Touring Project Row Houses: Lessons on Arts as Anti-Gentrification Urbanism in Houston’s Historically Black Third Ward

On this block sits a one-story shotgun house with a modest “A”-frame structure. Two parts comprise the home’s street facing façade: a window centers the right half, while the left half indents inwards towards a front door. White paint unites the entire house’s exterior; this paint also covers and accents the horizontal wood beams that adorn this house.

Nine other nearly identical replicas—more one-story white “A”-frames—surround this house. In this near uniformity lies a story about the inception of these homes, and their continued meaning making in Houston’s Third Ward neighborhood.

These homes sit along Holman Street less that a quarter mile from a mammoth interstate intersection, and some two miles south of Houston’s Downtown. They are part of Project Row Houses. Founded in 1993 by artist Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses is, as described on its website, “a community platform that enriches lives through art with an emphasis on cultural identity and its impact on the urban landscape.”

I toured Project Row Houses (PRH) in late May 2018 as part of this year’s Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE) conference. What most impressed me: PRH’s unwavering commitment to centering the needs of its mostly African-American community and residents (the majority of whom are marginalized due to race, gender, and income) amidst gentrification threats.

The tour included a welcome from Executive Director Eureka Gilkey and a neighborhood tour by McKenzie Watson, Guest Services and Membership Coordinator. Days later, a plenary at AAAE featured an interview with founder Rick Lowe and Director of Strategic Partnerships Tamika Evans. Essential lessons from them close this post.

Much has been written about arts and gentrification. Notably, sociologist Sharon Zukin researched artists in 1980s New York City lofts in then-fringe neighborhoods and Richard Florida has written about the role of the creative economy in the neoliberal growth of cities. But in these discourses, there is often an unstated link between mostly white artists who move to and make work in mostly non-white urban margins, and the role of that racial difference in sparking gentrification.

More recently, the term “artwashing” was coined to describe “the work and presence of artists and creative workers is used to add a cursory sheen to a place’s transformation,” and to attend to race and racist processes of gentrification involving the art. [More on artwashing here and here.] Journalist Peter Moskowitz has also been more explicit about that link between white artists gentrifying non-white urban areas. He does so through redlining, writing in 2017:

Redlining not only depressed the economies of inner cities, it created an entirely new kind of people in the suburbs—the white middle and upper-middle classes. For the first time in American history, the majority of white people were living largely privatized lives in single-family homes, without many community spaces or diversity, a lifestyle that reinforced the ideal of the nuclear family, with a stay-at-home mom and a working father. When the children of that economic and cultural experiment we now call “white flight” looked around, and decided they didn’t like what they saw, they began moving back to cities. In the 1970s, New York, San Francisco, and every other major urban center began experiencing an influx of a new kind of white person—one raised with the aesthetic, economic, and spatial values of the suburbs.

[…] suburbanization unleashed on cities a deluge of artists who cared more about marketable aesthetics than about art that could create social change.

In the 1930s, the racist process of redlining (whereby government backed home loans provided top rates to whites, and abysmal rates and denials to blacks regardless of financial healthy) racially segregated Houston, as it did in a majority of sizable U.S. cities. [See the unparalleled Mapping Inequality for more.] Through redlining, white bankers and governmental officials marked a majority of Houston’s Third Ward (a mostly African-American neighborhood) in red, that is, as “hazardous”; a yellow mark meant “definite declining” and delimited the remainder of the area. They did so solely due to race, because the neighborhood was mostly black. In redlining, those banks and officials denied mortgages and/or gave black residents the worst mortgage rates solely based on race, and thus divested from black people and black spaces. They also, in lining white areas blue and green, subsidized white neighborhoods with the best mortgage rates and investments.

Texas Map & Blueprint Co. (1930): Street Map, City of Houston, Texas, circa 1930. http://hdl.handle.net/1911/91602.

Through Moskowitz, we can make an argument linking aesthetics and race (as I’ve written about before), about how dense, redlined, and non-white urban areas that were once economically devalued due to governmental racism became, in the late 20^th century, attractive to white artists who grew up in green-lined (and thus white and economically valued) suburban areas. U.S. gentrification narratives often narrowly focus on white artists entering non-white neighborhoods. Linking redlining to gentrification—whereby the presence of white artists in non-white neighborhoods attracts neoliberal capital and in turn displaces existing residents of color—then, more robustly animates how aesthetic and racialized values have been differently attached to white and black bodies because of past and continued racialized urban investments, and frames work by existing residents to confront dehumanizing neighborhood change.

Now a neighborhood of 15,000 residents, Houston’s Greater Third Ward currently has a population that is about 64% black. From 2000 to 2013, home values nearer downtown have risen over 176%, displacing many long-time residents. Project Row Houses centers historic and existing black residents, and humanizes those made most vulnerable by contemporary neoliberal development, and past redlining. From my tour, I learned that it does so in at least three ways.

First, PRH uses its resources to respond to the needs of the community, including confronting racial policies that have long dispossessed black residents in Houston. During her welcome, Executive Director Eureka Gilkey told us how PRH centers the question “How can we use our resources to respond to the needs of the community?”

Eureka Gilkey introducing Project Row Houses to our tour group

Some answers in the organization’s 25 year history include:

-Preserving housing stock. PRH started one of the first affordable housing programs in the neighborhood and more recently purchased 20 units from a slumlord, renovating them to become safe and quality places to live.

-Bringing back small businesses along Emancipation Avenue, which runs by Emancipation Park. Emancipation Park is the oldest park in Houston and in Texas. Bought in 1872 by former slaves who pooled together $1,000, the park celebrates Juneteenth, the day commemorating the emancipation of slavery in Texas on June 19, 1865 (two years after the Emancipation Proclamation). In the 20^th century, Emancipation Avenue had myriad of black-owned businesses that acted as a refuge for black residents denied entry into mainstream businesses elsewhere in Houston. In the past few decades, real estate prices have jumped from $5/sq. ft to $100 sq. ft. PRH has helped to anchor small businesses including NuWaters Co-Op, a food market.

-Working with University of Houston and Texas Southern University, universities located in the greater Third Ward, to hire residents who live in their zip codes.

-Using the majority of their annual budget of $2.6 million (which is mostly foundation funded) to sustain these structures.

Ultimately Gilkey emphasized how the work of Project Row Houses recognizes the complex the racial and classed effects of gentrification, and fights against how long-time residents have been displaced without recourse and resource. She detailed city policy issues, including the fact that if you are a renter in Houston, you cannot be part of your neighborhood’s civic organization and are threatened by same day eviction. However due to PRH’s community-engaged work, by 2018 some 22% of land in the neighborhood was owned by non-profit and churches, organizations that do not adhere to capitalist development plans.

Second, PRH invests spatially in its community. During our tour, McKenzie Watson revealed how the structures that define Project Row Houses – the row houses, but also homes for single mothers — all invest spatially in the marginalized community. Here are some of PRH’s spatial work:

–Young Mothers Residential Program: “The purpose of YMRP is to empower low-income single mothers and their children in achieving independent, self-sufficient lives. YMRP has supported roughly 100 mothers and their families, some of whom have gone on to earn doctorates, law degrees and become community leaders and entrepreneurs.”

Murals across from the Young Mothers Residential Program homes

–Row House CDC: “Project Row Houses and Rice Building Workshop collaborated to create a series of row house-inspired duplexes to provide affordable housing for people in the community. In 2003, Row House CDC was created to act as a sister organization of PRH to manage the Affordable Housing Program.”

