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UNSEEN HISTORY
One of a series of sketches that Liska Chan drew as models for her students' work. Says Chan: “Students learned to identify and describe systematic patterns of discrimination and displacement in landscapes. The aim is that students will learn to never again see landscapes as a given, or separate, or scenery, but instead as dynamic and connected. There is always a story behind a landscape."
Clark Honors College class investigates a Black settlement displaced by Eugene’s Alton Baker Park BY LAUREN CHURCH
Alton Baker Park
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n July 1949, following previous warnings from Lane County government, the Black families who had created a thriving settlement on the outskirts of Eugene were given 10 days’ notice to evacuate their neighborhood. Today, nothing remains of the settlement, where much of Alton Baker Park sits now. Children chase each other on the park’s wellmanicured lawn and bikers commute on its nicely paved trails. Ducks waddle in and out of the pond where a house and farm once stood. No markers indicate—much less tell the story of—the diverse community that was self-established here but later demolished by the county. In the 1940s, Black families who could not find safe housing in Eugene due to deed restrictions and “sundown town” racism established a settlement known as “the Ferry Street Village” or “across the river” at
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AUTUMN 2021
the park’s site, just beyond what was then Eugene’s northern boundary. In 1948 and 1949, Lane County removed the residents, among whom were white families, and bulldozed the area to make way for the Ferry Street Bridge. Calling attention to this invisible history is exactly what Clark Honors College professor Liska Chan wanted to achieve in her honors college class, Invisible Landscapes. Chan, a landscape architect and associate professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, specializes in unearthing and commemorating the stories, myths, and veiled layers of a space—showing why they are important and explaining how we can learn from histories that have been deeply buried. Chan wanted her students to explore both the visible and invisible elements of a place that intersect to tell its story.
Chan saw the Ferry Street settlement as an ideal example of an invisible landscape obscured beneath manicured Alton Baker Park. Its popularity, proximity to campus, and sanitized, largely untold history made it an excellent case study for her class. Students across disciplines gathered virtually for Chan’s colloquia course last spring to explore how what can be seen affects perceptions of places. They learned how to set such predispositions aside when reading a landscape—a practice she calls “disorientation.” With this shift in perspective, she says, students can imagine ways to pull others out of their own “orientations” through art, ushering them into a new experience of the landscape. “We had a sequence of projects warming students up to the idea of ‘making’ as a form of inquiry,” Chan says. First, students observed landscapes as a tourist would, asking
PHOTOS BY MADDIE KNIGHT, BS ’21 (JOURNALISM), CHC COMMUNICATIONS; ILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF LISKA CHAN
Invisible Landscapes
