Monthly Archives: October 2025

October 27, 2025

“Salem is not a Theme Park”

By daseger

You hear my title phrase all the time in Salem now, with increasing frequency. It’s a way to acknowledge the fact that residents of Salem have to (or want to): go to work, drive to their appointments, take their kids to school, walk along the sidewalk or sit on their front stoops in the prolonged Halloween season of September and October (and a bit of November, and…….) when a million people shuffle around our very small city taking pictures of each other. Most people say it out of frustration. I’ve heard this expression from members of our City government as well, no doubt to also express frustration but at the time time, as coverage for doing nothing to ease it. Because the (other) official party line is that no one can do anything about it; the tourists just come and we have to do everything possible to accomodate them. We couldn’t possibly be asking them to come, in any way, because that would indicate a deliberate campaign to exploit an historic tragedy. Nope, they just come, we can’t stop them, and Salem is a real city, not a theme park, and if it exhibits theme park characteristics in response to the demands of the crowd, it’s the tourists’ fault and not ours! I understand the desire to point out that Salem is not a theme park, but at the same time, it looks like one to me, during this time of year, and increasingly all year long. And there’s a bit of protesting too much that it isn’t one going on here.

Here’s my argument for.

Some definitions of a “theme park”:

Oxford English Dictionary (my holy grail): an amusement park designed or organized around a unifying idea or subject.

Merriam-Webster: an amusement park in which the structures and settings are based on a central theme.

Cambridge Dictionary: a large permanent area for public entertainment, with entertaining activities and big machines to ride on or play games or restaurants, etc., sometimes all connected with a single subject.

Collins: A theme park is a large outdoor area where people pay to go to enjoy themselves. All the different activities in a theme park are usually based on a particular idea or theme.

This last definition could undermine my assertion, as people do not pay an admission fee to enter Salem—but they certainly pay in all sort of other ways. Still, it makes the point that a theme park is generally seen as a private enterprise, and I think that’s a big part of the “Salem is not a theme park” refrain. It’s not Disney. But I’m still going to beg to differ. And certainly no one can argue that Salem does not have a central, unifying theme! I could show you tons of pictures of a packed Essex Street which would look very theme-parkish, but I really feel that the City looks most like a designated entertainment zone—or even a movie set– early in the morning when no one is about. Right in the center of it all is Samantha, the Bewitched statue, surveying her domain.

It was a slow burn, but once the Hocus Pocus fan base reached critical mass, that gloss was added to Salem’s veneer as key scenes were shot here. During the week before Halloween, the Peabody Essex Museum dresses up the Ropes Mansion as “Allison’s House,” which you can see above, along with the City’s new bollards installed to protect picture-takers and tour groups. This scene definitely reinforces the “Salem as set” impression! Across town, Salem Common is transformed into a marketplace, food court, and carnival site at this time of year, and you can’t get more theme park than that–a large outdoor area where people pay to go to enjoy themselves.

And then there’s the coordinated messaging/marketing. Don’t get me wrong, it is necessary: people need to know which roads are closed and encouraged to take the train. But it looks and feels commercial rather than civic. Look at this first photo–posted by the Salem Police Department, whose badge bears the image of a witch on a broomstick. Just below, a post from the City’s official travel and tourism agency, Destination Salem: I’m sure this cookie is delicious (the Chocolate Pantry on Derby Street features wonderful treats all year long), but would it be front and center if it didn’t bear the City’s offical witch brand? The “unifying” or “central” focus is the defining characteristic of a theme park and you just can’t miss it in Salem. I completely understand the sentiments of frustrated Salem residents—-I think I actually uttered these same words myself to a squad of felt witch hat ladies who were just standing in the middle of my street obliviously when I was trying to pull out of my driveway, nearly late for class. But I think the City should own it; after all, it is no mean feat to transform a city into a theme park.

