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Beyer Blinder Belle-designed new National Urban League headquarters rises in Harlem

2024-06-15T06:22:00-04:00

Beyer Blinder Belle’s design for the National Urban League’s new headquarters, which also houses New York City’s first civil rights museum, has risen in Harlem.

The National Urban League is a historical civil rights organization dedicated to the economic empowerment of and the elevation of living standards in historically underserved urban communities. This milestone marks the completion of the organization’s relocation from their former Lower Manhattan office.

Called the Urban Empowerment Center, the new 17-story, 414,000-square-foot building was delivered through a collaboration between private, public, and state organizations. In addition to the headquarters, it will include the Urban Civil Rights Museum Experience and the National Urban League Institute for Race, Equity, and Justice.

The building also features 90,000 square feet of office space, 84,000 square feet of retail space, and 171 affordable apartments. The changes in the structure’s glass curtain wall and massing resp...

Historic civil rights-era church in Memphis to undergo $25 million renovation

2024-02-19T12:02:00-05:00

Memphis’ Clayborn Temple, a historic civil rights landmark, is set to undergo a $25 million renovation. The five-year-long project hopes to “not only preserve its historic significance but also usher in a new era of vitality for this cultural gem and the surrounding community,” as seen in new renderings by Self+Tucker Architects.

Image credit: Self+Tucker Architects

The building was originally constructed in 1892 as Second Presbyterian Church, where it served an all-white congregation. In 1949, the building was sold to an African Methodist Episcopal congregation for $100,000 and renamed Clayborn Temple.

Image credit: Self+Tucker Architects

Throughout the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, the church served as an important node for social, cultural, spiritual, and political expressions for the city’s African American communities, ultimately becoming the organizing headquarters for The Sanitation Workers’ Strike of 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaign.

Image credit: Self+Tu...

Historian Amber Wiley to lead UPenn's Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites

2022-09-19T09:00:00-04:00

Award-winning architectural and urban historian Amber Wiley has been announced by the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design as the inaugural Matt and Erika Nord Director of the Center for the Preservation of Civil Rights Sites (CPCRS).

The current Rutgers University assistant professor will also hold the title of Presidential Associate Professor and lecture primarily in the Graduate Program in Historic Preservation. Wiley holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from George Washington University in addition to degrees in Architecture and Architectural History from Yale and the University of Virginia.

From Wiley's 2021 CPCRS talk titled “The Revolution Continues.” Image courtesy UPenn.

She comes to the new positions highly recommended as the author of the forthcoming title Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital and curator of Collective Yearning: Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum, now on view at Rutgers’ New Bru...

Gensler’s Jackie Robinson Museum project finally debuts after a 14-year saga

2022-08-05T15:57:00-04:00

Last week was opening day for the new Gensler-designed Jackie Robinson Museum in Lower Manhattan. Luminaries, including Spike Lee and Mayor Eric Adams were on hand to inaugurate the museum, which was first announced by Major League Baseball and the Jackie Robinson Foundation to observe the 61st anniversary of his Dodgers debut in 2008.

Occupying a space on Varick Street that is now landmarked by the city, the 20,000-square-foot museum focuses as much on Robinson’s multisport athletic career and rise to baseball’s pinnacle as it does on his progressive social activism and lifelong fight against racism.

Years of delays meant the project has been put off its intended 2019 opening until this year.

Having opened its doors last Friday, the Jackie Robinson Museum seeks to bring people from all walks together to commune and appreciate each other’s humanity and diverse experiences. Enjoy a glimpse of the ribbon cutting ceremony led by Emmy Award winner @RobinRoberts pic.twitter.com/QyNcQVhW...

New Yorkers can’t wait any longer for the installation of long-promised public toilets

2022-03-31T16:42:00-04:00

As public bathrooms continue to be one of the rarest commodities in the city, the Adams administration has not provided a timeline or any details for the installation of 15 automatic sidewalk toilets unused for more than a decade. But only five of the toilets have been installed and the city has struggled to find suitable new spots. For years, the others remained mothballed in a Queens warehouse but city officials declined to detail where they are currently located.

The toilets are a holdover of the Bloomberg administration, which signed a franchising agreement with Cemusa (later JC Decaux) in 2006 that was supposed to provide 20 such facilities at a cost of around $500,000 apiece. Recently, the city declared it will not force dining establishments to offer their restrooms to the public after an update to pertaining sections of its building code.

The issue has as much to do with providing what many recognize to be vital pieces of public infrastructure as it does with serving the city’s roughly 45,000-strong homeless population, which has been the target of recent Adams administration efforts to restore a sense of safety in the wake of an alarming two-year spike in crime. Critics, for their part, see it as part of a larger effort to “criminalize” homelessness, charging that the lack of facilities denies everyone a “basic human need.”

“It is not only a sanitation issue but also a public safety and civil rights issue,” Councilmember Sandy Nurse ...

After struggling to find a buyer, the fate of Rosa Parks' home remains in limbo

2018-08-17T19:39:00-04:00

For now, the austere structure—and everything it symbolizes about the African American experience—awaits for a buyer while it sits quietly in Guernsey’s storage facility in upstate New York. As of this writing, the home’s destiny looks promising if uncertain. “There are 1,500 monuments to the Confederacy, which is absurd,” Mendoza says. “There are 76 monuments to the civil rights movement. Let this be the 77th.”

When Rosa Parks' Detroit home went up for auction a few weeks ago, the auction house Guernsey's struggled to find a buyer, despite the wide media attention the house has received.

“If all else fails, theatre and visual artist Robert Wilson and his Watermill Art Foundation in Long Island, New York, have also offered to take the house for a temporary exhibition. Another option, Mendoza says, is to take it back to Detroit,” artnet reports.

