Freedom, Optimism and Making in America
As we enter December, many makers I know are ramping up their inventory for the upcoming season of gift-giving. The most motivated have got their production runs begun in time for Black Friday. This is a time of year that pays off for many artists and crafters. For some, maker spaces are essential means to scale production.
When I think of maker spaces, one great American word bubbles top of mind most swiftly: freedom. Maker spaces offer people of all walks of life the freedom to create–individually as solo artists and together in creative, purpose-driven groups. Our ability to tinker, repair and create is a taproot of agency in American life.
This impulse to create is the engine of our progress. Whether on our highways, at the doctor’s office, at our themed parks, or sailing down the aisles of the supermarket the ingenuity of our nation is abundantly clear. Even our Black Friday perusal of endless links at Amazon, eBay or Etsy–themselves testament to the fruitfulness of the American imagination–turns up like a plow through topsoil a rich world teeming with the stuff of life. Evidence of agency.
And that stuff of American life, that essential product of freedom, I believe is optimism.
The freedom to create keeps us optimistic. Maker spaces breed optimism in cities where the cost of real estate can be so prohibitive that garage and basement workshops are folklore of bygone era. Maker spaces breed the optimism that comes with learning in a time when a college degree can bankrupt families and force young people into jobs they don’t want. And maker spaces cultivate conditions necessary for entrepreneurs to take risks, risks that are rooted in an essential optimism for the future.
In his essay titled, “Xanadu by the Salt Flats,” Wallace Stegner paints a portrait of his boyhood summers working at Saltair — “the Coney Island of the West.” From eviscerating descriptions of hot dog preparation to dreamy midnight train rides, Stegner paints a picture of youth seeping with optimism. It was an optimism that flourished in the Gilded Age and echoed in the post-war years with the rapid spread of the train, electricity and communication.
Saltair was a foreshortened paradise, its future cut short–like so many American establishments of its time–by the subversion of the train to the automobile. At its peak the salty getaway boasted 450,000 annual visitors who enjoyed delights that included the largest indoor dancehall on the continent, world renown entertainment, an unrivaled roller coaster, and impossible-to-get-anywhere-else experiences of nautical wonder.
“Civilization,” Wallace Stegner wrote, “Is built with thunderbolts.” And indeed, Saltair was populated daily by a 1500V open air electric train that delivered hundreds of visitors on the hour. It must have been a wonder to experience during its four short summer months each year.
It is dusk, the sun winking out in the west. Imagine for a moment the long arc of boardwalk that curves gently out to sea, the vast halls and outbuildings trimmed spectacularly in golden light. Hopscotch sounds of a swing band carry over the dense salt water as night time bathers splash and cry beneath a rising moon. The smoke of 100 grills obscures the cloudless view of the Oquirrh mountains across the lake. The rattle and cries from the roller coaster are punctuated by the bells and cheers from the midway games. Over the shoulder, lights of Salt Lake City to the east twinkle in the lowering Utah heat. The world feels alive, perfectly remote and immediately present.
But Saltair was never meant to be. “Xanadu by the Sea” would die in less than a century, starved of life by the receding throngs brought on by railroad’s own misfortunes–principally the limited destinations of train travel. As the automobile replaced the train, and as American’s options widened with the spreading of highways through the forties and fifties, by 1959 the state ordered the by-then fully hobbled resort to close.
Regardless of its commercial fortunes, ventures like Saltair strike me for the sheer scale of their ambition–an ambition that can only be powered by one thing: the optimism of their founders. American places like Saltair do not exist without vision, optimism, organization and skill.
About 50 years before work began on Saltair, a twenty-six year old French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville traveled the eastern regions of the United States, from Boston to New Orleans and on up into the Great Lakes. In his great two-volume work, “Democracy in America,” he concludes that the dynamo of American progress is, “a lively faith in the perfectibility of man … society as a body in a state of improvement.”*
Despite how much 2020 has brought to our doorstep and into our homes, I can’t help allowing a twinge of optimism tug at my heart this year. The organization that I serve—a maker space in Boston called Artisan’s Asylum—is poised to sign a lease on 52,000 SF of warehouse space in Boston on December 1. When we do, we will be bucking a quarter century trend of pushing affordable artist workspace farther from the urban center. We’ll be bringing 12,000 SF of studio space into the city. We’ll be provisioning 20,000 SF of tooled workshops and shared workspaces. We’ll open gathering and collaboration space within a community that has experienced a loss of these resources over the last decade.
This is progress for the arts that we can all be optimistic about. My hope is that the vitality of our cities remains hopeful, an outlook rooted in the creative agency of artists and creatives across America.
As we head into December, I am reminded of so many threads of optimism that have powered the greatest and lowest patterns of our American fabric. I am enthusiastic about Artisan’s Asylum’s mission and our move because I share this optimism. I believe that at the end of this effort — when we look back a year or two from now — Artisan’s Asylum will be a modest, significant, and enduring contribution to the energy of this great American weave — our energetic, applied and industrious definition of freedom.
* It is worth a footnote on de Tocqueville’s use of gendered language here. He was neither modern in his sensibilities, nor was he a myopic patriarch. As he concludes “Democracy in America,” de Tocqueville writes: “the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”
