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Google Map Redux Art, Blue Street, Richland, Washington
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Blue Street, Richland, Washington as it once was
This is a house in plutoniumville, USA, where we lived when we moved to Richland, Washington from the midwest. Richland was a government town that sprang up during WII to house individuals who worked at Hanford making the deathly stuff that would be stuffed in a missile, dubbed Fat Man, and pointlessly dropped on Nagasaki. People didn’t know what they were working on. At least most people didn’t. They just knew it was secret and that if anyone asked what their job was they were supposed to lie and relate a fake occupation. Due the tens of thousands required to build such a deadly bomb, this meant having to design a town and rapidly construct housing. The homes were called “letter houses” because A, B, C etc. specified a particular design. Then many more came which meant more housing, such as the neighborhood of which Blue Street was a part, the homes there not one of the original letter homes (which are now a historic district) but were built under the Wherry Act Federal Housing Program to house the 1950s influx of people from around the country. Hanford and Richland, post war, were supposed to become something like the crown nuclear plant jewels of a superatomic future, manufacturing power for the pacific northwest. When the Cold War arrived Richland was said to be the number one strike zone. It was during the Cold War that my father went to work at Hanford for General Electric, doing research, and how I came to grow up believing the entire world was covered in rambling tumbleweed but it was in Richland where the tumbleweeds blowing down the street and across your lawn might be radioactive.
If one looks through the neighborhood in which these homes stand, which was once at the edge of town, as with the alphabet homes you don’t see any torn out and replaced with more modern housing. and the exteriors seem to show that any remodeling has preserved the original aesthetic of…well…a federal housing project. Perhaps there’s a desire to preserve it as it was.
There are certain differences you see readily. Such as the replacement of the original asbestos shingling.
Everyone has the home where they were toilet trained and learned how to feed themselves. The home where the cultural dictates of your environment create your first world stage and you learn the basic vocabulary for all the props. The home where your brain built its first memories. Your first dreams. Your first conception of self. Your first realization of mortality. This above was that home for me, where my early formative years were spent. We were all from elsewhere and perhaps because of this nothing felt very permanent, as if we could all blow away in an instant.
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