Urban Narrative Project

Old Salem C. Winkler Bakery and Food Production

Salem in the eighteenth century was a magnet for visitors. People came to stay at its tavern during long journeys and to sip its notable brandy. They came to buy food, pottery, tools and receive medical care. Salem’s history teaches us that the quality of life we enjoy and take for granted today has not been easily or quickly won. This eighteenth century town was economically unusual in the fact that the church owned all the land and kept a close eye on the quality, productivity, and moral character of businessmen. Pottery, guns, saddles, furniture, cloth, and other goods made in Salem were of superior quality. From the earth, the Moravians took clay for bricks, roof tiles, stoves, and the manufacture of their jugs, plates, and bowls. The Moravians made one of the first public waterworks systems in America. They piped water from springs through hollowed logs joined with iron fittings to the town’s tavern, pottery, and tanyard. Moravian holiday celebrations and traditions were very important to their heritage such as Christmas and Easter. One of the Christian rituals that the Moravians celebrated was called a lovefeast. The lovefeast is signified as the sharing of meals and music. The meal consisted of stewed pumpkin, cornmeal mush, sweetened milky coffee, and soft buns. This food is passed along the pews at the Christmas Eve services held in all the Moravian churches.

            From 1800 to 1927 Winkler’s Bakery served the community of Old Salem. It was the most familiar and most fragrant landmark in Old Salem. Christian Winkler began to study baking in Germany at age twenty-five. He and his wife had six children and moved to Salem. The family produced baked goods for the town residents for thirty years. The building was a bake shop downstairs and a home for the baker and his family upstairs. The same building still stands and preserves the original characteristics and architecture in the construction of its fireplaces, floors, doorways and thick walls. The Moravian love feast buns were made here; as well as rich candies, cream puffs, cookies and sugar cakes for everyday occasions. There was a formula for making love feast buns and it used to take a few days to make it by hand in stone ovens. But today new machinery and modern ovens replaced old stone ovens of the past and only takes a few hours. The making of the buns for love feast began at 6 o’clock on Friday two days before love feast began on a Sunday. The Moravians made a ferment which was made of liquid yeast and potatoes. At 11 o’clock that Friday night the sponge was made and put to rise in a bread trough. From 4 to 5 o’clock Saturday morning, the dough was made and a layer of butter was put over the top of the dough and worked into it, as it was then set to rise again. Everyone helped to carry the dough over to a table to pinch off the dough, weigh it, and shape it into buns. On the top of each dough an X or M was cut into it to prevent blistering to happen during baking. This process of making dough lasted all night long so there would be enough buns for a big love feast.

            The Winkler’s also made sugared pretzels for love feasts during the year. The process of making the sugared pretzels was just as extensive in addition to making the sugar. The sugar was boiled in huge copper kettles and then afterwards poured on marble slabs to cool. White cochineal coloring was mixed into it and then the candy was rolled and cut by hand into different flavored sticks.

            In addition to his food business of making assorted cakes, stick candy, love-drops, puff paste tarts, ginger, cakes, and ginger pop, Winkler also brewed and sold beer. The Winkler Family guided its establishment through a new republic, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and the beginning of the great World War. The Winkler tradition for delicious bread and cakes still survives in Old Salem today.

            The bread in the Winkler Bakery is baked in a dome-shaped brick oven. The bakers build a fire in the oven using the wood they have stacked outside. Once the brick oven gets heated the bakers rake out the coals. There is an order to baking the food. First the bread is baked in the oven and then they bake the Moravian sugar cakes. Afterwards they bake the sugar cookies because they require the oven’s lowest temperature. No preservatives were used back then therefore, the bakers today keep the tradition and authentically do not use preservatives either. Long wooden paddles are used to take the bread and baked goods in and out of the hot oven.

