Penn Avenue Arts Initiative Unblurred--East Liberty
Another First Friday in Pittsburgh, another Unblurred.
I have posted here about previous ones, the best one we've been to being December's. For May the Unblurred events started earlier than normal, right after lunch time, as the focus early in the day was to be on East Liberty.
Most of the Unblurred events occur on Penn Avenue along the Friendship-Garfield division. Only a few blocks further down, Penn Avenue in East Liberty is about to undergo a radical destruction and rebuilding project. In the 1960s, as a part of the Urban Renewal bandwagon that was started by Robert Moses in NYC, some of the older buildings in East Liberty were torn down and replaced with high-rise housing projects for low-rent public housing. Of the major projects in the East Liberty neighborhood, the East Mall is a particularly fine example of urban planning, Moses style. In the Moses model of urban planning, the flow of traffic was superior to the needs of human beings. Okay, maybe that was too harsh (but read Caro's biography or watch Ric Burn's documentary and you'll get really harsh). To Moses, the hum and flow of cars, and even the interrupted flow of traffic due to congestion, was the din of city life and urban vitality. He saw the suburbs as the proper location for recreation. We have a different ideal for urban life today, a restoration of downtowns and vital neighborhoods. In building many of the bridges and expressways of NYC, Moses refused to take into account the neighborhoods and communities that would be divided and destroyed by these projects. The South Bronx has never recovered. Minority neighborhoods were particularly suceptible in the Moses model to make way for the new expressways. When people think about NYC today, most think about some of the famous downtown neighborhoods, like the Village, SoHo, and Chinatown. If Moses was not forced to stop, the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have gone right through these neighborhoods. To this day, Manhattan is the only borough in NYC that does not have an Expressway going through it. To this day, Manhattan is celebrated as New York City around the world (tourists care little about the other boroughs). I think about Robert Moses a lot, actually. Whenever I would take the train to New York for the night and I would get out at Penn Station. Once upon a time, getting off the train at Pennsylvania Station meant something. The grandness of Pennsylvania Station welcomed you like royalty. That Penn Station is gone; what was built in its place was Madison Square Garden. Anytime I hear anyone celebrate Madison Square Garden I get ill. If you only knew what was there....
So anyway, when the East Mall was built, it was constructed so as not to interfere with the flow of cars along Penn Avenue to the East Neighborhoods and Suburbs. So the building straddles the street. Yes, this high rise apartment building, one in which lower-income, minority families and elderly people were supposed to live, had a constant flow of traffic (and exhaust fumes) right underneath it. Additionally, East Mall was slated to become a contained economic center for the projects, with retail and service space available for lease. Needless to say, it never worked like that. Like so many others in other cities in the U.S., the building fell victim to neglect by the city and was poorly maintained. The retail tenants never really took hold; all that is left is a Dollar Max type of store. And what impact have these projects had on East Liberty on the whole. Well, East Liberty is no South Bronx, but it definitely isn't what it was. The downtown that remains is full of beautiful 3-4 story store front buildings and even a few theaters. The buildings's uses belie the better time East Liberty had seen. The area is full of beautiful churches, huge Protestant Churches built at a time when East Liberty had more middle-class residents. There are even 2 synagogues that are no longer in use (one is particularly large and majestic). Some of the streets still have the large houses that would have been built around the turn of the century, before income tax was instituted. East Liberty was the center also of the African American community during the Great Migration north (the Hill District was the center of the African American Pittsburgh that pre-dated the Great Migration). Now you walk through East Liberty on any given day and the projects are nearly vacant, condemned finally after years of the City's neglect, the sidewalk under East Mall occassionally decorated with flowers or wreaths left by the mourning family and friends of an urban casualty. The stores are full of cheap, fashionable merchandise, readily consumed by a community of folks who believe all income is disposable.
Now most of the projects in East Liberty are slated for demolition or reconfiguring. This is the new age of urban renewal, one in which we try to make blighted neighborhoods look like suburbs. Many low-income units have already been built nearby that look more like Condo Farms than what they actually are, at least from the outside. Developers have planted an AutoZone and a Home Depot in this neighborhood, too. And East Mall is coming down.
With the announcement of the demolition of the East Liberty projects, the local press, both alternative and main stream, announced the news with cheers and sighs of relief. At last that eyesore, that ugly remnant of City Planning gone bad, will be gone, erased from our eyescapse, no trace to remain. To celebrate this further, the Penn Avenue Arts initiative sponsored a good-bye with an experiment in public art. Two CMU grad students designed a slingshot that would allow folks to launch paint-filled balloons onto the building. The hope was to create a colorful multi-story work so that the remaining days of the building will at least be decorative.