The home of civil rights activist Rosa Parks is now up for auction

2018-07-27T13:27:00-04:00

In 2016, the Berlin-based US artist Ryan Mendoza and Rhea McCauley, the niece of Rosa Parks, teamed up to save the civil rights activist’s Detroit home from demolition. Now, the structure is heading to another block: the New York auction house Guernsey’s, where it is due to be auctioned tomorrow (26 July) with an estimate of $1m-$3m.

Park's house is part of the 700-lot of African American Historic & Cultural Treasures up for sale at the New York auction house Guernsey’s. McCauley initially bought the house for just $500 back in 2016 reaching out to Mendoza to help preserve the house. In 2017 the structure was safely disassembled and reassembled in Berlin where it was open to the public hosting sound performances inside.

Rosa Parks originally lived in the three-bedroom house with 17 relatives after she left the south in 1957 for Detroit. Mendoza and McCauley have hopes that the house will end up in an institution where it can inspire visitors with Park's life and legacy in civil rights.

Canadian $10 bank note features Antoine Predock's Canadian Museum for Human Rights building

2018-04-10T14:51:00-04:00

In March, the Bank of Canada unveiled a new $10 bank note [...] The laurel leaf signifies justice, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights building, designed by New Mexico architect Antoine Predock, is featured prominently. To contrast its striking modernism, the Library of Parliament’s vaulted ceiling is reproduced with a metallic sheen, as is the Arms of Canada insignia.

Canada's new $10 note depicting Antoine Predock's Canadian Museum for Human Rights building on the back of the bill, along with an eagle feather and the laurel leaf.

Canadian Museum for Human designed by Antoine Predock, located in Winnipeg, CA. RightsImage: Bob Linsdell/Wiki Commons.

The front of the new note depicts Nova Scotia civil rights icon Viola Desmond, the first Canadian woman to be honored on money (besides the Queen).

The Viola Desmond bill will enter into circulation by late 2018.

A new beginning for Rosa Parks' Detroit home

2016-10-05T18:11:00-04:00

[Rosa Parks' home] on South Deacon Street had become blighted and faced demolition in recent years, but its fortunes have since changed. The home’s facade has been removed and will be refashioned into a replica-style artwork that will be shown in museums across Europe...“She loved the city, but I don't think the city loved her very much back,” [Parks' niece Rhea] McCauley said. “This house should have been preserved here. But we live in a world where every other project takes precedence.”

You would think that the Detroit home of Rosa Parks would have more easily garnered local support for its preservation in the present day. But as Parks' niece Rhea McCauley described, her aunt was still treated with hostility when she moved into the city in 1957, two years after she refused to give up her bus seat. That attitude seems to have carried on as McCauley struggled to find a backer to preserve the home, saying that “Doors have been slammed in [her] face”.

Luckily, McCauley was able to get help from artist Ryan Mendoza, who will transform the house's facade into a replica-style art piece that will tour museums across Europe. Why Europe? Mendoza, who acknowledged that he isn't even from Detroit, says it's “a statement about the lack of interest in preserving the home in the city where it actually existed”.

h/t Quartz

Carrying a racist legacy, highways today play a central role in civil rights activism

2016-07-13T12:59:00-04:00

Block a highway, and you upend the economic life of a city, as well as the spatial logic that has long allowed people to pass through them without encountering their poverty or problems. Block a highway, and you command a lot more attention than would a rally outside a church or city hall — from traffic helicopters, immobile commuters, alarmed officials.

The article notes that, historically, highway construction decimated black communities, such as in St. Paul, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Oakland, and many other cities. In New York, Robert Moses explicitly used highways to clear "slums," in the process devastating parts of the Bronx and other black neighborhoods.

Highways were also used as weapons in the arsenal of segregation. For example in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley separated traditionally white Irish neighborhoods from black communities in the South Side with the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Today, highways carry additional symbolic weight for Black Lives Matter protestors. Many of the black men killed by police over the past few years – Philando Castile, for example – were stopped in routine traffic checks.

Infrastructure also has symbolic resonance in the larger history of the civil rights movement. The article mentions as examples the Selma March, the Freedom Rides, and Rosa Park's refusal to sit at the back of a public bus.

For more on th...

Stonewall Inn formally declared as national monument

2016-06-24T15:10:00-04:00

On Friday, President Obama formally [declared] the Greenwich Village bar and its surrounding area the Stonewall National Monument, and creating the first National Park Service unit dedicated to the gay rights movement. According to the White House, the monument designation will consist of 7.7 acres, protecting the tavern, Christopher Park across the street, and several other streets and sidewalks where spontaneous protests were held for equal rights in 1969.

How LGBT Acceptance Is Redefining Urban America

2014-08-15T12:49:00-04:00

In cities around the country, the geographical hubs of gay culture — so-called “gayborhoods” — are changing. Amin Ghaziani, author of a new book, There Goes the Gayborhood?, says this subtle cultural shift holds enormous significance for the gay community in urban America and beyond. [...] Yet while positive social and legal shifts have led to this change (from the Castro to Chelsea), we haven’t quite evolved past the point of needing them.

Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Opens in Washington

2011-08-26T00:43:15-04:00

We don’t even see his feet. He is embedded in the rock like something not yet fully born, suited and stern, rising from its roughly chiseled surface. His face is uncompromising, determined, his eyes fixed in the distance, not far from where Jefferson stands across the water. But kitsch here strains at the limits of resemblance: Is this the Dr. King of the “I Have a Dream” speech? Or the writer of the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech?