In the 1980s, Asheville almost added a mall downtown. UNC Asheville junior McKenzie Whalen wasn’t born yet, but the history major doesn’t want people to forget what might have been.
“If the mall had gone up, Asheville wouldn’t be what it is today. The restaurants and shops that we love would be under the mall in a suburban commercial center,” says Whalen.
That scene might be tough to imagine, but it’s come into focus during spring 2015 thanks to Whalen and her classmates in Associate Professor Ellen Holmes Pearson’s digital history class. Teams of students have spent their semester revealing details of the downtown mall proposed in the 1980s, Asheville’s East End/Valley Street neighborhood, and the Carolina Mountain Club.
Their source of inspiration stems from Special Collections and University Archives, housed in Ramsey Library. By the end of the class, the three projects will be digitally accessible and interactive, thanks to a cross-campus collaboration with Associate Professor Marietta Cameron’s computer science class in game programming.
“It isn’t just making history more accessible,” says Pearson of the interdisciplinary innovation in combining two classes for a client-based project. “It’s also a service to the community.”
For example, Whalen’s teammate Charles Hurt, a senior history major, interviewed Asheville natives, Kathryn Long a local interior designer, and Wayne Caldwell, her brother-in-law and local author of the novel Cataloochee, both integral to the decision not to build a mall. Hurt is taking the project one step further by adding a video to the archives and building from his own experience in a computer science course this semester.
“History that isn’t remembered isn’t a history,” explains Hurt. “We’re using new methods and technologies to connect people to recent history. It gives us the ability to say did you know this happened or almost happened? I don’t have to dig out a newspaper to show them the story. They can see and connect with it from their phones and computers.”
To enhance that experience, the history majors turn to their computer science colleagues.
“We want to transport you into what the downtown mall was going to be,” says senior Mariana Herzog of her team’s work in Unity 3-D modeling software. “We envision something similar to Google Maps but more interactive. You can move around and see each individual building.”
It’s almost as if visitors were there, in the 1980s, in the mall that almost was, but now can always be remembered through the digital history project.
Learn more about the projects at the following student-created sites:
East End/Valley Street Neighborhood http://eastend.uncadighist.org/
Asheville Downtown Mall project http://avldntn.uncadighist.org/
Carolina Mountain Club http://cmc.uncadighist.org/