The slingshot system was actually pretty cool. The sling ends were attached to two stand=alone cherry pickers that were raised and lowered as needed to change launch angle. A team of people actually held on to one of many handles to pull back on the slingshot. The shot was a paint-filled balloon. The participants, holding on tightly, would walk backwards and then sit on the ground, still holding on. The shot would be released by another guy who would pull another handle that would dteach the slingshot from the handles, so you didn't need to rely on the team of people releasing all at once. Here is a Post Gazette photo of what it looked like
Most of the time the balloon would hit and make a nice paint splotch. Sometimes they would break a window, something I don't think they accounted for. A good hit was followed by cheers.
At the beginning of this entry is a picture of Kate and Crispian as part of one of the launch teams. They loved it. Crispian was of course very good at it. Here is a picture I took of the building right before we left. We left before the event was over, so I don't know how much more colorful the buillding is now.
The whole celebration, the Good-Bye to old-style Urban Renewal, was supposed to be a big street fair in East Liberty. I was amazed at how empty the street was. In that neighborhhod, on the wonderfully unseasonable warm afternoons we had last month, the afternoons were busy times. The street would be full of pimped rides and people shopping the table venders for pirated CD's and fake Gucci. This event was advertised with live music and free food from Whole Foods (which is techinically in East Liberty), Giant Eagle, and Shop and Save. We only saw one table that had hot dogs. The live music was very cool, but drew almost no crowd. House of Soul, a popular local soul cover band, played to a tiny enthusiastic gathering near the stage. Local slam poet and rapper Davu Flint was warmly received by Megan, Myles, me, and three others (later this week I'll blog about the live performance that Davu was in later that night that I attended). A drum and dance group also performed. I think I heard them describe themselves as Afro-Brasilian, but I am not sure. I tried to find more info on them on the internet, but all I know is their name, Nego Gato Capaoro.
Despite the (yes, unkept) promise of free food, and the free live entertainment, and the opportunity to throw things at an ugly building, the event was not as well attended as one would have thought. Especially missing were more East Liberty residents. The slingshot area was mostly white people, a lot of them saying Thank you for taking this ugly building out of my sightline. A few middle-school-ish black kids came over to take some turns, but more out of the novelty of throwing things high in the air, rather than being a part of anything historic or even cathartic.
Why? Where were all the people of color? I'm not saying there were only white people there, but in a black neighborhood, I thought at least half of the crowd would have been local. Was it that the residents of the neighborhood have had this building in their midst for most of their lives now, that it is as much a part of their neighborhood as the old, useless train station, or the spires of the Presbyterian Churches? Don't they see what East Liberty could have been without these projects? That the projects don't have to be part of the Black American landscape? I haven't read or overheard anyone saying they are sad to see them go, so I really have no idea if that sentiment even exists. Do these buildings still hold some visible promise to the neighborhood as they once were imagined to by some earnest urban planner more than 40 years ago? That they may have lived there themselves, that it was their home (I wouldn't want to watch a publicly sanctioned vandalizing of my childhood home)? The apartment their Big Mama died in? Are lives so tied up in these buildings, vacant really for quite sometime, that we were really rude to celebrate with with complete glee their doom?
Are we just another generation of Well-Meaning White Folk? That special category for the misguided but genuine, those that heedlessly interfere when we think we are trying to "help" people of color. Urban planners were sometimes this type of people in the 1960s. Are we just cut from that same cloth? What will be said about these decisions forty years from now?
But then again, maybe I am reading too much into this. Maybe, like so many community events in all parts of the U.S., attendance is lacking because it just doesn't generate interest. Maybe it is as simple as that.
but I can say, for those of us that went, we had a good time. As an act of public art, I am not sure how to judge the success. It was no "Gates." A blog that is adertised as a Pittsburgh art blog doesn't even mention it, so I can't even consult an expert. And while the local press and media were represented, I haven't found any comprehensive story about the event--just some pictures. As a community event, I thought it was the type of event that cities should stage--some sort of public art experiment with a block party, brought to a neighborhood that might otherwise be ignored in the city.
I have posted here about previous ones, the best one we've been to being December's. For May the Unblurred events started earlier than normal, right after lunch time, as the focus early in the day was to be on East Liberty.
