Visitor: Information? was a yearlong public-facing project and installation organized by the historian M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska. The purpose of the project was to create connection and understanding between Washington, D.C. and its visitors.
Visitor: Information? is a part of a larger effort to trace the history and role of visitors to the city. When Dr. M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska began research on this topic several years ago, she quickly found that while visitors and newcomers are overrepresented in popular culture, there is very little knowledge about how people are actually getting their ideas about the city—and how those ideas inform their expectations and experiences once they get here.
Dr. Rymsza-Pawlowska also noticed that in both popular cultural representations of Washington and in the experiences of tourists, there is very little interaction between Washington’s visitors and its residents. Instead, visitors are most often limited to the city’s monumental core, and their time in the city—whether that’s sightseeing, protesting, or advocating—is highly choreographed and regimented.
These Washington guides were purchased on eBay and incorporated into the Humanities Truck installation. In the earlier ones, visitors to Washington were encouraged to see and learn about all of the city. In more recent years, guidebooks and tours stick to a very small part of Washington.
As for the rest of the city (what is sometimes called the “Real D.C.”), it’s often represented as totally separate from either the tourist or political sectors. Washingtonians sometimes take pride in this distance, without acknowledging the very real connections between both sides.
As a result of this false separation, Washington’s visitors don’t know the city, and don’t know it’s people. Washingtonians, on the other hand, avoid tourist spaces, and voice frustrations with sightseers.
The purpose of Visitor: Information? was two-fold: to find out how both Washingtonians and visitors were understanding the city, and to create a space for dialogue and exchange.
The first step of the project was to gather messages and questions from Washingtonians for visitors.
The inaugural pop-up was at the D.C. History Conference in April of 2024. Conference-goers and library patrons at the History Network in the Great Hall of the Martin Luther King Junior Library were invited to write on their questions and messages on vintage postcards from Washington. Check out some of them here!
At the D.C. History Conference
In June, we did two pop-ups at the Heurich Mouse Museum in Dupont Circle, where Dr. Rymsza-Pawlowska was Scholar-in-Residence for the 2023-4 Academic Year. We talked to Washingtonians (and some tourists) who were enjoying the Museum’s 1921 Biergarten.
Read some of the postcards collected at the Heurich pop-ups on June 20th and June 26th here.
At both pop-ups, we also shared some of the tourist ephemera that Dr. Rymsza-Pawlowska had begun collecting. People were surprised to see that the “standard tour” of Washington has not changed in many years.
In the summer, the tourist season was in full swing, and we were ready to incorporate the postcards and tourist ephemera in what we hoped was an eye-catching installation on the exterior of the Humanities Truck. The idea was to talk to visitors and use the questions and messages written by Washingtonians to learn more about their experience of the city.
We planned to go to “liminal” spots: outside of hotels, en route to tourist destinations, after museums were closed—to try to catch sightseers in between activities.
In the end, most of the people who stopped and talked to us were Washington residents! The tourists, it turned out, were too focused on their task—they ignored us, looked away, and walked past quickly.
Even thought this was not the intended outcome of the project, it helped clarify just how strong the pre-planned D.C. tourist experience is—it became evident that the sightseers we encountered were not interested in experiences that were not on their preplanned agenda.
Visiting DC is a political act—it’s meant to shore up identification and consent—when you go to DC, it’s to perform what you understand as the duties of being a subject-citizen—whether you’re there to look at memorials, participate in governance, or to demand rights. People who are visiting should have a space in which to think critically about what they are doing, why, and how it fits into a longer history of visits to DC. But also—and more concretely—they deserve to understand how actual Washingtonians have been systematically erased from the very popular cultural and political narratives that inform their expectations and their experience and be encouraged to use their own political platform as Americans to help us gain ours.
Acknowledgments: With gratitude to the Humanities Truck team, Dr. Dan Kerr, graduate fellows Inaya Rivera, Daiki Tsumagari, Public History graduate students Marie Kohrman, Emma Wiley, and Bennett Rosenbaum, and undergraduate student Isabelle Ritz. Additional thanks to Kim Bender and Stephany Fry of Heurich House Museum, and Karen Harris and Anne McDonough of the D.C. History Center.