15 Comments | tags: Destination Salem, Halloween, Haunted Happenings, Peabody Essex Museum, Ropes Mansion, Salem Common, Salem Tourism, Witch City | posted in Culture, Salem, Tourism

October 20, 2025

Limning the Local

By daseger

I’ve engaged in lots of different history here: a lot of public, some world, American and European, but above all, local. I’m always looking for new ways to delve into and present local history. I follow the sources, I chase down new perspectives and approaches whenever I catch a trail, and because I’m operating in a digital world, I always look for striking visuals. All of these avenues have somehow brought me to a somewhat obscure graphic artist who centered much of his life on living in, working in, and illuminating the backwoods Maine lumber town of Weld, Maine, a man named Seaverns W. Hilton who often signed his work S.W. Hilton. Hilton was born in Rhode Island and worked as a graphic artist (he is generally referred to as a poster artist) in New York City, but by the 1930s and his 30s he was in Weld, a Franklin County town whose population had shrunk precipitously as it lost its lumber trail. He diversified his artistic training into wood carving as a means of reviving and perhaps becoming part of his chosen community, but continued to illustrate on paper as well—mostly local history texts, and this is how I found him. I became a bit preoccupied by Benedict Arnold’s disastrous Quebec Expedition of 1775 after attending some commemorative events in Newburyport a few weeks ago, and found a little treatise with that perfect mod/mid-century aesthetic by none other than S.W. Hilton. And then I caught his trail.

It’s just great! I mean, this was quite the adventure (disaster) and you need the pictures. I tried reading some academic texts, but I think I learned more from Mr. Hilton. He illustrated books about the neighboring towns of Livermore and Rumford, as well as the famous Mount Zircon Moon Tide Spring in the latter. The Bethel Historical Society has an online exhibition on this venerable mineral spring, comparable to Poland Spring, featuring Hilton’s illustrations fromThe Mount Zircon Moon Tide Spring: An Illustrated History by Randall H. Bennett. These inland Maine cities and towns have interesting histories, as highlighted by Hilton and the authors for whom he illustrated, but they are not as well known as the Downeast ports on the coast with their more dramatic maritime narratives, so I appreciate Hilton’s creative spin. The title page of Josiah Volunteered, featuring the Civil War diary of a Maine soldier, also illustrates the Hilton treatment: it was published in the year he died, 1977. Looking at Hilton in a somewhat wider frame, he seems to have had success working in advertising in New York City (his copy work is scarce but has fetched high prices in recent auctions), and became increasingly entangled in Maine from the later 1930s, primarily through the woodworking shop he founded, Woodworkers of Weld, which produced toys and figurines into the 1950s. Some of his creations garnered a national spotlight when an adjoining restaurant adorned with them, The Farmer’s Wife, was featured in Life magazine in 1937, and postcards followed. In this and all of his work, there’s an obvious whimsy in his depictions of past and present, and I think that’s what I appreciate the most, especially now.

Opening Day of the Mount Zircon Spring, from The Mount Zircon Moon Tide Spring: An Illustrated History by Randall H. Bennett.

Hilton posters for the Northern Pacific from the 1920s: Swann Auction Galleries and David Pollack Vintage Posters.

A wonderful 3 part series about Weld and Hilton starts here: https://luannyetter.wordpress.com/2021/04/09/the-shop-land-part-i/

1 Comment | tags: Art, Graphic Design, illustration, Local History, Maine | posted in Culture, Design

October 13, 2025

So much WOOD!

By daseger

The Historic New England season is closing this Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day weekend and as I am up in York Harbor, I went to visit one of HNE’s oldest houses (both in terms of sheer vintage and time under its stewardship): the Jackson House in Portsmouth, built circa 1664. This is an extraordinary house: I’m sorry to be posting at this time when you won’t be able to visit it until next June, because I’d really like to urge everyone reading to go. I had been in it before, but when I was much younger and couldn’t appreciate it properly. But now, wow. I always thought it was a saltbox: it is not. It’s a seventeenth-century two-story small square house which had an elaborate lean-to added a bit later, along with two additions on each side. It is also a lavish display of wood: certainly not from an American perspective, but from an English one, which would have been its builder, Richard Jackson’s perspective. When I was writing my first book, The Practical Renaissance, I was reading treatises written for carpenters and shipbuilders, as well as some more general agricultural pamphlets, all of which made me aware of the increasing concern about the shortage of wood in seventeenth-century England. All the first-growth forests had long been chopped down, so to come to North America and see all this wood must have been something. So for me, the Jackson House was just a great illustration of that abundance. Our guide emphasized this theme adroitly as she described the house’s framing, exterior and interior, and she also illustrated the construction impact of less-abundant woodland in New Hampshire by showing us the attic over the eighteenth-century addition, with its decidedly less-robust timbers. The Jackson House is one of Historic New England’s unfurnished study houses (like the Gedney House in Salem), so the emphasis is decidedly on construction, but we got to learn a fair amount about the family as well, who possessed the house until 1924, when William Sumner Appleton, the founder of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities (now Historic New England) purchased it.

