The Metropolis Observed
community
won't you brand my neighbor?
In Chicago, Mayor Daley is planting flowers, painting the town, and promoting cultural identities.
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by Todd Savage
Since its earliest immigrant days, Chicago has embraced the romantic idea of itself as a city of neighborhoods. It remains a sprawling collection of villages where residents find a sense of community and identity. Only now there are signs to tell you so. One need look no further than the pair of monumental steel Puerto Rican flags over Division Street. Or the Ionic column crowned with a statue of Athena on Halsted Street. Or the Italianate piazza with fountains and a Joe DiMaggio statue off Taylor Street. This is the city's way of reminding you that you've arrived in Humboldt Park, Greektown, or Little Italy.
Over the past few years, Chicago has embarked on an ambitious series of streetscape improvements. In a campaign known as "Neighborhoods Alive" (always identified by a prominent blue and white sign), the Department of Transportation has been fitting many of the city's commercial streets with fresh sidewalks, trees, and streetlights. But some distinct neighborhoods have received special attention. Extra architectural touches have been added to raise their profile even higher, instill neighborhood pride, encourage economic development--and, no doubt, garner support come election day.
The street-improvement projects are part of a movement led by Mayor Richard M. Daley. Newly inspired by visits to Europe, the mayor has begun charming up the city, ringing parks, schools, and parking lots with wrought-iron fences, lining streets with ornamental Victorian lights, and planting flowers everywhere--from sidewalk cafés to airport garages. There's even an initiative known as "the mayor's fountain program," a pet project that has sprinkled new water features all over the city. When daffodils and tulips bloom in median planters (another mayoral favorite) on busy thoroughfares, it's hard not to appreciate much of what his Johnny Appleseed--like mission has done for the city.
But Chicago is planting cultural identities as well as flowers and fountains. In 1995, it paid homage to the Puerto Rican community with 60-foot-high, 50-ton flags made of painted hollow steel tubes. They were the centerpieces of a $1.2 million face-lift for Division Street that included sidewalk seating, lighting, and landscaping. Soon after, $3.5 million went into refurbishing Greektown's Halsted Street, a process that included the erection of three 45-foot-tall sculpted limestone pillars along an expressway, each pillar representing a different age of Greek civilization. The district is also bracketed by a pair of mini Greek temples.
City officials view their efforts as "confidence builders" that will spur merchants to invest more money in their own businesses. "From the time we started the planning process to the time the [Greektown work] was complete, just about every restaurant and several of the other buildings did a major rehabilitation," says Augie Chidichimo, senior project manager of the Department of Transportation's streetscape program. The annual downtown Greek parade has been moved to Halsted, and a local Greek Orthodox church has extended the route of its Good Friday procession to embrace the rehabilitated street.
Pilsen, a Mexican-American neighborhood on the South Side, has a new plaza that features a column topped with a bronze eagle--an important Mexican cultural symbol--donated by the mayor of Mexico City. Chinatown got dragon lanterns as pedestrian-level lighting. And more neighborhoods, led by their aldermen or by community groups, are lining up for makeovers. Old Town, with its bohemian past, will get Art Nouveau sidewalk gateways and interpretive historical panels. Little Italy will have its "Piazza DiMaggio." Community groups in Andersonville, a traditionally Swedish area that has grown more eclectic, are trying to determine what kind of identity to go for. Greg Harris, the chief of staff for the neighborhood's alderman, says Chicagoans are only beginning to ask: What is our neighborhood, and what should symbolize it?
The projects are intended to be responsive to a community's desires. A design team is established for each neighborhood, and architects hired by the city meet with business owners and residents to create a concept. In Chinatown, residents even brought back pictures of lanterns they had seen in Vancouver, and then succeeded in getting the same lanterns for their streets. Funds either come entirely from the city or are provided in part by local merchants.
After the design team comes up with ideas, they are presented at public hearings. In Chinatown, the hearing was broadcast in Chinese on a neighborhood radio station, and proposals were displayed at the local library for residents to review and later vote upon.
