Community-based chaos

PHOTO BY DRP

 

CITY JOURNAL

August 20, 2015

 

Community-Based Chaos

by James Panero

 

The de Blasio administration has all the wrong answers on the homeless mentally ill.

 

For New Yorkers who remember the bad old days, the recent reminders of an era when urban pathologies ruled the streets can be jarring. Back when times were tough, residents of my neighborhood on the Upper West Side passed by abandoned graffiti-covered lots, crunched red-capped crack vials under their feet, and worried about when Larry Hogue, the “Wild Man of 96th Street,” would make his next appearance. Now some of this sense of foreboding seems to be coming back.

Late last year outside Pomander Walk, the historic Tudor-style residence on West 95th Street, a custodian sweeping the street was attacked by 29-year-old Jairo DeLeon, who, without provocation, proceeded to stab him with a knife. The handyman sustained severe lacerations to his arm, which he had held up to protect himself as he bled out onto the sidewalk. He was saved by neighbors who staunched the blood with a tourniquet. After police apprehended DeLeon, they learned that he was known as “Little Owl” in a gang called Dominicans Don’t Play and had 29 prior arrests.

In June, on what was, until recently, a leafy stretch of West 94th Street, a 28-year-old man named Jack Kester, deranged and apparently high on drugs, damaged and destroyed several trees with a saw while riding around on a child’s scooter, declaring “I’m king of the world.” When a neighbor confronted him, Kester threatened him with his gardening supplies while exclaiming “You’re a punk-ass bitch,” before fleeing into nearby Riverside Park.

More recently, the New York Post made a cover story out of a 49-year-old homeless man named Monk, a well-known local presence who for years has resided in his own fetid sidewalk encampment of blankets, trash, and crumpled newspapers on Broadway near Zabar’s. The Post featured Monk urinating in the middle of Broadway in broad daylight with the headline20 YEARS OF CLEANING UP NEW YORK CITY PISSED AWAY.

Post columnist John Podhoretz, himself a lifelong Upper West Sider,lamented how “homelessness and empty stores” had become “the new normal in NYC.” The Post ran several follow-ups to the Monk story, and its coverage finally prompted a noticeable police response. After being picked up for psychological evaluation, however, Monk returned to the streets.

Last year, Mayor de Blasio announced that the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, is spearheading a taskforce that will soon unveil a plan to address the problem of the mentally ill homeless by decriminalizing certain pathological behavior and raising the bar for possible arrest and incarceration. “We intend to treat this situation very differently,” de Blasio said. At the same time, city council speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has also proposed decriminalizing offenses such as the public urination that landed Monk on the cover of the Post. Even police commissioner William J. Bratton, an architect of quality-of-life policing but now beleaguered within de Blasio’s administration—he says he won’t serve in a second de Blasio term—has equivocated on using his officers to address vagrancy. “They have every bit as much right to be in that park as you or I to sit on that bench,” he said of the homeless—though in late July he announced new training for 10,000 officers on how to deal with vagrants.

Without a comprehensive approach to mental illness that includes a fresh look at institutionalization, however, the only idea that de Blasio and liberal homeless advocates can come up with is what they call “community-based solutions”—that is, placing facilities for the homeless, the mentally ill, and even convicted criminals in residential neighborhoods. But by basing treatment in such areas rather than in sequestered settings, these solutions introduce destabilizing populations into functioning communities. They damage the city’s social fabric, further marginalize residents already at risk, and poorly serve those in need. Yet they also enrich certain landlords and homeless-industry insiders, who profit from their incursion.

“Community-based” approaches are already having disturbing effects. In East Williamsburg, former homeless men who have earned a second chance thanks to the Doe Fund’s Ready, Willing & Able work program are battling the Department of Homeless Services, which proposes to push them out of the Doe facility and replace them with sex offenders. In outer Brooklyn, the New York Times reported on the operation of community-based facilities for criminals called “residential reentry centers” (RRCs), otherwise known as “halfway houses.” Here, a “politically connected entrepreneur with a checkered history in the halfway-house industry,” Jack A. Brown III, was paid $241,900 in 2010 by his own RRC organization, Community First, which also employed his brother and sister. To operate just one facility called Brooklyn House, Community First was awarded a contract estimated to be worth more than $29 million over a two-year period. Yet as the Times reported, rather than receive assistance in acclimating to life outside prison, inmates lived in squalor and “often have little to do and receive few services . . . Some of them pass the time playing cards, ordering takeout food and watching videos, including pornographic ones. At night, they talk on cellphones, which are supposed to be banned; drink alcohol hidden in water bottles; and smoke synthetic marijuana, called K2 . . . They also flee.” A Department of Justice internal audit of Community First confirmed much of the Times story.

Last year, after a doubling of smash-and-grab break-ins of cars parked along Riverside Drive, along with an 82 percent uptick in robberies in the area, police from the 24th precinct raided the Freedom House Shelter on 95th Street and arrested 22 residents who, it turned out, had outstanding warrants. The homeless advocacy group Picture the Homeless held a rally at the shelter to protest the raid and called for more “effective community-based solutions.” And Bratton proceeded to criticize the raid, seeing it as “well-intended, but [not] something I’m . . . supportive of . . . That policy of that precinct has ended.”