Cookie Love’s Wash n Fold, a laudromat for PRH residents named after a neighborhood resident

–Small Business Incubation: “PRH’s Incubation Program provides space, time and/or mentorship to artists and creative entrepreneurs working in the early stages of project development. The incubation program affords creative entrepreneurs the opportunity of operating within a close-knit community of artists and activists in addition to operating on a neighborhood level with members of the Third Ward community and beyond.” Many businesses are begun by former PRH residents.

Inside Crumbville, TX, a vegan bakery owned by Ella Russell (center) incubated by Project Row Houses

Inside NuWaters Co-Op with a member-owner

Inside NuWaters Co-op

Many incubated businesses are near Eldorado Ballroom, owned and renovated by PRH, the historic home where 20th century black audiences, denied from white-only theaters, were able to see traveling black musicians.

-Space for Art: From Public Art, to Residencies, to low-cost studio space, PRH is spatially thread by and led by art.

A stretch of row houses on Bastrop St used for art installations including radio broadcasts

“Neighborhood Fantasies” exhibit

Third, PRH animates an artistic thinking about its mostly black neighborhood. The AAAE plenary featured Rick Lowe (founder) and Tamika Evans (Director of Strategic Partnerships) in conversation with Sixto Wagan (Director of the Center for Art and Social Engagement at the University of Houston). Rick Lowe detailed the inception of Project Row Houses; how high school students visited his studio and questioned the greater goal of his work. As he detailed in 2006:

I was doing big, billboard-size paintings and cutout sculptures dealing with social issues, and one of the students told me that, sure, the work reflected what was going on in his community, but it wasn’t what the community needed. If I was an artist, he said, why didn’t I come up with some kind of creative solution to issues instead of just telling people like him what they already knew. That was the defining moment that pushed me out of the studio.

At the plenary Rick Lowe also made us think about the relationship between art and the community, even admist neoliberal displacement, saying “in a market economy, we exercise our role in the market as well,” “you loose things when you scale up,” “as an artist, you make something and you think about it,” and “having an expansive mindset integral to the whole thing.” Lowe suggested framing residents as artists, as those with expansive and creative mindsets, is integral to the work that Project Row Houses does.

Sixto Wagan, Tamika Evans, and Rick Lowe at the 2018 AAAE Plenary

Tamika Evans, director of Strategic Partnerships, also expansively revealed how through centering arts, “PRH had the capacity to dream” and to “empower people and engage community through direct action.” She also incisively queried, “What does it mean to be a in a community with another human being?”

By thinking artistically, by working artistically in its neighborhoods, Project Row Houses makes an expansive space for its community and confronts the spatial dehumanization of black people. Especially in urban processes like redlining and gentrification, black people aren’t given multitudes of meaning. They are just marked in redlines as “hazardous” or through development as “to be displaced.” By contrast, Project Row Houses has allowed for multitudes of meaning to be re-attached to black residents from animating Emancipation Park, to housing single mothers, to making space for black businesses, financial aptitude, and of course, art.

Unless otherwise noted all images are by Jasmine Mahmoud. 

Biking Seattle’s Redlining: An Interview with Merlin Rainwater

Redlining Map of Seattle from 1936

“The policies that created segregation have been so successful, that if you live in a white world, it’s kind of hard to see out of it. You just have to learn to see it.”

-Merlin Rainwater

Consider the following language. When was it written? Where was it written?

No person or persons of Asiatic, African or Negro blood, lineage, or extraction shall be permitted to occupy a portion of said property, or any building thereon; except domestic servants may actually and in good faith be employed by white occupants of such premises

No residence property shall at any time, directly or indirectly, be sold, conveyed, rented or leased in whole of in part to any person or persons not of the white or Caucasian race.

Tracts or parcels of land in this plat shall be used or occupied only by members of the white or Caucasian race, excluding Semites, and no other persons shall be permitted to use or occupy said tracts or parcels, except employees may occupy the premises where their employer resides.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, this language was widely written into deeds in housing stock not in Detroit, or Chicago, or St. Louis, but rather in Seattle. Now documented on the “Racial Restrictive Covenants” section of the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History project at the University of Washington, much of this language—although outlawed by the 1968 Housing Rights Act—still exists on today’s home deeds, acting as a vestige of the racial restrictions that pervaded Seattle in the early 20^th century. Despite that past ubiquity, many Seattle residents remain unaware of the ways in which the city was (and arguably still is) systematically racially segregated: through these restrictive covenants (private agreements made by white homeowners to exclude non-white and ethnically white residents), and through redlining.

Redlining, as many have documented, was the system begun in the 1930s by which the federal government worked with banks to spur the economy during and after the Great Depression. They did so through homeownership; in particular: racially restrictive homeownership. Banks drew up color-coded city maps based on existing and desired racial segregation. Banks then offered white residents seeking homes in white areas (areas drawn on the maps in green and blue) the best mortgage rates, and contrastingly, black residents seeking homes anywhere, but especially in black areas (drawn in red — hence the naming redlining), either no option for home loans, or exorbitantly high rates. Redlining took place in 239 cities across the U.S.; the process was backed by the federal government, invested money and wealth-making property into white people and neighborhoods, and divested from black and other non-white people.

Many residents of progressive-ish Seattle remain unaware about restrictive covenants redlining and their effects on the city today. Due to the growth of Amazon and other companies, Seattle has been the fastest growing city of the last decade. But that population growth took place without equitable urbanist policies in place. As such, many residents have dealt with drastically increased rents, lack of protections for vulnerable residents, displacement of non-white neighborhoods of color including the historically black Central District, and increased homelessness (an estimated 41% of Seattle’s homeless population is black). These changes and their racialized impact dialogue with past urbanist practices that dispossessed people of color from neighborhood space.

Merlin Rainwater, a Seattle-born resident, has been trying to change how Seattleites—in particular mostly white Seattleites—understand the history of race and racial dispossession within Seattle’s neighborhood spaces. Earlier this year, she launched the Red Line Rides, a bike tour (and subsequent walking tour) of redlining in Seattle. So much of her tours are about teaching white residents to, in her words, “learn to see” how and where white Seattle was built by systemic and racially restrictive practices, and the strong residues of those practices today.  I interviewed her to learn more about the what, when, why, where and how of the tours.

Interview edited for clarity. 

JASMINE MAHMOUD: Tell me about your history in Seattle. Where did you grow up? What are your initial memories of the city?

MERLIN RAINWATER: I was actually born in Seattle, but I grew up mostly in a little town … about 16 miles out of Seattle: Edmonds. We belonged to the Quaker meeting that met in Seattle, so I had a strong connection with the neighborhood around the University [of Washington], the University District. Both of my parents were born in Washington State. My father’s grandparents on his mother’s side were pioneer settlers outside of Seattle. And my mother’s parents homesteaded in Eastern Washington.

When I moved back to Seattle in 1974, Seattle was in the middle of a major recession, and it was pretty cheap to survive here. When I got married, my husband and I were able to buy a house, a very reasonably priced house in an area that had been redlined and that was on the margins on the Central District, the historically black part of Seattle. Looking back on it, almost 40 years now, we were really the first wave of white gentrifiers moving into the historically black part of town.

Central Area and Mount Baker from Beacon Hill, 1955 (seattle.gov)

MAHMOUD: What was the Central District [historically African-American neighborhood] like when you moved there in the 70s?

RAINWATER: The neighborhood had been very hard hit by the recession. I had a girlfriend who bought a house nearby in 1976 for $3K. [Before she bought it], it had been repossessed and had stood empty for several years, and there were a number of other houses in similar conditions that young, liberal, white people had been able to buy. So by the time we bought our house, the neighborhood had stabilized quite a bit. … The people who’d lost their jobs … were gone. It was just a cusp of a boom in this area. So a couple of years after we bought our house, I counted 14 new houses that had been built within a three block area that were all fill ins of these undeveloped blocks.

MAHMOUD: Around what year was that?

RAINWATER: That was 1986 to ‘88 probably, when those houses were filled in. And when we moved here, probably about half of the families on the block were black, and then little by little those people left, moved out, sold their houses. As all these new houses were built and new people moved in, all of the new neighbors were white. One black family moved in next door to us, the year after we moved in here, but that’s the only black family that’s purchased a home. We have a long block with probably 30 houses. so it’s been a gradual but dramatic change. So when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t really see it.

Looking back on it, I recognize that one of the things that really struck me as I’ve been was trying to educate myself about all the issues related to segregation, I realized that my family and I have directly benefited from both the impoverished and the disinvestment in this neighborhood that happened over many years. Then the legislation that the city council passed in the 70s to outlaw redlining so by the time we were ready to buy a house in a previously redlined area, we were able to get a nice federally insured loan. Yeah, so that’s been a challenging bit of learning from the work that I’ve done.

MAHMOUD: How did you learn about redlining?

RAINWATER: We have a really wonderful project based out of the University of Washington called the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project. They have a great little slideshow on Segregated Seattle, so I was aware of the general history, then I was aware of the campaign for open housing that had taken place in the mid sixties, but as a white person that knew about that, I was a rarity. And so when I went to visit the Douglass-Truth [Seattle Public] Library, which houses the African American collection and is located in the middle of the Central District, the historically black area, and I saw this nice display about the open housing campaign. I thought it’s great that they have this display, but this is not where it needs to be, people who live here and come to this library, they already know that. [Rather], it’s the people who benefited by the established by the fact that huge areas of Seattle were over 90% white until quite recently in its history.

If you look at population maps. Often, they are colored so that the presence of people of color shows up in more dramatic colors, but seeing a series of maps where what’s highlighted is the areas that are high percentage white, and it’s pretty much dramatic to look at all the parts of Seattle that were over 90% white until … If you weren’t white, you had no choice [where to live].

And so, people that lived within that little [redlined] sliver were forced into that part of the town. They knew what was going on. But if you were white and you lived in the vast rest of the city, you could be completely oblivious. Most people still are. Most white people still are.

MAHMOUD: Your tour animates what scholars like sociologist George Lipsitz (author of How Racism Takes Place) and urban planners J. Rosie Tighe and Joanna P. Ganning point out: that divestment in neighborhoods of color has long accompanied investment in white neighborhoods. You have said: “I thought, you know, this is information that really ought to be in Laurelhurst. It should be in Broadmoor … Because black people in the Central District, they know this history. It’s the white folks in the segregated white parts of the city that need to know that there was a struggle for open housing in Seattle.” What connections do you see between white and black areas in Seattle? How are these ideas animated on the tour?

RAINWATER: The section of the redline that I feature in the walk is an area on Capitol Hill, where there is actually quite a dramatic boundary between the affluent white, by racially covenanted north part of Capitol Hill, north of Roy and Aloha, and the redlined area to the south.

The area of Capitol Hill that’s south of Roy Street, basically, the character of the housing stock is not that different as you move east to west. There are modest, middle-class, pretty nice houses, but east of Roy Street, it was redlined and the only excuse for considering that area a bad investment was that black people lived there. The only thing that the surveyors bothered to point out was that there’s black people here. So on the one hand just a lack of contrast and they’re still fairly similar on both sides, but the lack of contrast is interesting.

Then as you go further north, the north of Roy and Aloha, a huge number of those lots had racially restricted covenants on them. And the sense that you get is that … and the houses are generally much larger and they look affluent. The fact that so many of the white folks in that part of town were afraid that black people might infiltrate, that they went through the trouble of getting together with all their neighbors and hiring a lawyer and drawing up a covenant that says “no Negroes can ever live in this place.” That’s dramatic. So to see the contrast in actual investment … I mean, the Central Area it’s sustained a very vibrant, middle-class black community that was mixed in with people of all economic conditions, but it wasn’t a terrible, general hell hole. So people had to work really hard to hold onto their properties and maintain their properties.

But at the same time, the investments that allowed white people to move out of the city and into the suburbs, you can’t actually see that when you’re standing on the line, I guess is what I’m trying to say. And I think that really is the challenge because the policies that created segregation have been so successful, that if you live in a white world, it’s kind of hard to see out of it. You just have to learn to see it.

MAHMOUD: Where did your idea for this tour come from? Why did it first start as a bike tour?

RAINWATER: So I started doing a series of bike rides that I call SLOW rides, Senior Ladies On Wheels, which is a fabulously brilliant acronym–

MAHMOUD Yes, it is.

RAINWATER: –because I have always used a bike as my main transportation, and I think it’s really the only sensible way to get around. I don’t understand why the rest of the world doesn’t always agree with me. I was looking for a way to create an opportunity for tentative bike riders to learn how easy it is to get around on a bike in the city, and so I developed SLOW rides through the Cascade Bicycle Club Free Group Rides Program. I wanted it to also be a way for people to learn about the Central District and the history of the Central District.

And so I start all my rides at the [Northwest] African American Museum, and that way, if anybody who comes along … now they know, we have an African American museum which many white people don’t know. I did a ride called “An Introduction to Seattle Black History Through Parks,” so you go to a about dozen different parks that are named after important figures in black history and learn a little bit about them. [Figures include musician Jimi Hendrix, director of Urban League Edwin Pratt, Seattle’s first black female pediatrician Blanche Lavizzo, editor and reporter Susie Revels Clayton and Horace Roscoe Clayon, Mount Zion Baptist Church Pastor Rev. Samuel Berry McKinney, entrepreneur Prentis Frazier, second black settler in Seattle William Grose, dermatologist Homer Harris, musician Powell Barnett, children’s advocate and talk show host Flo Ware, and legislator Sam Smith.] So looking for ways for the rides to be subtly educational and I was just looking for another theme for a ride and I came across an article about the redlining maps that had just recently been made available online. And I thought, wow. That sounds like an interesting bike ride.

So when I first did it, I really tried to ride along the big section of the line, which made for kind of a challenging bike ride, and I had marginally too many people show up, and I was really not sure how to … I really wanted to do it again, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it. But just the fact that it attracted a lot of interest the very first time that I did it made me want to do it again and refine it. Also, it’s just by coincidence, one of the people that I know through the biking advocacy realm is a personal friend with the student who had written the essay on racially restrictive covenants for the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History project.

MAHMOUD: Oh, wow. Yeah.

RAINWATER: Her name is Cat Silva, who is now in Berlin, Germany, unfortunately, but anyway, she got real excited about the idea of these rides, and she mapped out for me where many of the properties with covenants on them are. So that’s really a great prop to have for the tours, to be able to show people where the covenanted properties are. I also had a request from the Plymoth Congregational Church that were just fans of my SLOW rides and they heard about the redline ride, asked if I would do a version just for their intergenerational study group, so I did that and simplified the ride a little bit to really make it for anybody to participate.

[See here for “Segregated Seattle Visualized: Patterns of Enforcement in the Central Area” by Cat Silva.]

My daughter went to preschool with the son of a woman who is the president of the Seattle Black Heritage Society, and we’re still friends and neighbors, so she and I would get together, talking about what we were doing. She mentioned that there was going to be a major exhibit of photographs of the Central District at the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) – the photos of Al Smith. The photo collection belongs to the Black Heritage Society, but is housed at the Museum of History in Industry, and so Carol and I were talking about this exhibit and the work she’s doing with the Black Heritage Society. I kept telling her about my bike rides, and at some point we kind of went, “oh, the museum is looking for community activities in conjunction with the exhibit, so maybe you could do a bike ride in conjunction with the museum.” So I met with the people from MOHAI I met them … Carol was with me. We all thought that doing the redline ride would be a good thing to do, as part of public activities connected with that exhibit.

