Harvard GSD, Option Studio: The Lincoln Avenue Cookbook

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Option Studio 2021 Authors: Colleen Sloan + Scarlet Rendleman Instructors: Gina Ford + Rhiannon Sinclair The Lincoln Avenue Cookbook is a collaboration with local community members of New Rochelle, NY, Walter Brown and Linda Tarrant-Reid to piece together the cultural history of the Lincoln Avenue Neighborhood, prior to the desegregation and destruction of Lincoln Elementary School and construction of Memorial Highway that cleared homes and local businesses. This cookbook serves as not only a repository of food and culture, but also a proposal for a healthy and inclusive future for the Lincoln Avenue Neighborhood.

Link to full book: https://issuu.com/virginia277/docs/sloan_rendleman_lincolncookbook_final

This project is situated within the broader context of The Great Migration, which was not only a movement of people, but also food, culture and heritage.

The contributions of African Americans and Carribeans to the culinary and cultural landscape of the United States informs this project’s understanding that food, culture, and crop cultivation have, and continue to, play a role in liberation movements of Black Americans and it has the potential to address food insecurity.

Given that our focus for the project was around food and culture, our designs for four significant public spaces around the neighborhood are organized in the book by season and in harmony with seasonal food production activities. Excerpts from the Spring chapter are shown here.

The half-circle diagram below illustrates the goals and activities of Linda’s grow! Community Garden in New Rochelle which we used as a guide for our proposals.

Throughout the cookbook are family recipes from our two community advocates as well as proposed locations where food items may be sourced, publicly available kitchens, and new public spaces to eat and gather around food.

Left: Drawings by Colleen Sloan and lower diagram by Scarlet Rendleman Middle: Recipe drawn/transcribed by Scarlet Rendleman Right: Drawing by Colleen Sloan + Scarlet Rendleman

One of the spaces of intervention is in Lincoln Park, where the Lincoln School once stood and where Linda’s grow! Community Garden currently resides. The proposal includes seating, BBQ grills, new paths of circulation, a memorial for the school, and a greenhouse to extend the growing season.

For the final review, as a studio, we compiled all of our projects to present them as one cohesive whole both at the review and at a month long exhibition that would take place in New Rochelle for community members.

I was part of the physical exhibit team where myself, Scarlet Rendleman, Melissa Eloshway and Hattie Lindsey designed a model to situate all of the projects geographically.

A zoom in of the neighborhood of focus, above, included movable game pieces cast in rockite and photo printed that represent important places and each group’s project. This allowed community members to move around the pieces where they thought projects should be deployed.

On the large model, height corresponds to percentage of African American population per neighborhood while hatching refers to median income, in addition to etched roads for orientation.