Solid Objects: Lena Crown
Tayari Jones keeps a baby food jar of dirt on her desk from Toni Morrison’s hometown. CJ Hauser gifts her students a tiny plastic chicken to pull out whenever and wherever it’s time to write. Writing totems, talismans, amulets—we ascribe many names to the objects we keep close while we write. These objects inspire us, comfort us; they can prompt our productivity, make their way into our writing, or at the very least, serve as a dangling carrot to the world beyond our daily pages.
In Virginia Woolf’s short story, “Solid Objects” her main character grows enamored with a smooth piece of green glass he finds at the beach. “It pleased him; it puzzled him; it was so hard, so concentrated, so definite an object compared with the vague sea and the hazy shore.” The right object can be our own green glass; a raft when we’re treading the slippery shapes thoughts take.
In SOLID OBJECTS, we ask writers about the objects most essential to their creative practice, and what exactly these objects do for their brains.
This edition is written by Lena Crown. You can read her piece from our Body Language issue here.
I have always been what my mother calls a “texturizer.” As a child, I worked my fingers through the holes in my crocheted baby blanket until threads snapped, then wound the broken strands around the pads of my fingers until they purpled. When I started painting, I loved experimenting with viscous mediums in squat, black-capped bottles, whose chemistry could make the paint seize or slip or shine. When reading, I still flick the corner of each page and catch it between my thumb and forefinger, caress it lightly, then release it, again and again until I turn the page. Tactility is a balm; when I am not fidgeting with something, I feel untethered, both invisible and weightless.
Sometimes I think my obsession with writing about the urban fabric of the places I’ve lived springs from the same unstable proprioceptive attachment to the world around me. Other times I think it comes from growing up in arid California, where textures were brittle and slippery. The tech boom was sans-serifying San Francisco; cranes hoisted up whole apartments in Oakland and stacked them like soup cans, and nothing felt old or rooted or real.
When I moved to St. Louis for college, I felt an immediate affinity for the texture of the city’s public spaces. My first old-old city. There are years engraved over entrances; there are trolley tracks half-buried in the boulevard. It is not surprising that I started writing in earnest during my six years there: like many people, I write to find out what I think, but I also write to find out where I am, what that place is made of, where I fit. You could see what St. Louis was made of. And everywhere, moving between neighborhoods and between worlds, we could hear the polyphony of social and economic life, its simultaneous and distinct melodic lines.
Which brings me to the map.
I had heard from writers and mentors about the tactile magic of the archives. But I didn’t fully understand what that meant until I touched a Sanborn Insurance Map for the first time. On a research trip back to St. Louis last June, I stood over a low table leafing through the pages inside a black box so large and unwieldy that it had to be wheeled out on a gurney. Each page took effort to lift and crackled under my fingers inside its clear plastic sleeve.
It's hard to imagine anyone knowing a whole city inside and out, let alone thousands of cities, but the Sanborn Map Company got close. During the country’s rapid growth after the Civil War, insurance companies began hiring surveyors to determine how susceptible new and existing structures were to fire. Sanborn’s anonymous field workers (sometimes delightfully called “trotters”) communicated their findings via sketches and notes that illustrators transformed into hand-painted lithographs. Each page in a Sanborn volume offers a birds-eye view of a few square blocks, fifty feet of city scaled down to one paper inch. Every row home and factory and outhouse is archived in staggering detail: washes of color and a symbolic alphabet tell us things like what each structure was made of, whether its roof was shingled or slate, and even the thickness of interior walls, scrawled in tiny script. Turn the page and the next blueprint picks up where the previous one leaves off, as if the city were a story, and a linear one.
The first thing I noticed about the Sanborn fire insurance maps was their texture. Or rather, that they had a texture at all – in my experience, maps were either two or three dimensional, but these weren’t quite either. Sanborn trotters returned to the same cities multiple times over decades to update their original maps, and rather than start from scratch, drafters grafted cutouts with updated buildings onto the existing page. The result is a subtly raised patchwork. Newer additions are lighter and slightly thicker, with more saturated washes of color, brighter pinks and deeper blues. Under the thin plastic sheet, I could feel the edges of the years—the imperfect collage that, in the real world, until you live in a city long enough to watch how it adapts to our whims and follies, to sudden disaster and to the simple passage of time, is nearly impossible to see.
I had never known a map to try so hard to avoid its own obsolescence. I could feel the futility of the project, really feel it: the city outwits the cartographer; it defies constant surveillance and resists being fully known.
In the 1960s, new technology made Sanborn maps defunct. It is the technology I use now to look back at them from my apartment in Northern Virginia while writing my first book. It is not the same. Writing about my attachment to place, and to all the versions of itself that place has been, I need to feel the depth of time. I need to imagine scratching all those layers off with a fingernail, tearing the story of the city down to its foundation. The maps remind me of my inevitable failure to capture some essential truth about the city, and they help me accept that it might be worth trying anyway.
Nowadays, Sanborn maps allow historic preservationists to trace how cities have changed over time. They are similarly popular among genealogists, or those looking to corroborate family stories (yes, there was a corner store next to Grandma’s childhood home, and look, it really was made of iron). I am neither. But I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that my connection to the map might be more personal than intellectual. The Sanborn maps as tactile, concrete objects make my attachment to St. Louis, past and present, feel more secure. As long as the maps exist—even as the city they document continues to change, as the city as I knew it disappears—I have something to go back to, something more than memory.
Lena Crown is a writer from Northern California. Her work is published or forthcoming in Guernica, Narratively, Gulf Coast, Sonora Review, and The Offing, among others. She serves as a PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence and writes for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage while working on a memoir and an essay collection.