Читать книгу The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race - Carl C. Anthony - Страница 15
ОглавлениеAT THE AGE OF NINETEEN, I was the volunteer head of the youth chapter at Heritage House, an African American cultural organization. The City of Philadelphia had given us an old brownstone mansion, where we conducted our programs on African American heritage and consciousness. I thrived under the mentorship of the adults who managed the programs at Heritage House, particularly the executive director Eugene Jones, who was the first black man I met who had a PhD. One afternoon, as I looked down from the second floor into the courtyard, I noticed a short man in his mid-thirties, surrounded by a dozen graduate students. He was gesturing energetically, directing their attention to the features of the space, particularly to an ample locust tree shading the concrete courtyard, which was otherwise devoid of vegetation.
This was Karl Linn, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. As soon as I found an opportunity, I introduced myself. Karl reminded me of my father: both men were eloquent, intellectually gifted, and loved to work with their hands; both were also short in stature—around five feet four.
I had been an avid reader, soaking up everything I could about my chosen field of architecture and city planning in books that were written by people whom, given my class and race, I could never hope to meet. But here was Karl, a university professor in the flesh, eager to not only share ideas but also demonstrate how to put them into practice.1 Karl became a mentor to me. He suggested books to read and introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, writers, and creative professionals, such as the visionary social critic Paul Goodman and his architect brother, Percival, who had just published the second revised edition of their classic book, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, in which they explored ways that society and the built environment could support communal values. Their radical proposals for reorganizing Manhattan to support the development of community intrigued me. With my limited understanding of planning and architecture, their ideas seemed simple to implement, but, in hindsight, I realize that many of them were complex and challenging.
Learning to Recognize Resources with Karl Linn
Large and uncaring urban renewal projects, which were demolishing houses and devastating neighborhoods, were at their peak in 1960 when Karl took his students (all of whom were white) into the ghetto of North Philadelphia to observe and, later, to serve. Karl encouraged me to join him and his students in walking the streets of North Philadelphia, finding the potential in empty lots, back alleys, and shady backyards and looking for vacant land that could be reclaimed. We talked to street musicians, kids playing pavement games, and people sitting on stoops or on chairs on the sidewalks. Karl taught his students and me to notice the genius of inner-city neighborhood residents, who transformed stoops, sidewalks, streets, and vacant lots into extensions of their home territories.
As we walked the back alleys, Karl had his students and me make drawings of what we saw. He made me aware of the many ailanthus trees growing in people’s yards, which most landscape architects saw as weeds because they didn’t conform to conventional notions of street trees. Walking through the streets of North Philadelphia and looking into backyards, we could see the ways the ailanthus trees had taken over the landscape. Even as the city was being destroyed by redevelopment, the presence of life was reaffirming itself.
Not only did Karl reinforce my recognition of the destructiveness of urban renewal, but the students and I began to realize that these places, which had been thought of as waste, were actually quite beautiful and full of potential. Karl trained a whole generation of architects and planners to see beauty and utility in the city’s abandoned and underutilized resources.
A New Appreciation of the Natural World
When I met Karl, I didn’t much care for nature. In our family, we worked all the time. There were no vacations or camping trips.2 As a kid, I had spent time cutting grass and doing yard work to earn spending money, but that work was boring and demeaning. It felt like the subservient roles my ancestors had played as servants and sharecroppers. Karl helped me to see nature in new ways—as an opportunity for play and inspiration and as a spiritual resource. The fascination with the natural environment I had experienced in my third-grade class with Mrs. Aikens was reawakened.
Karl and the Neighborhood Renewal Corps, the nonprofit he founded, would acquire legal control over abandoned property, enabling Karl to recruit and organize neighborhood residents, teams of volunteers, and volunteer professionals to design and build common spaces for community activities. He called these places “neighborhood commons” and the process of building them “urban barnraising,” a term that recalled the traditions of Pennsylvania’s early Amish and Mennonite settlers, for whom building barns was a community effort.
Karl directed volunteers to collect building materials that were being discarded by industries and suppliers, such as cable reels, concrete cylinders, tiles, railroad ties, and plants. They also rescued materials from demolished houses—marble, bricks, lumber, and more. These discarded parts were reclaimed treasures and belonged to the neighborhood, Karl asserted. They were part of a community legacy. Karl used donated money to buy an old truck for the neighborhood gang, who became eager collectors of the marble steps left behind by urban renewal and other free resources.
At Melon Commons, Karl’s pilot project, the Neighborhood Renewal Corps planted greenery and used the salvaged materials to build playgrounds for kids, an amphitheater for performances, and gathering spots for adults. Karl collaborated with a man who organized Shakespeare performances by local kids in Melon Commons. One weekend, Karl gathered the neighbors and announced: “I want each of you to come here tomorrow and bring an old dinner plate from home.” People were puzzled but intrigued. The next day, neighbors came with their plates, and Karl orchestrated an incredibly dramatic event: smashing plates and using the pieces to pave the alley. The result was the most beautiful mosaic I’ve ever seen.
To bureaucrats in the development agencies, the neighborhood was considered blighted, but Karl encouraged the ongoing celebration of what people had. Watching the project take shape gave me the idea that you could design and build beautiful, uplifting places and provide amenities to underserved people.
Karl and I were an odd pair—a tall, lanky young African American and a short, intense Jewish refugee with a thick German accent. In a sense, we were the very embodiment of discarded parts. Our dialogues during long walks through inner-city Philadelphia laid the foundation for a lifelong friendship and a series of creative collaborations. I had no way of knowing then that Karl’s ideas, practice, and the force of his personality would shape my life and work as an architect, urban planner, civil rights worker, and environmental justice activist for the next fifty years. In the work and wisdom Karl shared with me, he taught me the value of discarded elements, both materially and metaphorically. There were people, stories, and communities that the dominant culture had wrongfully discarded. Building neighborhood commons with Karl was my first taste of the deep spiritual and psychological transformation that comes with asserting the value of the discarded.
A Social Agenda in Architecture
After World War II, the nation’s decaying cities were spawning new developments outside their boundaries: suburbs accessible only by car. Although Karl had been very successful at designing landscapes of affluence for wealthy clients in suburban and urban settings, he had found this work unsatisfying. The subdivisions where he had worked were designed around the automobile and devoid of outdoor spaces for social interaction. Designing landscapes for increasingly affluent clients had gradually undermined his sense of social relevance.
While growing up and working with my dad as a house painter, all our clients were white. Many were suburban residents, moving into neighborhoods where no blacks could live, such as the communities along Philadelphia’s Main Line rail line. I had become critical of a suburban lifestyle built around racial discrimination.
I was impressed that Karl had turned his back on a successful career working for rich and powerful clients to teach and work with students in inner-city communities. During those years, he was on the forefront of a current, gaining strength in the fields of architecture and planning, and committed to improving the lives of poor and working people. Karl was running something that he called a “community design” studio at the University of Pennsylvania; its purpose was to provide design service to disenfranchised communities while teaching the students to grapple with real-world problems. These studios led to important innovations in design and planning: increased citizen participation in the planning process and an acknowledgement that inner-city residents may have different needs than those of standard middle-class clients.
Karl’s vision of building commons and community was very attractive to me. It brought together my interests in environmental design and the emerging civil rights movement. During the next few years in the early 1960s, Karl’s students took on projects in a dozen inner-city neighborhoods in Philadelphia. With the rising interest in civil rights, Karl created the Neighborhood Renewal Corps that brought together students and volunteer professionals to provide architecture, landscape architecture, and planning services for African American and other vulnerable communities. The community design-and-build studio that Karl modeled was replicated in several other universities, such as Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and University of California at Berkeley. Karl taught me to see the connections between the environment, architecture, and the quest for social justice. In some ways, he anticipated the movement for environmental justice three decades before the field even had a name. In a letter, Lewis Mumford, the great historian and philosopher of urban planning, wrote to Karl, “I can plainly see, in the work you are doing, the fresh shoots that will flower in a new age.”3
Shortly after I returned to Philadelphia following my time in Enid, Oklahoma, I came across Notes of a Native Son, a little book by the African American writer James Baldwin. The book, first published in 1955, contained his essays about growing up in Harlem and living as an expatriate in France, along with three critiques—two of popular books about the black experience and the other of a film about African American life.4 I was greatly impressed by Baldwin’s willingness to be critical of African Americans, himself, and American life, all in equal measure. I was grateful to have him as a model. Like me, he was grappling with issues of identity and seemed determined to maintain his authenticity. I wished to have direct contact with him, and later, I did.
I remember clearly the time and place I first came across the writings of Lewis Mumford, who would become a huge influence in my life as I pursued professional training in architecture. At the age of twenty, I had a part-time job after school at the Witherspoon Library of the Presbyterian Historical Society in downtown Philadelphia, returning books to their proper location on the shelf. Normally, I worked from three in the afternoon until about five, locking up when I was the last person there.
For some reason, I was drawn to a particular hardbound book with a maroon title on the spine that sat in a stack of six books on the wooden library cart. It was The Condition of Man by Lewis Mumford. Instead of putting the book away, I sat down to read:
What is man? What meaning has his life? What are his origin, condition and destiny? To what extent is he a creature of forces beyond his knowledge and control, the plaything of nature and the sport of the gods? To what extent is he a creator who takes the raw materials of existence, the heat of the sun, the stones and the trees and the soil, his very body and organs, and refashions the world to which nature has bound him, so that a good part of it reflects his own image and responds to his will and his ideal? (Mumford 1944, 3)
I was riveted. Mumford’s writing blew open a door in my mind, making it possible for me to think about architecture and buildings in a larger social and philosophical context. I had nurtured an aspiration to become an architect since my visit to the Better Philadelphia Exhibition with my third-grade class, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there was more to the field than making pretty drawings, which I loved to do. I became so engrossed in the book that I didn’t leave the library until eight o’clock that night. I decided at once that I would read everything Mumford had written.5
My Passion for Architectural History Ignited
Lewis Mumford wrote his first book, The Story of Utopia, in 1922 when he was in his twenties. This book introduced me to the notion that we can imagine new ways of organizing the places where we live to achieve more balanced and healthy lives and communities. Bringing together the dreams and schemes of utopian thinkers from Plato up to the twentieth century, Mumford enlarged my perspective on what might be possible beyond the world of our everyday lives.
I continued reading Mumford with a growing realization that a sense of history and cultural dynamics in society is integral to understanding and shaping the built environment. His Sticks and Stones: A Study of Architecture and Civilization, published in 1924, was, if not the first, one of the earliest books on American architectural history. In it, Mumford explores the relationship between America’s building practices and its cultural trends. The final essay in the book celebrates one of the most fertile periods of American architectural history: the development of the Chicago School of Architecture. I was greatly moved to learn about the ways that the social, economic, political, and technological life of the city had shaped its buildings.
I decided that I wanted to write a book like Mumford’s but about black people. However, I quickly encountered a serious problem. Mumford had documented the medieval influence on the architecture of New England, the heritage of the Renaissance on nineteenth-century American public buildings, and the influence of machine technology on the pioneers of modern American architecture. As far as I knew, there was no building enterprise (save housing projects and slums) that revealed African American aspirations for a better life. Consequently, I wondered why this was so and what there was to write about.
I wrote to Mumford expressing my appreciation for his books and asking for his advice on how I should be developing my career. I was amazed to receive a letter back from him several days later. Subsequently, we exchanged letters several times and spoke on the phone once. “Although we may not be able to meet right away,” he wrote in response to my suggestion that we meet for lunch, “I’m happy to exchange correspondence with you.” Although we never met face-to-face, Mumford’s writings shaped the pathways of my thinking about architecture, cities, and the role of humans in creating the world we live in.
Mumford’s book that engaged me most thoroughly was The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects, in which he explores the various factors that support the development of cities and argues that to find the roots of the idea of a city, we must look at the origin of the pre-human impulse toward community. The instinct of members of a species to come together has a deeply rooted biological basis as evidenced by schools of fish, flocks of birds, and so on. In forming cities, we are following a deep-seated trait that is grounded in our very being and in that of most other species.
I loved Mumford’s analysis of the effects that trends, such as urban sprawl, have on society. Although he did not point to racism as the motive for white flight to the suburbs that led to diminished services and opportunities for people like my family who were confined to the inner cities, I had the impression that he was sympathetic to our plight. His assertion that cities be surrounded by greenbelts and provide easy access from residences to work, shopping, and recreation made a lot of sense to me.
Coming of Age in a Segregated City
As I approached adulthood and my awareness broadened, I realized that despite the inspiring, idealistic projections conveyed in the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, I had, in fact, grown up in a segregated city that offered little hope for my future. The Redevelopment Agency, the bureaucratic entity inspired by the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, became the chief public entity responsible for destroying the African American neighborhoods of North Philadelphia.6 William Penn’s vision of a “greene country towne,” with its generous housing sites and its streets named after trees, was fading like a figment of the imagination. Despite the vitality of city life, the city itself was under stress. It was losing population as more and more people moved to the suburbs. The city was being abandoned.
Yet, there was hope on the horizon. The fierce honesty of Jimmy Baldwin’s prose had planted a seed in me: the possibility that one could tell the truth about race in America without ignoring the complexity of human relations and interactions. My encounters with Karl Linn and Lewis Mumford helped to expand my understanding of my chosen career. I was moving away from architectural drafting as a purely technical and vocational skill and toward an appreciation of the potential for social reform in architecture, urban planning, and city building.
Karl Linn’s creation of Melon Commons and other projects fostered my hope that leadership by architects and city planners was not a pipe dream. Lewis Mumford’s writing gave me an insight that, by articulating utopian schemes and drawing upon the power of the imagination, architects, urban planners, and designers might contribute to changing the face of our cities and regions. The idea that I could work with others and begin to transform the legacy of racism into a vibrant expression of democracy inspired me.
Gradually, I pieced together the remnants of my secondary education. In 1960, I was accepted as a night school student at Columbia University School of General Studies in New York City. My plan was to complete my liberal arts studies and then enter Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation to earn a professional degree in architecture.
