Fieldwork for "Worcester: A City & Its People"

Students in Dr. Conroy's Worcester: A City & Its People class (UR 312) took to the city for a second time this semester to do some fieldwork. The first trip was to North Main Street -- this one was to Coes Pond and Webster Square. Here they are on the eastern edge of the pond along the boardwalk.

The student field packets contained old maps and images of city buildings and spaces at various historical points. For example, the packets contained plates from the 1896 and 1911 Worcester Real Estate Atlases as well as pictures of the "old" Webster Square Cinema when it was in operation, the "old" Stop'n Shop that's not the Asian Market, the Coes Wrench Factory, and the Roller Skating Arena that is now called Arena Plaza (where a Little Caesars is located).

Students located the sites along the way and compared the old images and maps to what remains of them today. Then they were encouraged to speculate about the changes before they dug into source material on it. It is an exercise that builds their historical detective skills and also forces them to regard the built environment in deeper ways, certainly more than they can whizzing by in a car.

The course is a recently restored version of an old Jake Powers class (for those of you who recognize that name.) In fact, we use some of Jake's notes, including a wonderfully crusty lecture called "What's Wrong With Worcester History." (Note that he offered it as a statement, not a question.) One of the course's readings is his excellent dissertation, Invisible Immigrants, about the pioneer Irish in Worcester, MA.

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