            In addition to food of Old Salem water was crucial for survivial. In 1766 most communities still depended on wells or drew their water directly from springs or rivers. However, Old Salem did not need to depend on that because their system was the first of its kind in the Southeast. They created pipes that were ten-to twelve foot long white oak logs that were joined by iron rings. Two springs were placed at the base of the hill and trenches that were three feet deep and two miles longs were dug from the water source. In Old Salem there is a reconstructed Pump that sits on the Southwest corner of the Square for the public to enjoy and imagine what it was like back then with water pumps.

            Furthermore, the Salem Tavern was another one of the most successful businesses in town. It had become a favorite stopping place to rest and eat for merchants, traders, and pioneers heading west as well as for local Moravians. It is special to know that George Washington had stayed in Winston-Salem’s Tavern for two days during his grand tour of the South. In the Tavern, meals were served to travelers in the “common room” while wealthier guests dined in the “Gentleman’s Room”. The wealthier guests ate more elaborate meals that were lit by candle light.

            Lastly another landmark that is famous in Old Salem which relates to the production of food is The Coffee Pot. The Coffee Pot is associated with Moravian Lovefeasts because they served coffee with the famous buns. The Coffee Pot had become the unofficial symbol of Winston-Salem.

                In conclusion, Old Salem vegetable gardens were grown in need to produce the ingredient for their production of food. The gardens would grow currants, gooseberries, raspberries, apple trees, peaches, plums, and a quince tree for jelly. An asparagus bed was considered to be a prized addition to some Old Salem gardens. Mint, parsley, sage, and thyme were also commonly grown in gardens. Lavender and rosemary were always included in a garden which can help flavor any kind of food, especially breads.

~Following my essay, there is a powerpoint but I do not know how to upload it.

Sound Curation

All of my recordings are of a pianist playing the piano. I asked to sit in a piano practice room when my friend was just normally practicing for his weekly lesson. It was an average day for the pianist as he goes to the piano and works on what he needs to improve. However, if was very new to me as I have not spent a lot of time in the music department’s piano practice rooms. I told my friend to pretend that I wasn’t there and to go the hour without trying to make pretty sounds for my recordings. Throughout the hour of his playing I recorded three different versions of the piano piece he was working on which is Beethoven Op. 109. During my time observing his work ethics I was surprised at how many different ways there are to practice a piano piece. There is repetition, singing along while playing, and then what it seems like pretending that you are playing the piece for real like in a performance. Here are my experiences:

“Practice” is the first sound that I recorded. The pianist is working slowly through the piece and repeats parts that he feels he has not quite worked out smoothly. Working slowly through the piece allows your brain and fingers to remember what you are practicing. Repetition also is a helpful tool when you are trying to practice, and I feel that this concept applies to everything else in life. This recording is a rough take through the piece but can show the struggle through something new that a person is trying to accomplish. It is the smaller piece in a bigger picture that people usually don’t pay attention to, but this part of practicing is the most important part because you can’t get to the beautiful final product without the tedious part of practicing slowly.

“Ba Ba Ba” is the next sound I recorded and it shows another aspect of practicing or another technique to practicing. In this sound, the pianist is singing while practicing in order to keep the tempo right. Singing while playing the piano is difficult because the pianist has to concentrate on the singing and also concentrate on playing the right notes while keeping up with his speaking tempo. This kind of mind stimulation is difficult but just another form of practicing that develops good technique to make a brilliant pianist. However, one might not normally think of this kind of practicing while they are attending a live performance of a professional pianist. This recording can also show the frustration that goes into practicing and if the pianist is not getting the right results that he wants.

“Beethoven Op. 109” is the last recording that demonstrates the culmination of practicing and what kind of beautiful result it will produce. I recorded the main theme in this piece which I find is very beautiful to listen to. Even talking with the pianist, I found out how much he enjoys playing this beautiful theme. There are still some mistakes played in this recording which also shows how people cannot be perfect during a “performance” and that you have to keep on pushing through to finally get a result that pleases you and your audience.

I think that all my recordings can relate to artists at this school. Here at this school, we all experience practicing and working on something which we will perform or show to an audience of people. A lot of work goes into being an artist and a lot of that work goes unseen, only the final product is seen. However, I wanted to portray the hard work and time commitment that goes into producing beautiful art, and in this case beautiful sounds.

