mind when you ask that question is the Swiss Cottage built by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert for their kids. It was talked about at the time as a site where children could throw off the restraints of royalty. And that was a message that actually played really well to the queen's middle class subjects who thought that children should be able to enjoy an innocent and carefree existence.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And so they really embrace this idea that this was a place where the children could go and be themselves. And in some ways, the evidence is that the kids really did enjoy it. They looked forward to it, and they spent a lot of time there, and they had fun. But there were also moments when their parents used that site to prepare them for the royalty that they supposedly were avoiding. On simple levels, like when they first laid the first stone to build the Swiss cottage, the Prince of Wales was 11 and he read sort of a proclamation on a piece of parchment that had everyone's names on it.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And so he had to stand up there as an 11 year old and proclaim all of this stuff. And then they rolled it up and put it in a bottle and put it in the foundation. Later on, when his brother was actually 18, so not not a young, young boy, but when he was 18, the geologist Charles Lyle came to visit. And the young prince was assigned to show him around the museum, which was associated with the Swiss Cottage. And so he he got to practice talking to his subjects, right, as a young person talking to adults and holding conversation.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I think there are more subtle things happening. I think the Swiss Cottage had particular resonance for Vicky, the princess royal. I think their parents had her in mind. At the great exhibition in 1851, they were already thinking about a marriage partner for her, even though she was only 10 at the time. They bought a Swiss desk at the exhibition, highly ornamented, with images of Swiss peasants enjoying cozy domesticity.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And then two years later, they start building the Swiss cottage where the Swiss desk lived and, you know, sort of created an environment in which their daughter and her siblings could play out their own version of this kind of cozy domesticity. So it serves to frame her for her future husband and her in laws as a young woman with an appreciation for domestic pursuits. And it also puts her in a longer line of elite women who had themselves depicted doing things like feeding chickens, right, as a way of signaling that they understood that when they married, a big part of their responsibility was the care of their husband's estates. Actually, it's part of your nobility, right, to indicate that you understand that you have an obligation to the land.
Marta Gutman:So it's clear these kids the children, the children, we could call them kids, they had lots of work to do in a playhouse. Right?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Absolutely. I also think it's really interesting at the Swiss Cottage, there was this there was always a museum component. So the museum initially was a room on the Second Floor. And the idea was that the kids would go out and collect natural objects from from nature and put them on display in the museum. And then eventually, people start sending them things.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So their connections who are, you know, throughout the world are sending them objects. Sometimes they're things that were given to their mother when, you know, people came to visit from far flung parts of the empire. And so they actually build a separate museum building eventually. I think that building plays a really important role in giving these royal children an imperial mindset in part because the stuff that gets displayed in the museum is either their natural history or they're objects from non European. They're cultural artifacts from non European societies.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:The European stuff is characterized as art, and it's at the main house. The building not only helps create that kind of hierarchy of cultures, but it also teaches the children because the children act as the curators of this museum. It also teaches these young royals that they are the ones creating meaning by the way that they decide to arrange the stuff from all over the world.
Annmarie Adams:Abby, I have a question. I just love the book. One question I have is how aware the adults were of the power of these spaces? Were they aware that they were powerful tools of elite culture, like you say, that might transform their children, or was it just, like, the right thing to do?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:That's a super interesting question. I believe that they did understand how important it was. And one of the challenges of this work is that I don't have long letters from parents saying, oh, and today, we started by commissioning a children's cottage because we know how important it will be for preparing our children to be, you know, effective elites in the future. I don't have any of that. But I look at instances like the children's cottage at the Breakers.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So Cornelius Vanderbilt the second, one of the richest men in America at the time, buys the Breakers from Pierre Lorillard, a a big a a big house in Newport. And he immediately hires Peabody and Stearns, at that point, arguably, the the most prominent architects in The US, to vastly expand the dining room so that they can really entertain on a on a large scale and to make other changes. But before they start any of that, they build the children's cottage, and that's the very first thing they do. And they spend more on it than a middle class house. Again, they're using Peabody and Stearns to actually do the design.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So everything about their actions suggests to me that this is their top priority and that they know how important, this building is gonna be in in helping them sort of manage their children. At the same time, there is that sense of it sort of becomes the thing to do for people at that level. You know, the next generation of Vanderbilts, young people who are forming their families in the very early years of the twentieth century. They go on to to build playhouses. I think it changes a little bit in tone at that point because play is taking on this whole new importance in American culture for sure.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:There are play theorists, you know, they're actually arguing that the human entity needs play in order to grow up into a healthy adult and that by depriving children of play you're depriving them of something really, really important developmentally. And so then the playhouse becomes a way for these parents to actually make very visible their commitment to play. It reflects back on them and that it's also a way of saying, I am a good parent.
Annmarie Adams:And I think about houses like the post war suburban house, you know, in 1960 with the open plan where it was so important for the mother to watch the children play. It becomes something to be a good parent, you have to be the visible guardian. It's so different to have a playhouse.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Exactly. And so I think that's the other thing that's very interesting to me. And it seems a little contradictory. And so I work I struggle at sometimes to articulate what I think is going on. But the way I would put it is these elite families are a part of their historical moment.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:They know what middle class culture thinks about the importance of children. They know that middle class families cherish their children, put them at the middle of their domestic space, put them at the middle of their schedules, how they organize their lives in terms of their weekly routines, in terms of their annual celebrations, but children are central to that. They know that, and they wanna be seen to be a part of that. And so the playhouse isn't like that visible symbol that they get it, but they themselves do not have existences that allow putting children at the very center of their lives. I think about Payne Whitney and Helen Hayes Whitney.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I love them. In their family papers, there's a baby book. Right? One of those ones that you buy, and you put the first tooth and the first word and the first step and the first birthday and the first Christmas, whatever. And they fill it out partly, but they save it.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I mean, what's interesting is that that baby book is still preserved, you know, hundred and, you know, twenty five years later, still in the family papers. But it's also clear that they so they knew that mode of parenting. They admire it enough to have a baby book and make entries in it, but it's clear from other documents that they're not living that life. Their son, Jacques, was born at a time of year when the parents were normally in Europe, and so they go to Europe without the kids. They leave the kids at home for weeks at a time.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Jacques has a birthday party. It's a lavish birthday party. Every kid gets a camera, but the parents aren't there. I think it becomes, the building becomes even more important because it stands in for intentions that the parents can't actually live out.
