Invisible Cities: The Arts and Renewable Community

Classroom Activities

These activities will be completed over the course of seven to eight weeks. If that timing is impossible, the unit can be taught over the course of a greater amount of time. Weather needs to be considered for the re-enactment.

Word Study (completed in journals)

There is a great amount of text, key terms, related to the content of this unit that the students will need to know. This knowledge will come from word study and the words will be introduced as they come up in lessons so as to be organic for exploration. As I said in the beginning, this is a story of Chicago, public housing, and the tornadic path of social policy through real people and actual lives. Students must be able to speak about social policy.

Policy comes from the root word "polis", meaning city or body of citizens. Policy is a plan intended to determine actions taken by a central force, such as the government. The root of social is "socio", companion. Social policy is a plan that affects human interaction and communities' well being. It is vital for students to understand this term, because our study centers around the question "Where does a place go that is no longer there?" The reason the place is no longer there and was there in the first place is due to social policy.

Another term that must be "unpacked" for deeper understanding is public housing. The meaning of the root word "public" is belonging to the people. Housing is a noun for houses and apartments considered collectively. Homes for the collective people of a community, the public, are planned out as a noun (a place and a thing) by other people.

The core of this unit is in the three phases of the place in question, Ickes. The first phase is the Ickes conception. Conception is creation. How did the Harold Ickes Homes come to be? They came to be through social policy. Then comes habitation, living inside and outside of the place. Finally, there is elimination, the demolition/destruction/tearing-down of something. Elimination can happen in many different ways and that will most definitely be explored.

Habitation will be introduced through the oral histories of two Ickes residents. Oral history must be defined then, and I'll define the term as the past spoken. We will listen to the past spoken by JP and Audrey who can speak to many different aspects of habitation in this place that no longer, physically, exist. I used a Chicago Real Estate Board quotation to open up this story of public housing, and I would like my students to be able to access the words, own them, and use them to write an argumentative narrative themselves. The words that need defining from the quote are committee, immigration, and feasible. We'll discuss that a committee is a group of people that makes decisions. We'll recount and expound upon what students know about "The Great Migration," immigration, and the large groups coming here from somewhere else. ²⁴ I will explain the concept of feasibility as asking yourself if something is possible or not.

Most of my students understand what documentation means. Because of this, our dive into documentation will be more about types of documentation, beginning with the recorded oral history, interviews. We'll view and take photographs. We'll also venture into videography. We'll take record of the space and make notes on what remains on our excavation of the Ickes vacant lot.

There are several acronyms that need unpacking: HUD (Housing and Urban Development), CHA (Chicago Housing Authority), CADRE (Combating Alcohol and Drugs through Rehabilitation and Education), LAC (Local Advisory Council), CAC (Central Advisory Council). All of these acronyms apply directly to organizations and resources found within The Ickes during its conception and habitation and that were taken away during the long slow elimination. Another term that will be defined is screening, which was the job of the LAC and CAC at Ickes. I will define screening as the act of assessing suitability for a particular purpose. In this case we will discuss screening in relation to residing at Ickes. Screening took place for a number of years at Ickes and residents were the ones making the decisions.

A lot of theme words also come up from the oral histories. JP talks about greed. Intense and selfish desire for something such as power or wealth with no regard for how it affects others is the way we'll define greed. Greed will be discussed by looking at the causes of greed and we'll relate this to the drugs and gangs in Ickes. Perspective will be shown and thought out by assessing the point of view of JP, Audrey, the city and us. Role will be defined as a person's place in the world. Greed, perspective, and role are all concept words that are deeply human and help us imagine where the Ickes have gone and why.

Interviewing (completed in journals, including transcriptions if needed, and recorded digitally)

There are two or three interviews that still need to take place for the fleshing out of this study of the Ickes Homes. I was going to interview Amy Rome (former NTA principal and community worker for eighteen years in the neighborhood), D.J. Roy (of the Old School Parties and talent shows), and Pastor Moody (thirty-five years at the historic Quinn Chapel). After gaining a huge amount of knowledge from Audrey and JP, I've decided to work on interviewing as a group with my students. The experience was eye opening and strategic.

I'll invite a sociology doctoral student to visit the classroom in order to discuss the importance of planning your interview questions strategically. ²⁵ Students will take notes in their journals about considering what you want to learn from your subject, how you will get them to talk about what you want to hear, and how to make the subject feel comfortable.

Walking the City & Heart Maps (ideas recorded in journals during the walk)

The fieldwork we complete will begin with "Walking the City", an activity that will entail listening to oral history with headsets while walking around our school's neighborhood. We'll visit the sites written about below and snippets of oral history as told by Audrey, JP, and myself will be listened to during the walking tour (for access to audio-files: saweidmanncps.edu).

Upon returning to our classroom, students will be shown examples of heart mapping as shown in Katherine Harmon's text Map As Art. ²⁶ Heart-mapping will include tracing the outline of a map of the city of Chicago. Students may use only the perimeter of the city-map or they may trace their neighborhood/community within the perimeter. Then they'll choose symbols and/or words to fill their map.

I'm thinking of doing this at the end of the unit, for a second time, with a map of Ickes. Perhaps the maps will be added to the memorial. Students will create their own "heart-map" with assistance from our visual arts teacher (for materials and methods).

Fieldwork [sites used for above activity, including recorded content]

In the recorded content that will be listened to during this fieldwork, I would like to discuss the word state because of State Street being home to the Ickes. We can speak of a state of being, the part of the whole of a country, and the street itself. We'll speak of the "State Street Corridor" and the part of Frank Marshall Davis's poem about State Street's cement blocks. ²⁷ We'll walk these blocks in order to visit local businesses, Quinn Chapel, and the Ickes Site. Each place has a reason for being on the list of places to explore as fieldwork. Quinn Chapel is a historic site in the area and most of NTA's families attend Quinn Chapel. The basement of the chapel was used as part of the Underground Railroad. We'll go to the Ickes site for obvious reasons and set-up our site-specific performance there. There are a couple of local businesses that JP discusses in his interview that we will visit, including Chef Luciano on Michigan Avenue.

