The Westsider (New York City), February 27, 1975, p. 2
By Carolynn Meinhardt
If you are poor and need a lawyer, you can get one through the Legal Aid
Society or through court appointment. If you are poor and need medical help,
you can go to your local Department of Health clinic or to a hospital clinic.
Even before the institutionalization of free medical and legal aid there
was always a tradition within those professions for free help to needy cases,
either as a matter of conscience or of curiosity.
But in architecture (and planning, which is just one part of architecture)
there has been until very recently no parallel. If you were poor and lived
in an abandoned building and you wanted, together with your neighbors, to
rehabilitate the building and be responsible for it in cooperative ownership,
there was absolutely nowhere for you to go outside of paying a fee. If the
federal, state or city government had some hideous plan for your neighborhood
which ignored the local quality and character of life, it was very hard to
articulate the objection, much less fight such plans. If a group of people
wanted to improve the physical character of their local school or parks or
waterfront, what recourse did they have than to go back to the vast central
agency, the establishment power, responsible in the first place for the
lackluster facility needing change? So the need for free architectural services
for the forgotten client, the poor and working class elements of the inner
city, was clearly felt.
In the sixties. along with all the myriad changes in social perspective,
came a response to this need. The Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem
(ARCH), founded in 1964, and the REAL Great Society were pioneering efforts
in community advocacy in New York City. Other groups across the nation were
the Cleveland Design Center, the Young Great Society Building Foundation,
Inc. and the Architect's Workshop of Philadelphia, the Neighborhood Design
Center in Baltimore, Metro Link in New Orleans and Colorado/Environment Inc.
in Denver.
Several universities set up graduate and other programs which allowed students
academic credit for working in community action groups. Harvard had its Urban
Field Service and the School of Architecture and Planning at the University
of California in Los Angeles and Berkeley had similar programs in Watts and
Oakland.
With anything new and untried and especially within the passionately emotional
context of the times, there had to be mistakes, there had to be controversy.
Beyond simply the lack of practical architectural experience within some
of these groups was a vast cultural gap to be crossed if communication was
ever to happen. Most of the architectural workers were middle class, black
or white, with different values and different experience from the poor clients
they tried to serve. If the long-hairs talked about social injustice and
social change, most of their clients were more concerned about a roof over
their heads, a bus route in their neighborhood -- things of a more practical
and immediate nature.
But if there were mistakes in all of this social rewiring, the main imbalance
was that the white ethnic working class felt slighted. Paying the largest
share of the tax burden, these citizens put out enormous pressure to stop
this "lavish" spending in the black ghettos instead of lobbying for their
share of services. As the Republican administration entered office then in
1968, the Office of Economic Opportunity was dismantled, Model Cities was
put on a starvation diet and much of the snap went out of the independent
community advocate business.
But did it? One group on the Upper West Side has managed to weather the storms
of federal funding by, perhaps, never having much to do with it from the
start. Born during the 1968 Columbia student uprising as a loose group of
15 to 30 architectural students and their friends, Urban Deadline, Inc. became
a non-profit membership corporation in the fall of that year "for educational
purposes: to provide information and skills in organization, planning, design
and construction to community groups not able to obtain these services through
conventional means."
Some of the people in the original group had had several years of conventional
architectural office experience, some had even worked with other community
development centers before coming back to graduate school, but the majority
were architectural novices. There was no real structure to Urban Deadline
in the sense of a normal architectural practice, no hoard of directors, no
hierarchy, no specific work hours, not even a regular body of people. Anyone
who had a community project could work with the group, share facilities and
experience. They could simultaneously work at other things. To support all
of this free work, the group has maintained a crazy quilt of part-time jobs,
small grants, construction work and personal loans. Every Monday night they
have a meeting where problems are discussed, information traded and general
wonderment about where it is all going is felt. Somehow it seems to have
worked.
In community advocacy there are basically two kinds of projects. In the first.
you are on the defensive, naysaying -- the community doesn't want a highway
put into its midst, or doesn't want to have a group of homes leveled for
a governmental project, doesn't want a particular service cut from a budget.
While these protests are necessary functions which require little expense,
"Stop" campaigns can be used by demagogic politicians to give a group a negative
image.
On the other hand, projects on the offensive, in which the community seeks
to build housing, to build parks, to rehabilitate facilities, take a lot
of money. So Urban Deadline leaned heavily into assisting rehabilitation
and restoration projects, developing in the process an expertise out of economic
need before the energy crises made such need commonplace in every corner
of the architectural profession.
Within the past six years, Urban Deadline has done such things as historical
research, planning and design for the restoration of 60 historic industrial
buildings on an 89-acre site for educational, commercial and recreational
uses for the Great Falls Project Committee in Paterson, New Jersey; programming,
design and construction supervision for the conversion of 16 storefronts
into Street Academies (schools for drop-outs) for the Urban League in New
York City; research, planning and design for the restoration of five blocks
of historic buildings and the adjoining waterfront for the South Street Seaport
Museum; renovation of a tenement for use as a theater, workshop and educational
center in East Harlem for the New World Revelationists; design and construction
of a park on East 6th Street between Avenues B and C for the Astor Foundation
as well as another park on West 112th Street sponsored by Columbia University
for a local block association.
The list of work of this group is lengthy and varied and ongoing. It includes
tenement rehabs for such tenant groups as Manhattan Valley Tenants Association,
various storefronts in Brooklyn and Manhattan and New Jersey and other work
for church groups.
Since 1970, the original rambling group has condensed to six individuals,
who insist, nonetheless, that anyone doing the sort of volunteer, free work
that they do is a part of Urban Deadline. John L. Young, the principal of
Urban Deadline Architects, teaches the preservation program at Columbia as
well. Alan Feigenberg teaches at the Parsons School of Design. Tony Schuman
works part of his time with Homefront, a socialist group. Marjorie Hoog was
one of the founders of the Alliance of Women in Architecture (AWA) a group
which has succeeded in winning substantial advances and recognition for women
in the field. Mary Welsh and Joel Silverberg complete the group.
Through Urban Deadline and other community advocate groups, many people who
might never have had the benefits of architectural and planning tools have
gained that experience. At the same time, the architects working within this
new area have had the luxury of creating their own professional world in
a way by working alongside people rather than for them. This close contact
has brought its share of bumps and bruises to Urban Deadline, but in spite
of a few callouses they still seem to embody the best things about the old
flower-power days -- the good will, the sharing, the openness and honesty
which includes argument and the ability to work alongside someone with whom
you do not totally agree.
These qualities will surely help in the years ahead as they attempt to merge
their paying work with their free projects. As they continue to meet the
skepticism of poor people who wonder why anyone would help them with their
architectural problems for nothing.
After speaking with these people for several hours I came away refreshed
with their humility, their lack of animus and dogma. So many "community
advocates" have heavy axes to grind; they ripple with righteousness, they
fuel themselves on all t he wrongs of hundreds of years of history and in
the end all this baggage only serves to trip them up in their working
relationship with a system which shows no sign of disappearing. In short,
they do not serve their clients.
Urban Deadline has somehow managed to keep its balance over the years. Their
most recent paid work, a wide survey of existing facilities for Teachers
College, puts the emphasis on rehabilitation and conversion rather than the
usual tack of neighborhood conquest and destruction in institutional expansion.
It is the kind of patient, low-key work which doesn't get a centerfold in
the Sunday Times Magazine, but which has so much more to say about where
the profession is going.
[Two photos omitted] John Young, Joel Silverberg and Marjorie Hoog are members of different kind of architectural firm. Below are Young and Alan Feigenberg. Photos: Tom Rosenthal.