Annmarie Adams:Oh, so it's just such an important marker of social class, like, such a difference, like a sign.
Kate Solomonson:Yeah. Along those lines, I was really struck by your discussion of newly rich industrial magnets and, constructing playhouses even as they were celebrating the path that they had had taken from the workshop and so on on up. And, I mean, as as late as the late nineteenth century, no matter how much money they had, another elite was, looked down on them for having come out of the workshop
Abigail A. Van Slyck:tradition in manual labor. So, you know,
Kate Solomonson:we fast forward tradition and manual labor. So, you know, we fast forward ahead to Ford and Dodge playhouses, and it was so striking to me that these playhouses were being built for children of families, where there were people who never had childhoods of play, but had childhoods of perhaps education and then work at a young age. I I find it fascinating about how those two things came together. I was wondering if you wanted to say any more about that.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Yeah. That's thank you for that question. Yeah. It's in part, it's fascinating to me because those playhouses by Ford and Dodge are so over the top. Right?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:They are actually unlike other earlier nineteenth century cottages and playhouses that were places to hang out. These were miniature middle class houses. Right? You walk through a front door into a front hall. There was a front hall closet.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:There was a little console table with a mirror hanging over it, and you continued into a living room and then a dining room and then a kitchen. And there were in the Dodge Playhouse 2 bedrooms so that one could not only belong to Frances Dodge, the the mistress of the house, and the other could belong to her dollies who were in the nursery. Right? And a bathroom. Right?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So they are and they so they are fully plumbed, and it costs a lot of money to make these little miniature houses and to have them function so completely. So by the time they're doing this, the income tax had been instituted. They were not motivated by trying to forestall, income tax. And so it's like, well, if we have to pay tax, we might as well enjoy our wealth, at the same time. And so they do these kinds of over the top kinds of playhouses.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I think and then there's a very narrow play script for girls, that these over the top playhouses of the nineteen twenties are very feminized. They're typically a gift from an adult woman to a particular little girl. It's typically given to her on her birthday. She is understood to be the owner of the house forever, no matter how old she gets. And that her only, you know, the only play script there is to be the mother to the dollies and be the housekeeper to the house and forget hanging around and just reading and listening to music or whatever you might do in your playhouse.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Right? There is a sense that the Fords and Dodges who had come out of working families also wanted to signal that they weren't that far away from it, that they hadn't lost their common touch. They hadn't lost their common touch to such an extent that their girls wouldn't know how to keep house. Even though I don't think their girls ever once kept house, the playing house became a a way of adults saying they still care about it even if they don't do it.
Kate Solomonson:I have another question. One of the things I've always admired, Abby, from the very beginning of your career is your methodology, the kinds of questions you pose, the kinds of sources you use, how you go about doing your work. And this is work that is really complex. And you're dealing with representations. You're dealing with performance.
Kate Solomonson:You're dealing with space at all scales and, quite an array of sources. And so I was hoping that you would say a little bit more about the challenges that you faced because at one point you mentioned that doing this work on playhouses, produced methodological challenges that were really hard.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Yeah. One of the things well, I think it's difficult anytime any of us take on any project is that the sources that you particularly would love to see are just don't exist. In this case, there's not robust correspondence between fathers and mothers talking about why they're gonna build a playhouse or a children's cottage for their kids. There's just not that kind of paper trail, and so you have to build to that in other ways. For this, I was actually really surprised at how few architects drawings I had for these buildings, even though many of them were architect design.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And so, I mean, I got around that. I'm on record as suggesting that I think a plan is the most important thing we can possibly analyze. So I commissioned plans all drawn consistently to three different scales depending on the size of the building. I'm really, really proud of that. And then I'm really, really grateful that the book designers at the press honored what we'd accomplished with those plans and made sure that the scale was kept consistent, in production of the book itself.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So that's great. But it means that we don't have things like in a lot of cases, I don't know what the family called the rooms inside these buildings. And one of the things, Kate, you taught me years ago was how important it is to pay really close attention to what the people who commissioned and designed the buildings said they were doing. Whether it was the style, it's not up to architectural historians to say, no, no, no, no, no. We call that this style.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:You need to listen to what the people thought they were doing so that you can understand a little bit more about their motivations. I would have loved to have known what they actually called some of the rooms in these playhouses, and I don't in some cases. And then if there was, you know, there was not a lot of visual evidence of children at play. And one of the things that I was really delighted by is that Tracy Dowse, who was the man who owned Fox Hollow Farm in Rhinebeck, New York and built a playhouse for his children, was also an amateur photographer. And so we have, like, unbelievable photos of 11 year old Olin Dows standing at the stove in his playhouse dressed in Escoffier whites.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:It's like, oh my god. You know? So, you know, on that side, there was actually some stuff, some of these jewels that came forward. But then what do you do when, you know, you don't have the adults involved telling you what they think they're doing? And that's when I think you have to begin to triangulate from other kinds of sources.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And I think the analogy that I find most useful for my work is that of the theater. That if you can think of the architecture as the stage set, and you can think of the furnishings as the props, And then you look to other things like paintings, like literature, like other art forms to give you a sense of what the script was, like, what the social interaction was that was intended to take place there, what were the sorts of things on the minds of the people who inhabited those spaces. Then I think you can begin to productively, right, think about and to think about life as a performance, to think about using a space as a performance, and then to actually think about if we're gonna use that terminology, who's the audience? Who can actually see that performance at a given time? If they aren't there to see it themselves, are there ways in which that performance is being amplified through other media?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And pay really serious attention to when we are finding out, how we're finding out what we know about a building, in what context it was originally presented. But everybody, all all of you must have thoughts on the methodological challenges and how we get over them.
