To the left is the Hall Tower of Mechanicsburg, PA. Although it was
located less than 5 miles from my high school and was visible from two major highways, no one I knew seemed to know anything about it. A research paper assignment from my (amazing) 11th grade history teacher gave me an excuse to satisfy the curiosity about the tower that had plagued me since I first noticed it as a child. Working on the project was boring and frustrating at first, but once I uncovered a few details, my research took me all over my area hunting down people to interview, spending hours in the State Library flipping through microfilm newspaper articles, and sneaking onto the property to take pictures (and getting chased off several times by angry rednecks). When I finally turned in my paper, I had uncovered a truly fascinating story about a madman who built an enormous mansion and then fought to keep it through financial ruin and criminal charges. When he finally was forced to sell the property, he purposefully destroyed most of it, leaving behind only the charred remains of the tower (which was actually built to house his collection of European church bells).

So that leads me to what I'm planning to do with this paper. I was trying to think of something that I would enjoy and which would inspire me to become as involved and motivated as I was with the Hall Tower. Also, I wanted to do something that related to me personally that I could research with fieldwork, rather than a topic that had only vague significance to my life and would require dull hours hunting down articles online. I wanted to focus as well on the idea of public space we've been examining in class. So, I'm hoping to research what secrets could lie in the history of Kutztown's spaces, and how they could affect our life here. For example, the Hall Tower now attracts cults and is covered in satanic graffiti. Very few people know much about the unpleasant history of the place, yet for some reason it attracts satanists rather than happy picnickers. Clearly, the function of a space is effected in some way by its history.

So basically, I want to take the exploration of public space that we've worked on a step farther to incorporate extensive detail into the history of the spaces, and hopefully I draw some connections between what I find out and the way that space effects people's lives. I'm not sure what particular places I'm going to focus on, but I'm hoping that a visit to the Kutztown Historical Society will turn up something interesting.

Finally, here's a picture of Mr. Food in the 1800s.