Hauntings, Palimpsests, and Aesthetics: Portraits of Remembering Schools that were Closed

Hans Christian Andersen Public School and Friedrich Von Schiller Public School were neighborhood public elementary schools in Chicago that served low-income families of color and were closed. Both buildings are in contested neighborhoods that have been gentrifying and had non-neighborhood schools take over the spaces. This study is a deep dive into the histories, contexts, and memories of Andersen and Schiller using portraiture as methodology. I employed archival methods and visual arts-based methods to collect and analyze data about the schools, creating palimpsest portraits. Through conversations with people connected to the schools and collective remembering, I created portraits of remembering— written narrative portraits to work toward an aim of historicizing the school sites. I draw from urban planning, sociology, philosophy, psychology, the literary world and the large amount of research already conducted on urban school closures and the connections between neighborhoods and schools. The concepts of hauntings and palimpsests weave throughout this project. I discuss the theoretical and analytical work that is done by participants through remembering the schools and argue that the stories of school closure are also stories of gentrification, public housing, and urban planning. I call on my readers to get haunted through an aesthetic awareness. Through reflecting and remembering, the portraits resist urban school closure and point to the lasting human-level impact of school closure. With this work, I aim to disrupt the dominant narrative of school closure that is district-driven, historically and geospatially disconnected, and justified through commonsenseness. These acts of remembering invite us to reimagine solutions to the persistent inequities manifested in urban schools.