Marta Gutman:To jump in here a bit, one thought I had is it's the way in which the designs of these buildings are reflective or engaged with the ways in which architecture for children is changing for all children is changing overall in this period. So I'm thinking of a couple of examples in the book. One, when you talk about Prince Albert's program for education and his implementation, not only in the children's cottage, but in the other places at Osborne and also in other palaces of eighth grading in the kids' education and their children's education, his attention to that, and how it played out architecturally. And that seems to me that there's we can think of them as exceptional, these buildings, but we can also think of them as typical. And it seems to me that that's one way in which the typicality of these buildings is pretty it's pretty interesting to me.
Marta Gutman:So that's one example. Another thought I had is the role of the model kitchen, and the model and the role of the model kitchen in domestic science and in educating children, girls of all classes to be better workers in kitchens. And so the kinds of model kitchens that you depict so beautifully in these cottages and a couple of different ones, and, I was fortunate to see the one at the Breakers just last fall, are reminiscent to me of the kinds of model kitchens you see in settlement houses or in settlement house instruction programs or involved in those pro programs and cooking classes in some of those industrial schools for girl for kids. So there's a kind of really interesting cross class, I think, potential for comparison here that your work raises in the ways in which these buildings show that children how children come center stage in the ways in which the physical the built environment is changing for children overall in the period you study. And then we could also talk about playrooms, and particularly gender differentiation in play.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So the kitchen stuff, Marta, that's so interesting. I mean, I agree that physically, they look a lot like the kinds of model kitchens you just, you know, enumerated. But throughout my work, I've been struck by the fact that these are not training these young heiresses for this domestic work in the same way. That, you know, the my argument would be that the kitchen in the playhouse at the Breakers has no relationship to what the kitchen in the Breakers looks like, which is an industrial kitchen of the sort that you would have found in a hotel of the time. Right?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And that Alice of the Breakers never goes down to the kitchen to give instruction to her staff, that they meet with her in her boudoir, and that's her command center, and that's where she gives instructions. And it's up to somebody else to figure out how to work the stove. It seems like a bit of a conundrum to me, or it has in the past at moments, that these heiresses were given these kitchen environments. Heiresses and heirs, because boys did cook as well, particularly in the nineteenth century. I mean, I think in some ways, they were supposed to think it was fun, and they did think it was fun.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And they were encouraged that if by treating domestic labor as play, that that was one of the big distinctions between them and the adults who were employed by their families. That as an heiress, I would outgrow cooking. I would do it as fun when I was a girl, and then when I was a woman, somebody else would do it for me. And in in contrast to the young woman who is a servant who actually helps Gertrude Vanderbilt and her friend make lunch.
Marta Gutman:Yeah. I don't disagree with you on any of that. I guess what I'm trying to articulate is that the kitchen becomes important to feature in places that are dedicated to kids, and that appears in settings regardless of class, although the uses of those spaces are quite different. But the appeal of the kitchen garden in a settlement house was that it was cast as something a playful activity that would teach a girl how to be a servant, right, five or six years old, right, or as young as that. Whereas in the Breakers or the Breakers Cottage or one of the others, the kitchen is also a side of play, but it's a side of play that reinforces the class position of the girl who's in it.
Marta Gutman:Right? My point is is that the kitchen is present.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Thank you for clarifying that. Really interesting to think about this in terms of storybooks and children's literature and I tried to do a little bit of that as, some of the 1920s playhouses are more overtly fairy tale like in their architecture. And so I tried to figure out what's going on there. There might be great literature on that somewhere, but I couldn't find it. So, either I'm gonna have to write it or or I'm gonna have to find it.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:But it does seem to me that what you know, I'm thinking of, I don't know, Beatrix Potter, mice, Hulk Cook. You know, every, you know, every activity that takes place in a storybook has a kitchen in it, and that's the site of often great domestic comfort. It's also the place where the safety of domesticity can go horribly wrong if you get cooked or something like that in one of those darker fairy tales. Super interesting thing to think about, Mara. Thank you.
Marta Gutman:Super. Yeah. And then I think also in a period in which age grading, not only in education, but in every aspect of children's lives, it becomes this preoccupation that you're going to get this kind of toy when you're five and this kind of toy when you're six and on and on and on and I mean from the material culture side to the building side to even the city side the people you describe use these buildings again and again and again. They're not aimed at a particular time in childhood. They're aimed at a kind of period, right?
Marta Gutman:And so Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney is hanging out in the children's cottage when she's 19 years old, if I remember this properly, or Princess Victoria is coming back to the cottage after she's married. So the buildings to the children, right? I mean, if we're trying to understand what the buildings mean to the children as kids, their actions as older teenagers, young adults would reveal that they're quite important, right? That they hold a place of their imaginary understanding of childhood. Right?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:You know, especially the children's cottages, but even some of the playhouses were intended to be used cross generationally. Right? It was also understood that one of the activities that would take place at a playhouse would be that kids would be entertaining their parents, that they would make little tea cakes or whatever and serve them to their parents. And that takes place at the Swiss Cottage with Victoria and Albert. It takes place, you know, in with Olin Dows cooking in his Escoffier whites.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And what's really interesting is that when these shrinky dink middle class houses get bestowed upon a particular girl, she doesn't pass it on to her younger siblings. She keeps it, and it is hers forever. And so that completely undoes the kind of age grading that you're talking about as well.