Perfect 17th century parlor and east and west wings, with a patch of preserved wallpaper.

Appleton had apparently been obsessed with the Jackson House since his freshman year at Harvard, when he came up from Cambridge and knocked on the door. A pioneering preservationist and critic of “one property museums,” he began acquiring choice properties after the founding of SPNEA/HNE in 1910. Rather than stripping off the east and west additions of the house, he removed stucco and plaster to reveal its construction. The original property was extensive, fifty acres or so just across the North Mill Pond from downtown Portsmouth, in a neighborhood named Christian Shore. When I was growing up across the Piscataqua River in southern Maine in the 1970s and 1980s, Christian Shore seemed to me a drive-through area with delapidated old houses, but then suddenly appeared The Inn at Christian Shore and I started noticing all the beautiful old houses and now they really are all beautifully restored. Portsmouth is actually growing in this direction, with several hotels built in what were once vacant lots which divided Christian Shore from downtown. But when you look out the windows (replaced by Appleton, but in their original openings) of the house on its slightly elevated lot, you can imagine, and even sort of feel, the aura of its first century.

The replacement windows and upstairs, including some wood-carvings. I knew all about the counter-magical daisy wheel from the M.A. thesis on apotropaic marks by Alyssa Conary at Salem State, so it was fun to see it (a perfect example of how I didn’t “see” on my first visit as I have no memory of it). A watercolor and Detroit Publishing Co. (Library of Congress) photograph of the house before it became a museum.

5 Comments | tags: Architecture, Colonial Architecture, First Period, Historic Interiors, Historic New England, Historic Preservation, House Museums, Portsmouth | posted in Architecture, Culture, Houses, New England

October 6, 2025

Words or Pictures or Numbers?

By daseger

This post is about the work of a venerable but new-to-me graphic designer, Seymour Chwast, but before I get to him I have to explain how I got to him. If you have been reading the blog over the past year or so, you might have perceived that I have become mildly obsessed with two images associated with Salem: the official Salem City Seal with its Sumatran trader, now likely on its way out after 180 years or so, and more recently a cartoon cat mascot chosen by the Mayor of Salem and the Salem 400+ Committee to represent our city’s “unique identity” for our upcoming Quadricentennial. The discussion, and in the latter case lack thereof, over both images has been perplexing. I’ve written quite a bit about the seal, and was going to write more about the mascot, but I now realize that such efforts are a waste of time. These images, deemed rascist or representative or not, will stand or fall according to the whims of five or six or maybe 20 people at best. That’s how Salem works: the average person has very little power over matters of civic identity or branding (or anything else for that matter.) Nevertheless, it’s been so interesting exploring the power of images over the past year or so in various ways. As a Renaissance historian, I’ve always been aware of the complexity of images, but if you want to consider their power in the present, that brings you into the realm of graphic design, and so that brought me to Seymour Chwast, briefly. And then he popped into my consciousness again just last week when I was searching for an image of the Battle of Sluys for a powerpoint lecture on the Hundred Years War. The search led to a compelling image of a medieval naval battle which was not Sluys but rather Chwast’s depiction of the Battle of Zonchio in 1499, fought between Venice and the Ottoman Empire. This is just one of nine hand-colored linocut battle scenes, paired with literary quotes on the opposing page, included in Chwast’s 1957 folio A Book of Battles.

Chwast is in his 90s and still working, I think: his career is too prolific and illustrious to summarize here but I will take a stab. Over six decades he has published all sorts of images and illustrations, individually and on behalf of the Push Pin Studios (now Group) the graphic design firm he co-founded in the 1954. From magazine covers to posters to corporate advertising to packaging to theatrical backdrops to his own publications: he has done it all. Chwast is the author of 30 childrens’s books and four graphic novels, and he is also a typeface designer! Chwast’s career is marked by his intent and ability to utilize design as a political force on many occasions, and one theme seems to run through much of his editorial work from the beginning: pacifism. This was certainly the inspiration for his Book of Battles, as the juxtapositions of images and words make clear.

And then, in 2017, a capstone (or maybe not yet) anti-war book, At War with War: 5000 Years of Conquests, Invasions, and Terrorist Attacks. An Illustrated Timeline. More striking graphics and literary excerpts, but a timeline too, which means numbers. The (red) numbers somehow make the illustrations all the more menacing, especially as we proceed into the (modern?) information age in which casualties can be marked along with dates. It all packs a powerful punch.