The Place is Not the Story

There are a number of ways to structure a story about great historic places. How you choose is going to be based on how much story you have to tell, and on how you are able to turn “data” into something richer and more appealing.

Picture1The first thing to remember is, the place is not the story. For instance, you may tell us how a building is the first skyscraper in Kentucky or a perfect example of Art Deco, but the short list of people who will care about those data points are architecture students and historians. What we care about are people, someone we can relate to personally. That should always be the main thread of your story, how this place affected people like me.

Stories of Place

Picture3Saying that, sometimes a place has so much history that you want to tell a story centered around it. The key is, make the story about the people that lived, worked and played there. Tell the story about the architect and how this place fits into his career, about the builders who labored for months, the original owners’ dreams for the building and how it was converted into a family-owned deli and how that helped the surrounding neighborhood prosper and grow. You can do that with RuskinARC while at the same time creating a powerful, rich repository of info about your places.

I call these “Stories of Place” and that place could be a building as well as a city. Just like in the movie “The Red Violin”, the story is about the people that changed and adapted the object over the years but the object itself is only important as the anchor for the story.

Stories of People

Picture4You could also tell a story about a certain person or group of people and how they affected a certain place. The first example here would be an architect or builder. It seems that every community has a resident architect that gave a part of the community a flavor not seen in any other part of the country. Tell us who that architect was, what their influences were, why they picked their certain style and how that affected the community around them. Show us all the places they designed or built and why each one matters to the people living in the community today.

This is also the story you would tell for famous individuals that lived in the community and where they did the work that made them famous. Tie your places back to something we know or care about and we’ll be much more interested in the places themselves.

Stories of Events

Picture2We all have events that have touched our lives and every community has them too. They could be something as simple as the story of the founding of a city or a disaster that left its mark that you can still see today or a triumph such as an invention or a disaster averted. All communities have these stories hidden away in their history and if you can bring them out and show how they affected the people living there, we will put ourselves in their shoes and imagine what it must have been like to live through it.

These are the stories that you’ll need to tell us if you want us to care about your community.

If you aren’t telling these kinds of stories to us today, get started!