If there was any doubt that de Blasio intends to expand his community-based approach, look to his robocalls earlier this year to landlords,offering them incentives to take in more city homeless. Such a push is a win first and foremost for the mayor’s allies in the homeless-shelter industry and a payback for campaign support. “Homeless shelter landlords bet big on de Blasio,” Andrew Rice reported in New York in 2013. “During 2011 and 2012, a small group of property owners and contractors who do business with the city’s Department of Homeless Services donated more than $35,000 to de Blasio’s campaign, according to records on file with the city and state campaign-finance boards.” Rice reports that most of the money came from landlords of single-room-occupancy hotels converted into shelters with “sky-high rents” by an organization called Housing Solutions USA, formerly known as Aguila, run by Robert Hess, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s one-time commissioner of homeless services. Hess even held a fundraiser at his home for candidate de Blasio that included Alan Lapes, “one of the largest and most controversial players in the for-profit shelter industry.”

It so happens that Lapes is the owner and Hess the operator of Freedom House, the raided shelter on West 95th Street—from which DeLeon was departing when he stabbed the super of Pomander Walk.

This Week: The Hall of Fame for Great Americans

The Hall of Fame for Great Americans (all photographs by James Panero)

James writes: 

With the reopening of the High Bridge, now is a great time to explore the beauty of the Bronx. You heard right. The Bronx contains some of the most picturesque, historic, yet overlooked sites in New York. One day recently I biked across High Bride and north up University Avenue through Morris Heights to the the nearly forgotten architectural wonders of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans and Gould Memorial Library, both designed at the turn of the last century by Stanford White, located at Hall of Fame Terrace and Sedgwick Avenue. 

Atop a promontory overlooking the Harlem River, here was once the site of the uptown campus of New York University. When a financially distressed NYU consolidated in downtown Manhattan in 1973, Bronx Community College took over the campus and stewardship of these two architectural landmarks.   

 The Hall of Fame was the idea of Dr. Henry Mitchell MacCracken, Chancellor of New York University from 1891 to 1910. He saw to the construction of a 630-foot curving open air colonnade lined by the bronze bust of its honorees, organized among American statesmen, soldiers, jurists, and writers, with identifying statements from each included on commemorative plaques beneath them.

Inspired by "Ruhmes Halle," built near Munich by the King of Bavaria, in addition to Westminster Abbey and the Pantheon in Paris, this was America's original "Hall of Fame" and the one that led to the many others around the country in sports and entertainment.

 Ninety-eight busts are included in the Hall of Fame, with 102 Americans elected to receive the honor since 1900. Unfortunately inadequate funds have prevented the creation of busts for honorees Louis Brandeis, Clara Barton, Luther Burbank, and Andrew Carnegie. Meanwhile the election of new honorees has ceased while any available resources now attend to the upkeep and maintenance of the existing statues and architecture.    

 

The portrait busts are among the best collection of statuary in the country, with sculpture by Daniel Chester French, James Earl Fraser, Frederick MacMonnies, and others. 

The Hall of Fame was designed to wrap around the back of the original campus buildings, with Stanford White's Gould Memorial Library at the center, and the name of the former owners inscribed above.  

Bronze doors now lead onto a rickety revolving door and stairwell.

 A coffered ceiling above the stairwell only somewhat prepares you for what's inside. 

 

The celestial dome in the heart of the building, thankfully preserved and recently restored, offers a stunning final stop for any visit to this forgotten architectural wonder of the Bronx. 

Noguchi

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
June 28, 2015

Noguchi
by James Panero

A review of LISTENING TO STONE: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, by Hayden Herrera, Illustrated. 575 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.

The art of biography is not unlike the creation of sculpture. Out of a raw material of artifact and anecdote must emerge the semblance of living form. There may be no one right way to animate such matter. Certainly, there are plenty of wrongs: from hazy abstraction to overwrought realism, from misapplied attention to mannered application. Whatever the approach, however, the spirit of the subject must somehow guide the telling. For Isamu Noguchi, the great border-crossing sculptor of the last century, the art came, he said, from tapping into “the materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity — not what might be imposed but something closer to its being.” The genius of “Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi” is how its author, Hayden Herrera, inhabits the sculpturing hand of its subject. Rather than focus on the surface, Herrera gets “beneath the skin,” as Noguchi would say, to the “brilliance of matter.”

In Herrera’s elegant account, the “stone” of Noguchi’s “art and life” is left quiet enough for us to hear. Distracting ­voices, whether they be the author’s or those of Noguchi’s many friends, lovers and critics, are kept to a minimum. The story that emerges is therefore not unlike one of Noguchi’s gardens, or his playground designs, or his dance sets. Space and spareness balance matter and articulation. “An important element in both Japanese stroll gardens and Noguchi’s sets was the experience of the body moving through space,” Herrera writes. Arranged along the path of Herrera’s chronology, Noguchi’s words and deeds similarly convey their affinities without overly determining one step to the next. “If sculpture is the rock,” Noguchi once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” Both artist and author leave room for us to drift around and listen.

