During the month of October - though I was not a candidate for president - I made a rail-stop campaign traveling 4,000 miles by Amtrak to the National Trust of Historic Preservation Conference in Miami, Florida.
The focus of last year's National Preservation Conference was "Cultural Diversity and Preservation". There was a delectable menu of speakers, workshops and tours. Some of my favorite sessions included:
There was an extraordinary mixture of speakers at the conference. The Honorable Harvey B. Gantt, first African American mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, is both an architect and a planner with considerable interest and expertise in neighborhood housing issues. He shared a story about their success in preserving an area in their community of one-room homes from the early days of American slavery. The primary conflict was the urge to forget and the need to remember and share the past.
The Historic Overtown Mobile Workshop was led by a leading edge innovator, Dorothy Fields, founder of the Miami Black History Archives. Linda Chavez was an equally dynamic speaker who generated small discussion groups following her presentation to explore and define principles for cultural diversity in the preservation movement.
There were numerous meetings at the conference to discuss local, state and federal incentives for historic preservation. The transportation and ISTEA program featured the Scenic Byways incentives that may be complimented by other funding programs including the development of the alternative energy sources for public transportation.
If you have questions or are interested in finding our more about the benefits of attending a National Preservation Conference, please call me at 756-1571.
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Photo taken at famous Miami South Beach Youth Hostel
Eileen M. Smith, M.Arch.
Founder & CEO Since 1992
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INNER CITY REDEVELOPMENT IN THE HANDS OF INNER CITY RESIDENTS
This article first published as on-line article April, 1999
There is one thing that is different about the inner city redevelopment team I found in Dade County Florida that sets it apart from Habitat for Humanity, Christmas In July and other charitable redevelopment programs to rebuild our inner cities. The important difference is that it is the inner city people themselves who live in the deteriorating areas of our aging American cities that are redeveloping their neighborhoods. In the process, homeless high school African American mothers are getting their GED degree while learning the building crafts.
I was sitting chatting with some people waiting for this session to begin, when suddenly the room simmered into silence. I looked around to see what had caused this sudden change. A distinguished petite blond woman in high spiked heels had entered the room and was talking quietly to one of the Conference managers at the back of the room. She was intently focused on the conversation and appeared oblivious that most of the eyes in the room were focused on her. A few minutes later she walked to the front of the room and following a brief introduction, and a booming applause, Bertha Pitts began the history of this inner city redevelopment program she had started nearly twenty years before.
In the late 1970s, Bertha Pitts was Principal of Dade County Schools in Miami. One of the most difficult challenges she faced was the circumstance of many high school women who as single mothers in inner city Miami were homeless with a child to raise. Many of the young mothers were rejected by their families as a disgrace. These youth were often forced into prostitution and other crimes to make enough money to support their children whose fathers had either abandoned them, were unable to support a family themselves, were unknown or were actually pimps encouraging them into prostitution. She was very impressed with the amount of effort these young women expended in attempting to remain in school despite the fact that they were homeless and raising a child. She found little assistance in place to change the harsh circumstances that forced many of these single mothers to drop out of high school.
In the neighborhoods where these youth lived there were at least 2,000 boarded up homes needing restoration of some sort that had been declared uninhabitable by the local housing authorities. As Principal Pitts faced these youth on a daily basis, the idea came to her that she could combine these problems to create self-sufficient young adults with high school diplomas. She began calling various building organizations, and found the Miami Builder's Institute most responsive to her idea. Mr. McDonald assisted in creating a liaison with the JTPA Youth Program to develop a building crafts training program for these young students who were mostly female with over fifty percent being mothers. The plan began to unfold as follows:
Mr. McDonald and his wife provided a tour of their facility. I had never met so many happy inner city youth. They were all working like busy elves at their building restoration tasks. We visited two groups in progress. One was painting a flagpole base in front of the training center and another group was renovating a home several miles away. It was obvious that these youth were learning life-long skills in a dignified program that allowed them to take care of themselves against nearly impossible circumstances. At the time of the 1992 Conference the program was about fifteen years old. It had already won national awards for excellence and international recognition.
The program had extreme resistance at the beginning. Many people did not trust the intentions of the organizers and pimps were angry at losing the income from the women who escaped the enslavement of prostitution to become self-sufficient through the skills they learned in this program. There was some violence during the first few years and several of the projects were burned in angry resistence. It took nearly five years for the program to finally become accepted by the inner city neighborhoods who became intolerant of further resistance. As the graduates of the course increased the impact of the work began to strengthen.
When I asked one of the young ladies what had been the most influential person in her making the choice to enter this program, she indicated it was a friend (or sister) or hers who had graduated four years before. The young women who influenced her most had gained her high school diploma from the program and she was working fulltime in the building crafts. She had bought a car without any income from parents, drugs or prostitution. She was still single and raising her child who was now in primary school. The young student told me she wanted to work in a hardware store when she graduated from the program. She said it would be really difficult to believe this would be possible without the role model of her older friend who had succeeded.
Mr. McDonald and his wife also took a few of us on a visit to one of the Builders One Stop Centers developed to assist the victims of Hurricane Andrew that had struck only a month before the Conference. We will have more on the Builders One Stop Centers and an article on the Art Deco of Miami's South Beach Historic District. Pictures of will be available on our web page within the next year as we bring them out of archives and get them scanned on-line.
Please direct your questions about these programs to:
DADE COUNTY SCHOOLS AND MIAMI BUILDER'S INSTITUTE
Miami, Florida
Georgetown University Intercultural Center
300 Kilowatt Peak Photovoltaic Rooftop Installed In 1984
Generates An Average One Megawatt Of Electricity Everyday
In One Of The Most Dense Urban Areas of Washington, DC