Citizen Statement

After completing my blog entries I have thoughtfully reflected on my life as a citizen who currently lives in the city of Winston Salem but who also has a home in the suburbs of New Jersey. I have experienced new ways of perceiving how to live in a city as well as how to observe its surroundings such as the people, buildings, and the environment. Walking through Winston Salem and taking time to listen to sounds has been thought provoking and I can truly say that I am a participant in this world that is increasingly being composed of improving cities.

I really enjoyed learning about New York City's architecture and the main people who were involved in its construction such as Robert Moses and LaGuardia. I think learning about these influential people has given me better insight into how a city develops. I was able to relate my knowledge about Moses and Jacobs to when I went on the Post-WWII Winston Salem class bus tour with Kelly Bennett the city planner of Winston Salem. On the bus tour Kelly had explained that a city has a bunch of years already planned out for its future constructions. I thought that was really interesting and I liked being able to look through Winston Salem’s city planner and knowing that the city has a 5-year plan already made. This way the city is ensured potential for future growth. Kelly mentioned about Robert Moses’ New York City development and it was great to be able to know what he was talking about and being able to relate back to my viewings and readings about Moses.

Living in New Jersey made me become familiar with New York City without having to live directly in the city. Growing up I was able to visit the NYC so much so that I had a mental mapping of how my parents would drive across the George Washington Bridge and into the city. After driving across the G.W. Bridge we would then take the West Side Highway to get into upper Manhattan to watch Broadway shows or etc. After watching the Episode 7 of New York: A Documentary Film, I now know that the bridges and highway across Manhattan were Robert Moses's idea and his dreams. It was very valuable to learn about the history of Penn Station and how it was architecturally built beautifully, but then it had to be torn down as part of the urban renewal project. In the 1950s everyone was devastated by the tearing down of this historically architectural monument. Penn station not only had welcomed people and commuters into New York City, but it was such a grand way to enter a big elaborate city. Besides the architecture in the city, one thing that currently has not changed is how much people adore the beautifully constructed city. Beginning in the 1950s people had started to think of New York City as a home and a welcoming neighborhood. In recent times, I know how much people still adore New York City and what it has to offer the people living and visiting it.

It is incredible to think about the unknown and how far our society and culture will progress. Our class mural paintings illustrate this concept of a changing society and how far we have come and improved our technology and use of architecture. The first panel demonstrates the idea of people living in caves and their way of communication was by cave drawings. The next panel is of the pyramids and in my interpretation of it, it is how society began to develop  by building structures for people to live in rather than finding homes through nature. Hence, man begins to take control and increase his livelihood. The next panel is of the current city and interprets how people in society live today in skyscrapers and tall structures, making a living and a big advancement from the beginning of time with cave drawings. And the last panel depicts how the future is unknown like the vast galaxy. The next step in our future is like turning a page, you don’t know what to expect until you turn the page and begin to start a new chapter in life.

The story our panels depict that we painted for class reminds me of Jack Kerouac’s story cityCityCITY. The fact that his story takes place in the future and it describes a city that is overpopulated and how the Earth is covered in city. Technology overrides everything in the world and controls how people are reproduced even. In our society today, we have already come so far in advanced technology and people are constantly improving old technical devices developing newer and faster ways to communicate. Our society is just trying to improve itself just as Robert Moses wanted to improve the society by constructing a grand city that we still use today. Hopefully there will not be devastating reoccurrences such as the tearing down of Penn Station. But luckily we have learned from Jane Jacobs the journey of living and walking with people in an urban environment is more important than the separation of people and the building of infrastructures through a already great architecturally world. 

  

Urban Walking

Finding my way to new a place,

I see new things only at walking a pace.

I simply walk to Washington Park,

But along the way something in me inspires a spark.

I decide I want to make a change in my life,

By living simply and not having any rife.

The birds chirp peacefully and put me at ease,

I feel the lightness in the air through the spring’s breeze.

I pass a dog park along my walk,

And never before seeing this I open the gate’s lock.