They asked me to develop a walking version, so I said, okay. We worked this out in October [2017] and the tours were scheduled for March [2018], in the weeks following a town discussion on segregated Seattle, from redlining to gentrification. And I think they probably posted the events in early February, and within just a matter of days, all the … So I did two bike tours and two walking tours and everything sold out instantly.

MAHMOUD: Wow.

RAINWATER: And we were all really surprised it was so popular.

MAHMOUD: What were some of the reactions to the tours?

RAINWATER: I haven’t got a lot of really direct feedback, other than that people just find it thought provoking. Since then, several people have contacted me, interested in the tours, and have asked me to do repeats and one organization that contacted me was Zillow, the online real estate [company].

MAHMOUD: Oh, wow.

RAINWATER: And they actually approached me through the Northwest African American Museum. And arranged for me to do the walking tour three times in order to accommodate almost 50 of their staff. They’re doing an educational series around the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. And they have recently started an equity initiative in the company. So anyways, the first time I did the tour, they had asked me to shorten it a little bit. I said it was going to take two hours, they wanted it to be an hour and a half. I asked for feedback and the only feedback I got was, well, you spent too much time in the wealthy areas. And I think they were expecting to see desolation or something? So I tried to be more clear about what I was intending to show them in the wealthy parts of Capitol Hill.

MAHMOUD: Right.

RAINWATER: And I didn’t change where I went, I just changed a little bit how I talked about it. Also, when they asked me to shorten it, I had left off a section by the site of the Liberty Bank, the black owned bank that was founded in ’68, and there had been a big controversy about attempts to preserve the building that had housed the bank. That’s a really interesting part of the whole learning about segregation and disinvestment, but in order to shorten the tour, I left out the Liberty Bank, and just mentioned the bank, and they said, well, you should have said more about the Liberty Bank. Okay, so I put that back in. But that’s the most direct feedback I’ve got. And there’s people during the tour expressing their surprise at things they didn’t know anything about.

Liberty Bank in 1968. Credit: libertybankbuilding.org/liberty-bank/

MAHMOUD: What are some important moments of places to you on the tour?

RAINWATER: So, I think the most dramatic place on the tour is the corner of 19th and Madison where the Mount Zion Baptist Church is located, because it’s not only right on the margin of the redline, it’s also on a boundary between two redlined areas that the surveyors described differently. So, to the east of 19th, there’s an area, both north and south of Madison, is the area that the surveyors described as “this is the Negro area of Seattle.” That was all that needed to be said. And to the west of 19^th, there’s a band that was redlined, but included on the racial map Jewish, Oriental, and Italian residents, so from that corner on 19th and Madison, it’s an opportunity to talk about that, but the fact that parts of the Central District really had been a combination of different minority and undesirable groups, that’s such a complicated, fascinating history.

Mount Zion Baptist Church

Anyway, so there you are on this corner of redlined area, and then west of 19th and north of Madison is a section of the map that’s colored yellow, that the surveyors described as, “this is the twilight zone.”

MAHMOUD: Oh, wow.

RAINWATER: And so an area that really felt it was under threat by undesirable populations. Diagonally, across the street from Mount Zion, two entire blocks that in the [19]20s, the homeowners got together to establish a racially restrictive covenant. So Mount Zion moved to that location in 1920, to 19th and Madison, and this is an eminently respectable, historical institution in the black community. The neighbors diagonally across the street are terrified and hire lawyers to make sure that no Negros ever move into their block. That’s just really dramatic. I think that’s the most dramatic point of the tour.

When I do it as a bike tour, I also take people down into Madison Valley, and we look at the storm water management project down there; that’s an example of disinvestment, because in the 1970s, the city got a bunch of federal money to do various kinds of projects and they routed storm water from Capitol Hill down into Madison Valley. And there was supposed to be another component to the project that would take the storm water out to Lake Washington, but they ran out of money, and they ran out of interest in this whole thing, and for many, many years, once or twice or four times a winter, Madison Valley would flood and the sewage would back up into people’s basements.

MAHMOUD: Wow. Wow.

RAINWATER: Madison Valley was probably more than 90% black neighborhood. Very poor, very modest little houses down there, and people were having to deal with these sewage soaked basements, year after year after year. And it wasn’t until white people started moving into Madison Valley that it started to get the attention of the city. They ended up purchasing an entire block of houses to create a storm water retention facility, and they invested a huge ton of money. It’s a really lovely, lovely part, this storm water retention pond. But it didn’t happen as long as the neighborhood was entirely black.

MAHMOUD: You have said: “It really is white people’s history. White people were the actors that developed and implemented the policies that led to segregation. And it’s really inappropriate to, say, segregate those aspects of history that black people suffered under, and label those ‘black history’ as if they weren’t relevant to the rest of us.“ How do you frame your own racial positionality as a white person in the making of this tour? What have been the reactions of white attendees? Black attendees? Folks of other races? How you see this tour as that, as part of a white people’s history, or as framing whiteness in Seattle. How is this tour in dialogue with that?

RAINWATER: Well, it’s really the focus of the tour. And I have to say, when I first did the tour, there were two women of color I of the 20 people who came, everybody else was white. And I was a little bit, almost apologetic, about being a white person talking about this, but I was talking about that with one of the black women on the tour, and she said, “oh my God, I’m so glad that you’re doing this.” She said she’s a university student in a class where she’s the only person of color, and she just hates being the one that everybody turns to when ever anything comes up that has to do with race as if she’s the only person that has a race. I’m just fed up with that. This whole idea that the United States has a “Negro problem.” Well, no, we don’t. We have a white people problem. And I’m so glad that the Lynching Museum finally opened, because that visualizes, that makes it concrete. You know very well that the reason that those stark monuments are hanging there. It’s not the black people that did that, you know?

MAHMOUD: Right.

RAINWATER: And that’s something that our country just has not come to terms with. It’s been very easy for white people to turn their backs and say, “no, this doesn’t affect me, this isn’t about me. I might feel sorry for those poor people that have suffered so much, but it’s not about me.” I just don’t agree with that. I think I mentioned … Or maybe I didn’t mention, that my senior year in high school, I spent in West Berlin. And at the time, the people around me really did not know how to talk about the Holocaust and the Nazi period and everything that had happened during that time.

Just a couple of days ago, I got a package in the mail from one of my friends in Berlin, with a brochure that describes the Stolpersteine project, the stumbling block project. It’s a project of identifying and memorializing the individual Jewish people that were deported and murdered during the Nazi era, by creating little brass plaques the size and shape of paving stones, and these little brass plaques are embedded in the sidewalks in front of the homes that people were forced out of.

And each little block, each little brass plaque has the name of the individual and a brief summary of when they were born, where they were deported to, and when they were murdered. And these are just embedded in the sidewalk. The brochure that I got discusses just one street that’s two blocks long in West Berlin and it contains about 25 of these little blocks.

And this is just one tiny component of a project that’s placed about 5,000 of these blocks in Berlin alone, and thousands others in other cities. And I just think it’s important. This project, this little stumbling blocks, they don’t tell you to do anything, they don’t pretend to fix anything. They just remind you that you’re walking through a landscape that contains this terrible history. I just think it’s important to acknowledge that and live with it.