Marta Gutman:But but it also speaks about their value. Right? Their emotional value, I think.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Kate Solomonson:Abby, a question that came up in the planning of this podcast about, how what you've been researching the playhouses might connect with issues in the present. I'll toss out a very obvious one that I'm curious about what you think about, and that is after writing about British royal family spaces for children, what do you think about how this has been represented in recent productions like The Crown and Victoria?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I love talking about this. As you can imagine, I watched both of those shows very carefully, and I was very hungry to see my buildings represented there and how they would be presented. I was sorely disappointed. I I think in large part because they weren't filmed on-site. The Osborne scenes were not filmed at Osborne and I don't know for sure where they filmed all parts of The Crown, but I'm fairly sure they were not at Royal Lodge At Windsor, which is where Princess Elizabeth's Iggwilth and Bach is.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So I get it that you'd have to reproduce it in order to film it somewhere else and that it might not seem worthwhile. I did wonder whether I mean, it seems like particularly on The Crown, but also a bit of Victoria as well, that some of the drama comes from this sense that that royal children are not loved in the right ways. They're to be pitied in some ways, but they have not been, nurtured and and loved in just the right way. And so I think that the playhouses could be hard to fit into that narrative unless you're gonna let me come in and, you know, give a mini lecture. Like, okay.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:We're gonna pause and have an architectural historian come in and talk to you about playhouses. Because, you know, on the surface of them, you just look at them and you think, oh, well, here's this material evidence that the parents did lavish attention and material goods, and they gave their children the stuff of a good and happy childhood, to coin a phrase from Lorta Gutman, that this is the way that you show that you know what the good childhood should be. It's harder to fit them in there. What I think is really ironic is that, especially at Osborne, if they had looked at the way that childhood was spatialized beyond the Swiss Cottage, it could have really investigated that fraught relationship between parents and children. Because at Osborne, yes, there is a nursery that's right above where Victoria and Albert's quarters are, and the younger children were up there.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And it allowed that part of Osborne, which is called the Pavilion, to be like a beautiful little container of happy domestic, you know, nuclear family life. But the truth was that as soon as the children left the nursery, that is when they're about seven, they get put into the building next door. Buildings are connected. Right? It's a wing, but it's it's a very different kind of building.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And they're given their own very different kinds of places to live. The the princesses on one level, the prince of Wales and his brother on the floor above, and they are completely isolated from the family. It is, you know, the prince of Wales' bedroom, his sitting room, his brother's room and sitting room, hit, the prince of Wales' Tutor's room, and then their personal attendants. There's only one stairwell. There's no connection to the rest of the family, and I think that prince of Wales, right, did not react well to that.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I think he felt ignored by his family. He felt somewhat overworked and somewhat put upon by his tutor. He acted out. His father would overreact, and they would start the cycle, you know, all over again. So the space is actually a really great way to look at how that dynamic played out exactly as it did.
Marta Gutman:And just to say, that dynamic, that's fascinating, and I I think you write about that beautifully in the book. I think it's wonderfully explained. But to compare it with the condition of working class families, children didn't have separate beds, children there may be in a tenement there might be two rooms, the mixing of generations, the mixing of different kinds of activities and family life, parents worked. It was a completely different world socially, economically, and architecturally. So there's such a stark contrast there and even too with in the 1850s, I mean Anne Marie is much more the expert on this than I am with regard to British architecture, but even in a middle class house you wouldn't have such stark separation between generations as you find in the royal family.
Marta Gutman:So again, the idea that these kids have lots of work to do is really pretty evident in, through the architectural arrangements. It's pretty striking.
Annmarie Adams:I can't help but jumping in and and saying that I think part of that separation, comes from ideas about health and keeping bodies separately and surrounding each body with fresh air as such a privilege of class. So I just gave a lecture this morning on New York tenements. Very fresh in my mind showing all those Jacob Riis photos. But, yeah, what a difference in terms of separation.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So what's interesting to me, prince Albert was really interested in that movement. Right? And he commissions these, working men's houses that are erected at the Great Exhibition of of eighteen fifty fifty one and wins all kinds of awards for them. And those were actually really useful to me when I looked at the plans of the Swiss Cottage. We don't have original plans of the Swiss Cottage.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:We have plans that were made three years after the building was built. And they've been interpreted as though they sort of show the original state of the of the caretaker's quarters. And by using Albert's very strong opinions about what goes into decent housing, I have come to the conclusion that that caretaker's cottage only had one bedroom originally. There's only one room that had both sufficient privacy, but also an exterior window to be a bedroom in Albert's view of things. And so it tells me that they always had in mind caretakers that were a couple without children, and that there was a change made later because the people they actually hired brought her elderly mother with them.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And so they the place for the older lady. But I began to reflect on the fact that having nonroyal children would have completely bollixed up the whole system. Because even though the royal children could throw off the restraints of royalty, The caretakers couldn't. They were never allowed to forget that those kids were royals and that they had to show deference to them. And if they'd had their own children who were required to show deference to adults just by nature of their age, I think the system would have broken down somehow.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Amrita, can you tell us more about the times that you've incorporated children in your work?
Annmarie Adams:Well, I was thinking about that preparing for the podcast thinking, well, I haven't really ever studied children. Have I?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I thought of a few times.