"I don't think of these projects as being primarily design-driven, and this is certainly not hip design," says Ed Windhorst, an architect at DeStefano + Partners, a Chicago firm hired for a variety of streetscape additions, including the Puerto Rican flags. "It's more idiosyncratic and more responsive to the people than the typical design process."
The city and DeStefano + Partners got plenty of input on a plan to develop a $3.2 million streetscape along a mile of North Halsted, a lively strip of bars and shops that serves as Main Street for much of the city's gay community. The neighborhood, formerly a run-down commercial area, has been revived by bar owners, and the improvement was viewed as a reward for their good works.
The mayor's intentions for North Halsted, however, elicited everything from homophobia to concern about the neighborhood turning into Disneyland. Straight residents worried they wouldn't be welcome. Some gay homeowners fretted about their property values. The city received more than 7,000 letters and petition signatures from people opposed to designating the neighborhood, according to Harris.
In the end, the North Halsted plan was scaled back somewhat. The neighborhood's new look is highlighted by wider sidewalks, brighter lighting, and "area identifiers"--"Northalsted" signs at both ends of the street and 20 space-age steel pylons with rainbow-colored rings along the route in between. Planters in the shape of wishing wells wear steel nameplates to mark side streets. This promotion of the biggest gay nightlife area in the Midwest has already helped generate tourism, and the pylons have become backdrops for visitors' snapshots.
Whether or not Chicago's neighborhoods have become more photogenic, Jeff Edwards, an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University in Chicago, says he finds the "theme-parking" distasteful. "You're taking superficial symbols from particular cultures, putting them in a cityscape, and calling it 'recognizing cultural diversity,' " he says. "Experiencing Chinese culture means eating Chinese food on a Chinese-themed street. It's a fake multiculturalism. It's about displacing citizens with shoppers and tourists." Edwards is the author of a paper that he recently presented at the University of Chicago's Center for Gender Studies' "Politics of Responsibility" conference, entitled "Gentrification, Disneyfication, and Gay 'Ethnic': Chicago's North Halsted Renovation."
Political and cultural implications aside, most residents love the new sidewalks and trees, and the enlargement of public spaces and gathering places can only invigorate the city's neighborhoods. No one needs a sign to tell them so. |
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reproduction
it serves a Village
The Met brings back Eva Zeisel's off-center ceramic-ware from the Forties for downtown and klutzy types.
(photos: Kathy Mucciolo courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art)
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by Stephen Milioti
In the 1940s, Minneapolis-based Red Wing Potteries asked designer Eva Zeisel to make a line of ceramic dinnerware that would transform the company's look. "They wanted a 'Greenwich Villagey' design--whatever that meant in Minneapolis," says the Hungarian-born Zeisel, who is 92 years old and has been living in New York since 1938. She came up with the "Town and Country" line, which was produced from 1947 to the mid-1950s and featured pieces with an urban sensibility: The center well of her saucer was off-center, for example.
Now the Metropolitan Museum of Art is reproducing Zeisel's collection: The full line of 11 items, available in four colors, can be purchased over the phone, (800) 662-3397, as well as at the museum and the Met stores in Soho and Rockefeller Center. |
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media
must-see TVs
Rerun-worthy sets from Harry Poster, who's putting modern minds into vintage bodies.
(courtesy: Harry Poster)
Ready for prime time: the 1970s JVC Videosphere, top, and the Muntz 1960s console, restored for the rec room.
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by Elisa Zuritsky
Film has always beat television out in the arena of cultural respectability. It's fitting, then, that TV designers are desperately stripping away the box, minimalizing sets into movie screens for the living room. The Philips Web site, www.sv.philips.com/vision/flattv.html, for example, trumpets the two-dimensionality of its Flat TV, which can be wall-mounted like a painting for "cinema-style viewing."
Futuristic and sleek, the flatter, wider cutting-edge is fine. But for anyone who has ever swooned over a 1949 Philco mahogany set at a flea market, there is Harry Poster. Originally a dealer of repaired vintage TVs, Poster recognized the practical limitations of working within decades-old technology five years ago and decided to move into a fusion business: melding yesterday's TV "bodies" with today's color "minds." In his Bergen County, New Jersey, warehouse, Poster stocks an average of 175 to 200 televisions from the Thirties through the Seventies, most of which he can refit with new, color, cable- and remote-control--ready innards for $500 to $650. Poster's body options include Forties Hallicrafters by Raymond Loewy and prewar RCAs by John Vassos.
Poster doesn't have a store per se, so interested parties should first browse the inventory on his Web site, www.harryposter.com, and then e-mail him at hp@harryposter.com; he pulls the televisions out of his warehouse by appointment only. The sets are mildly distressed, but Poster promises that in three weeks' time they will not only be transformed but also cleaned up to look as good as old-new. In addition to the retail business, Poster sells and rents his hybrids as movie props. (They have appeared in Driving Miss Daisy, Quiz Show, and Dead Presidents.)
Now that recycled reruns are de rigueur for cable networks, Poster's products are often the TV within the TV. The set of ESPN Classic's new show, Vintage NBA, prominently features a Sixties Magnavox alongside a lava lamp and rotary telephone. Meanwhile, over at Nick at Nite and TV Land, general manager Larry W. Jones and his promotional crew have bought more than 20 TVs from Poster, some of which are given away as contest prizes.
Poster's favorite sets include the space-age Seventies JVC currently in stock. And in case you're wondering, he's partial to shows like Friends and Will and Grace because, he says, "occasionally they remind me of the old sitcoms." No Nick at Nite reruns in the Poster household? "I'm not ready to pay for cable yet," he says, sounding like someone truly out of another television era. |
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preservation
casting Stone
An unfashionable facade on a historic town house stirs a like-it-or-landmark-it debate.
(courtesy: Benjamin Hicks Stone)
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by Kristin Miller
In a staid district of late-nineteenth-century town houses on New York City's Upper East Side, the romantically lacy, stark-white concrete grille in front of the Edward Durrell Stone house has raised a ruckus since it was constructed in 1956. When the grille first appeared at 130 E. 64th Street, more than 20 years before the Upper East Side Historic District was created, Stone had only his neighbors and architectural critics to contend with (neither group was pleased). Nowadays, in a landmark district, such an alteration to a facade would be absolutely prohibited. Yet the controversial little town house has become an unofficial landmark of its own--and largely for the addition that many still consider an eyesore. This turnabout has led some of the city's big guns to take the surprising stance of defending the screen on its architectural merits.
According to longtime New York City Landmarks Commissioner Thomas Pike, standards for landmark status have changed significantly over the years. During the nineteenth century, preservation decisions were mostly dictated by politics. (There's even a church in Queens that missed the first wave of landmarking because it was popular with the wrong side during the Revolutionary War.) In the early twentieth century, the focus shifted to preserving works of "import." According to Pike, "Now we're preserving not just beautiful buildings, not just those connected to history, but the fabric of history itself."
So how did the Stone house almost become an official landmark? Stone is a hard architect to love, particularly in aesthetic terms. His brand of romantic Modernism has yet to come back into fashion, and, according to one New York architect, "Many people who love Modernist architecture don't like Stone." This is probably why, when the facade fell into disrepair in the late 1980s, Stone's widow removed the screen--and promptly got slapped with a Landmarks violation penalty, which halted all reconstruction efforts and made selling the property difficult. These days, such a violation can incur fines of as much as $250 per day.
In 1992, Maria Stone applied to the commission for release from the violation through a "certificate of no effect." But some powerful voices spoke up for the white grille. Unbeknownst to the Stone family, Robert A.M. Stern, a strong advocate for the preservation of Modernist architecture, asked the commission to "rise above the inevitably changing winds of fashion... and preserve an important architect's ingenious, if controversial, solution to the problem of town house design." Stern's voice won out and the violation remained in effect. Stone's son, Benjamin Hicks Stone, an architect himself, proposed several of his own designs as alternatives, but the commission wouldn't accept anything other than the reconstruction of the original design, as unpopular as it was.