Most of the Unblurred events occur on Penn Avenue along the Friendship-Garfield division. Only a few blocks further down, Penn Avenue in East Liberty is about to undergo a radical destruction and rebuilding project. In the 1960s, as a part of the Urban Renewal bandwagon that was started by Robert Moses in NYC, some of the older buildings in East Liberty were torn down and replaced with high-rise housing projects for low-rent public housing. Of the major projects in the East Liberty neighborhood, the East Mall is a particularly fine example of urban planning, Moses style. In the Moses model of urban planning, the flow of traffic was superior to the needs of human beings. Okay, maybe that was too harsh (but read Caro's biography or watch Ric Burn's documentary and you'll get really harsh). To Moses, the hum and flow of cars, and even the interrupted flow of traffic due to congestion, was the din of city life and urban vitality. He saw the suburbs as the proper location for recreation. We have a different ideal for urban life today, a restoration of downtowns and vital neighborhoods. In building many of the bridges and expressways of NYC, Moses refused to take into account the neighborhoods and communities that would be divided and destroyed by these projects. The South Bronx has never recovered. Minority neighborhoods were particularly suceptible in the Moses model to make way for the new expressways. When people think about NYC today, most think about some of the famous downtown neighborhoods, like the Village, SoHo, and Chinatown. If Moses was not forced to stop, the Lower Manhattan Expressway would have gone right through these neighborhoods. To this day, Manhattan is the only borough in NYC that does not have an Expressway going through it. To this day, Manhattan is celebrated as New York City around the world (tourists care little about the other boroughs). I think about Robert Moses a lot, actually. Whenever I would take the train to New York for the night and I would get out at Penn Station. Once upon a time, getting off the train at Pennsylvania Station meant something. The grandness of Pennsylvania Station welcomed you like royalty. That Penn Station is gone; what was built in its place was Madison Square Garden. Anytime I hear anyone celebrate Madison Square Garden I get ill. If you only knew what was there....
So anyway, when the East Mall was built, it was constructed so as not to interfere with the flow of cars along Penn Avenue to the East Neighborhoods and Suburbs. So the building straddles the street. Yes, this high rise apartment building, one in which lower-income, minority families and elderly people were supposed to live, had a constant flow of traffic (and exhaust fumes) right underneath it. Additionally, East Mall was slated to become a contained economic center for the projects, with retail and service space available for lease. Needless to say, it never worked like that. Like so many others in other cities in the U.S., the building fell victim to neglect by the city and was poorly maintained. The retail tenants never really took hold; all that is left is a Dollar Max type of store. And what impact have these projects had on East Liberty on the whole. Well, East Liberty is no South Bronx, but it definitely isn't what it was. The downtown that remains is full of beautiful 3-4 story store front buildings and even a few theaters. The buildings's uses belie the better time East Liberty had seen. The area is full of beautiful churches, huge Protestant Churches built at a time when East Liberty had more middle-class residents. There are even 2 synagogues that are no longer in use (one is particularly large and majestic). Some of the streets still have the large houses that would have been built around the turn of the century, before income tax was instituted. East Liberty was the center also of the African American community during the Great Migration north (the Hill District was the center of the African American Pittsburgh that pre-dated the Great Migration). Now you walk through East Liberty on any given day and the projects are nearly vacant, condemned finally after years of the City's neglect, the sidewalk under East Mall occassionally decorated with flowers or wreaths left by the mourning family and friends of an urban casualty. The stores are full of cheap, fashionable merchandise, readily consumed by a community of folks who believe all income is disposable.
Now most of the projects in East Liberty are slated for demolition or reconfiguring. This is the new age of urban renewal, one in which we try to make blighted neighborhoods look like suburbs. Many low-income units have already been built nearby that look more like Condo Farms than what they actually are, at least from the outside. Developers have planted an AutoZone and a Home Depot in this neighborhood, too. And East Mall is coming down.
With the announcement of the demolition of the East Liberty projects, the local press, both alternative and main stream, announced the news with cheers and sighs of relief. At last that eyesore, that ugly remnant of City Planning gone bad, will be gone, erased from our eyescapse, no trace to remain. To celebrate this further, the Penn Avenue Arts initiative sponsored a good-bye with an experiment in public art. Two CMU grad students designed a slingshot that would allow folks to launch paint-filled balloons onto the building. The hope was to create a colorful multi-story work so that the remaining days of the building will at least be decorative.
The slingshot system was actually pretty cool. The sling ends were attached to two stand=alone cherry pickers that were raised and lowered as needed to change launch angle. A team of people actually held on to one of many handles to pull back on the slingshot. The shot was a paint-filled balloon. The participants, holding on tightly, would walk backwards and then sit on the ground, still holding on. The shot would be released by another guy who would pull another handle that would dteach the slingshot from the handles, so you didn't need to rely on the team of people releasing all at once. Here is a Post Gazette photo of what it looked like
Most of the time the balloon would hit and make a nice paint splotch. Sometimes they would break a window, something I don't think they accounted for. A good hit was followed by cheers.
At the beginning of this entry is a picture of Kate and Crispian as part of one of the launch teams. They loved it. Crispian was of course very good at it. Here is a picture I took of the building right before we left. We left before the event was over, so I don't know how much more colorful the buillding is now.
