Megan Kendrick
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History
Believe it or not, the walls of buildings do in fact talk; well, at least the walls of hotels in Los Angeles. And they have a lot to say that is not about (or not just about) the celebrity guests they might offer refuge to from time to time. “Hotels,” says Megan Kendrick, a doctoral candidate in the USC Department of History who specializes in urban history, “are very central in the creation of the identity of a city, because they are projecting, they are advertising the city.”
“My main interest,” says Megan, “is how cities are shaped; that is, how they are officially planned, but also how they are constructed in our imagination. I have always been keenly interested in architecture and the ways in which buildings express ideas and shape lived experience.”
In her first two years at USC, through a special fellowship, Megan collaborated with researchers at the USC Center for Sustainable Cities. The Center engages in multidisciplinary research and education on the environmental, social and economic sustainability challenges facing metropolises today. The Sustainable Cities program, “opened my eyes on what it means to be part of a large collaborative project,” admits Megan, and “I really enjoyed being able to bring a historical perspective to the work being done there.”
Megan was born and raised in Southern California and that, she says, pushed her to focus on the hotels of Los Angeles and the stories they tell about the city. “When you are growing up and driving around on the freeways, you really don’t know what you’re looking at. I developed this curiosity. I wondered, why do these buildings look so bland? Why does L.A. look like it has no, or just very little, history?” But that’s a superficial reading, says Megan. You need to look a little deeper. If you do, you will find that “L.A. is fascinating. It is just that what you perceive or expect historic architecture to be has a different form here; it takes on a different shape.”
Megan’s dissertation research, supported through a fellowship from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, covers 70 years of Los Angeles history, from 1880 through 1950. A long list of hotels, some landmark sites and others less known, yet equally interesting, are the storytellers in Megan’s research. Among those hotels featured in her research are the Raymond Hotel in South Pasadena, the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the Roosevelt in Hollywood, the Figueroa (initially a hotel just for women), and the Hotel Somerville (renamed Dunbar in 1929, it was built by an African American Angeleno, John Alexander Somerville, and was intended to provide first–class amenities to African Americans). Megan argues that hotels have served as a vanguard in the shaping and imaging of the city. “Throughout different phases of urban planning history, influenced by distinct systems of transportation, hotels have played a leading role in the way Los Angeles has been planned, formed, and imagined.”
A chapter–size, web–based companion to her dissertation, entitled ‘Virtual Tourisms,’ was created in 2005–2006 when Megan was a Provost fellow and part of the Annenberg School for Communication’s Digital Dissertation Program. The ‘Virtual Tourisms’ project exposes, according to Megan, “what lies behind the façade of the ‘picture perfect’ postcard [of a city].” The website allows users to adopt one of four specific historical identities, which will then limit and direct their experiences within a virtual tour of the late nineteenth century Los Angeles tourist landscape. Arranged formally as a travel album, the website provides users with the freedom to browse through topics dealing with travel, regional identity, and the space of the tourist hotel, while all the time being confronted with unexpected sights and realities. “Whether the user selects to take on the identity of an upper–class white woman, or a lower–class Chinese merchant,” says Megan, “ the site continually puts the two into conversation through unanticipated encounters.” Megan is currently seeking to have ‘Virtual Tourisms’ published in an online journal.
Megan will be graduating this year, and plans to submit the final draft of her dissertation to her committee just in time for the arrival of her third child (she and her husband are already the happy parents of twins). Looking ahead, “professionally, my first goal would be to teach,” she says. “But I am keeping my options open. I’ve done some work with architectural preservation and I really enjoyed it. Beyond teaching though, I would be interested in a career which would allow me to participate in the preservation of Los Angeles’ unique history.”
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