According to Pike, "Preservation means telling the whole story of the American experience accurately and completely," which might be the single best argument for saving the unfashionable Stone style. The red velvet and white marble interior certainly contained a glamorous version of the American experience, with hostess Stone serving cocktails to the likes of Sophia Loren, Jack and Jackie Kennedy, and Frank Lloyd Wright. It's a roster of figures whose popularity has waxed and waned, perhaps as much as that of the man behind the wild, white concrete grille. |
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entomology
new-zoo review
London's bug-infested Web of Life is the latest in built environments for the spineless.
(courtesy: Zoological Society of London)
Termite style: Cooled like the insect's nest, the Millennium Conservation Centre is a tribute to invertebrates. |
by Tara Mack
Cockroaches have never had it so good. They scurry unimpeded over dirty dishes, devouring a tomato and cucumber sandwich left on a plate. Roach Motels and Raid are nowhere to be found. And better yet, the bugs are admired by hundreds of visitors every day.
The cockroaches, and dozens of other critters, have recently moved into a new home at the London Zoo. The $7.5 million exhibit, called the Web of Life, opened in April. Insect exhibits as large as this one are rare, but they are becoming increasingly popular; zoo experts say that bug houses are the next wave in zoo design. The Web of Life is home to more than just bugs; its theme is biodiversity--the entire network of living things that share the Earth. But because invertebrates comprise 98 percent of animal life, they are the stars of the show. From the microscopic water flea to the dung beetle, the Web of Life is an homage to the unsung heroes of the animal kingdom. "Without all this life--particularly the invertebrates--none of us would be here," says Paul Pearce-Kelly, curator of invertebrates at the zoo. "We owe our existence to these animals."
In 1996, zoo officials commissioned the London firm Wharmby Kozdon Architects, who'd done their children's zoo, to design the building for the Web of Life. The London Zoo, which has been known for its innovative architecture since it opened in 1828, is hoping this new facility, called the Millennium Conservation Centre, will keep the zoo at the forefront of this latest trend in insect importance. And, as opposed to Ralph Appelbaum's more tech-reliant Hall of Diversity at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, actual animal life is the main attraction here.
The center's walls are almost entirely glass, including those of the zookeepers' offices. "It's a bit like a doll's house with the front taken off," says Pearce-Kelly. "Everything is there to be seen." The restrooms even have a view of the anteaters.
The first insects on display are housed in what Pearce-Kelly calls "stereotypical" settings: cockroaches in a kitchen, locusts swarming in a desert scene. Then the more nuanced biodiversity tale unfolds as visitors move through the building, starting with microscopic creatures and continuing with life in rain forests and oceans. As visitors spiral downward along a path, they can see the many different ways in which human beings are threatening this fragile network--through pollution, hunting, the introduction of alien species. As the path winds back up to ground level, informational plaques explain how we can take better care of the planet.
Architect Philip Wharmby's center is as environmentally responsible as the exhibit's message. The building uses a minimum of fossil fuels. It's warmed by body heat and the sun, and its cooling system owes a debt to an oft-maligned insect, the termite. Like termite nests, the center has holes in the floor to distribute cool air, and tall ventilation shafts to let hot air escape.
Wharmby says he also wanted the space to be flexible. Some of the older buildings at the zoo were innovative in their time but don't meet modern standards for housing certain animals. They're hard to tear down, he says, because they are listed on historical registries, and they're impractical to convert. Wharmby calls his design "a large, exciting, sexy barn," in that the framework of the building is simple and the interior could be radically altered without disturbing the basic structure.
Curators plan for the Web of Life to display creatures such as the moon jellyfish, the giant centipede, the Mexican red-knee spider, and the mole rat, and, says spokeswoman Debbie Curtis, to drive home a single idea: "It's important to save these guys, too." |
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activism
big Amsterdam things
A little road fixture with a romantic past inspires the city to save it.
(courtesy: Netherland's Board of Tourism)
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by Todd Savage
Anti-parking poles known as Amsterdammertjes have long kept the peace between pedestrians and drivers in Amsterdam. The steel sentries dot the landscape at six-foot intervals, forming a barrier between street and sidewalk and a slalom course for the city's legions of bicyclists. The first Amsterdammertjes (roughly "little Amsterdam things") appeared in the late nineteenth century to keep horses and buggies at bay, and by the end of the 1970s, tens of thousands had been erected to guard against the influx of cars.
But Amsterdammertjes are the latest victims of a growing effort by the city to unclutter the Dutch capital of such quaint fortifications. They have been disappearing from the cobblestone streets, and crews digging up the roadway for repairs are taking the opportunity to excavate the poles. "We're working on a new look for our city center," says councilwoman Guusje Terhorst.
But the lowly street fixture has developed a powerful romantic association with Amsterdam, and a growing number of dedicated fans. Sporting the three crosses of the city's coat of arms, Amsterdammertjes show up on postcards, T-shirts, even chocolates, and locals often encircle them with flowerpots or use them to prop up café tables. Residents of the eclectic Jordaan neighborhood have protested the removal policy by wrapping their Amsterdammertjes in gold foil. Says café owner Caas van Zuilen, "It's not for nothing that they are called Amsterdammertjes." |
by Sarah Horowitz
Bob Woody is thinking about Egypt's mighty pyramids. As a public-information officer with North Carolina's Park Service, Woody is in charge of describing his state's most unusual current preservation project: the relocation of Cape Hatteras Island's 130-year-old lighthouse. "I can hear Egyptian drums beating," he says. "It is magnificent!"
Woody might be overdramatizing the half-mile move, but relocating the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is no small project. Built in 1870, the country's tallest brick lighthouse weighs about 9 million pounds. The landmark has been threatened by the Carolinian seas over which it watches--justly dubbed the "graveyard of the Atlantic"--since the 1930s. But it wasn't until 1988, after years of beach-bolstering failed to stem encroaching tides, that the Park Service, on advice from the National Academy of Sciences, decided to move the lighthouse. Eleven years and $11.8 million in Congressional appropriations later, a team of experienced building movers, led by the Buffalo-based International Chimney Corporation (ICC), is now hurrying to relocate the lighthouse (and several outbuildings) before the worst of the 1999 hurricane season hits.
The move will take, start to finish, eight months. Last January, workers began bracing the lighthouse and testing the ground around it. In March and April, they cut the lighthouse away from its original foundation (using a diamond-cable wire saw) and then gradually replaced the foundation with shoring towers on a steel I-beam base. The team is now using hydraulic jacks to lift the building up and then installing travel beams and a roller-dolly system underneath. They'll begin pushing it--at a speed of less than 100 feet per day--toward its new home, a full half mile away. By September it will rest on an oversized slab of reinforced concrete, which is meant to be much more stable than its old Vermont rose granite block foundation. "I always get a kick out of the last inch," says ICC project manager Joe Jakubik. "Even though you've checked and double-checked, you still breathe a sigh of relief when it's done." |
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sports
designers on board
Shorter, wider, CAD-crafted surfboards are the rides to have this endless summer.
(photo: Sam Diephius courtesy Channel Island Surfboards)
Al Merrick's Flyer |
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by Carly Berwick
When surf aficionados at the July 28 Huntington Beach OP Pro competition (a key stop on 1999 World Championship tour) eye the height of the waves and the quality of the riders, they'll also be noting the size and shape of the winning boards. One-eighth of an inch more or less on a board--a difference that might allow for better balance in large surf or more efficient turns in small--can determine a champion. Until the advent of Computer Aided Design a decade ago, the search for the perfect board was as grail-like as the one for the perfect wave. Now, with CAD, the ideal form, once found, can be continuously refined and repeated.
This year, the top board from the top board designer, Al Merrick of Channel Islands Surfboards, is the Flyer. Summer surf is notoriously "fishy," or small and slow, and new, popular boards like the Flyer, which has a wider tail and nose for better flotation in small waves, seem to be made for the endless summer. Kelley Slater, who's won five consecutive world championships, has been riding his own version, the K-Flyer, though he's taking a break from the tour this year. Merrick's Flyer is even squarer than last year's Sashimi, which was already cashing in on the shorter, wider, thicker trend begun around two years ago. "It's a 1987 template with modern bottom-contouring," says Scott Anderson, a shaper at Channel Islands, of the Flyer.
New, lighter materials like polyurethane foam and fiberglass advanced board design in the 1960s. Surfers also discovered that shortening their boards to an average of six feet dramatically improved their ability to carve quick turns across wave faces.
As in fashion, film, and music, the Eighties are big in surfing, which means a renewed interest in shorter shortboards, including the swallow-tailed fish. The trend pays homage to the hacked-off boards of the era's surfing champs like Tom Curren, who introduced his own line of boards this March. According to Rusty Preisendorfer, founder and head designer of Rusty Surfboards, Curren "started goofing around on fishes again three or four years ago," inspiring riders and designers to rethink their infatuation with long, thin boards. Rusty Surfboards are continuing to refine its C-5, a board it developed in 1996. Named after its stabilizing, five-fin design, the C-5 "enables you to get more drive and speed from a short, wide board," says Preisendorfer. Today, he adds, the average shortboard length is about 5 feet 11 inches--compared to 6 feet 2 inches a few years ago.
Matt Biolos of Lost Enterprises, a design shop in San Clemente, California, is releasing the Proto this year, a board he describes as "an extremely small wavy toy. It didn't come from the pros, it came from me and my friends wanting to surf shitty waves. It's for the everyman." Like shaped skis, the easily maneuverable shortboards allow the average rider to rip--at least on the small stuff.
The Flyer likewise reaches out to a broader surf population, says Merrick. "It's real adaptable for young guys on small waves and for older guys for normal surfing," he says. "It spans generations." This last fact is especially important now that the boarding pioneers of the Sixties have put some years behind them. Merrick also emphasizes that the long, narrow boards are hardly obsolete. "There's been great diversity. The future of board design will be determined by where the guy wants to put the board on the wave."
More and more, surfers are going for speed and tricks. It's ironic, though, notes longtime boarder Brian King, a former head judge of the Eastern Surfing Association, that surfing, with its substantial past, is becoming increasingly like snowboarding and skateboarding, sports that surfing launched. "It's come full circle," says King. "Now we're learning from those guys." |
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competition
one to watch
The Rado winner offers medical and nerdy assistance.
(courtesy: Rado Watch Co.)
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by Stephen Milioti
A heart-rate monitor is one of the features of architect Peter Wasem's winning watch for the inaugural Rado Watch Design Competition. In March, the design was picked from a pool of 18 finalists. According to Rado's director of marketing, Massimo Schawalder, "It's something that you can wear even if you're not a tech nerd." (If you are, though, the watch also features something called an "Internet-time reader.")
Wasem says he incorporated the only slightly less geeky medical function into his design because "the client base that can afford this watch is 50, 60, 70 years old; they might be interested in monitoring their vital functions." The handsome--but potentially hypochondria-inducing--watch may go into production, but the company hasn't set a date yet. In the meantime, best to use your wrist to check your pulse the free, old-fashioned way. |
civil disobedience
"I am not monolithic"
The splendid isolation of Michael Henry Adams.
