Earthday

Author with Adam Central Park NYC

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In the case of the 1969 event in Union Square I was approached by a member of the Pratt faculty, who was himself designing some of the media electronics, and requested I gather my students to design and build the performance stage upon which his crew did its media things. My students were ecstatic and before you know it I was meeting with people in the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC) and Fred Kent and Mr. Hays and others. One very strange radical Pratt faculty member called and described what he was doing and what was additionally needed and could I utilize my class to do what was needed.
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Both the NYC Earthday events in Union Square and then in Central Park were for two different organizations and my involvement in either was unsolicited by me. 

          I mean, I never really actually knew, or, was          concerned about the issues founding either undertaking; or, the motivations for staging the events.

          In the case of the 1969 event in Union Square I was approached by a member of the Pratt faculty, who was himself designing some of the media electronics, and requested I gather my students to design and build the performance stage upon which his crew did its media things. My students were ecstatic and before you know it I was meeting with people in the Environmental Action Coalition (EAC) and Fred Kent and Mr. Hays and others. One very strange radical Pratt faculty member called and described what he was doing and what was additionally needed and could I utilize my class to do what was needed. He gave the contacts and took me to several organization meetings where I could learn about the mission and the operations. The mission seemed wrapped around many variations on environmental issues while the films and sound effects of the Pratt faculty member dealt rather with war and peace, identify and the greater good for a different society. Truly, It was not any part of my vocabulary but I was open and learned all that I could.

          I had to get the materials so I looked in the yellow pages; and, low and behold every lumber company, scaffolding contractor, paint company, etc. jumped at the opportunity to supply free materials and labor to erect our design on 14^th Street and Union Square. I used the lessons taught to me by Pastor Bergen in Puerto Rico.

          My students and Christina designed and made the most beautiful drawings. Little did we all realize that some thing bigger was on its way?

The actual event led to legislation in New York State and Washington having to do with the formation and funding of the Environmental Protection Department and attending legislation.

          The actual event was a delight where we got close to Pete Seager, the cast of Hair, Paul Newman, the Sesame Street gang, etc. We had a great time. It was here I met Adam Alexander who for several years visited us. He was a member of the Mayors special task force. Our design was published in all the leading architectural journals.

          In addition to teaching at Pratt, I was also working part time at the office of LH Pomeroy in the Plaza Hotel and we were living at the Picasso House in Manhattan. 

          One day I get a phone call from a soft and quiet voice announcing that he was John McConnell and he wanted my help to stage the ”real” earth day on March 21, 1970 and would I help him.  Immediately invited him to tell me more and invited him to our apartment.  He showed up and for a couple of hours he explained his concept and plans to my self, several of my key operative students, such as “Ken”, “Jeff” and a few others. The plan was to get a petition signed by the people of New York City which on that day he would present to U-Thant, secretariat of the UN while we stage a huge gathering in Central Park.

          He already had the design for flags; the planet earth as photographed from the Apollo on a blue background. We were to get them up the flagpoles at the main bandshell. I volunteered to handle the media my students were again very enthusiastic and after my lining up CBS, NBC, ABC, Daily News, Post, etc/ my cousin Louis, Adam, my students and I came to Central Park to find over one hundred thousand people in front of the band shell. The cameras and news reporters swarmed us and we told John’s story and held the crowd’s interest. To this day and in his late eighties I still get phone calls from John McConnell to discuss his various peace initiatives. He feels that his entire efforts were Shanghaied by environmentalist and that he is still trying to win the peace by a world rallies and single-minded efforts and agreements.

LME

          John had gotten Earth Day proclaimed as an international holiday and things ended. 

          At the time I was meeting in my apartment at the Picasso House, several nights a week with an architectural student of City College introduced to me by Pomeroy’s, Phil Winters.

          Some where in all of this Christina complained that our studio apartment was too small and she longed for space to spread out our furniture and for her to do her artwork. Soon our lease would be up. Having the examples of Gene’s girlfriend, Davian, Max Waldman, and other artists we reckoned that this would be the most affordable and metaphorically luxurious context we could afford. So, I set out find a place and soon conceived the idea of the place to be a loft, but not in the village where lofts were typically inhabited, but, in mid town where we could combine her studio with a potential architectural studio.

          I just believed that in this mid-town silk stocking district there were depressed and marginal properties.  I recall seeing them a few years ago with my homosexual Pratt professor friend, Ed Carroll; particularly next to the Fifty ninth street Bridge. He showed me this neighborhood in 1962 and this was eight years later.

         

It also occurred to us that we could also get people and materials to really design and build a wonderful place, if, with a foundation such as John’s and EAC. I scoured the news papers and walked the neighborhood. I telephoned and I visited. I narrowed down a few very good places.

But this time we do our own.  In addition, we wrongfully thought that there was a lot of grant money available to sponsor environmental programs and that we could participate in them with Phil Winters, Adam and my students, etc.

          Using my Yale Club and University contacts I went to the NY Bar Association and got a team of Attorneys to volunteer to incorporate us a NY not-for-profit corporation. Using the completed lecture series at Yale University called: “Architecture: the making of metaphors” and a place in which to experiment with ideas we came up with the name:”Laboratories for Metaphoric Environments”. Main Currents in Modern Thought was just publishing parts of Yale lecture series on “Architecture, as the Making of Metaphors”

         

Now I needed to find a place. I looked in all the newspapers and visited many places meeting so many interesting owners and land loads. One was the owner of the Plaza Hotel and Chrysler building. Finally I gave up and just started walking around the neighborhood I knew Christina would like in search of an old factories.   I recalled from my days with a gay Pratt faculty member he showed me a friend place on 59^th Street, so i walked there and soon I found 320 East 65^th Street and its owner Jose Fernadez. He had the bakery on the ground floor filed with German manufactured equipment baking bread, which he supplied to all the top hotels and fines t restaurants. I told him our story and he showed me the empty third floor which had one wind separated from the rest. He really liked me and offered me the place for peanuts. ($400/month). Gene, Christina, and I designed the space and

Robert Jacobs volunteered to draw the isometric of the space. Christopher Sweeney volunteered to help do the carpentry, and many construction companies volunteered to supply the 2x12 timbers. The space was 4000 square foot. It was a beauty with skylights and giant floor to ceiling casement windows.

         

         

Author at conference table Christina's art on wall

For several months my students and I scraped a hundred years of paint and false ceiling and asbestos off of the walls and ceilings; nightly eating fresh hot bread and dinner at the corner restaurant, it was a hard but wonderful time for all of us.

         

Far from finished, our lease at Picasso House and the month’s extension was past so we moved in. Those first nights sleeping in the loft were magic. The moonlight and street light s coming in to the space and us laying thereon our blow up mattress amidst all our furniture and construction materials and equipment. We worked on the place for months and it evolved into a living and workspace.

         

I designed my self-a small telephone-booth type office and daily called every foundation and philanthropist.  I met and explained our mission. Henry Classon met with us regularly and authored our LME Prospectus. He even paid for its printing. I held some of my Pratt “Open School” classes in our meeting area which is how I met Jeffery Chusid. Various hospitals and schools asked us to train their students and we took on special education young me and taught them construction skills.

         

But, alas, the city’s coffers went dry.  I had qualified and was at the top of the list to get Public Works projects and developers asked me to draw up schemes for projects. But the city went bankrupt. In the midst of all this “Forrest Wilson invited me to teach in Athens, Ohio; so I commuted, while at the same time looking for work in real estate development and construction outside of New York

          We invested thousands of hours of labor and thought to the creation of LME and so many people supported LME in spirit and hopes. We had so many visitors, classes and seminars.  We prepared many proposals and presentations. To even to the Lutherin church Rueben Jesop; Fund Raiser; Missouri Synod office on Riverside drive) to repeat the neighborhood construction effort we had initiated in Puerto Rico’s Grace English Lutheran church in Santurce.

          It was during this time we visited Germany and toured the Ruhergebeit seeing how Germany deals with water, waste and air pollution I made many photographs of one plant that cleans the water and provides power to a village on the river which was published in Progressive Architecture in 1971. Ken invited us to stay a week in his parent's upstate NY house and we visited with Christina’s father in Berlin.

          LME was a great dream, the loft was a great place to live the dream, and New York was a great place for dreamers such as us. Even Warner Leroy liked what we were doing and when we left Mr. Fernandez rented him our space. 

         

bedroom

Mr., Fernandez took me around some time before I left for Jackson, Tennessee and showed me his many tenement buildings.  When we were in Jackson we were watching Pat Robertson show and learned from watching his young wife being Interview that Mr.Fernandez had died, she remarried and squandered the bakery, the building and all his real estate holdings.

         

Gil Colgate who had commissioned us to design an Ice hockey Rink in Brooklyn remained a good friend and kept in touch; particularly making the Yale Club available for us when we visit New York. Many of our board members are still living and working somewhere but most have been lost to us. Unfortunately, we were too poor to photograph the place and regret not having a collection of pictures, but it was a magnificent place. Several of our special education students kept in touch with us for man-years, one boy in particular who wrote Christina about his new jobs and locations.

          I remember vividly not speaking to any one in Jackson about what we had just come through; not about Earthday, the environment, the loft or LME. It had quickly become ancient history, irrelevant and redundant. We truly knew that no one we met could understand the loft, the Earth stage and the ideals of dreamers.

I still have the original large blue earthflags with the planet earth in the center which flew over Central Park.