one at an animal hospital—and managed to save around two thousand dollars before returning to Philadelphia. I took a room in the house Aunt Ede shared with my grandmother, worked odd jobs, and attended Temple University High School part time to finish my secondary education. I applied to the University of Pennsylvania (since I had grown up just a mile away, I had always assumed I would attend), but Temple failed to forward my records as promised, and that option evaporated.
AT THE AGE OF NINETEEN, I was the volunteer head of the youth chapter at Heritage House, an African American cultural organization. The City of Philadelphia had given us an old brownstone mansion, where we conducted our programs on African American heritage and consciousness. I thrived under the mentorship of the adults who managed the programs at Heritage House, particularly the executive director Eugene Jones, who was the first black man I met who had a PhD. One afternoon, as I looked down from the second floor into the courtyard, I noticed a short man in his mid-thirties, surrounded by a dozen graduate students. He was gesturing energetically, directing their attention to the features of the space, particularly to an ample locust tree shading the concrete courtyard, which was otherwise devoid of vegetation.
This was Karl Linn, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. As soon as I found an opportunity, I introduced myself. Karl reminded me of my father: both men were eloquent, intellectually gifted, and loved to work with their hands; both were also short in stature—around five feet four.
I had been an avid reader, soaking up everything I could about my chosen field of architecture and city planning in books that were written by people whom, given my class and race, I could never hope to meet. But here was Karl, a university professor in the flesh, eager to not only share ideas but also demonstrate how to put them into practice.1 Karl became a mentor to me. He suggested books to read and introduced me to an astonishing range of artists, writers, and creative professionals, such as the visionary social critic Paul Goodman and his architect brother, Percival, who had just published the second revised edition of their classic book, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life, in which they explored ways that society and the built environment could support communal values. Their radical proposals for reorganizing Manhattan to support the development of community intrigued me. With my limited understanding of planning and architecture, their ideas seemed simple to implement, but, in hindsight, I realize that many of them were complex and challenging.
Learning to Recognize Resources with Karl Linn
Large and uncaring urban renewal projects, which were demolishing houses and devastating neighborhoods, were at their peak in 1960 when Karl took his students (all of whom were white) into the ghetto of North Philadelphia to observe and, later, to serve. Karl encouraged me to join him and his students in walking the streets of North Philadelphia, finding the potential in empty lots, back alleys, and shady backyards and looking for vacant land that could be reclaimed. We talked to street musicians, kids playing pavement games, and people sitting on stoops or on chairs on the sidewalks. Karl taught his students and me to notice the genius of inner-city neighborhood residents, who transformed stoops, sidewalks, streets, and vacant lots into extensions of their home territories.
As we walked the back alleys, Karl had his students and me make drawings of what we saw. He made me aware of the many ailanthus trees growing in people’s yards, which most landscape architects saw as weeds because they didn’t conform to conventional notions of street trees. Walking through the streets of North Philadelphia and looking into backyards, we could see the ways the ailanthus trees had taken over the landscape. Even as the city was being destroyed by redevelopment, the presence of life was reaffirming itself.
Not only did Karl reinforce my recognition of the destructiveness of urban renewal, but the students and I began to realize that these places, which had been thought of as waste, were actually quite beautiful and full of potential. Karl trained a whole generation of architects and planners to see beauty and utility in the city’s abandoned and underutilized resources.
A New Appreciation of the Natural World
When I met Karl, I didn’t much care for nature. In our family, we worked all the time. There were no vacations or camping trips.2 As a kid, I had spent time cutting grass and doing yard work to earn spending money, but that work was boring and demeaning. It felt like the subservient roles my ancestors had played as servants and sharecroppers. Karl helped me to see nature in new ways—as an opportunity for play and inspiration and as a spiritual resource. The fascination with the natural environment I had experienced in my third-grade class with Mrs. Aikens was reawakened.
Karl and the Neighborhood Renewal Corps, the nonprofit he founded, would acquire legal control over abandoned property, enabling Karl to recruit and organize neighborhood residents, teams of volunteers, and volunteer professionals to design and build common spaces for community activities. He called these places “neighborhood commons” and the process of building them “urban barnraising,” a term that recalled the traditions of Pennsylvania’s early Amish and Mennonite settlers, for whom building barns was a community effort.
Karl directed volunteers to collect building materials that were being discarded by industries and suppliers, such as cable reels, concrete cylinders, tiles, railroad ties, and plants. They also rescued materials from demolished houses—marble, bricks, lumber, and more. These discarded parts were reclaimed treasures and belonged to the neighborhood, Karl asserted. They were part of a community legacy. Karl used donated money to buy an old truck for the neighborhood gang, who became eager collectors of the marble steps left behind by urban renewal and other free resources.
At Melon Commons, Karl’s pilot project, the Neighborhood Renewal Corps planted greenery and used the salvaged materials to build playgrounds for kids, an amphitheater for performances, and gathering spots for adults. Karl collaborated with a man who organized Shakespeare performances by local kids in Melon Commons. One weekend, Karl gathered the neighbors and announced: “I want each of you to come here tomorrow and bring an old dinner plate from home.” People were puzzled but intrigued. The next day, neighbors came with their plates, and Karl orchestrated an incredibly dramatic event: smashing plates and using the pieces to pave the alley. The result was the most beautiful mosaic I’ve ever seen.
To bureaucrats in the development agencies, the neighborhood was considered blighted, but Karl encouraged the ongoing celebration of what people had. Watching the project take shape gave me the idea that you could design and build beautiful, uplifting places and provide amenities to underserved people.
Karl and I were an odd pair—a tall, lanky young African American and a short, intense Jewish refugee with a thick German accent. In a sense, we were the very embodiment of discarded parts. Our dialogues during long walks through inner-city Philadelphia laid the foundation for a lifelong friendship and a series of creative collaborations. I had no way of knowing then that Karl’s ideas, practice, and the force of his personality would shape my life and work as an architect, urban planner, civil rights worker, and environmental justice activist for the next fifty years. In the work and wisdom Karl shared with me, he taught me the value of discarded elements, both materially and metaphorically. There were people, stories, and communities that the dominant culture had wrongfully discarded. Building neighborhood commons with Karl was my first taste of the deep spiritual and psychological transformation that comes with asserting the value of the discarded.
A Social Agenda in Architecture
After World War II, the nation’s decaying cities were spawning new developments