Annmarie Adams:I feel I've dabbled in children and architecture. You and I, Abby, wrote something on children's spaces, I don't know, in another century for an encyclopedia. And then I wrote this, paper on, Eichler houses in California suggesting that the kitchen was a kind of command center for women and showing that the family didn't use the house at all, how the the plans would suggest, you know, that touches on many of the themes you've mentioned. And then in my PhD dissertation, which became the book Architecture and the Family Way, it was mostly about women, health and doctors. But, of course, children are always present when you study women.
Annmarie Adams:So those are the main ways. And I teach a course on feminism and architecture, so children are very present there. The thing I always tell students to explain the prescriptive power of plans that I learned from you, Abby, is that buildings are always bossier when it comes to women and children. You can read the directions for women and children. They're so exaggerated.
Annmarie Adams:And I think that's really evident in your book, too, that studying these elite houses where those instructions are exaggerated is part of that world. Since I wrote the Eichler paper, I've been completely obsessed with how people use buildings in ways that were unintended. You know, I myself, I I use my dining room in my Victorian era house as a place to work, to do my Zoom calls, etcetera. So, I mean, we all do that, and that's how I've gotten at children. Oh, I also forgot.
Annmarie Adams:I did a major study of a children's hospital in Toronto where we gave 80 kids cameras, disposable cameras, and got them to run around and document how they used, atrium space. And that was just an amazing project. And that really underlined for me how children's hospitals are really designed for adults. The children think that it's silly that there are Disney characters in the bathroom or that the sinks are smaller or that there are pigs on trapezes in the middle of the atrium. And we have to really look to Scandinavian hospitals to get away from that.
Annmarie Adams:Scandinavian hospitals, pediatric hospitals are dignified, amazing buildings. And and I'm convinced that that's why in Scandinavia, Architecture is so valued because we they design for children at an early age in a really noble way.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So the bossiness of space for women and children, I think, is really interesting. I think so many of us got to children through gender. Right? That we were trying to understand women's lives. And in the cultures that we were studying, that meant that they were the, you know, the primary caretakers, and there was a lot of debate about whether that should be the case.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Right? But I was also just thinking I mean, I've been thinking about playgrounds that were established in the early twentieth century, and it's all you know, the discourse is all about the what the children need. And what I think no one is actually saying is that it was also a way of marking the rest of the city as the unmarked norm for white men. Right? And not even for women somebody.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:You know, I my students when we do when we study the establishment of women's rooms in libraries or in hotels or in train stations, they are like, oh, and there are these new spaces for women. I'm like, no. They used to be able to be anywhere. This is the way of segregating women and telling them that the rest of the city is not for their use. So I think that I think that's super interesting to to, like, bring a really open mind to those spaces that are for a particular group.
Annmarie Adams:Yeah. Well, now I'm studying older people in long term care, which is a lot like studying children in a way as older people, especially with dementia, lose their sense of orientation and need so much, guidance. And I'm so convinced that long term care is only designed for the families to comfort them about stashing their their relative in an institution and not at all about the resident or the patient. Very much like how the world designs for children.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Are you meaning that the long term care has kind of a inappropriate goofiness about it?
Annmarie Adams:No. It's usually houseiness that you make it look, like a house. You put a rocking chair. You you now the the new fad is that you put these memory boxes at the doorway and that the resident it's always the resident's daughter who curates a little exhibition about the person's life. Research has shown that staff spends more time in the rooms of residents that have memory boxes.
Annmarie Adams:So it turns out in a circular way that it benefits the person in bed, But it's really about comforting the family. It's not about what old people want in their architecture. Anyway, it's a continuing conundrum of how we design for vulnerable populations.
Marta Gutman:Oh, that's interesting. I'm just thinking back now to forty years ago when my grandmother was my father's mother was institutionalized with dementia in a pretty much old fashioned nursing home, you know, a reasonable one where there was relatively reasonable care. But we were told that it would help her as she lost her memory that if she had photographs that brought her family to life displayed in her room. And it was a very, very painful for my father to put that together, But he did, and he did it, you know, in deference to the expert council that said this is what you're supposed to do, but it there wasn't a box. It wasn't curated.
Marta Gutman:It was just like a bulletin board in in a hospital room that was then covered with photographs. I I wonder what to what degree how that practice has changed. Abby, I know this is you've said this before about when you make space for a particular group, you then tell that person or that group that they can't be somewhere else. In my book on kids using Oakland as a case study, I make the argument about public buildings, that in public spaces, that when we articulate the needs of children publicly, whether through play, through daycare centers, through orphanages, through settlement houses, whatever, after care centers, we are reminding the public of their responsibility to care for children, that we don't privatize children's needs in domestic settings. I believe that very strongly that although we may say, yes, you do belong here, being a kid, this is where you're supposed to play, or this is where you're supposed to go to after school or or so forth and so on, That happens, but that happens in the context of cities and suburbs and communities that are being differentiated all over the place.
Marta Gutman:And if we don't represent the needs of vulnerable populations to larger urban publics, then their needs disappear. It's a double edged or triple edged sword. I know certainly in the stories that I read about children in orphanages that children found solace and comfort and power in being in institutions with people who are like themselves, but that the question that I received from children who now adults who grew up in orphanages, and most of them had one living parent anyway, was not they were so called half orphaned, was not about the place where they were cared for. It was about the family that abandoned them. And I could never answer that question, which is why did my family not step up and take care of me?
