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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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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... View full entry
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 City
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... View full entry
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.” — Artnet
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... View full entry
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. — theartnewspaper.com
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... View full entry
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. — azuremagazine.com
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... View full entry
[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.” — Detroit Free Press
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... View full entry
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 Washington Post
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... View full entry
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.
— The New York Times
More on Archinect:Queer Space, After Pulse: Archinect Sessions #69 ft. special guests James Rojas and Susan SurfaceThe enduring significance of gay bars in American citiesObama administration to designate Stonewall as America's first LGBT memorialHow LGBT Acceptance Is Redefining Urban AmericaU.S... View full entry
'Recently, people were more worried about preserving their jobs, not preserving their history...Now a new generation is aware there was a history that came before them...Not a lot of our history has been preserved. People without a history can be erased.' — Mark Meinke, co-founder of the Rainbow Heritage Network — Curbed
History was made today in American civil rights with the Supreme Court ruling that legalizes same-sex marriage across all 50 states. The ruling is a major push toward marriage equality in the U.S., but like several historically marginalized communities, one giant obstacle that the LGBTQ community... View full entry
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.
— nextcity.org
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? — nytimes.com