MAHMOUD: I’d love to about your passion for biking and non-driving forms of transportation. Why do you feel it’s so important to emphasize them?

RAINWATER: I guess that the really fundamental reason that I think it’s important is that keeps us contact with a place, that if you’re walking or biking, you can stop and notice things, and you don’t have to look for a place to leave your two-thousand pound box that you’re carrying around with you, and you can interact with people and the environment. I think that the world of cars has taken something really important away from us in these tiny every day interactions that people have when they get around on foot.

Merlin Rainwater during the “Red Line Rides.”

And I’ve also found a really fun community of other people who love to bike and love to walk and are working to make the city safer and better for human beings. Bringing these interests into my commitment to racial justice and my passion for walking and biking, they don’t always easily mesh, but that’s what I’m trying to do.

MAHMOUD: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share about this tour?

RAINWATER: Well, it’s really been a learning experience for me and just right from the beginning, just looking at the map, and walking and biking around this neighborhood, where I’ve lived for 40 years, and looking at it through that lens has been very thought provoking. I’ve thought for a long time, I’ve been curious about the people who were forced to leave this neighborhood before I moved here, and wondering who they were and what happened to them. And this has given me some more motivation to really explore that. Why did they lose their houses? What kind of financial arrangements had they used in order to be here in the first place? A lot of questions like that. I have these very general assumptions about what was going on at that time, but I haven’t tied them to the individual stories that they’re connected to. That’s an interesting next step.

‘Priced Out,’ ‘Erased,’ and ‘Eminent Domain’: Voices from Portland, Kansas City, and Saint Louis – Part Two

How do we best document those displaced by pernicious, dehumanizing forms of urbanism?

In October, I attended “We Lived Here!,” a panel at the Griot Museum featuring residents—all black women—displaced by processes of eminent domain in St. Louis, MO and Kansas City, MO. As detailed in this previous post, each described eminent domain as an ugly, hurtful, demeaning process used as the reason to take her home and displace her mostly black neighborhood and as a tool for economic development that only benefited a few.

Image from “Eminent Domain/Displaced” exhibit at the Griot Museum, curated by Lois Conley and Matt Rahner.

The panel took place as part of events for the “Eminent Domain/Displaced” exhibit at the Griot Museum of Black History. Described on the Griot’s website, the exhibit is a:

[m]ulti-media installation of place, portraiture, landscape, and appropriated space that explores how the use of eminent domain contributed to the disappearance of three Missouri communities: Wendell-Phillips (Kansas City), Mill Creek Valley, and St. Louis Place (St. Louis). Salvaged objects, oral interviews, archival materials, photographs and more explore the impact of displacement.

Matt Rahner, a photographer and Assistant Professor of Art at Missouri Valley College, and Lois Conley, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Griot Museum, curated the exhibit. Conley’s own history and the museum’s location only amplify the exhibit’s meanings. Conley “was a teenager when her parents lost their Mill Creek neighborhood home to eminent domain. A portion of her former backyard became Market Street after the city leveled the area in the name of progress.” The Griot Museum “sits across the street from the site of the future National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, in a demolished area that was part of the St. Louis Place neighborhood.” (The above two quotes are from an interview with Lois Conley about the exhibit, found here.)

Image from “Eminent Domain/Displaced” exhibit at the Griot, curated by Lois Conley and Matt Rahner.

How do we best document those displaced by pernicious, dehumanizing forms of urbanism? I talked the exhibit’s co-curator, Matt Rahner, for more about creating work that documents deleterious urbanization.

Jasmine Mahmoud: How did you begin putting together this exhibit and photographing displaced neighborhoods?

Matt Rahner: I’ve always been a documentary photographer and as an artist I’ve always been interested in real world things. In August of 2012 I read an article in The Pitch [free alternative weekly newspaper of Kansas City] about eminent domain and the city’s plan to tear down the neighborhood of Wendell-Phillips and replace it with a new police station and crime lab. The article grabbed my attention, and I became interested in the process, the neighborhood, and the residents.

The article raised more questions than answers, so I decided to contact Ameena Powell, who was mentioned in The Pitch story. Ameena became a central figure in my series, and was integral to making the work. One of the most important photographs from my series, Eminent Domain, is a photo of Ameena on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse. She had just left the courtroom where her home was condemned by the city, as one of the final steps in the Eminent Domain process. Ameena stands in front of the courthouse with bags of paperwork, defiant in the face of a city that has forcibly, yet legally, made her move from her home. The city had decided this was going to happen, and there was really nothing Ameena could do other than fight for more just compensation for her home. Her goal was to save her house, but everything was stacked against her. There really was no way she could have done that.

Ameena Powell standing on the steps of the Jackson County Court House after her condemnation hearing in 2012. Credit: Matt Rahner.

JM: What other subjects have you documented in your photography?

MR: Eminent Domain was my Masters of Fine Arts thesis project. Before that I was just a photographer of the world. I had documented people who stay on the side of highway exits holding signs and got to know their stories. However, Eminent Domain was my first real in depth documentary project.

JM: How did you meet the residents of St. Louis?

MR: I was connected with Lois [Conley] at the Griot through Robert Powell who owns Portfolio Gallery in St. Louis. Robert is actually the uncle of Ameena [Powell] so Ameena contacted Robert and said “hey, Matt just made this project, I don’t know if you’re interested in it or if you know somebody who is.” It just so happened that Lois had gone through eminent domain herself growing up in the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood. On top of that, her museum, the Griot Museum sits right on the border of the NGA site. Lois had been wanting to do a project on eminent domain herself, and it seemed quite pertinent and a great time to bring our two projects together. Her project Displaced and my project. 

JM: What were you trying to communicate in the exhibit?

MR: In the photographs I wanted to communicate how the residents felt about the process of eminent domain because they didn’t have a choice in the matter and they had to move. They had to leave behind a house they’d lived in for 50 years.

My photographs aim to communicate the way the residents felt. Their reaction to eminent domain. As I took the photographs my camera became a stand in for the city and their presence in the photograph was more a reaction to the city. There are definitely pictures of defiance but also I was trying to give the residents a voice, give them agency over the situation … because no one really listened to what they wanted or to how they would have liked to see things handled differently.

A note scrawled inside an upstairs closet in a home of a long-time resident of Wendell-Phillips. 2012. Credit: Matt Rahner.

And with the exhibit my goal was to transform the space of the white wall gallery into a homelike space. I wanted to create an intimate environment where my photographs could reside on the wall with objects from the homes and neighborhood. I decided to recreate wallpaper that I had found in one of the homes and use it to transform the space of the show. On top of the wallpaper, I hung my photos as well as found paintings and prints that came from Wendell-Phillips.

I used objects that were left behind, and I was never sure why they were left behind. Some of them were damaged beyond repair and I could understand why people threw those away. But the objects allowed me to access the past and to understand the neighborhood better than I could have in the time that I was there.

For example, one of the main found sculptures in the show is a pile of bricks that came from one of the homes after it had been demolished. I chose to bring the bricks into the gallery space to speak to my experience of watching this place be torn apart. As I was documenting Wendell-Phillips, it was a common sight to go back to the neighborhood and find a new house had been torn down, until eventually all of the homes were razed. The pile of bricks in the gallery represents the essence of these homes and the devastation brought onto this neighborhood by the city. The bricks are physically in the space, and you have to walk around them, you have to bear witness in your own way and have your own experience of this place. The bricks on the floor relate to the photographs on the wall, so they tie together the past and the present.

