Notes
1. John Pointer spoke of his relationships with family members and friends who have been incarcerated, or are addicts. His empathy and consideration to members of his community have forced me to rethink my judgments. I believe that this is important to consider as an educator, but also as a human being.
2. Dwight Conquergood was an incredibly influential performance ethnographer. His essay of praxis, "Life in Big Red: Struggles and Accommodations in a Chicago Polyethnic Tenement", articulates the experience of people who rely on community and create a community based on a common language of love and respect.
3. John Malpede is a performance artist whose medium is re-enactment and focus is on social and political forces shaping lives directly. It is this model that has influenced the re-enactment and memorial section of this work.
4. City of Chicago politicians called the Ickes Community Towers at 22nd and State-The Terror Zone. The reasons behind this nickname are described in Popkin and Gwiasda's text, The Hidden War. This text's focus is on "the crime and tragedy of public housing in Chicago". The "crime and tragedy" described is the terror of drug and gang activity, especially in the main tower at 22nd and State.
5. This concept, brought up in The Hidden War, of tenants choosing to "mind their own business", reflects a lack of understanding from middle and upper class citizens. There were many intricacies involved in creating a safe home out of project housing units. Guidelines and rules and internal communication were one of those rules.
6. The speech that Harold Ickes gave in Central Park titled, "What is an American?" shows his need for Americans to view the war as a fight for human dignity. He was in a place of power and the country listened.
7. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill LLP (SOM) are credited for the plans and drawing that will serve as a blueprint for our "footprints" activity. The drawings are of the three-tower exterior, a bird's eye view of the first floor of one tower, the paved areas of the Ickes Community, and the property line map.
8. The neighborhood Bronzeville was considered a "Black Mecca" in Chicago, similar to New York City's Harlem neighborhood. Bone and Courage discuss the creative expression involved in Bronzeville's conception in their text, The Muse in Bronzeville.
9. I want the students to understand the history of social justice and the arts in the Bronzeville in order to document their own experiences.
10. Poetry and short narratives from the prefaces of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, and Gwendolyn Brooks's In the Mecca will be used as student text to inform the concepts of home, rage, dignity, and place.
11. Gerald D. Suttles goes through the roles of policy-makers for public housing in The Man-Made City. The court's role is to deem an item "constitutionally appropriate" or not. Interpretation of the constitution should be objective, and yet seems too subjective in the case of public housing, as there are actual people whose perspectives are not heard.
12. In the text Chicago: Race, Class, and the Response to Urban Decline, Gregory D. Squires writes about Chicago's many faces. One of these faces is the city that "gets things done". In Chicago's constant struggle to reinvent itself, this face (or quality) is an important one for Chicago's identity to remain confident.
13. John Pointer (JP) drives home again and again the fact that it was the "families who knew how to solve problems" that made the Ickes (and Dearborn) Community a home. The methods for solving problems in the community were individualized and worked for as long as the resources in the community continued for support of the families.
14. JP talked about the large families in his interview, but Audrey Johnson talks about the popular families. Audrey happened to be from one of these popular families. She believes they were popular because of her father. He was "the life of the party". What made them a popular family was also their attention to the seniors and children of the Ickes Community.
15. Lucy Tapahonso, the Native American poet, writes of memory. Memories are how we know we have lived. The discussion of memory in this way answers the essential question of this unit about where a place goes that is no longer there. In interviewing members of the Ickes Community, the memories (of joy or hilarity mostly) became rich stories that I felt honored to hear.
16. In Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the city of Zoe is a place where everything and everyone has an existing role that is filled so that the perspective of the place can be simple and one-sided. Everyone and everything understands its place and what it should look like. The unknown or unique is a scary thought in this imagined city. I imagine this perspective as that of the policy-makers having a fear of the unknown and who try to fit people into places that fit a singular idea instead of whole peoples' lives.
17. Audrey is full of rage during "The Fight". This rage makes her completely insane in the moment. A person would have to be to choose to physically harm another human being until they collapse. In her description, though, she acknowledges the changes she is going through. Her femininity comes forth in the emotions that are exploding inside of her.
18. According to Suttles's The Man-Made City, in 1966, The Supreme Court made a decision about public housing in the U.S. known as the Gautreaux decision: no further construction in black areas and mandated new construction.
19. In a section of the book The Presentation of Self and Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, a father of modern sociology, the concept of self is discussed in theatrical terms: front-stage being what we choose to show the world and back-stage being what we keep behind closed doors (literally or metaphorically). The self's front and back-stage become skewed in public housing, as Goffman describes, "with thin partitions for walls". Peoples' back-stage becomes their front-stage in this "everyday life". The community's dynamic is very different than that of a community with people who have actual private lives.
20. This quotation, released in Minneapolis in 1969, by the Chicago Real Estate Board from April 1917, epitomizes the lack of consideration business can have for actual people. The denial of the racial prejudice that takes place during this public housing decision made by policy-makers is transparent in this quotation. The parallels of this concept with this unit's theme of fighting for human dignity make the quotation an important one to dissect.
21. Anne Bogart is credited with making The Viewpoints for performance public. Viewpoints connects space and time qualities to text and events.
22. The text Theatre/Archaeology (Mike Pearson & Michael Shanks) introduced me to "recontextualization", crafting the past and the significance of place. Site-specific performance can create dialogue. The blending of theater and archaeology explores loss and ruin: rituals, body orientations, transient occurrences, and ephemeral events.
23. The artist, John Malpede, creates re-enactments with relatives of people who involved in the original event. This layer of performance adds meaning. This element is being added to our re-enactment of "The Fight" in this unit. Though relatives of all people involved will not be in attendance, the daughter of the original antagonist will play the main character's role. This may create some tense dialogue, but that's the work I'm going for!
24. There were two waves of "The Great Migration of Chicago" between the years 1916 through 1970. My students understand what the Great Migration is, but we will research both waves during our study of public housing in Chicago. The written component of our unit relates to a quotation about the first wave, and then the building of the Ickes Towers happened after the second wave of African Americans moving to Chicago from the South.
25. My dear friend and amazing sociologist, Cayce Hughes, is very willing to work with my students. He will come into our classroom to discuss interviewing techniques for different kinds of research. His work is related to gender and the workplace and is rooted in interviews of hundreds of people in both urban and rural areas.
26. Katharine Harmon's book about contemporary artists' exploration of cartography is a beautiful and helpful presentation the connectedness of place and human experience. This work will inform a heart-mapping activity students will complete. Heart mapping relates students' identity's to the space and city they reside in.
27. Frank Marshall's poem Chicago's Congo feminizes our city. There are elements of the poem that reflect Audrey's emotions and actions during "The Fight". I want students to see that. The poem was written in 1935.
28. Ersilia is the city (Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino) where residents show their relationships with different colored string, and when the string-paths become too dense they leave the city and become refugees, leaving the string s behind and starting over.
29. Maya Lin's memorials are representative of the type of thought-process I want students to know and understand in relation to memory (http://www.mayalin.com/).
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