"Footprint" of the Towers

Students and I will observe the original plans and drawings of Harold Ickes Homes from Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP to map out the "footprint" of the towers. We'll begin this journey in the classroom. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill have scanned plans and drawings of their buildings. I've requested both interior and exterior drawings for each of the Ickes sites, four sites total. We will view one tower from each site at a time. After looking at electronic images of the drawings using projection, we'll print out the blueprints and have students work in pairs to transfer this, spatially, to the actual vacant lot that is the site currently. We should begin with "the suburbs" on 24th and State. This is the building that Audrey grew up in.

Students can use string to show the "footprints". Each student will walk the path of the tower site. We'll move from tower to tower, from laundry room to playground, from library to paramedics. Students will walk one at a time and each will have an end-place that is predetermined. We'll start at the main corner of the grassy lot on the southwest side of State and 24th. The perimeter of the ground floor of each tower will be walked out first. The first students to walk will do so in straight lines to follow the exterior floor plan lines. Each of the first students will walk one exterior "wall", so four students per tower. There were six towers at each site; so twenty-four students will walk with string to map out the ground floor first.

Then, we will have a next batch of students use a different color of string to walk and show the "footprint" of moving from tower to tower from each tower. That is five students walking from one tower to each of the five other towers and then completing this pattern from each tower as a starting point. That's thirty students walking the inter-tower path. In the main tower, which housed the largest laundry room and the Chicago Public Library, we'll send another group of students with different colored string to walk the path of the interior-back by the laundry room to the playground and back, as well as the interior-front by the library to the building with the paramedics and back. This will consist of four more students walking with two different colors of string.

I should mention that the colors of string would be predetermined as well. The colors of the string should match up with the idea of the path that we are walking. The inter-tower path might be done with purple string to represent the hierarchy of residents within each of the towers. The laundry to playground path could be done in red string for the blood relationships of the children to kin that are playing and then washing the clothes that they played in. Maybe the laying of the ground floor could be done in blue string to represent the workforce, blue-collar workers, who laid the bricks of the original towers.

I'm imagining that we will take pictures to document this process, but we will not leave the strings there, as the citizens of Ersilia in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities did. ²⁸ The strings that created the "footprint" of the Ickes could be wound into a ball of "footprints" and relationships. Maybe the ball of string could be used for the memorial in the culminating activity.

Plans and Drawings Viewing (ideas about drawings recorded in journals)

Students will have the opportunity to view and study drawings from the original Ickes plans. The drawings include: abbreviations and material symbols, property line maps, topographic maps, site plans, paved areas/playground, site plans, yard lighting, sections/details, and architectural plans.

The drawings that will be sent to me in four full-size images are the paved area drawings, the topographic site plan, Architectural drawing 207 (the tower triad exterior) and Architectural drawing 209 (first floor birds eye interior view). These drawings give a sense of the structures on the outside and inside. I have access to smaller (and more skewed) images of all of the drawings listed above (saweidmanncps.edu).

There are many options for student exploration of these images. The "footprints" activity above includes use of the drawings to map out the space before we move onto the land plan. I am planning to take students through a series of questions, modeling the first time and then breaking them into groups, that are similar to an art history perspective: What do you see? What can you describe? How do objects in the space relate to each other? What are the lines doing? What stories can you imagine from what you see? After a discussion takes place, students will have time to write down their reflections.

Re-enactment

"The Fight" from Audrey's comedy story will be re-enacted on the vacant lot of the Ickes. There will be a good amount of stage combat that needs to be dealt with. I will contact a stage combat professional to do this, and I don't recommend doing this without one. Any local university or college with theater courses should have people schooled in stage combat. This process will take a number of days and rehearsals to do safely and effectively. I am modeling my re-enactment of "The Fight" after research on John Malpede's re-enactment of RFK in EKY. This means that relatives (blood or "fictional kin", as Dwight Conquergood defines) will have the opportunity to act as their counterparts. For instance, Audrey's daughter Season should be able to play the role of her mother.

The fight characters include sixty-five distinct roles: Audrey, Joyce, fifty boys (gang members), Omar (the Reej), bystanders (representative of Ickes people and activities-basketball players, roller-skaters, steppers, seniors, Pastor Moody, JP, play-ground kids). The students will assist in writing a script based on the transcription of Audrey's story from her interview. I should mention that when I say transcription I do not mean word for word, but note taking. When we listen to interviews, we will write down powerful moments and quotations. Props and costumes should match the time and place of the actual event.

We will discuss the media and may have them involved. Whether media is brought in or not, the community will be involved. I'm thinking of having students create invitations for community members, city politicians and policy-makers, and contacts of staff members from NTA. My hope is that this re-enactment spurs a greater dialogue, the beginning of which can happen in the moment based on post-performance discussion. We'll need to address the difference between actual fighting and stage combat. The beginning of the conversation will be about why this fight scene became the heart of this unit: the metaphor for the fight for human dignity.

Memorial

After the re-enactment, I'll have students come up with a special memorial as the culminating activity for our unit. We will study Maya Lin's process of memorial creation before creating our own. ²⁹ This memorial should be a ritual that gives service to the lives and space of the Ickes. We may complete a burial with ceremony leading up to the digging and sealing. In the classroom, we will work together to figure out how we will honor this community and what we will bury to remain there at the site, the vacant lot.