Aikens later took us to see the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, a display of aerial photos and models showing what Philadelphia would look like in twenty-five years. It was designed by the famous architect Edmund Bacon, who became Philadelphia’s chief city planner. It occupied two floors of a prestigious downtown department store and included a full-scale model of a street corner in South Philadelphia complete with public trash can. I was delighted by the opportunity to look into the future and deeply inspired by the aerial photos and models that allowed me to look down at the city from a God’s-eye point of view.
Many elements of the exhibition excited me. The sketches, aerial photographs, and motion pictures reflected my love of drawing and other modes of visual communication. My passion in math and science and my enthusiasm for making things were satisfied by the architectural plans and elevations and the various charts, displays, and models. Going to the exhibition was like magic. Something in me clicked, and I knew I wanted to be like the people who created the exhibition. However, just as I became enthusiastic about designing and building cities, I was dimly aware that white flight to the suburbs had begun. The dominant culture was losing interest in the urban environment and focusing primarily on building racially restrictive suburbs. Gradually, the pattern of suburban sprawl and inner-city decline was becoming established.
Growing up, my experience of the natural world was always linked to the human community. It was never an idyllic encounter with the untrammeled landscape of water, sky, rolling hills, forest, and mountains. I didn’t have such experiences until I became an adult.
Starting in early childhood and continuing throughout my youth, I developed emotionally and formed my sense of identity through my explorations of geographic space in the city of Philadelphia and beyond. As I walked throughout the city and observed patterns in the neighborhoods, I learned about ethnic communities and about issues of race and class. It occurs to me now that my love, fascination, and obsession with cities are simultaneously the cause and the effect of my walking everywhere.
Our family, like nearly all black families in the forties, fifties, and later, never went on vacations; however, when I was ten years old, Dad got the idea to take us on an overnight trip to the nation’s capital. On our way there, he was arrested for speeding through a little town—Laurel, Maryland—midway between Washington, DC and Baltimore. I don’t think we were really speeding. The officer, who had a thick Southern accent, didn’t seem to care one way or the other about anything we said. He had the power to lock my father up, and we couldn’t do anything about it. I vividly recall the sensation of being in a strange, surreal landscape. I had a vague notion that we had crossed into the South and that this was the kind of thing that was said to happen there.
Dad had often told us, “You never know what is going to happen. Things could turn weird at any time. When they do, you have to stay steady and figure things out. You gotta keep your eyes open. You gotta be able to deal.” At the age of nine, I was too young to fully understand what was happening, but clearly things had turned very weird. The officer took possession of the car and took Dad away to jail, leaving my fifty-two-year-old mother and two young boys standing in the street outside the home of the justice of the peace. Such callous and pointless treatment made no sense at all.
We had just enough money for Mother to get on a bus. Lewie and I hitchhiked and met up with her in the Baltimore bus station at Travelers Aid, where we called Aunt Ede and waited for her to wire us enough money to get home. I don’t recall how long Dad was in jail and don’t remember hearing any stories about what it took for him to be released and regain possession of the car, but I’m sure it was difficult and expensive.
My first years after moving to the new house were overflowing with wonder and spontaneous learning. I was enchanted with the park, the trees, the rocks beneath my feet, and the stars above. I loved walking through the city, going to movies downtown, and exploring the department stores. Gradually, though, a shadow side began to emerge. The neighborhood was changing. Although we lived in a beautiful house, as early as 1945, our second year there, our beautiful new neighborhood had begun to deteriorate. Banks made a practice of denying loans for home improvements and repairs in our neighborhood and others that were inhabited primarily by African Americans. Likewise, city agencies reduced spending on maintenance and upkeep of public properties—such as parks, schools, and libraries—in neighborhoods like ours. By 1956, when I left home at the age of seventeen, the neighborhood had become a ghetto.
After the war ended and my father was no longer needed at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, no one except the four members of our family ever set foot in our house. Dad put so much time and energy into improving white people’s houses and landscapes that he was unable to keep our house in working order, much less improve it. There were always paint buckets, brushes, ladders, and other tools in our living room and no place to sit down. The upstairs and downstairs toilets were out of commission for a long time, and we had to use the toilet at the gas station, four blocks away. Sometimes, we didn’t have money to pay the electric bill and had to use candles and kerosene lamps to see after the sun went down.
“There is no Santa Claus,” Dad once said to us. “You want toys? You need to make them.” We did have a well-equipped workshop and books and magazines that gave us ideas for things to make. I was often proud of the things we made, but I also wondered why we couldn’t just buy things the way other families did.
Sometimes, before I was school aged, he would say, “You know, I was on my own when I was your age.” I didn’t know quite what to make of that. I grew to believe that I didn’t deserve to live in a nice house and that we didn’t deserve to have the toys that other children had.
My father’s response once when I showed him a toy I had made was crushing but not unusual: “You did a terrible job,” he bellowed. “This is a mess. You need to have discipline and do it right.” In retrospect, I realize that he was trying to make sure we developed the means to be independent. The challenge of his parentless childhood had inspired him to develop extraordinary skills and savvy that he tried to pass on to us. He was quite present and worked hard to be a good father, but he lacked the emotional foundation that a secure home environment brings. He couldn’t pass down to us what he hadn’t received himself.
Although whites continued to flee to the suburbs, there were small pockets of a block or two where no black families had moved in. We thought of those as white neighborhoods. The buildings on our block were actually bigger and better designed than the homes in those so-called white neighborhoods. Our three-story house, for example, was semidetached with a front porch and a small backyard while the nearby white neighborhood was composed of two-story attached row houses with porches running the length of the street. Despite the obvious differences, we thought of our neighborhood as being of lower quality because black people lived there.
During the years of my later childhood and early adolescence, as whites abandoned inner-city neighborhoods and the city’s industrial employment base collapsed, my parents began to lose hope for a bright future for us. Lewie and I were slated to go to Central High School, the best academic high school in the city, where graduates became doctors, lawyers, and scientists. When we graduated from Tilden Junior High School in the summer of 1952, we both scored in the top 1 percent in the citywide academic achievement tests. Clearly, our parents wanted us to be different from the other young people in our neighborhood. They had chosen the location of our house so that when we grew up, we could walk to the University of Pennsylvania, which was less than a mile away. They had done everything they could to keep us from being caught in an educational tracking system that would isolate