The writer of biographies of Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, two artists who make intimate appearances in this latest work, Herrera understands creative people. In Noguchi she follows a life that rarely departs from the realm of artistic mythology. Noguchi’s Japanese father, Yone, was a rising poet living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He met Isamu’s American mother, Leonie Gil­mour, through a classified ad he took out for freelance editorial work in 1901. Following their brief affair, he returned to Japan. Yone bequeathed his name and poetic sensitivities to his son but withheld just about any other consideration one might expect. “He appears to have had little regret at leaving the six-months-pregnant Leonie behind,” Herrera writes.

Because of his father’s fame, Isamu’s birth in 1904 elicited a newspaper headline in Los Angeles, where Leonie came to live in a tent town: “Yone Noguchi’s Babe Pride of Hospital. White Wife of Author Presents Husband With Son.” The remarkable article foretold much of what Isamu would contend with in life: his estranged father, his Japanese and white-American backgrounds, and the public recognition he would attain by giving form to mixed identities. This forming took shape as a continuous process over Noguchi’s long creative life, beginning with himself. ­“After all, for one with a background like myself the question of identity is very uncertain,” Noguchi said in 1988, the year of his death. “It’s only in art that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all.”

Noguchi’s mother became the sculptor’s “strongest influence.” Far more than his father, it was his mother, a fascinating and tragic figure, who haunted Noguchi’s expression, and she likewise haunts the ­pages of Herrera’s biography. “I think I’m the product of my mother’s imagination,” he once said. Leonie was a graduate of what became known as the Ethical Culture School, which stressed both “manual and academic training.” She followed this with a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College and studies at the Sorbonne. “She kept hoping I would eventually become an artist,” Noguchi said. She got her wish — but, dying of pneumonia in 1933 at age 59, never saw his artistic promise fulfilled.

In his formative years, as his mother attempted to reconnect with his father, Noguchi lived for a decade in Japan. Here he became “knowledgeable in the ways of nature” with “respect for materials and how things are made.” Leonie read Greek mythology to Noguchi while encouraging him to “learn how to build a Japanese house.” Then in 1918, she sent her 13-year-old son on his own back to America to study at a progressive hands-on school in Indiana. From then on, fortune and talent saw this self-described “waif” through artistic and spiritual mentorships that included studying Italian sculpture-casting at a school on Tompkins Square Park in New York and interning with Gutzon Borglum, the future creator of Mount Rushmore (who told Noguchi he would never be a sculptor). In Paris, an apprenticeship in the studio of Constantin Brancusi, a “laboratory for distilling basic shapes,” gave Noguchi his modernist bequest, to which he added a traditional Japanese sense for the “value of nonassertiveness.”

Just about every famous and interesting person of the 20th century seems to have crossed Noguchi’s globe-spanning path. Perhaps most significant was the futurist Buckminster Fuller, whom Noguchi called a “messiah of ideas.” At only two points did Noguchi’s associations touch down to earth. Patriotically American, denouncing the militancy of his father’s Japan, Noguchi voluntarily locked himself in a Japanese internment camp during the war. For a brief moment some years earlier, he also studied pre-med at Columbia University — news that his mother “hotly denounced.” She wanted her son to “be your own god and your own star.”

It was Brancusi who taught Noguchi “you’re as good as you ever will be at the moment. That which you do is the thing.” Noguchi could be as artistically astonishing in his portrait busts of the 1920s and ’30s, where innovative materials reflect the nature of his sitters, as in his enigmatic stone abstractions of later life. Just as he crossed borders, he crossed disciplines to work with others. Some of his greatest output came from these collaborations: dance sets for Martha Graham; garden designs with architects; his coffee table for Herman Miller; and his Akari light sculptures, the paper lanterns now universally copied, which came to overshadow his other work. Herrera’s book also tells how some of Noguchi’s most startling concepts were never completed: Robert Moses killed an innovative playground design for the United Nations; Thomas Hoving prevented another destined for Riverside Park. One hopes this last design, a collaboration with Louis I. Kahn, might still someday be ­realized, as we’ve seen with Kahn’s posthumous Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island.

Rather than for a particular body of work, Noguchi said he hoped to be remembered for contributing “something to an awareness of living.” As a “magnificent gift to the people of New York,” Herrera writes, 30 years ago the artist created the Noguchi Museum out of his studio in Long Island City. To this legacy of awareness we can now add the present biography. Walking in his museum garden with his friend Dore Ashton, Noguchi once said, “I have come to no conclusions, no beginnings, no endings.” With minimal intervention, Herrera helps all of us walk beside this “nomad” who “sought and found, by making sculpture, a way to embed himself in the earth, in nature, in the world.”