As I organized the plethora of objects I had collected, I realized there were specific arrangements that became more potent than my photographs in terms of communicating the story of the neighborhood. I arranged the objects for the viewers of the show to be astute and to pay attention to the clues hidden within the arrangements. My hope is that viewers saw the connections between the objects and how they can describe a larger narrative of the history of Kansas City and this place in particular.

JM: What were some of those objects that were more potent than the photographs?

MR: The family photographs that I found were really potent. I was an outsider going into this neighborhood as it wasn’t my neighborhood, so I was really respectful of that. My photographs were from my point of view, as an outsider, but the family photos come from a different place. They are insider views on people’s lives, and something I wasn’t able to access as a documentarian.

Found object assemblages installed in the exhibit Eminent Domain. Credit: Matt Rahner.

Many of the items in the exhibit were given to me. One resident’s family lent me this incredible document that goes back into the 1800s that shows every transition of ownership on their land and house. It’s an incredible object, visually, and the history of the neighborhood can be read in the creases and folds of this document. It’s powerful that way.

In the show I wanted to draw comparisons between the treatment of this neighborhood and the history of the United States. Obviously Native Americans were here first and were pushed out by settlers. From day one in America there is a history of taking, and systemic racist ideology. These practices have been perpetuated in urban America, and continue to happen in cities like Kansas City and St. Louis. Practices of redlining, block busting, white flight, and racially restrictive covenants have left negative effects on cities and neighborhoods. I believe that this particular eminent domain project is an extension of systemic racism, it was an extension of all of these things that had been in place since our country was founded. I wanted to talk about this in the show, and I used the objects to tell that story. Specifically, I used a print of Jesus on the cross, hung next to a velvet painting of a Native American Indian. Each story (of Christ and Native Americans) deals with taking. Interestingly, in the print of Jesus, his wounds are visible on his torso, hands and feet, and on the painting I found of the Native American the velvet canvas was pierced and had holes in the figures torso, hands and feet. I put these two pieces in the show to specifically raise the question of power and authority, and of who is able to “take” from whom. Often it is the powerful wielding influence and taking from the powerless. I saw this correlation in the history of the neighborhood up to the use of eminent domain.

A found velvet painting of a Native American, installed in the exhibit Eminent Domain. The wall paper the painting hangs on is recreated from one of the homes within Wendell-Phillips. Credit: Matt Rahner.

A found print of Jesus Christ on the cross, surrounded by two angels. This print was found hanging on a wall in a home in Wendell-Phillips. Credit: Matt Rahner.

JM: Did anything surprise you while putting together this project and/or once it was displayed?

MR: I think the surprise came when I had everything in the gallery, and I was like wow, the installation, with my photographs and the found object felt complete. That was actually a surprise for me. I’ve been surprised as well by how Eminent Domain has resonated with people. My goal was to tell “A” story of the neighborhood and not to write “THE” history. I wanted to tell the story of eminent domain in a compelling way and hoped that people connected with it, which I think they have.

While making the work, one thing that was more appalling than surprising was that the city handed out these bricks at the groundbreaking that were brand new and had silver plaques on them with the inscription, “Kansas City: rebuilding our city one brick at a time.” It was such a tone-deaf and disingenuous gesture that ignored the history and relevance of the neighborhood. It was totally opposite of what the city had done, because in reality they had torn the city down one brick at a time. Now, these city employees and contractors have these bricks in their homes or offices as a sort of trophy for destroying this neighborhood. Luckily, for posterity, I was able to secure one of these bricks, and I display it in the exhibition to serve as a reminder of the city’s complicity in the process.

JM: At the event, I remember that many were so depressed after hearing the residents’ stories. They asked, “what can we do? It seems like we can’t do anything.” Do you have thoughts about what we as citizens can do to either stop eminent domain or make more equitable neighborhood change?

MR: That’s a great question. First of all, I think understanding the history of the place you live is really helpful, understanding how our cities are formed, developed and redeveloped. Some people are aware of racially restrictive codes and redlining … but for the most part people aren’t aware of those ideas. So understanding this history. … Places that are chosen for eminent domain have usually struggled and I think for neighborhoods it’s helpful to be organized and have neighborhood organizations that have a plan for their own development. Also, I think it’s important to document the place and create projects in the neighborhoods, whether that be art making projects, creating written histories, or visual documentations. Neighborhood leaders can create asset lists of the neighborhoods and document those things now so that when the city does come up and say, “We want to do this project here,” the neighborhoods can say, “NO, there are all of these important cultural markers in our neighborhood that we think are important.”

Found object assemblages installed in the exhibit Eminent Domain. Credit: Matt Rahner.

Found object assemblages installed in the exhibit Eminent Domain. Credit: Matt Rahner.

In Wendell-Phillips many residents felt that the city never cared enough to ask them (the residents) what they thought the City should do to spur economic growth or to curb crime, and that’s too bad because I think the residents had a lot of great ideas, and tearing down the neighborhood wasn’t one of them. The city, however, had their “reasons” for taking the neighborhood, and perversely, one of the more prominent ideas they pushed was that it was going to help the surrounding neighborhoods. They tried to sell the idea that this re-development would help the residents. This kind of faulty logic is on the city, and the effects are yet to be seen. Many residents wished the city would be more involved with the neighborhoods and listen to their feedback.

JM: Are there any other thoughts you have about this project?

I think it’s important for artists everywhere to be involved in their communities … if not making work about these topics, then to at least get involved in some way, whether joining associations or attending city council meetings. I don’t feel like I can measure in any qualitative way what my project has done, but I feel like it has helped raise awareness on these issues. Other professionals are working in their respective fields to raise awareness and create change. It takes multiple perspectives and multiple people to create change, and it can’t be just one person. There are strength in numbers.

‘Priced Out,’ ‘Erased,’ and ‘Eminent Domain’: Voices from Portland, Kansas City, and Saint Louis — Part One

“We found that the city had used whatever tactic … to take [our] home. The blight study led to condemnation. Condemnation opens the door for eminent domain. By the time we were aware that our properties had been audited, eminent domain was just inevitable. … Because our memories, our homes, our neighborhood, the people that we are, the people that we saw every day, mattered not to the city. The city used us as a way to bring economic development and all they saw were dollar signs. They couldn’t care less about the fact that we had people in the neighborhood that were upwards of 75 and 80 years old, who had never lived in any other home in their adult life.”

-Sheila Rendon, displaced St. Louis Place resident

Ameena Powell (standing), and Sheila Rendon (seated at far right), panelists at the “We Lived Here!” panel, October 7, 2017 at the Griot Museum in St. Louis, MO

Earlier this month, I moderated “The Politics of Gentrification and Displacement, from Portland, Oregon, to St. Louis, Missouri,” a panel at the St. Louis International Film Festival (SLIFF). The panel screened two films. The first, Displaced and Erased (2016), is a short feature (which you can watch here) about the mid-20^th century displacement of a thriving black community from what is now downtown Clayton, MO. Where there used to be black homes, churches, and schools, there are now four-star business hotels, restaurants, and parking garages that cater to mostly white clientele. These changes came because officials in Clayton, the St. Louis County suburb adjacent to St. Louis City, systematically implemented policies to displace black people, by erasing black homes and gathering spaces. Emma Riley, a white filmmaker who was born and raised in Clayton, directed and produced the film after learning about the displacement from her black high school teachers.