Marta Gutman:It wasn't that I was put in a place. It was that my family abrogated responsibility, and I I never had an answer. It haunted me.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So it resonated with me, Marta, when I think back to my library work and the fact that, you know, these children's rooms were a new phenomenon, in the early twentieth century. And the librarians had the middle class librarians had assumed that they were gonna have to kind of lure the working class kids in. They were immigrant kids. They wouldn't know. They didn't know the language they thought.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And so they you know? And in fact, what what the reports are is that the kids embrace this space as theirs completely and just and had this great sense of ownership of it and sort of would march in and, you know, demand the library card and, you know, just made the place completely their own.
Marta Gutman:I would say that I mean, that speaks to me personally in terms of my use of the Carnegie Library in my town of Nyack and how it became my place on way on my way home from school. I would stop there all the time. It also speaks very much so to the to the way students current students at City College speak about public libraries now and how they serve as way stations for them as anchors, as places where they can go not only for books, but for computers, for guidance, for collective activity. They're super super important institutions for children and youth regardless of whether made for them purposely or housed in particular rooms within them. They're critical institutions for them, critical places.
Marta Gutman:And so that brings me back to your book and another question I wanted to ask. Do you think the children's cottages serve to advertise the needs of children to bigger audiences? Do you think they promoted the need to take care of children in societies that were relatively indifferent to the needs of children on an institutional level? Do you think they worked publicly that way?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:What an interesting question.
Marta Gutman:Because they have this enormous public life. Right? I mean they're promoted in the newspapers. The parents are really determined whether they're kings and queens or industrialists or actresses or whatever. They're determined to let the public know that they aren't making these places for their kids, And so we can see it as a way of building status, right, for sure, enunciating class privilege, etcetera, etcetera.
Marta Gutman:That's very clear and very powerful. But did they take on another role? Did they work? Did they capture the imaginary? Did they have any other kind of place in public culture?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So yeah. I mean, I would say that part of my argument at the very end of the book is that, so Shirley Temple has a glass block playhouse that's given to her by Owens Illinois because they're trying to promote their product. And a forward thinking woman who is the head of the New York Infirmary for Infants and Children, I think it was called, decides to get a replica of it and put it on display at the New York World's Fair in hopes of making enough money to actually build a children's hospital for it. And that doesn't work. That that this strategy does not really work.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:But, I mean, part of my argument is that, you know, the guy who oversaw that fair, the children's world at that fair, is also the director of Playland. And so decides that, you know, he built a playhouse there, I think. I'm not exactly sure of the timing. That paper trail was not really clear, But I think it's his doing. And it doesn't look anything like Shirley Temple's Playhouse, but I think that it becomes more commonplace.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I think the stars of stage and screen do a lot for really saying this is something you can aspire to. I we're living the good life. We have a swimming pool that's built in. You can have a doughboy. We have a barbecue pit.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:You can have a grill. We have this vast lawn. You can have a little yard. And we have this kind of playhouse, and you can have this kind of playhouse. And you can buy yours for my kit.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I had a cloth one. I had a thing that went over, card table when I was growing up that could be my playhouse. So I think there is I think there is some of that.
Annmarie Adams:Abby, I still have my table cloth house. It goes over the card table. My mother made it. She was so proud of it with little lace curtains and oh, and, magic marker drawing for the bricks.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Wow. Mine was store bought.
Marta Gutman:I guess what I'm wondering is whether these buildings and the promotion of them in any way contributed to a reformed discourse that said children do need places to play and we do need in the face of a growing durable play space, informally handled to begin with by children just making places for themselves, as cities become more specialized, more developed, streets become more dominant, traffic becomes more deadly, children become more highly valued, that we do need to think carefully about how we plan, build, and make places for kids in modern cities. I wonder if they had any impact on that thinking. I I I don't know that there's any way to measure it, but I find it fascinating to think about.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I mean, I think about the fact that the playhouses seem to me kind of the middle class domesticated mode of play on steroids. That, you know, one of the differences is that there is room in middle class domestic houses for children to play and to play with things that are store bought. It is a way of them playing in a somewhat isolated manner or with a handful of carefully chosen playmates, but that their play is is controlled by adults sort of in that way. And I think of the playhouses as being just sort of in that line. I feel like in post war suburbia, that kind of playscape was taken up by schools.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Like, it made its way into municipal thinking, I think, by way of the playground movement.
Marta Gutman:Yeah. I did. I can tell you that for sure. Good.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:That so I'm not sure to what extent the playhouses that I study contributed to that. But maybe.
Marta Gutman:Maybe. There's a super interesting history of the relationship of public schools and public school development and graded education and play that is yet to be written. It will come. In New York City in the eighteen forties and fifties, architects are thinking about where play happens in public schools. Basically they're putting them in basements and cellars, roofs come much later, but one of the great challenges that is faced is the cost of land and how to assign the space that's needed for play properly in crowded public schools would require land acquisition costs that no city, well, New York City isn't willing to expand.
Marta Gutman:And there are lots of there's lots of discussion about that. But it's, it's tangled with with regard to the buildings at that moment and starting at the beginning of the movement for public schools, but playgrounds themselves, which are largely produced in public in American cities by women and women's organizations become integrated in the progressive era in departments of parks and recreation. And there's a big battle between boards of education and between parks and rec about who's going to control those spaces. And it actually endures because there are playgrounds on school grounds that are covered by schools, and then there are the playgrounds and parks that are run by parks and rec and they don't collaborate easily. But what I see is that overall, we don't have enough place for kids to play.
Marta Gutman:Regardless of who's running the playgrounds, the dearth of open space for children to play of any age, is remarkable and really tragic and really telling of our values.
