Alexander Wells interviews urban historian Brian Ladd about his new book “The Streets of Europe”…
The Streets of Europe: The Sights, Sounds, and Smells That Shaped Its Great Cities, the latest book by urban historian Brian Ladd, looks at how streets and street life has changed in four major European cities—London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna—between the seventeeth century and the early 1900s.
In particular, the book is interested in conjuring a sense of what these streets looked like before the rise of the automobile: what people did, what people bought and sold, and what laid a particularly strong claim to people’s senses. Throughout, Ladd conveys his love for the metropolis, a place where, ideally, “everyone coexists and old hierarchies crumble”, and for city streetscapes: “The quintessential place of crowds and strangers, of stimulation and surprises, is the city street,” he asserts.
Local history buffs may already be familiar with Ladd from his excellent 1997 book Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, a thoughtful examination of arguments and controversies about the presence of the past in Berlin’s cityscape—in particular the debates over what to do with the remnants of Berlin’s Prussian, Nazi and Communist histories.
Ladd’s interest in, and connection to the city goes back to its years of division, as he explains during a video interview from his home in Washington, D.C. “What drew me to Berlin,” he smirks, “was in fact the Cold War money for Americans. I got a couple of grants to continue my work in German history, one was from the Stiftung Luftbrückendank, which by its name expresses how these things existed to keep Americans attached to Berlin, as a Cold War initiative.”
Afterwards, Ladd jumped at the opportunity to live in this “totally weird” place, a divided city where many of his friends lived in apartments with a toilet in the stairway and no central heating. “You had to buy your coal briquettes and lug them from the cellar to your oven,” he remembers. “And the air was, uh, aromatic, shall we say.”
Ladd eventually moved back to the States in 1988, watching from afar as the Berlin Wall came down. “As a historian, the world I had lived in was now history, and fair game,” he says. “So I started writing about the transition.” Since Ladd’s early days in Be…