The second film Priced Out (2017) documents early 21^st century gentrification and displacement in Albina, Portland, a once thriving black area of Northeast Portland that endured 20^th century practices of redlining and divestment, and later late 20^th century and early 21^st century investment and displacement/gentrification. The documentary film follows Nikki Williams, described on film’s website as “a black single mother who once embraced the idea of gentrification. A decade and a half later she found herself torn between feelings of grief for her community and the economic opportunities that come from rising home prices.” The film’s director Cornelius Swart first met Williams in the late 1990s while making NorthEast Passage (2002), a documentary film that chronicled how Williams worked to clean up her neighborhood from drug dealers and abandoned buildings; at the time Williams celebrated gentrification as a process to further “clean up” her neighborhood. Priced Out chronicles Williams over a decade later when, according to the website for the film, “she realized she was one of the last black people on her street. While Nikki wanted to see the neighborhood fixed up, she never thought ‘they would kick everybody out, fix it up, and tell everyone they can’t come back.’ The catch is, Nikki is a homeowner, now caught between the loss of her community and the opportunity to sell her home and achieve economic freedom for the first time in her life.”

Scenes from Priced Out: Nikki Williams in 2013, when she realized that the black community in her neighborhood had been “obliterated” by gentrification. Image from pricedoutmovie.com.

Both films poignantly depict how the particular processes that displace and erase marginalized communities–and in these cases processes that displace black people and black neighborhoods–contribute to logics that naturalize gentrification. Priced Out also particularly shows the how the aesthetics and young, white demographics of gentrifying coffee shops (and I’m thinking about the recent controversy in Denver with its “happily gentrifying” coffee shop) and apartments act as violent signifiers to long-term, often non-white residents—who often also being displaced by huge rent hikes—that they are no longer welcome in their neighborhood.

While moderating, I gave genealogy of the word gentrification. As many readers of this blog know, in 1964, British sociologist Ruth Glass coined the term gentrification to describe what she observed in the London neighborhood of Islington. She wrote:

The social status of many residential areas is being ‘uplifted’ as the middle class—or the ‘gentry’—moved into working-class space, taking up residence, opening businesses, and lobbying for infrastructure improvements.

One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class. Once this process of ‘gentrification’ starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed

Even her description included a warning about the process. She also wrote:

There has been a great deal of displacement. All those who cannot hold their own—the small enterprises, the lower ranks of people, the odd men out—are being pushed away.

Since Glass coined the term, gentrification has been used by scholars to capture a set of processes that produce a pernicious type of neighborhood change. In his 1996 book, The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist City, Marxist geographer Neil Smith defines it as a “process … by which poor and working-class neighborhoods in the inner city are refurbished via an influx of private capital and middle-class homebuyers and renters—neighborhoods that had previously experienced disinvestment and a middle-class exodus” (30).

Gentrification as a process is almost always associated with racialization and displacement. As such, it follows broader genealogies of geographic and urban change in the United States that relied upon policy to produce those racialzied changes. These include the westward settling of the frontier, which relied upon legislation to mark Native American lands as an empty in states like Oregon, which, as Priced Out documented, also used policy, specifically black exclusion laws, to prevent black settlers. This includes redlining efforts that not only racially segregated neighborhoods, but that also produced wealth for white homeowners, and dispossession for black residents. And this includes displacement of black people and destruction of often black neighborhoods: not just downtown Clayton, but also in St. Louis Mill Creek Valley in the 1950s, Pruitt-Igoe in the 1970s, Laclede Town in the 1980s, and most recently St. Louis Place where in 2017, 212 black homeowners were displaced for the new NGA site.

For those living in Albina, Portland in the 1990s and 2000s or downtown Clayton in the 1960s, or St. Louis Place in the last decade, gentrification is not just an academic term that captures a process; it is also describes lived, often nefarious experience of disorienting neighborhood change. Michelle Lewis, a protagonist in Swart’s film, says gentrification is “pain, loss, and grief.”

While moderating, I asked our panelists (Priced Out director Cornelius Swart, as well as Peter Benson and Kedron Thomas, both professors of anthropology at Washington University): what can we do? What can we do to prevent displacement and produce more equitable cities? Actions by activists captured in Priced Out suggested some solutions: ending no fault evictions (which are currently legal in Oregon), implementing rent control, enforcing affordable housing provisions in tax incentives (often ignored by developers), and giving those displaced a first “right to return” to newer developments. Cornelius Swart also floated the idea that displaced residents, especially those displaced by city practices meant solely to extract profit, should sue the city.

I felt much more hopeless a month earlier while an attendee at “We Lived Here!” An October 2017 panel at the installation Eminent Domain/Displaced at the Griot Museum in St. Louis (more on this in a following post), “We Lived Here!: A Community Panel” featured residents from St. Louis and Kansas City displaced by practices of eminent domain including Ameena Powell, Sheila Rendon, Charlesetta Taylor, Ruth Marie Johnson Edmonds, Vivian Gibson, and Patricia Lee. All residents on the panel were black women; some had been displaced multiple times from both Mill Creek Valley, the thriving black community in St. Louis demolished in the early 1950s, and more recently in 2017 from St. Louis Place, the mostly black neighborhood in North St. Louis City, of which city officials seized 97 acres by eminent domain for the National Geospatial Agency (NGA).

Eminent domain often connotes the state acquiring private property for public use to build parks or transportation. But the panel implicitly queried these ostensible benefits by asking: what does it mean when eminent domain—ostensibly meant for public good—is to used to displace black communities and bring profit to only a few stakeholders? (Panel moderator Maggie Garb, Professor of History at Washington University, recently wrote a salient post about the history and practices of eminent domain.) The stories offered at “We Lived Here!” revealed a pernicious, ugly side to eminent domain, especially when directed towards black residents who, despite efforts to engage with local officials, were left ignored, displaced, and erased. At the very least, one thing we can do is document their voices and stories. So in the reminder I include excerpts from two of the panelists of “We Lived Here!”

Sheila Rendon, St. Louis (displaced from the St. Louis Place neighborhood in 2017)

My home was taken for the NGA Project. We fought hard. We understood probably in the 1970s, there was a move against our neighborhood. We saw businesses leaving, we saw institutions closing, we saw offers being made to homeowners to buy their living costs to leave the neighborhood. Within about 1998, there was the last of the residents here and there was an active move from several businesses to buy up our neighborhood. But we still wanted to reach out to these entities thinking that there was a development coming that would include us.

We understood in roughly about 2007 that the neighborhood was being taken, finally taken. Not developed. My house was built in 1865, and the blight study read that our property was outdated, an eyesore, unsafe, unsanitary. Which none of those things were true.

We found that the city had used whatever tactic in order to take your home. The blight study led to condemnation. Condemnation opens the door for eminent domain. By the time we were aware that our properties had been audited, eminent domain was just inevitable. … Because our memories, our homes, our neighborhood, the people that we are, the people that we saw every day, mattered not to the city. The city used us as a way to bring economic development and all they saw were dollar signs. They couldn’t care less about the fact that we had people in the neighborhood that were upwards of 75 and 80 years old, who had never lived in any other home in their adult life. They couldn’t care less about the fact that my children were in high school … they started since they were in kindergarten.

So to the fight that is Mill Creek, St Louis Place, and others in the future, will be from the very beginning. When there is talk about the development of your communities, you have to be there from day one. Because development is not always for you, sometimes it’s against you, and the very last tool that they will use is eminent domain. So do not fear it, it’s not something that you should fear, it’s something that you fight. And you fight to the very, very end. My husband and I were the very last people in our community and we fought. My husband starved himself for 30 days on a public forum from the transition from winter to spring, sleeping in tents, the struggle was real.

One thing I will leave you guys with, with the idea that, Mill Creek Valley happened and St Louis Place happened, is that it can happen to you and if you are not diligent, and you do not go to the meetings, if you do not confront your elected officials, it will happen to you. And you will be on the stage as we are today talking about what happened to our neighborhood. Don’t let that happen to you.