(photo: Jimmy Cohrssen)
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by Ellen Barry
Michael Henry Adams was arrested alone. This is how it happened: On March 24th, Adams arrived at the Landmarks Preservation Commission office dressed like a Jazz Age banker, in wing collar and bowler hat, and affixed himself to the door handle with a chain. "Save Harlem now!" he yelled, for three hours. Officials from the commission came out with beseeching looks and said, pleadingly, "Michael... " Adams did not respond, although he paused to remark that he should have brought a lemon drop.
"I am not monolithic," he said to a reporter at one point, referring to the modest size of his campaign, and it was true. At three, a friend stopped by and nearly lured him away with a lunch invitation--the same temptation, by the way, that persuaded Adams to unlock himself from a gate during a protest over construction at Harvard three years ago. When the police arrived at the Landmarks Commission, Adams helpfully supplied a key to the padlock, as befits a partisan who traces his inspiration to the movie Please Don't Eat the Daisies, in which Doris Day's character becomes involved in a marvelous renovation.
"So much of it was about wanting to be able to do something that would annoy the chairman of the commission as much as she has annoyed me by ignoring me," Adams explained later, when he had traded in his arrest wear for a cardinal-red V-neck sweater.
In that, at least, he seemed to be successful. For more than a decade now, Adams, 43, has been agitating to speed up the process of landmarking in Harlem. Adams entered the rarefied brotherhood of African American historical preservationists when, as a child, he watched Gone with the Wind and "absolutely identif[ied] with those houses--not the houses where the slaves lived, but the houses where they were working."
After he moved to New York from Akron, Ohio, in the Eighties, he attended Columbia's Historic Preservation program and studied country houses at the Attingham Summer School in England. Now he is working as a waiter while he awaits the publication of his second book, due out in 2000 with the tentative title Harlem Past and Present (Monacelli Press). In the meantime, journalists who cover his efforts--and there have been a lot of them--employ the word "gadfly."
No one would argue that Adams hasn't made a difference. Local activists credit him with making the cause of Harlem preservation impossible to ignore, in part because he is impossible to ignore. He is charming; he wears Corbusier spectacles; he carries around pictures of buildings and displays them like a grandfather.
But even Adams' allies were uncomfortable with this last protest, which followed a meeting that others characterized as extremely constructive. At issue were two moves that activists have awaited since 1991: the infill of buildings carved out of the original Hamilton Heights historical district, between 140th and 145th streets and St. Nicholas and Amsterdam avenues; and second, the extension of the district north through Sugar Hill to 155th Street. According to Carolyn Kent, who is co-chairwoman of the parks and landmarks committee of Community Board 9, which covers West Harlem, the meeting convinced her that the 10-year struggle is finally paying off. "We're making such definite progress," says Kent.
Inside the commission headquarters, officials say Adams' expectations have made it impossible to negotiate with him. "Michael has requested that all of Harlem be designated as a landmark. That's not humanly possible," says Terri Rosen Deutsch, chief of staff at the commission. "It's not even worth discussing."
And Adams' great friend and fellow activist Josephine E. Jones, who at 78 has agreed to return and picket with him, has been encouraging him to soften his tactics. "I've been talking to him about that and I think I worked on him some," she says. "You have to go around it and come in another door, that's what I said."
Adams says his wish list is in fact much more reasonable than Deutsch suggests--he's basically just looking to accelerate the timeline of actions agreed upon years ago--and he has not missed the eye-rolling around him. But he also says he is a necessary figure, something like Al Sharpton.
"I am the alter ego of a lot of people," he says. "They have much more at risk than I do. They own houses, they have jobs and live with people. I don't have any of that shit. There's a part of them that says, 'Gosh, maybe Michael's right, maybe if we all did this things would change, but I wouldn't risk it myself.' But they want me to do it. Sometimes that's annoying, too, like I'm the attack dog of Harlem."
And even an attack dog can feel a little cold and lonely after a night in a holding cell.
"I really was loath to lie on the floor and try to sleep. That's what a lot of people did," says Adams. "But I got more and more tired. Ultimately I decided at 10 in the morning to lie on the floor. I put my hat over my face and put my gloves under my head and I slept." |
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