Feb. 5

A guide to researching a local building that focuses on digital resources and a Word Doc that is the form that we will essentially follow to record our building research are also on Canvas to peruse. Reading responses for this week are below.

Readings:

Jessica Larson, “The Black Building Environment of Benevolence in New York’s Tenderloin District”

Robert W. Craig, “Fire Insurance Records and the Architectural Historian,” Buildings and Landscapes:  Journal of  the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Vol. 30, No. 1/2, Spring 2023.

Mandi Isaacs Jackson, Model City Blues: Urban Space and Organized Resistance. (Choose at least one chapter.)

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

12 thoughts on “Feb. 5

  1. Throughout the Larson reading on New York’s Tenderloin District, I was struck by the similarity between the urban issues Larson describes and some issues facing New York City today. Just as the Police Department plotted to overtake the property of the Colored Mission and St. Phillip’s Church, today New York City is planning to build a massive jail in the heart of Chinatown. One of the few islands of a minority communities left in Manhattan, Chinatown has been a dumping ground for “undesired” projects for decades. The City decided to close Riker’s Island and as a result are building new jails in every borough. The result, however, is a 300-story tower, completing overwhelming the neighborhood. And just like the new police station Larson describes, the new Chinatown jail is clad in a skin of architectural respectability. Renderings that have been released of the new jail could easily be mistaken for a generic commercial or office building. This is completely intentional. Back in the nineteenth century, a new police station in the Tenderloin was made to “visually convey the precinct’s intent to bring the Tenderloin’s residents under the heel of the police department.” (54) And today, Chinatown’s new jail visually signals “office building” but in reality, its function is no different than a depraved tool of state violence.

  2. The Safransky chapter from last week and Larson’s article are connected through their shared subject matter, the continual violence on Black communities through the government seizure of land. What separates these readings (100+ years and 600+ miles) does not discontinue the continuous history and legacy that connects them, that of the tug-of-war between government officials and planners making harmful decisions for Black communities at the behest of White investors, developers, and neighbors and those same communities reacting through acts of care, benevolence, and rebuilding to recover. Rinse and repeat. While there are examples of this relationship between community members and government planners across cultures, class, and race (enter Victoria Thomas from the first chapter of Model City Blues), we also see time and time again that Black communities are most often hit first and hardest.

  3. I found Robert W. Craig’s, “Fire Insurance Records and the Architectural Historian” particularly interesting when it comes to the differences between the fire insurance drawings and the agents behind them. From the drawings of the Franklin Fire Insurance Company to those of Hexamer General Survey’s there was obviously a difference in skill level or necessary quality between companies and clients, yet I am stuck wondering who the agents were, how they were trained, where did they come from, did they have an engineering or architecture background? Because surveying building(s) is not necessarily something you can pick up in a day, especially when it comes to the hand drawn aesthetics of the Hexamer General Survey’s mappings. At first I assumed the Franklin Fire Insurance Co. predated Hexamer by decades, but then I realized Hexamer’s drawing of the Lucas Paint Works factory predates Franklin’s survey of the First Presbyterian Church of Trenton. With 150,000 agents working throughout the United States in 1922, I wonder what impact this had on architecture or our cities themselves (if any).

    On another note, I found Craig’s writing to be in a very similar vein to what I believe Field Methods is all about. Craig explains that there is an almost infinite amount of lost history in just buildings alone that is still out there and can be discovered and exposed to the world. Yet, we must collaborate with past private companies, governments, and institutions who hold the keys to new discoveries, but aren’t necessarily interested in pursuing such endeavors. Each time Craig touches on an area of exploration that he believes has not been explored, I find it beyond inspirational, much like the digressions of our class discussions… With this, Craig’s writing, as well as our experiences in class have proved to me that research cannot be done purely digitally, especially when I tried to look up every image from this text and not a single one is available publicly online. There is so much lost information and data out there that needs to be physically mined in order to reveal the world that used to be.

  4. The Larson reading reminds us that the ideas around “urban renewal” have always been around. These events did not just happen during one time period – there have been patterns throughout history that have shaped our cities. The use of imminent domain to seize property in the Tenderloin district is part of the same history of the city seizing properties for highways and even central park. These patterns are reflected in the Chapter 2 of the Jackson readings. As Mayor Lee declared that there were going to be no more slums, while not creating plans to improve Black home ownership or create more low-income housing for residents. City governments seem to create the city’s that they want to without an understanding of who lives there and what there needs are. If city and national policies can shift to the needs and wants of city officials at a whim, can’t they shift to improve the lives of residents? The Jackson and Larson readings also highlight the violent relationship between the police and Black communities, something that we continue to see every day. These patterns have yet to be broken because we are using the same system to fight against and change, therefore nothing is changing.