I haven’t pet a dog in so long being at school,

I fall in love with them even if on me they drool.

I must leave the cute puppies as I am short on time,

But in my mood I become jocund and sublime.

I find that this walk has cleared my head,

And with all my worries I am finally able to put them to bed.

I enjoyed my 45 minute walk in the urban environment of Winston Salem. I began my walk out of Center Stage Apartments and onto Haled Street which then leads to S Main Street. I went down Cascade Ave to walk to Washington Park. I have never been to Washington Park this way but I realized that it was a lot shorter route than going any other way I have traveled. Also, walking along this route, I realized that it was familiar to me because I had trick-or-treated on that road this year during Halloween. However, since it was dark outside when I went on Halloween, the area looked different than on a cheery Sunday afternoon that I decided to talk my urban experience walk. I walked right to one of Washington Park’s entrances and headed through the park. I love parks and it reminded me of being home seeing swing sets and baseball fields. It was such a lovely walk, I enjoyed the fresh air and the time alone to be able to think and contemplate things that were on my mind. It was distressing because I had set aside time to walk and I knew that I could do my homework later rather than worrying about it now.

On my walk, I came to a conclusion that Winston Salem has its own identity and unlike New York City, Winston Salem is not a melting pot of pushing people together. I think Winston Salem is a small city but still allows the beauty of people living a suburb life because of the parks that are around the city and the cute houses that people inhabit. Also, Winston Salem’s population is not an overload of people or having too many things coming at you and it is not like to have to majorly adjust to survive, which is how Stanely Milgram expressed it in his film The City of the South. Living in Winston Salem is not like living in a major city such as NYC, which is like living in a place with millions of others and being congested by its constant activity. As expressed in Milgram’s film, only in New York City can you be three seconds late. I like normal pace of Winston Salem’s city rather than being rushed all the time like how it is in NYC.

Overall walking is a good way to clear your head, but next time I will share it with a friend and maybe jog next time instead of walk to get in some cardio as well as thinking time.

Urban Sacralization

I want to bring back traditional loyalties to people and ideas. Dean MacCannell says it is now impossible to determine who “we” are verse who “they” are. Going off of what MacCannell thinks, I would like to sacralize dying eyebrows a color as a statement or fashion. People nowadays dye a strand of hair on their head as a donation to a cause. I think that dying your eyebrows a color could become a trend just like putting feathers in your hair or getting a piercing or tattoo since it is the first stage of sight sacralization. Dying your eyebrows is already marked off from similar objects as worthy of preservation. For the naming phase of sight sacralization I would call this trend DyeBrows. DyeBrows could be died pink for breast cancer awareness or died purple for gay awareness. The second phase in sight sacralization which is called framing and elevation, people would already be putting on display their died eyebrows. Eye brows are not usually first noticed on a person’s face but if they are died then it would stand out and be a bold statement as well as another fun accessory to do for fashion. Dying your eyebrows are like putting spotlights on your face or putting on makeup. The DyeBrows could enhance eye color. For example if someone has blue eyes and then dye their eyebrows blue then it would be an enhancement of blue on a face.

This will begin to be popular in New York City because there are exotic trends that can start there.

I played around with this idea on myself and to my surprise it turned out well.

Urban Experience

This is my mental map of my hometown in New Jersey. After creating my mental map of my town Old Tappan, I was curious to visit my town's website to see if there would be something I could relate to my map to. I found out that the borough of Old Tappan has been around since 1664 which gives it over "300 years of History and Heritage". I realized that my mental map differs from a regular map of my town Old Tappan in more ways than one. Firstly the scale is not correct because specific landmarks are not evenly spaced out. I tried to my best of my drawing ability to map landmarks as accurately as I could from my memory. But in addition, since my town is over 300 years old, the layout of the town must have changed. Landmarks must have been removed and replaced over that long amount of time period. I did some research into my town and there was apparently more land to begin with than there is now. In the beginning around 1664 the town mostly consisted of farm land. However, disputes between the New York and New Jersey divided the land. The settlement of the New York-New Jersey boundary severed Old Tappan from its original connection with Orange County and the colony of New York. That had now made Old Tappan part of the province of New Jersey.

