DISCUSSION

Alexandra Staub: Thank you very much, Ife. That was a remarkable essay. You’ve interwoven so many themes into a mosaic of cultural phenomena. I’d like to circle around to some of your topics. You talked about racial categorization and oral history as a means of accessing individual subjectivities. At the same time, society at large objectifies the people you interview. You tie that in with the idea of architecture as an artifact and as a product of culture. The people and the architecture are both a construct of culture, and you’re delving into the ways in which the two intersect.

Many of your stunning images are from pop culture of the 1970s. Considering the U.S. housing history after World War II and through the 1970s, this was a time during which white families increasingly moved into suburbs and Black families were relegated to high-rise housing in the cities. I was wondering if you could comment as to your choice of using the 1970s as a point of analysis?

Ife Vanable: The 1970s are an important periodization for my work as an architectural historian. New York State’s 1955 Limited Profit Housing Companies Law, known as Mitchell-La-

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

ma, did not initially produce the number of housing units hoped for in the 1950s and 1960s. And, in many ways, the Mitchell-Lama housing program was conceptualized and enacted as a deviation from New York City public housing authority projects — architecturally, socially, and financially. With the private, though publicly subsidized, development of low-moderate and middle-income housing, the housing program produced architectural objects and simultaneously defined the contours of a desirable middle- income Black resident. Without access to wealth or income to sustainably enter into market-rate housing, as the law was written, this desired and envisioned resident would nonetheless be recognized as different in terms of finances, status, family composition, and values from an imagined more low-income public housing tenant. Many of the images I shared reflect how this imaginary was also constructed in popular culture. [The Jeffersons, Good Times] a notion that is often attributed to the “tower in the park” ideal, touted as seeking that sought universal access to light and air. This led to urban policy schemes that benefitted developers of middle-income housing.

With these architectural and financial ideals and incentives, in the late 1960s, developers in New York began to produce ever-taller housing. In other parts of the country, high-rise residential towers were being demolished, yet New York was going ahead with production. The largest number of high-rise residential towers came into being in New York between about 1968 and 1975. This was the time when New York was on the brink of financial and material decline, and the Bronx was assumed to be burning. At this time, in 1970s New York, something else is happening that often is untold [Paris Match]. For me, that becomes the very fertile ground from which the tales I unearth emerge.

In 1961, a set of revised zoning resolutions in New York City provided benefits and bonuses to developers for open space, following

Alexandra Staub: What you’re describing — the idea of putting families into a certain type of housing and encouraging them to become middle-class or to remain

Ife Salema Vanable

middle-class and not take on perceived characteristics of poor families — sounds like social engineering. Was that what was taking place in New York City?

Ife Vanable: In New York, the Mitchell-Lama housing scheme contributed to the making of the city itself. Designed in very robust ways, by architects like Paul Rudolph and I.M. Pei, or well-known mid-sized firms, such as Davis Brody and Associates, as well as firms like Bond Ryder before Max Bond joined Davis Brody, Mitchell-Lama housing is still quite desirable. The apartments are large and were affordable. Though affordibiity was not a term used at the time, there was much more emphasis on tenant income. I would say the city was not necessarily interested in transforming families as much as it was in maintaining its own status by keeping families who supported the city. People deemed “essential” during the COVID pandemic, for example, those who work for municipal agencies and authorities – post office workers, bus and train drivers, nurses, or home care aids – would have been classified as Mitchell-Lama tenants.

In many ways, Mitchell-Lama housing can be understood as a form of catchment, a way to keep bodies in the city. These were folks who could have potentially moved elsewhere, those who once had a home and decided to do away with having to shovel snow, or the responsibilities of maintaining a home, or folks who loved the view from the 28th floor high-rise apartment unit. While recognizing these developments as a form of catchment, simultaneously my work recognizes desires to live in ways not always aligned with prevailing narratives of a single-family home as the most desirable object. I’m so interested in how these objects and the program operates on both these levels.

Alexandra Staub: New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s was experiencing many difficulties and social disruptions. How do the towers figure in?

