Three students, Anna Depping-Herzog, Ruth Dikkers, and Luke Ehrenberg from Profesoor Anna Andrzejewski’s fall 2025 class, “History of American Vernacular Architecture and Landscape,” applied knowledge from classroom lectures to interpret the history of the 400 and 500 blocks of Madison’s Mifflin Street. Now the location of the “Mifflin Street Block Party,” the block was originally developed in the early 1900s for single-family houses and apartment-style flats for downtown workers before transitioning to student housing in the 1950s and 1960s. Students examined primary sources, including maps, newspapers, building permits, city directories, and the buildings themselves to capture the blocks’ longer history and produced multi-modal projects with the potential to inform upcoming plans for the future of “Mifflandia.”
Several students working on a cluster of buildings researched a prominent Madison family—the Blieds—and explored the family’s influence during the twentieth century. In a recent interview, the students shared their experience conducting public history research and producing their web-based project.
Question: What inspired you to take a course on vernacular architecture?
Anna: As an art history major, I was looking for ways to expand the scope of my coursework. My academic interests often focus on the lives and built environment of everyday people, a field of study commonly referred to as the “vernacular,” which is not often included in the traditional art historical “canon.”
Ruth: I took Professor Andrzejewski’s Art History 202 course (History of Western Art II) early in my time at the university and I absolutely loved her manner of explanation. She is both relatable and efficient, which is not always easy in lecture-heavy courses. It is not often that an art history course incorporates field work that impacts our local community. I was unfamiliar with the concept of “vernacular” architecture, and I thought it would be a good chance to learn something new about Madison’s local landscape.
Luke: As an Interior Architecture student, I was excited to take a course that was less focused on the general trends of the grand architecture of the highest class, and instead concentrated on the broader contexts of the architecture and design that most people are familiar with and actually use. Through this course I developed a more humanistic approach to design.
Q : This course focused on “vernacular” architecture and ordinary people. How did it change your thinking about art history and the stories we tell?
Anna: The emphasis on “vernacular” made me think about the importance of people’s everyday lives. People are the driving force of history, and yet common, day-to-day events are often left out of the greater historical narrative. In many of my previous art history courses, our discussions centered on monumental buildings like St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. In these sorts of discussions, we’d look at style, the architects, and how the building’s form relates to the papacy. While these topics are important, St. Peter’s is also a building that people work in and visit every day. In addition to the clergy, generations of people have managed reception, surveillance, cleaning, and maintenance of the building. By investigating vernacular elements of the physical architecture, we were able to better understand how buildings function as sites of both labor and life (rather than simply as symbols of authority or the creative genius of a singular architect).
Q: What appealed to you about working on the Mifflin Street project?
Luke: I think having the focus of this course be something that most students were familiar with, but never approached in an academic way, provided a sense of authentic curiosity. The issue of affordable housing in Madison is something that directly affects the day-to-day lives of many students. I think learning about the history of student housing and ordinary buildings is the first step to better understanding the housing crises. Most students are familiar with the development of large-scale, luxury apartment buildings near campus, but very few have the opportunity to study the historical transition from single-family homes to rentable flats. This course inspired me to care not only for these local histories, but also to consider affordability, cultural differences, and sense of place in relation to the further development of our city
Q: Ruth, you described our class as “sneakily educational.” Can you say more about that?
Ruth: I don’t want it to sound like I was not actively learning in this course, but it was the application and rerouting of methods and forms of evidence that were most surprising and rewarding for me. Before, concepts like style or mode and their diffusion lacked context. They were divorced from daily life until I saw them play out in real families from the twentieth century, such as the Blieds and Starcks on Mifflin Street. The development of cultural styles does not happen in a vacuum, but rather by individuals and communities. The buildings that make up Madison serve a purpose that is deeper than we realize. Architectural features like floor plans determine how we interact with one another within space. I hadn’t thought about that much before. This affected my perception of my relationship to Madison, my understanding of local history, and even my own family’s history. I hadn’t realized just how much our class discussion influenced my thinking until the final project. I think that’s why I would describe this course as “sneakily educational.”
Q: Luke, you described a major takeaway from this class was “history as storytelling.” How did you come to this conclusion?
Luke: It became apparent during our research over the semester that having a clear story that reads like a narrative, something that you can empathize with, makes historical research more impactful. I had thought the opposite prior to this course–that academic research had to be numbers and graphs and whatnot–but now I know how important it is that our research conveys that these subjects were real people with lives and families and interests. This perspective is often overlooked in classrooms and changed the way I think about what can and should be academically significant.
Q :What do you want people who might see your website about the Blieds and their role on Mifflin Street to consider as we make choices about the redevelopment of the area?
Anna: As Madison’s student population grows, the city faces challenges housing incoming students. In recent years, the city has seen the development of “luxury student apartments” popping up across neighborhoods close to campus. This means that multi-unit housing on streets like Mifflin, with their Victorian-era charms and recent dilapidations, become increasingly less appealing to the newest batch of students moving out of the dorms.
As families moved out of Mifflin in the nineteenth century, the street transitioned to student housing, and, in 1969, became the site of the Mifflin Street Block Party. Because of this, Mifflin has retained a strong “sense of place,” and yet families like the Blieds, whose legacy is woven into the very fabric of Madison’s landscape, have largely faded into the background. While their names are no longer common knowledge, their role in shaping the physical and cultural character of Mifflin remains important to our local heritage.
As we weigh redevelopment, we must consider that change is rarely a smooth transition. In our research, figures like Josephine Blied Bradford, who resisted the original influx of students in the 1950s and 1960s, remind us that every generation fights to protect their sense of community. When approaching the housing crisis, we don’t want to accidentally build a neighborhood where people are housed, but no longer feel like they belong to a community.