Ameena Powell, Kansas City, MO (displaced from the Wendell-Phillips neighborhood in 2013)

Who was Wendell Phillips? Wendell Phillips was a white man, who was a court attorney, he was a writer, a poet, and he left a good law practice on the east coast, and he gave up that practice to become an abolitionist for slavery. And so that’s how our neighborhood got the name Wendell-Philips. Some of the famous people that lived in our neighborhood…. There was movie called the Great Debaters. It’s about a gentleman named Melvin Tolson and how he took the debate team all the way to national championships. … He grew up in the neighborhood. He graduated from Lincoln High School, which is still one of the top performing high schools in the country. Virgil Thomas [wa]s a Harvard graduate of music and … a composer. … Charlie Parker, the famous saxophonist, grew up in our neighborhood.

About the community, like a lot of the people say about Mill Creek, this is a neighborhood where people lived and they stayed. So my grandmother bought her house in 1943, she had all her children out of that house. Her children now live in that house and they’re now in their 70s and 60s. And that house will be knocked [down] as well. So we’ve got 72 years of history, at least 72 years of history, in that one house.

I bought my house in 2007. I was thirty years old. I paid $10,000 for that house. It was a fixer upper but I was proud to own a fixer upper. I came back from holiday and said, “This is where I want to spend the rest of my life.” So I paid for the property, and it was probably the most exciting day of my life.

I got the notice in about 2011 that we were going to be displaced. Unlike a lot of the things that have happened to the people here, there was no planning for any of this. In our city, we have a city planning commission, and development has to go through the city planning commission before it can be implemented. So there has to be: these notices have to be posted. They weren’t. This is October 2013, we got our notices and were sued in court, well before this.

Chapter 5.23 requires you to give notice to a homeowner before you partake or undertake an eminent domain action. And that just didn’t happen. … The powers that be will get their way regardless of how illegal, nefarious or … criminal it can be. They will get what they want and so in 2013 … the city, after I lost my appeal in court, the city decided, whoops, this is them. So when I filed my appeal in court, they wanted to go ahead and tear down the buildings. Now this house [next to Powell’s] had been vacant for months and they were supposed to be tearing down the houses in order of the sale. … But they tore mine down so they could have an argument in court to say that the building is torn down, you don’t really have anything to fight for. So that is my experience with eminent domain.

At the very least we–those of us invested in building equitable neighborhoods and protecting those made vulnerable by destructive urbanization–can collect their voices and stories.

St. Louis Map Room

How do maps reflect a place and its culture? How do maps inscribe meaning into place? What do maps conceal about a space and its culture?

This week, my class engaged these questions at the St. Louis Map Room. The Map Room is a temporary exhibit located at Stevens Middle School, a shuttered St. Louis Public School in Vandeventer, a North St. Louis City neighborhood. We entered the school, walked down a hallway, and then turned right into the gymnasium. There we saw dozens upon dozens of huge maps (about 15’ by 15’), most of them hanging vertically in two rows. On a platform at the center of the room, another huge map rested. Another smaller map appeared on the t-shirt of a staff member. All maps were of St. Louis.

Maps in the St. Louis Map Room

We met Emily Catedral, a teaching artist and site coordinator for the Map Room. She led our engagement, first giving a pointed lecture about the role of maps in history and culture. She displayed, via a top-down projector, various world maps. There was the version seen by most Americans that centers the Atlantic Ocean. There was a version often used in non-Western countries that centers the Pacific Ocean. There was an “upside down map” created by an Australian high school student sick of being told he was from “down under.” Catedral asked us questions about each map: What countries did each map center and decenter? What colors were apparent? What places were included and what places were missing?

Emily Catedral

Various World Maps

From this display, Catedral presented her thesis: maps are subjective. They do not reflect universal truths. Rather as constructed representations of space they do not and cannot accurately portray everything a space has. In what they do portray, they influence readings of space and of the world. (I could not help but think of last week’s news, that Boston Public Schools dropped the Mercator projection maps, which have for the last 500 years drastically diminished the representational size of South America and Africa).

After displaying world maps, Catedral continued her talk on topics including “Borders and Names,” “Politics and Biases,” “St. Louis,” and “Personal and Community Mapping.” She gave examples of how politics—international, national, and local—influence maps. When using Google Maps, for example, the border of Crimea changes based on whether one is in or outside of Russia. More locally, she asked our group about the most popular places in St. Louis. We responded: the Arch, Forest Park, and Blueberry Hill. These places often appear on St. Louis maps but not wholly reflect places meaningful to St. Louisians.

Her talk led us through maps used in St. Louis past and present, such as redlining maps from the 1930s that marked certain white areas as non-risky and ripe for bank loans and investment, and marked black areas as risky and thus prevented substantial loans and investment. She toggled between redlining maps from nearly a century ago to current demographic and income maps to reveal the racial, economic, and infrastructural impact of those past racist zoning policies.

Redlining map from early 20th century

Income by zip codes in the early 21st century

A description from the Map Room’s website reads: “The Office For Creative Research, in partnership with COCA, is taking over a shuttered school in St Louis to make the St. Louis Map Room: a community space for creating and exploring original, interpretive maps of the city that reflect the personal stories and lived experiences of its residents.” COCA, the Center of Creative Arts, a non-profit arts organization, serves St. Louis City and County with arts classes, exhibitions, and performances. The Office for Creative Research is according to its website a “hybrid research group, working at the intersection of technology, culture and education,” based in New York City and co-founded by Jer Thorp, a former COCA artist in residence. According to COCA, “During his 2014 visit to St. Louis, Jer was struck by the city’s divided geography and began to explore the role that map-making has on the identity of communities and its residents.” St. Louis Public Schools loaned the space of Stevens Middle School, which closed a few years ago, to the project.

Interior entrance to the Map Room

Stevens Middle School exterior

What are the functions of maps? Many use maps everyday for navigation and also for discovery. But maps often do not reflect one’s personal experience in a city—meaningful places, routes taken, names (official and otherwise) assigned (many from the St. Louis region call the major interstate “40” rather than its official name “I-64/ Route 40”). The Map Room seeks to counter this: Catedral closed her presentation discussing the maps hanging in the room, maps made by local community groups. From COCA’s website:

The St. Louis Map Room combines theatrical set design, sophisticated interactive experiences, and facilitated workshops to bring members of the community together. Over the course of a month, a diverse set of community groups–spanning students, activists, historians, artists, public servants, and more–will convene to make large-scale maps that express their experiences in the historically divided city of St. Louis.

To make a map, each group picked the geographic area of St. Louis they wanted to focus on; using digital mapping software, Catedral imprinted canvases with a basic map reflective of those chosen boundaries. Upon that, each group gathered to draw places meaningful to them.

We viewed, displayed in images below, maps from University City High School students (University City is a St. Louis County inner-ring suburb city adjacent to St. Louis City); a migration map; a Homelessness and its History in St. Louis Map; a trails map; a redlining map including the home at the focus of the 1948 Shelley vs. Kraemer Supreme Court Case that made racial covenants unconstitutional; a Diversity Awareness Partnership map; a map created by those from St. Louis Children’s hospital; and a Foodbank map, created by the St. Louis Area Foodbank. Each is an example of community maps made by community mapping.

Map by University City High School Students

Migration Map

Homelessness and its History in St. Louis

Trails Map

Redlining Map including on home at the center of the Shelley vs. Kraemer Supreme Court case

Diversity Awareness Partnership Map

Map from St. Louis Children’s Hospital

Foodbank Map

The St. Louis Map Room, located at 1033 Whittier Street, St. Louis, MO, is open until April 11, 2017.