Kate Solomonson:So jumping from there to the mid twentieth century for a moment, one of the things that intrigues me and intrigues me all the more from having read your book, Abby, is the way that, play has infiltrated adult culture or at least adult elite culture to a certain extent. I'm thinking, for example, Abby, you've commented before on the the ways that some of Eames's the Eames furniture is really low and changes the way, adults sit and so on. If you could say something about that, then I'll jump off from that into another phenomenon. Okay?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Sounds that sounds like a team effort worth pursuing. I think we've had conversations in the past where I have offered this off the cuff theory that in the nineteenth century, the middle class goal was to get your children to act like adults as quickly as possible, you know, putting them up in a high chair so that they didn't interfere with the dinner table, putting them on display. I mean, making them visible, but also sort of keeping them contained so that they didn't disrupt the adult parlor or the adult goings on. In the twentieth century, I think that gets turned on its head somewhat and where adults are encouraged to act more and more like children. And so you point to one example that I always love is that the way that mid century modern furniture is really low to the ground.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Like, the floor plane had once been the plane of children. Like, that's where children got to crawl around and that adults sort of take that over. And I swear there are pictures of, Charles and Ray Eames sitting on cushions, like, on the floor of their Pacific Palisades house. Right? So there's that.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:There's the way that adults take over blue jeans, which had been youth wear. And now every old lady has on her blue jeans. And and I think of it, you know, that there's sort of a playfulness. I mean, the fact that so much of modernism claimed to take on the visual language of childhood. I mean, they were simultaneously inventing it and saying it was the visual language of childhood, but they were simultaneously saying this is the visual language of childhood and let's put it into adult objects as well.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And, you know, just sort of a youthfulness, a general valuing of of youth culture, over age.
Kate Solomonson:So, jumping off of that, one of the things I've I've been thinking about is place spaces within the headquarters of high-tech companies like Google, like Apple. As I was thinking about this, I tapped some of my friends who work in those places to see if my perceptions were correct and that, or is it just rumor? So you need to imagine a slide, connecting two floors in a in a Google building. But even earlier, it was really interesting to me. Hewlett Packard, and this might have been as early as the nineteen sixties, had hobby huts for its employees.
Kate Solomonson:And, you know, some of that, was connected to, you know, people who were inventing things literally in their garages and, basically to create spaces for creativity and invention. And it made me think about this book you edited, Abby, designing the creative child by Amy O'Gotta. Some of those people in the later twentieth century going on to extend their play in into their work in a variety of ways. And I could I could go into what they've said to me about, video games, and acid rock and how all those things come together. But, basically, it's it's just striking how we have meeting pods, play pods, the slide, various kinds of places to pursue play in high-tech headquarters and, possibly in other places and how also how the media has gobbled that up and represented it.
Kate Solomonson:So I think that there's room for research here in connecting what you're talking about with changes in modernist furniture. I think of of that is bringing adults closer to the ground, brings them closer to the plane of children so that perhaps they're closer to their children when they're standing up and, you know, bringing them down to a a child's scale to a certain extent. It's also something that may be invented and reinvented in adult culture as well. This, comes out of my thinking about how have adults, elite adults, been, using their children as a way of advancing their position. But that led me, you know, right back into the representation of those adults, pursuing childlike play and creativity.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Well, I mean, I think it that you remind me of Louise Bozingo's work, right, where she argues that the corporate campus was in part to attract college grads, right, who've gotten used to having a certain kinds of amenities on their college campuses. And therefore, you know, IBM or whoever had John Deere had to provide those kinds of environments in order to attract workers. And I think we've seen lots of that take off. Right? I mean, I think college campuses are in great competition with one another to provide really great recreational facilities for their students.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:If Louise is right about how this works, then that makes sense that that then informs the the adult workplace as well.
Annmarie Adams:Well, I think it's part of the what Barbara Penner has called the cosification of the public sphere. I don't know where she published it, but I saw it before it was published. And she's documented all these places, like public libraries in London in particular that have beanbag chairs and, cushions on those big staircases that you're supposed to sit on, not go up. And I think she suggests that it's in competition with cafes, like sort of Starbucks atmospheres in public places. In some places, you're allowed to bring your your dog and your coffee, and I think it's about more than just play.
Annmarie Adams:Playrooms don't appear in hospitals until the nineteen eighties. So the play takes place in wards or other places.
Marta Gutman:Well, one thinking about Kate's comment and then also Anne Marie's is a general comment about the interiority of play or the interiorization of play. And I guess this would sort of disregard my comment earlier about playgrounds because playgrounds are public. Right? You can see what's happening regardless of who you are. But in the case of the children's cottages, in the case of the Google whatever playroom they have for adults, they're interior spaces, and you can only know what's happening in them if you're in them or if you get privileged pictures of them.
Marta Gutman:So the performance is for a very select audience in both cases and that interiority and encapsulation of the activity, thinking back now to your comment about performance, Abby, means that it's highly highly privileged and the sharing of the knowledge is highly orchestrated. And so while I actually do think that the elite playhouses and cottages did work in broader culture to popularize the notion of play and its acceptability as a proper activity for kids and so forth and so on, it does so in a very different way than a playground would because a playground is in fact not controllable even though people make plenty of attempts to do so. So you can't hide it. You can't control it. You can't control the knowledge about it in the way that you can the children's cottage, the children's playhouse, or jumping ahead to now the Google headquarters for adults or even all those commercial play play spaces that proliferate from the 1950s onward.
Marta Gutman:I mean, Gary Cross writes about them, you know, a lot. I think there's something really important there about interiority and interiority as a signal. I'm not sure if it's a sign or a symbol, but as evidence of privilege and accruing privilege and the diffusion of that into into popular culture. Right?
Kate Solomonson:I mean, I think that's key, Marta. In these corporate buildings, we're looking at spaces that the corporations control. They design them and set them up, to encourage certain kinds of interactions and, to cultivate creativity that is contained within these spaces and that, you know, becomes, translated into intellectual property eventually.