Since my hometown is really small (which I now know why after some researching) I found it easy to recall all the main landmarks that make up my town. Google maps would be a more detailed map of my hometown but I think my mental map is pretty accurate to follow. The main landmarks in my town consists of the Bi-state Plaza where everyone in town shops, the High School, Middle school and Elementary school, the Church, the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Library, and the parks. I included a pizzeria that everyone in town know about so that is landmark that has been socially made.

Below is an image that came up when I searched Old Tappan, NJ in Google maps and it is one of the landmarks that I have included in my mental map. "Bi-State Plaza" is where mostly all the residents in my town go shopping. It is a distinctive landmark that all Old Tappanians will know well and would most likely include in their mental map as well.

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Below is a Google maps image of what my town looks like from an aerial view. The difference is that there are no specific landmarks that make the town personalized. There are only street names and the roads are more accurately drawn. My drawing of my hometown is how I envision it which makes my town special to me.

During the process of this mental mapping I realized that I did not know what exit of the Palisades Parkway I am off of.This is something that I have to look into more thanks to this mental mapping.

           The classes I took this semester a lot had connections to each other. The classes that I chose to analyze this semester were two academic courses: English Composition and Digital Media for the Artist (DMA); while the other two courses were dance related: Dance Perspectives, and Dance Composition. The New Media theme was a prevalent theme between all of my four classes. I found that even though the connections were all circular, without taking DMA I would not have known about the New Media that helped me with assignments in other classes. The way I conducted the connections between each classes were by analyzing and reviewing what I had conquered in each class separately.

            My two academic classes, English Composition and DMA were similar in the way that I researched assignments and wrote a lot of reflections about themes. In both of these classes I found a connection through New Media. In my Composition class I read a book called But Is It Art  by Cynthia Freeland. In Freeland’s book, there are a lot of references about art that I was able to connect to DMA. One big connection that I learned about was Running Fences. It was mentioned in Freeland’s book and I watched the excerpt on Blackboard provided by the DMA course.

            Next DMA also provided a connection between my Dance Composition. In dance composition I learned more about myself as a dancer and I learned about free range in movement that I could create myself. In DMA I created my own projects based of off themes and posted them in Facebook for my class to see. While in Dance Composition I choreographed a piece to a theme and at the end of the course there was a big comp showing where the whole class presented for everyone to watch.

            Dance Composition related to my other dance class Dance Composition. In Dance Perspectives the dance faculty talked about themselves as a dancer growing up and their careers. I was able to ask questions and learn valuable advice and knowledge from my teachers. The questions I asked and my classmates asked were questions we face every day as growing dancers and artists. Both of these classes related because I learned and had freedom to explore myself as a growing artist.

            Dance Perspectives and DMA associated in the way that I learned and analyzed the both the dance world and the technological world. I was also able to infuse my knowledge of New Media into one of my Dance Perspectives class assignments. For the last assignment I had to create a family tree and show how the dance world is all interconnected. The way that I executed this assignment was that I created my tree on the computer through Microsoft Word with the application called SmartArt. Therefore, I was able to appropriately incorporated both the dance world and technological world into my life.

            My Dance Perspectives and English Composition class were also related through New Media. In English Composition I read the book A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and in her second to last chapter she communicates the story through a PowerPoint. In both classes I had assignments that used the PowerPoint media which makes a connection through using new media.

            Lastly, my English Composition class and Dance Composition class are connected in the way that I both composed and recorded art through assignments. I was able to express myself through dancing and through writing on paper. Sometimes the process of creating or choreographing a dance can be improved through writing ideas down on paper.

            In conclusion, through all of my classes dance related and academic wise, I learned about myself as a growing artist and as an improving dancer. Without the guidance and assignments from my teachers I would not have improved or come thus far. Reflecting back on all my classes this semester, it was beneficial to me that they all were connected in some way and I look forward to next semester to see the connections between my future courses.