Excerpt #2: Freedom and the politics of space
Harlem River Houses, developed by the New York City Housing Authority, designed by a team including John L. Wilson in 1936-37. Originally rented to Black tenants only, while White tenants could rent at the Whites-only Williamsburg and First Houses.
The following is an edited excerpt from ‘Freedom and the politics of space: organizing and convening for self-determination in the American citymaking professions’ presented at the Schools of Thought architectural education conference in Norman, Oklahoma, March 2020.
“We are a racist nation, and no way in the world could it be otherwise given the history of our country. Being a racist doesn’t mean one wants to go out and join a lynch mob or send somebody off to Africa or engage in crude, vulgar expressions of prejudice. Racism is a basic assumption of superiority on the part of one group over another, and in America it had to happen because as a society we enslaved people for 250 years, and up until 1964 it was written into our laws and enforced by social custom–discrimination against human beings that a man because of the color of his skin couldn’t go into a restaurant or hotel or be served in public places.” - Whitney M. Young, Jr, Keynote Address to the AIA Convention, June 1968
Another American architectural history
The contributions of Black people, enslaved and free, to architecture on the colonized North American continent before the formalization of African American participation in the architectural profession are visible in the buildings and spaces these people created, both for themselves and through their labor for White people. From adinkra symbols in Charleston, South Carolina ironwork to the shotgun neighborhoods of New Orleans, from the freedmen’s towns of Texas to the statue of Freedom atop the United States Capitol, Black authorship is deeply embedded in the built environment of the United States.
Many writers, including Dreck Spurlock Wilson, Jack Travis, and Melvin L. Mitchell, examine in depth the histories of Black architects and citymakers in the United States. Sampling a few of them illustrates how Black freedom struggles are embedded in these histories. The nation’s first professionally registered Black architect, Robert Robinson Taylor, was born in 1868 in Wilmington, North Carolina, growing up during Reconstruction and the bloody reassertion of White supremacist political power that followed it. Taylor graduated from MIT in 1892 and began work that year on the new campus of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee University in Alabama, where he led students in every task from design through brickmaking and construction. Economic and material self-sufficiency aligned with Washington’s philosophy, but it was also a practical necessity; White brickmakers were uninterested in providing materials for the advancement of Black education in their state, as Ellen Weiss documents in Robert Robinson Taylor at Tuskegee: An African American Architect Works for Booker T. Washington. Taylor and his early Black architectural contemporaries designed for the institutions that built and sustain Black communities in the United States.
The career of Tuskegee and Cornell-educated Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York State’s first registered Black architect, exemplifies the location of architects at the center of Black history and culture in the early 20th century. Tandy designed the sanctuary for St. Philip’s, the Episcopal church whose purchase of apartment buildings on 135th Street helped facilitate the development of Harlem as a Black neighborhood in 1910; the Harlem YMCA, where dozens of artists and writers found their footing as they migrated into the Harlem Renaissance; and the suburban mansion of Madam C.J. Walker, the Louisiana-born hair-care magnate who was America’s first Black female millionaire. Walker’s Villa Lewaro is designed with light, air and recreational spaces for the service staff, a design choice communicating the architect and client’s understandings of her servants’ humanity.
1924 Walker Beauty Convention, a gathering of saleswomen and employees of Madam C.J. Walker’s business empire, at Villa Lewaro, Irivington, New York.
Some Black architects created spaces for themselves further outside the public eye. In his book Dark Space, architect Mario Gooden tells the story of Amaza Lee Meredith, a Black queer woman educator and architect who began practicing in Virginia in the 1920s, designed Azurest South in St. Ettrick, Virginia for herself and her partner, fellow educator Edna Meade Colson. Meredith applied Modernist aesthetics to her own spatial needs and experiences, providing a humanizing counterpoint to the racial and sexual objectification that can be read in White European architect Adolf Loos’ designs for Black American dancer Josephine Baker’s house in Paris. These architects’ works are consistent with the principles outlined by W.E.B. DuBois in his 1926 ‘Criteria for Negro Art’. DuBois demanded Black artists use aesthetics as weapons of propaganda against White supremacy. Contemporary accounts of prominent ‘Black buildings’, like New Orleans’ 1911 Pythian Temple, assert their presence and aesthetics in direct defiance of Jim Crow social, political and economic constraints. Gooden’s writing on Meredith’s home illustrates how Black women, and queer Black women specifically, have created space for themselves and their needs despite prevailing White supremacist, heteropatriarchal norms.
Some, especially those with educational experience at the growing number of architectural programs at Black colleges and universities, the institutions now known as HBCUs, took more explicitly activist roles as designers and planners. They employed cooperative economics and community-based design to fill holes left by racist disinvestment, such as those at Indianapolis’ Flanner House. This community-based work prefigured the projects largely White-led nonprofits not based in Black communities, like Habitat for Humanity and Architecture for Humanity, would popularize in the late 20th century, as noted by Justin Garrett Moore in his essay ‘Making a Difference: Reshaping the Past, Present, and Future Toward Greater Equity.’
Black architects like Hilyard Robinson, John Louis Wilson, Beverley Greene and Paul Revere Williams took an active role in ensuring the benefits of federal investment in New Deal programs would benefit Black communities through the design of human-scaled, art-filled, and dignified public housing developments like the Harlem River Houses and Langston Terrace Dwellings.