Marta Gutman:And the employee thinks the employee is getting all this great gift, this free stuff, right? But in fact, the employee is caught in a net that's just as exploitative as the nineteenth century factory. Think about play and how it moves through cultures in different ways and the importance of architecture in that process. All because of your book, Abby.
Annmarie Adams:One thing we haven't really talked about that I think is really key is, children's mobility. So we talk about the house in the nineteenth century, the late nineteenth century is the one I've worked on. And then you have the invention of the perambulator or stroller, as we would call it, which is so liberating for women because middle class women can then walk miles and miles and miles from home and not be tired, not carry babies, meet their friends with babies, probably in public parks, basically get away from the home. And there are lots of devices for children that children love, like bicycles and scooters and even those little cars that are about mobility. So did these elite children of yours, Abby, did they try to get away from home?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the questions that someone posed to me in preparation for this conversation is, you know, did these children use these sites in ways that their parents didn't anticipate? And all I can say is I'm sure they did, but the evidence is really hard for me to uncover for these things because the evidence comes from either posed photographs or family letters. There's quite a bit of correspondence from the governess who will write about what the kids are doing, and they're doing everything they should under the governess's expert care.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Or these letters I have between siblings, but they're reporting on activities that they've done with their parents. But I will also say so if you read the newspaper coverage about Princess Elizabeth, the late queen, the news would have you believe that she was happiest being a little domestic creature in this cottage. I think one of the reasons it doesn't feature very much in the early seasons of The Crown is that she didn't care very I don't think it was her the center of her being. I think horses and dogs were the center of her existence. I think the horse, right, is the way that elites get away in a way that is considered class appropriate and that their parents can approve of, and they can learn polo and other things and, you know, and socialize with the right kinds of people, but still get away from home.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:The Vanderbilt kids used to, you know, take a little pony cart and get away from the breakers and go to other land that the family owned where they, you know, that there was farmland that they could get away to. I think they did want to be very, very mobile.
Annmarie Adams:My other question I've been dying to say is, you know, as a Canadian, I'm a subject of the crown. He's my queen, and he's my king whether I like it or not. But he's not your queen. They're not your queen. And can you have this revolution?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I'm aware of that.
Annmarie Adams:Yes. I was kinda wondering, but, so can you just say a little bit about the link you've made between the British houses and the American ones skipping over the Canadian ones?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:I'd be happy to skip over the Canadian situation. I, you know, I started this project by working on the Vanderbilts and in the course of that work became aware of the Swiss Cottage. So became intrigued by that. There are some other royal European examples, some of which are connected to Victoria. You know, they're her offspring who do them.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:It's clear to me that American American elites were looking to the British for their ideas about what constituted elegance, what constituted high class behavior. I think about this area in, Long Island and New York where in the late nineteenth century, the very best hotels were called Osborne and the Isle Of Wight. And she's on the throne for so long, right, that you really people could get really invested in her and in what she was up to. And there was this back and forth. I mean, early on in our careers, Anne Marie, you and I co chaired a session at SAH because we were so aware that there was so much conversation going on across the Atlantic about progressive reform that it made perfect sense to us that we would actually make that the focus of the of the session.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And I think the same thing is going on. That one of the reasons that all the Vanderbilt pushes so hard for her daughter, Consuelo, to marry the Duke of Marlborough is because a British Duke is, like, the prize. That that's the highest prize. Some others, they have to make do with royalties from other European countries. But if you could tag a Brit, you know, that would be, the the best thing that they could think of.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And that you know, I I think about books like the gentleman's house. Right? A a book that's all about how elite houses are arranged in Britain and how that is sort of digested in The US and informs so much of the way that country houses are arranged and the principles are are, like, internalized really deeply, in The United States. And so it made sense to me to go a little bit of back and forth.
Annmarie Adams:Just forget that revolution.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:So what was interesting to me I mean, having been a person who started her career working on public libraries where you walk into the place that you're trying to study and an American public librarian hands you the file that she's you know, she says, I knew someone would ask that question eventually. Here's everything I've been saving. Right? And what can I get you in here? You know?
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And and, you know, the library is yours. To go to the royal archives at Windsor Castle where they don't have account and they don't have finding aids, or if they have finding aids, they don't let me look at them. Right? That you tell them what your topic is, and they pull things off the shelf and tell you what you can look at. And that that was huge to me that there is such a difference in sort of how you deal with the library user and the the kind of control that they maintain over information.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:And it just makes me wanna go back and rewrite the introduction to my library book and, and really cheer cheer on American public libraries in a much in a much more robust way. Yeah.
Annmarie Adams:The next edition.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:The next edition. Thank you.
Marta Gutman:So just as a side note, I would say to you Abby and Ann Marie that I am ever grateful for you for accepting my first S. A. H. Paper to that session on transatlantic reform in the progressive era. That's how I met you and where I met you.
Marta Gutman:Well, I how I met you was through the session and where I met you was where I think Philadelphia where the conference was being held. So the circles are are long and enduring. Long and enduring. That's just the gratitude.
Abigail A. Van Slyck:Well, maybe on that note, with us all in such a happy go lucky mood, we could pull this to a close. It has been just amazing having the opportunity to talk with you three and to say publicly how grateful I am for the model of scholarship that you've provided me over all these years, for the fact that you've been willing to read the manuscript in so many different iterations, and really push me in ways that without your nudging, the book wouldn't be nearly as good as it is. So I'm really, really grateful and happy to have you in my circle. Thank you.
Annmarie Adams:Back at you, Abby.
Marta Gutman:Yes. Absolutely. Same for
Narrator:sure. This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Playhouses and Privilege, the Architecture of Elite Childhood by Abby Van Slyke is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.