  5. Larsens reading both taught me aspects of black history that I had never heard about as well as made me think about the social weaponization of the built environment. The “slum clearance” that allowed for the construction of Penn Station displaced a whole community of black people. While not surprising I think it is important to acknowledge and understand the scars that have paved the way to urban renewal. The 23rd precinct building further illustrates the built environment’s ability to act as a weapon and social driver. Without any history of attack, the precinct building was placed in a castle-like fortress. This was strategically done to embody the power and control that the NYPD was attempt to exude at this time. Building or as much a symbol of power as actual hard power.

  6. After reading about the Dixwell Renewal Plan and the investigation into the use of fire insurance records to understand urban conditions, I am particularly struck by the idea that these records were created by an objective outside observer. Their primary concern was assessing risk and property value, primarily to generate capital gain. Similarly, the Dixwell Renewal Plan was driven by an objective vision of progress and modernization, crafted by external individuals, including city officials and planners, with the goal of increasing real estate value and rebranding the city’s image in line with modern ideals. However, both approaches failed to acknowledge or respect the subjective experiences and lived realities of the people in these cultural landscapes. The conclusions drawn from their properties are often one-sided. However, by reconstructing these properties into narratives, we may gain insight into the broader socio-economic context of their time and develop a critical perspective on it. The case of Dixwell raises important questions about who defines progress and whose voices are heard in urban planning. The text highlights the ongoing struggle between an idealized top-down vision and the disruption of local livelihoods, leading to long-term tensions that the city has yet to overcome. How can historical documents help us be better equipped to confront and alleviate these tensions in a way that empowers everyone?

  7. If Larson had read “The Black Building Environment of Benevolence in New York’s Tenderloin District” at a poetry slam, I would’ve been snapping every 30 seconds. In this paper, through the strong arm of paternalism, urban renewal becomes a bivalent system in which those in positions of power save the vulnerable. In this system, “father knows best.” I’m particularly interested in the discussion of “reform housing”, in which social and behavioral change in its residents was the goal. While these projects may have been well intended, providing refuge for new immigrants with no place to land, unhoused women with children, and the poor the moral compass overlaid on these institutions is vaguely terrifying. As a New Yorker who also happens to be queer, I can’t help but think of the Chelsea of yesteryear. Before the blue-chip galleries moved in, taking advantage of the cheapest rent the city had to offer, the west side below the tunnel wasn’t a place you would want to be after dark. Until the High Line effect took root and dumped droves of tourists in the area, Chelsea had a reputation for being an incredibly vibrant, extremely gay neighborhood that happened to also house a high concentration of addicts and sex workers because of the proximity to the piers. It’s no coincidence that the density of post-war housing projects built in this area was high. There seems to be something predatory about this kind of behavior– building “reform housing” to foist superior morals on residents on their turf. Help is one thing, but a savior complex (especially one based on reform that costs billions of dollars to realize) is another.

  8. I am increasingly interested in the moralization of urban space, which is a central element in both the Larson and Isaacs pieces this week, but something present in several past readings as well (Groth, Safransky, etc.). In all of these specific urban case studies, particularly those dealing with mid-century, modernist urban renewal, there tends to be moral rhetoric applied to the neighborhood, block, or building that dramatically influences the objective reading of space. This is particularly present in Larson’s writing just because it is framed through a parish and a mission, and so spiritual morality seeps into the language used to describe the conditions being addressed (or the “benevolent” work being done). Morality, in this sense, seems to mean qualifying space and social systems based upon the perceived or projected acts that happen there (i.e. discussions of prostitution in the Tenderloin, and in the Isaacs piece on Oak Street as well) which are often piped through complex layers of bias and prejudice. Wholesale judgment of space based upon action is something that is primed for narrative exaggeration, as we have seen time and time again, and spatial structures (blocks, neighborhoods) become political tools wildly divorced from their experiential reality. What we lose in this sort of system is the simple evaluation of space as a physical commodity, and it is interesting to read Craig’s essay alongside Larson. Fire insurance records, in theory, are attempting to bring some sort of objectivity to evaluating urban conditions, but that too is contaminated by politics and profit while failing to consider the local and cultural landscape, per Duy’s comment.

