Permanent Record

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

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On the left is Eva Greene Rosencrans; on the right, Beatrice Gross Zelin. These two women, born 10 years apart, lived remarkably similar lives: They both grew up poor and Jewish on New York's Lower East Side; both attended the Manhattan Trade School for Girls; both went on to have significant careers in the fashion industry, where their respective impacts continue to be felt today; both had major brushes with celebrity; and both finished their careers in the same place, where they may have met. Their stories -- among the most remarkable tales to emerge from my collection of Manhattan Trade School report cards -- are told today in my latest Permanent Record article on Slate.com.

I have a lot of additional research material that didn't make it into the Slate article. I'll be sharing some of that information here on the PermaRec blog in the coming days -- stay tuned.

1 comment:

Old PathfinderMay 29, 2012 at 2:49 PM
I just finished reading the Slate article. Excellent.
It never ceases to amaze me, as I read the articles, how the school followed up on the graduates. Bee's card shows her husbands name and when she had a child. 8 years after she graduated.
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Permanent Record, an object-based history project by journalist Paul Lukas, began as an investigation into the stories emerging from a bunch of old report cards found in a discarded file cabinet. The report cards are still the core of the project, but Permanent Record has expanded to include examination of other found objects, including postcards, business records, photographs, things left inside of old books, messages in bottles, and so on. Basically, if it's old, seems to have an evocative story to tell, and has been orphaned, lost, or otherwise isolated outside its natural habitat, Permanent Record is interested in it.

You can learn more about Permanent Record here. To contact Paul Lukas, or to be added to the PermaRec mailing list, please click here.

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Other Projects
by Paul Lukas

• Uni Watch is an obsessive look at the world of sports uniform and logo design.

• Naming Wrongs is a line of T-shirts that pushes back against the selling of stadium and arena naming rights to corporate interests.

• Gromm•It explores the juxtapositions resulting from the installation of metal grommets in unlikely surfaces, especially foodstuffs.

• Key Ring Chronicles is a crowd-sourced project that explores the stories behind objects that people keep on their key rings.

• Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, a zine published from 1993 through 2000, looked at consumer culture in excruciatingly close detail. Its first six issues were compiled into the book Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted, From the Everyday to the Obscure (Crown, 1997).

• My Pet Troll documents the relationship between a writer/webmaster and his most persistent and bellicose troll.

• The Candela Structures, a collaboration with the architect Kirsten Hively, documents the surprisingly complicated history of a set of super-cool fiberglass structures in Queens, New York.

• One-Man Focus Group, a weekly column that ran on The New Republic’s website in 2013, took a close look at the worlds of consumer culture, design, and branding.

• The Forewords, a collaboration with the writer Liz Clayton, are a lecture/slideshow "band" that has opened for the Magnetic Fields and performed while sitting in very, very high chairs, among other career highlights.

• Show & Tell was a live storytelling series in which participants were encouraged to bring an object of personal significance and talk about it for up to three minutes.

• Fire Wayne Hagin Already! chronicled the on-air foibles of a particularly incompetent baseball radio broadcaster and advocated for his dismissal.

• While not a distinct project per se, these articles written for the now-dormant design website re:Form all explore slightly eccentric topics, such as the design of membership cards, things that make a “click!” when they snap shut, and giant fiberglass animals.

Want to know more about any of this? Contact Paul Lukas.

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