Langston Terrace Dwellings, designed by a team led by Hilyard Robinson and including Paul Revere Williams, completed 1938 in Washington, DC. Rented to Black tenants only. The complex’s public art includes the terra-cotta sculptural frieze ‘The Progress of the Negro Race’, animal sculptures designed for climbing, and ‘Madonna and Child’, all by artist Daniel Gillette Olney.
An alternative path for public housing
Beverly Loraine Greene, then a student at the University of Illinois, 1935
Inspired by 1930s Viennese social housing and contemporary American projects in New York, these early projects were not the stripped-down Modernist blocks of Pruitt Igoe or the Robert Taylor Homes, projects designed, developed and administered as warehouses for Black people, whose planned failure was later used to justify the destruction of American public housing29. The underlying architectural quality of early federally subsidized public housing projects, despite the effects of deferred maintenance and disinvestment, testifies to the power of intervention in the hands of designers, planners and administrators who start from the position of Black and poor people’s humanity and the premise that their humanity alone entitles them to well-designed, well-maintained buildings and neighborhoods. The existence of contemporary privately owned, federally subsidized housing developed exclusively for White people and maintained at a high level for that reason, illustrates that racist design, development and disinvestment - not simply Modernist architecture and planning, and not fictitious ‘Black pathology’ - is the reason why American public housing ‘failed’.
The stories of New Deal federally subsidized housing projects and their designers reveal an architectural and planning history that centers the contributions of Black citymakers, racist and antiracist design and policy. Beverly Loraine Greene was raised in Chicago by her parents, James and Vera, a professional and a homemaker. She attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a public university which, unlike those in Southern states, was open to people of all races. In 1936, she was the first Black woman to graduate from UIUC with a degree in architectural engineering, and she went back for masters’ degrees in urban planning and housing in 1937. Hired out of college by the Chicago Housing Authority, she worked under Black planner Robert Rochon Taylor, son of Robert Robinson Taylor, and White administrator Elizabeth Wood, ‘crusaders’ in a multiracial group who pushed the CHA to develop housing projects as a means of racially integrating a city deeply segregated by policy and practice after the violent Red Summer of 1919.
Trumbull Park Homes under construction, 1937. Developed in a what was then a White South Side neighborhood by the Chicago Housing Authority, a number of its apartments were reserved for Black tenants under CHA Secretary Elizabeth Wood’s integration policy. When White residents of the neighborhood physically attacked Black tenants, Chicago alderman blamed Wood rather than protect the tenants’ Constitutional rights.
During Greene’s time at the CHA the authority completed projects like the Lathrop and Trumbull Park complexes, regarded as “virtual architectural monuments… red brick, ivy-covered, the kind of housing people would like to live in.” Wood and Taylor attempted to administer these projects through race-conscious leasing, in order to achieve racial integration in each development. This policy was highly unpopular with many White aldermen, who preferred containing Black tenants to projects like the Ida B. Wells Homes, designed in a repetitive ‘barracks’ style and located in the Black Belt on the South Side. When White neighborhood residents physically attacked Black tenants at the Trumbull Park Homes, newly developed in a White neighborhood of the West Side, aldermen blamed Wood’s efforts at integration rather than safeguarding the Black tenants’ 14th Amendment right to equal protection. Resistance to their antiracist efforts forced Wood and Taylor to resign in the early 1950s, and the CHA doubled down on its policy of containing Black residents in cheaply designed, intentionally segregated projects.
After becoming the first Black woman licensed as an architect in the United States in 1942, Greene sought a new opportunity in New York, where she was hired as the first member of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MetLife)’s team of designers for Stuyvestant Town-Peter Cooper Village (Stuy-Town-PCV) in Manhattan. Developed with massive public subsidy under Title 1 of the Housing Act of 1937, these developments are iconic Corbusian ‘towers-in-the-park’, cruciform brick skyscrapers which replaced blocks of walk-up apartments designated as ‘slums’ occupied by three thousand families, many of whom were African-American.
Like almost all private companies, MetLife prohibited Black tenants from renting in its developments. Rather than force MetLife to rent to Black families, the city of New York condemned a swath of Harlem for Riverton, a similar high-rise development for Black middle-class families - a supposedly ‘separate and equal’, but actually unequal, policy following the precedent of Plessy v. Ferguson. Riverton, with 1,200 apartments, is just over a tenth the size of the 11,000-unit Stuy-Town-PCV, and represents an application of the same philosophy that pushed Wood and Taylor out of their roles with the CHA: publicly subsidized housing as a means of reinforcing, rather than dismantling, racial segregation in American cities.
Part of Stuyvestant Town-Peter Cooper Village, developed by MetLife in the late 1940s, the project for which Beverly Loraine Greene moved to New York City
Greene ultimately chose a masters’ program at Columbia over her work for MetLife, and afterward worked on healthcare, education and institutional projects for the firms of Isadore Rosefield, Edward Durrell Stone and Marcel Breuer. Significant projects to which she contributed later in her career include the theater at the University of Arkansas in 1951, the arts complex at Sarah Lawrence College in 1952, the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and the University Heights campus of New York University (now Bronx Community College) in 1956. When she passed away in 1957, funeral services were held at the Unity Funeral Home at 2352 Eighth Avenue, now Frederick Douglass Boulevard, which she designed.
