Sites of Wounding / Sites of Healing’ Alternative Atlas: STL

We learned many things from scholars in STL and WashU, but the most amplified was the incredible impact of Walter Johnson’s book, The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States has had on how the city sees itself in various spheres from academia and cultural institutions to current political arguments. Johnson’s book arcs the founding, flourishing and decline of St. Louis as an industrial center of America. It reaches deeply into the geography of the city accounting atrocities and triumphs neighborhood by neighborhood and block to block. It explains how the ghosts of the past live in present STL making what was once a major destination for Black people during the Great Migration one of the most inhospitable places for Black people to exist in the U.S. 

Walter Johnson at Harvard, Linda Samuels and Geoff Ward at WashU developed a cross discipline studio course called, “Alternative Atlas: STL” for WashU in which students mapped the sites in Johnson’s book connecting the current geography and architecture of the city to layers of the past. They labeled them as “sites of wounding” or “sites of healing” and later this data would be pulled into an interactive map which animates points, areas and streets on which these occurrences accumulate over time and space. We present their map as a still image which has all the layers present. Through the process of printmaking we recreate a dissipation effect of layers through translucency along the map’s timeline of events. We stayed true to their original color scheme which gives one the feeling of hovering over a city at night. While not every data point in “The Broken Heart of America” is connected to Black histories, their stories and the stories of others have impacted the present Black population of STL most acutely. Instead of listing every location our work encourages the viewer to see the city as a complex of emotion and a place to discover Johnson’s book or the Alternative Atlas course project.