    In this sense, a purely objective reading of the city is deeply fraught and easily misconstrued as absolute. There is a subjective lived experience that can only be understood through the narratives of those who occupy and tend to those spaces. As architects, I think we must be advocates for both ways of seeing – urban space, as something that we describe and analyze with great specificity in simple syntax (something physical, tangible, and literal), and urban narrative, the social overlay that is borne only from experience (something emotive, fluid, but intensely formative). Everything else, particularly the politics that so often strive to warp the perception of a place for isolated/dissociated gain becomes secondary.

  9. Craig’s essay on fire insurance records is a powerful testament to the power of description. It also serves as a compelling reminder that many of the greatest achievements in recent human history—whether for better or worse—have been driven by capitalism and the pursuit of profit. This realization deepened my appreciation for those who, with remarkable dedication, contributed to these achievements not out of a desire for financial gain but out of passion and commitment.
    I also do wonder what measures the insurance industry relies on today in place of these on-the-ground mapping techniques. I imagine they are far more technologically advanced and less labor-intensive. Do these new methods still maintain a similarly intimate connection to the built environment, as the ones conducted by real people once did? If not, does this more distanced approach come at the cost of precision and the nuanced understanding that analog surveying and mapping once provided?

  10. This week’s readings unveil the tension between planners’ incentives versus the local communities they are meant to serve. “Urban Renewal” and policies such as “eminent domain” create a facade of public good while acting as tools of control, segregation and capital. New York City is an incredible example of public facing projects and programs built upon the ruins of public housing meant for underserved communities. I am thinking of Penn Station, but also of cultural and educational institutions such as Columbia University and the Lincoln Center – which erase culture in order to “build public spaces” for a preferred form of culture.

  11. In Larson’s essay, I was particularly interested in this quote about the Colored Mission’s lodging houses: “As was the standard nature of lodging houses, the mission’s lodgers would have been responsible for their own meals and expected (or possibly required) to vacate the space during the day in an effort to encourage employment. In the evenings, Bible verse readings were encouraged in the lodging room. As expressed by the mission’s reformers, a careful balance needed to be struck between the evocation of a homelike, enriching environment and a place that did not invite idle lingering.” These rooms (I imagine much like SROs) only provided the minimum required for living while the amenities (work training, gathering, etc.) were located outside the rooms. This organization illustrates how the architecture asserts (not just exteriorly but in interiorly) a level of control and reform on its residents (providing comfort but not so much that individuals become idle). This way of living requires that residents have what they need just outside their doorstep (retail, jobs, etc.), which contrasts with urban renewal strategies of programmatic segregation (discussed in the Brainard reading last week). While these two strategies contrast, they both demonstrate levels of control over the residents.

  12. When read together, Larson and Jackson’s pieces for me speak to (1) purposeful destruction and abandonment of land by the state and (2) the complicity of racial uplift politics. Larson writes of how New York City invoked eminent domain to take the Colored Mission’s land for use by the police department, yet allowed the adequate building to fall into disrepair and decay to be knocked down. Jackson points to the irony of the New Haven Redevelopment Agency condemning and claiming to exorcise “noxious” environments, yet the Oak Street Connector they built after razing Oak Street matches their description of “noxiousness.” It’s a continuing pattern. In the early 2000s, eminent domain was weaponized in New Haven’s Hill neighborhood just south of downtown to build a new school, rather than less costly repairs made to the already existing one falling apart. These examples speak to the state’s commitment to a capitalist racial project (what Black studies scholar and historian George Lipsitz would refer to as the white spatial imaginary, which links to Jackson’s emphasis on the proposed Dixwell renewal project as “imaginary”) trumps even its capitalist stakes in the supposed value they ascribed to the land they claim. As was said last night at the New Haven Rising Summit, it is not simply about money, but power. The American prioritization of land use for who and to what purposes is exemplified by the number of foreclosed homes and retail properties sitting empty amidst overwhelming rates of homelessness and poverty in the country. Abolitionist geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore argues that the turn towards carceral geographies and institutions is not a simple backlash to Civil Rights, but a state project for managing a “surplus population” in the wake of deindustrialization. As capitalism partakes in creative self destruction for the sake of reinvention and survival, the state will incorporate social movement language and figures to combat opposition and challenges to their order. While Larson speaks to the (anti-Black and elitist) racial uplift agenda of the Colored Mission, Jackson in particular showcases incorporation in the tension between the national NAACP and more militant New Haven NAACP and CORE leaders unwilling to accept the terms of the city in urban renewal, as well as the PR strategies of the Redevelopment Agency attempting to strategically claim “community” support. I think a lot about claims of community and community support and voices, especially now as it is a word used so broadly to the point of near meaninglessness. For me it begs the question of who and what is “the community” ? How is this abstraction called upon by the state? Rallied by those in opposition to the state?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *