Due: Artifact Study: Three narratives for your chosen objects.
Intro: Assignment 2, Building Study, intro New Haven Building Archive
Readings:
Zoya Brumberg-Kraus, “A Bridge at Powell and Clay: Designing Chinese American Community in an Francisco’s Chinatown YWCA,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Volume 31, No. 1, Spring 2024.
Jessica Larson, “The Black Built Environment of Benevolence in New York’s Tenderloin District: Comparative Architectural Approaches to Race, Reform, and Discipline, 1865-1910,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Vol. 31, No. 1, Spring 2024.
Zachary Violette, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age(University of Minnesota Press, 2019), selections
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Untimely Moderns: How Twentieth-Century Architecture Reimagined the Past (Yale University Press, 2023), selections. https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31741Links to an external site.
Screening
Kent McKenzie, “Bunker Hill 1956”
ABC News, “The Lost Neighborhood,” 1962
**we have a PDF**
“the tulip, full circle”
The year is 1956.
In New Haven, Connecticut, plans are in the works for a new ice hockey rink at Yale University. The man for the job is Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American architect and a member of the Yale College class of 1934. Saarinen’s ice rink would come to be named for David S. Ingalls, but generations of Yale students would dub it the Yale Whale.
While Saarinen’s head was spinning with visions of aquatic creatures, he was also musing on the fussiness of tables. His modernist impulses compelled him to clear the mess of legs, replacing the traditional four with a singular swooping central pedestal. Saarinen’s table would come to be called the tulip table. (A)
And upon the tulip table, we set our scene.
Saarinen’s design gained almost immediate popularity. Soon it would be found in homes all over the country. In trying to keep with the times, the Acme Furniture Company put Saarinen’s table in the catalog. (B) A family run business, Acme operated out of 33 Crown Street, right in the heart of New Haven and a stone’s throw from Saarinen’s alma mater and eventual hockey rink.
In the other corner of the table lies a can of Hull’s beer. (C) Hull’s was established in New Haven all the way back in 1872 by Colonel William Hull. When Prohibition ended in 1933 (just shy of Saarinen’s graduation from Yale), Hull’s moved to the Old Fresensius Brewery at 820 Congress Avenue in New Haven. From there, Hull’s would continue to brew away until unfortunately turning off its kegs in 1977.
An ashtray also adorns the table. (D) Made by the Modern Equipment Corp. of New Haven, a 1956 calendar serves as a backdrop to the dust and ashes from cigarettes.
Just off the tulip table would of course be a record player playing a record bought from Cutler’s. (E) Founded in 1948, Cutler’s was a stomping ground for generations of Yalies. Many young Yalies had their first exposure to the musical fluctuations of the twentieth century through the records sold at Cutler’s. Cutler’s would sadly close in 2012, just shy of the revival of records’ popularity with millennials.
And what song would the record be playing? In all likelihood the top song of 1956, Heartbreak Hotel by none other than the King himself, Elvis Presley. (F)
Which brings us to the next era of our journey.
On July 17, 1975 Elvis Presley would play a concert at the New Haven Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum. (G) Located in the ninth block of the nine squares, the New Haven Coliseum was a quintessential component of New Haven’s urban renewal of the 1960s and 70s. (H)
Holding 11,000 people, the Coliseum was home to various hockey teams over the years as well as numerous notable musical acts. In fact Yale’s hockey team sometimes played at the Coliseum when not at the Whale. The Coliseum was just half of an enormous modernist complex, the other half being the imposing Knights of Columbus headquarters. (I) Both gargantuan structures were designed by Kevin Roche of the firm Roche and Dinkeloo.
Roche got his start at the office of none other than Eero Saarinen. Roche worked closely with Saarinen on major projects after joining the office in 1954. After Saarinen’s untimely death in 1961, Roche and John Dinkeloo finished some of Saarinen’s projects before forming Roche and Dinkeloo in 1966.
“City After Property” reminded me of some of the controversy behind the Yale Building Project in the past couple years. The Friends Center, an early childhood education center, purchased a piece of land in the Fair Haven Heights area so as to build housing for their educators. YSoA students have been building houses the past couple years to fill the land. Though I have not been partial to the specific conversations, our professors made us aware that when the project was first proposed, it faced significant blowback from the neighbors. Supposedly the neighbors did not appreciate how multiple people would be living on one piece of land, and that the residents would not be living there permanently. For some, one can understand how a big change in the neighborhood might leave one confused and upset. But this anger towards the Friends Center’s proposal demonstrates how deeply entrenched traditional attitudes towards home ownership and property are in our society. Many Americans cannot get beyond the idea that one family owns a plot of land with one home on it. That’s why many of the more experimental ideas about property ownership, such as those described in “City After Property,” have faced significant blowback from the general public.
I think an interesting aspect to the neighborhood’s reaction to BP is also mentioned in the Safransky reading – that of collective ownership over this de facto public land. Before the Friend’s Center bought and began developing the property, the BP lot was one of the few remaining in-tact forested areas around Fair Haven Heights, and it’s my hypothesis that the community around the property also felt that when development began, not only was their “claim” on using the area for recreation taken, but with the development comes the lost of most of the trees in the lot, changing the feel of the street completely.
– I found the parallel notions of abandonment and vacancy to be especially compelling in Safransky’s chapters. These are active classifications, with agency, and the subtleties of each disrupt the conventional notions of ownership and valuation. Safransky frames abandonment as a process deeply embedded in systems of racial capitalism, where property regimes—historically constructed—produce scarcity in the midst of apparent excess. I couldn’t help but think of Proudhon when reading this, and his argument that property, as a construct, often reflects domination rather than justice, raising critical questions about how access and ownership are distributed.
– Abandonment becomes a mechanism that naturalizes dispossession. Describing Detroit lots as “vacant” erases the active care and informal stewardship by groups excluded from formal property systems, instead casting these spaces open for appropriation (and ultimately privatization?). This is a sort of rhetorical framing that aligns with broader capitalist intentions, where land’s value is only recognized through its ability to generate profit. What we see in this study of Detroit is some semblance of an alternative, a reimagined relationship to property—perhaps one opens pathways to alternatives beyond the limits of normative ownership.
– I also keep coming back to the concept of rightsizing. It seems so obvious after reading these chapters to interpret it as a malicious neoliberal urban response to decline, which in turn reveals the ideological underpinnings of private property itself. “Rightsizing” operates not simply as a logistical (or optimizing) solution but as a mechanism to stabilize value within a capitalist framework. Safransky is bluntly stating that it is simply a tool that prioritizes the recuperation of land for speculative, profitable endeavors rather than addressing the structural inequalities that produced the conditions in the first place. Rightsizing, in this sense, reinforces property as a tool of exclusion. Even the language (”right”) implies some sort of objectivity. Reallocating resources under the guise of optimization results in marginalizing individuals with competing (i.e. alternative) claims to the land.
To think of urban renewal in terms of abandonment adds a deeper layer of injustice to the whole concept. Often, the process involves displacing thriving, functional communities in the name of progress, with promises of a modern, clean, and revitalized neighborhood. However, what frequently happens is that, after displacing the original residents, the land itself ends up abandoned again—left empty for years, sometimes even decades. Examples can be found everywhere from the state street in New Haven to Boston’s West End. This occurs because the planning committee failed to attract enough investment or secure viable plans for development. Why would the government tear down established communities without a clear plan for the land’s future? Why let the same area be abandoned twice?
Im curious why you think the areas need to be developed again? If people are not able to care for the land then why add more? Detroit residents have been able establish their own systems in these abanndoned areas, I hope that there would be more of a system of centering what the communities want and need rather than just develop.
Thanks for reading, haha! I’m not advocating for these abandoned areas to be redeveloped into luxury condos. My argument is that these neighborhoods wouldn’t have needed to be cleared—displacing people in the process—if there was no real plan for the land in the first place. (Not that displacement would have been justifiable even if there had been a plan.) But I completely agree with you that now that these empty lots exist, we need better, more community-driven planning and land use.
While the Safransky readings largely discussed the themes of abandonment and what it means for a city to be abandoned. I was mostly struck by the ways that community members, specifically Black community members, (whose abandonment predates industry leaving) create and manipulate their environment to their needs. From creating community gardens to repurposing abandoned buildings, the ways in which community’s care for each other seem to create the city more than the fleeting industries. The title of the book “City after Property” hints at these ideas, that maybe the people of the city get to create the places, spaces, and care systems that they want after the shackles of private property are taken away from us. Safransky even argues that the strength of Fordist prosperity was from unions rather than from the jobs that the Ford and other companies created. It was the togetherness. My question from these readings is how can city planners and architects build these anti-property, pro community care into their work? If these systems are so embedded with private property, do they exist outside of those systems?
Model city blues reminds us of the impact that the highway system and care centered ideas created and shaped the city (also discussed in Safransky’s overview of Detroit). During this time period city and regional planners were able to shape city’s to their will violating and destroying neighborhoods. If it was so easy for planners to reshape a city to their needs, can we do it again? Can we focus on reparations and create systems of care? Can we prioritize the public rather than the private? Can we give back control to those who steward and care for the land?
In the first chapter, “Unbuilding a City,” Safransky argues that property should not be understood solely in its physical aspects, such as land and ownership. Instead, she presents it as a political construct that is deeply intertwined with social relations and political influences. She introduces the concept of “property regime” to analyze and critique the underlying systems of rules, norms, and power relations that determine who owns what, how ownership is defined, and how property is valued. Safransky further asserts that this regime is not neutral; rather, it is profoundly shaped by and perpetuates racial capitalism, colonization, and slavery. She also expands on the conceptual framework by examining the etymology of the word “abandonment,” which she describes as a politically charged term. Under liberalism, the meaning of “abandonment” has evolved from submission to authority—denoting servitude and surrender—to suggest a kind of contingent freedom. This dual meaning encompasses both individual freedom and freedom from responsibilities to others. This evolution is rooted in colonialism and racism. Ultimately, this understanding of etymology leads to the concept of “politic of abandonment” that contributes to the production of racial capitalism, which exploits and treats vulnerable racial groups as surplus.
In the second chapter, “On Our Own Ground,” Safransky narrates the challenges black communities face in asserting their identities and achieving self-determination in the urban areas left behind after white flight. This struggle is illustrated through the 1967 Detroit Rebellion. The aftermath of the rebellion gave rise to neoliberal urbanism, with an emphasis on privatization, deregulation, and market-driven development, further marginalizing vulnerable communities and exacerbating existing inequalities. It serves as a sore reminder of the ongoing challenge to create a more equitable built environment.
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