The whole celebration, the Good-Bye to old-style Urban Renewal, was supposed to be a big street fair in East Liberty. I was amazed at how empty the street was. In that neighborhhod, on the wonderfully unseasonable warm afternoons we had last month, the afternoons were busy times. The street would be full of pimped rides and people shopping the table venders for pirated CD's and fake Gucci. This event was advertised with live music and free food from Whole Foods (which is techinically in East Liberty), Giant Eagle, and Shop and Save. We only saw one table that had hot dogs. The live music was very cool, but drew almost no crowd. House of Soul, a popular local soul cover band, played to a tiny enthusiastic gathering near the stage. Local slam poet and rapper Davu Flint was warmly received by Megan, Myles, me, and three others (later this week I'll blog about the live performance that Davu was in later that night that I attended). A drum and dance group also performed. I think I heard them describe themselves as Afro-Brasilian, but I am not sure. I tried to find more info on them on the internet, but all I know is their name, Nego Gato Capaoro.
Despite the (yes, unkept) promise of free food, and the free live entertainment, and the opportunity to throw things at an ugly building, the event was not as well attended as one would have thought. Especially missing were more East Liberty residents. The slingshot area was mostly white people, a lot of them saying Thank you for taking this ugly building out of my sightline. A few middle-school-ish black kids came over to take some turns, but more out of the novelty of throwing things high in the air, rather than being a part of anything historic or even cathartic.
Why? Where were all the people of color? I'm not saying there were only white people there, but in a black neighborhood, I thought at least half of the crowd would have been local. Was it that the residents of the neighborhood have had this building in their midst for most of their lives now, that it is as much a part of their neighborhood as the old, useless train station, or the spires of the Presbyterian Churches? Don't they see what East Liberty could have been without these projects? That the projects don't have to be part of the Black American landscape? I haven't read or overheard anyone saying they are sad to see them go, so I really have no idea if that sentiment even exists. Do these buildings still hold some visible promise to the neighborhood as they once were imagined to by some earnest urban planner more than 40 years ago? That they may have lived there themselves, that it was their home (I wouldn't want to watch a publicly sanctioned vandalizing of my childhood home)? The apartment their Big Mama died in? Are lives so tied up in these buildings, vacant really for quite sometime, that we were really rude to celebrate with with complete glee their doom?
Are we just another generation of Well-Meaning White Folk? That special category for the misguided but genuine, those that heedlessly interfere when we think we are trying to "help" people of color. Urban planners were sometimes this type of people in the 1960s. Are we just cut from that same cloth? What will be said about these decisions forty years from now?
But then again, maybe I am reading too much into this. Maybe, like so many community events in all parts of the U.S., attendance is lacking because it just doesn't generate interest. Maybe it is as simple as that.
but I can say, for those of us that went, we had a good time. As an act of public art, I am not sure how to judge the success. It was no "Gates." A blog that is adertised as a Pittsburgh art blog doesn't even mention it, so I can't even consult an expert. And while the local press and media were represented, I haven't found any comprehensive story about the event--just some pictures. As a community event, I thought it was the type of event that cities should stage--some sort of public art experiment with a block party, brought to a neighborhood that might otherwise be ignored in the city.
Comments
Generally, for Black participation, it takes quite a bit of work. You have to work closely with community organizers. Word of mouth is always key because the average person doesn't have too much time to follow these things and they rely on the recommendations of trusted folk.
Also working with community leaders can give you a sense of the rhythm of the community, i.e, when people go to work, when they get back, what days/nights are church nights or other activities. Also, you can often guarantee participation if you target church congregations, maybe by asking a local choir to sing. This way, the rest of the Church makes an effort to show up.
Or, you could get a local black politician and promise some local media coverage and watch them work their contacts to guarantee an audience.
Of course, the rub here is that it is never quite as simple as inviting to the event. The Black community reacts negatively to not being let in on the ground floor on issues that impact them. In my former job, I had to deal with some stuff like this and it was always complicated.
I personally would be extremely excited and thrilled to hurl a large paint balloon with abandon at multi-story building.
I do agree that the oranizations that organize these events are missing an opportunity to get more Black involvement. Most of their advertising is in the form of posters in coffee shops and at Organic Groceries--you see who the target audience is. I don't think they are leaving out the Black community intentionally--I think they just don't know how to do it.
As I read your comment again I think you nailed it on the Ground Floor thing. I really wonder how much of the planning of the East Liberty portion of the Unblurred event involved local neighborhood participation.
LC--
For your benefit I forgot to add that every time we turned around someone was filming Myles for something. If you see something about this on QED, watch for the wild-haired toddler.