Ife Vanable: Some of the projects in Mitchell-Lama took fifteen years to build. An example is Waterside Plaza, which was the only development east of the FDR Drive and is constructed on invented land

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Scheme: Discussion consisting of pilings. Developers were very committed to moving forward with these projects. In the course that I’m currently teaching, we talked about the sense of distance from the ground and the notion of danger associated with being in a high-residential tower. Some students told me that their families moved out of high-rise buildings due to fear of being unable to escape during a fire or not wanting their children to run up and down the stairs and play in the elevators — all things that I actually did growing up because I lived on the 28th floor in one of these buildings. Distance from the ground is simultaneously desirable and also a means to capture bodies. The street has been seen as a site of disturbance and chaos. The tower begins to create a very palpable and real, physical, material distance from the street. There is an idea that housing, containment in towers, provides a sort of stable distance from the street. A notion of the stable family persists after

Daniel Moynihan’s 1965 report [titled The Negro Family, the Case for National Action], in which the Negro family is analyzed as unstable and pathological. These towers do emerge in this moment as part of a narrative toward stabilizing a seemingly “unresting” urban population at the level of the street. This construct between the street and the sky is something that I’m constantly thinking about and looking at.

Alexandra Staub: A fascinating thought. From an architectural viewpoint, the tower has to be very stable because there’s the structure to consider. The engineer is involved from day one. Metaphorical and physical stability overlap here.

I was wondering if you could speak a bit more about racial categorization. You mentioned that Black people and Black families were seen as pathological, but on the other hand, everything that you’ve said about the tower sounds very positive. Where is the overlap for you?

Ife Vanable: I obviously do not align my- self with Moynihan’s thinking of the Black family as pathological — a framing based on the perceived lack of a male figure, and the ensuing critique of a matriarchal structure. Hortense Spillers writes that if you look at the Black family, you can find a father, that there is not merely instability, but otherwise familial compositions that might not be registered or valued in the same way. Value questions are prominent. I resist the narratives that urban housing in the form of high-rise residential towers is inherently problematic, or that a spatial concentration or even segregation of Black bodies is inherently bad. space, the idea of the terminal bedroom, the separation of uses, and the categorizations of domestic space. It’s one of the first things you learn to do when you draw floor plans of domestic spaces — you call out where the living room is, where the bedroom is, where the bathroom is — ongoing processes of demarcating. These ideas of social structures inherent in dwelling are also implicated in racial categorization.

In many ways, Mitchell-Lama was an integrationist project. The initial idea was that if you take families of moderate income and put them next to people who are more middle income, there would be a growth in values and behaviors. But I really resist perceiving the towers as a problem. I even question where and how the problem is described, and the tendency of architecture to operate in terms of problems and solutions. Robin Evans writes about the production of domestic

Alexandra Staub: It sounds as if you are emphasizing the value of particular and specific cultures that you find in the housing you’re studying. In your oral history project, I assume you’re interviewing residents of the towers?

Ife Vanable: Yes, current and former resident activists, tenants, and organizers.

Alexandra Staub: As a final question: you mentioned COVID at one point. I’m just wondering if what you are unearthing in your own research has some implications for what you see happening today?

Ife Vanable: I get this question a lot

State Looks, Black Desire(s), Housing Schemes

when I talk about this work. I do historical analysis and research, but am also engaged in a theoretical project framing questions around media and documents. As I’m analyzing oral histories, talking to people, I’m also looking at how these projects are represented in media, and how they’ve been understood and received across time. My aim has been to see how we pose questions, how we assert certain schemes of value, how we talk about things as being good or bad, and how we ask questions about where those designations come from. I’m aiming for a methodological transformation that I hope to integrate pedagogically. We need to examine the way that we can move through the work pedagogically and in practice with greater attention to nuance. We need to ask questions about things that are seemingly cemented, and we need to take those things apart with greater depth and specificity.

Alexandra Staub: One of the underlying premises of this symposium is that we do need to explore alternative ways of generating knowledge, asking questions, and finding answers. I would like to thank you very much for your fascinating talk and for this discussion.