Verde Smoke

This week I got into the meat of the work in Lawrence, in that I finally met some residents in a context of social change, at a community meeting and a cultural celebration. As I described last week, I’ve previously tried to taste the context of Lawrence’s landscapes and people by just showing up and walking around. For instance, a fellow and I wandered into Cesar’s Cafe on the main drag of Lawrence, in search of a cup of coffee. Cesar’s is a small sandwich shop, where I had a true cafe con leche and watched in wonder at the woman behind the counter pressed sandwich after sandwich while speaking Spanish to some other customers almost continuously.

I enjoyed staring at the back wall behind the counter the most, with this strange assortment of utilitarian instruments, fanciful knickknacks, and family photos, almost as if I had wondered into someone’s kitchen and not into a sandwich joint. The unicorn especially seemed to be an anomaly to me in an eating establishment. But the wall of photos in the Café served as an interesting contrast to the dusty photos at the Historical Center around the corners, with it’s historical records vault of Essex Company records.

We next wandered into the Tripoli Bakery, with rows of traditional Italian baked goods with a few American minorities peppered in. We were served by two lovely ladies who not only sold me a sweet roll, but also sized me up in two very different ways. The younger sales clerk excited asked us about our status as students at MIT (Did we know so and so?) and recommended lunch joints (other than the awesome pizza at their sister restaurant, of course). Her older counterpart absorbed it all with knowing eyes and the only thing she said was to crack a joke about wouldn’t my photo be better if they were mother/daughter….they’re not by the way. I was trying to capture the feel of this typical Italian bakery, but got a lot more detail from the expressions on these two generations of Lawrence residents and their hands folded on the counter than if I had captured the rows of cookies and rolls behind the glass.

I decided to use of human element to animate my photo of this detailed bakery scene, with the young eager high school girl next to the senior matron with her knowing smirk in their matching yellow uniform shirts. I wanted to show a context of economic change over time, especially in contrast to the closed bakery across the street.

As interesting as it was to venture into little cafes, thumb through historical photos, and talk to staff at visitor centers, I was still feeling like a stranger passing through. Most of the people I met and talked with on those initial journeys were not current residents, who not just worked, but lived and rooted the community’s circumstance. On Wednesday, I haunted the Practicum’s “kick off” meeting Wednesday, organized to discuss revitalization strategies for the Arlington neighborhood. It included MIT DUSP Practicum students and local community organizers, leaders, residents, and staff from the City’s Community Development Department. The Practicum is a team of graduate students interested in working with the City and its partners in the Arlington neighborhood on developing a neighborhood strategy to address community revitalization issues, such as (1) flooding and (2) foreclosure prevention. The students presented the past history of other practicum projects, held in other neighborhoods in Lawrence, and proposed some ideas about projects they think they could implement to support very local community development. It was an effort to not only meet some organizers and resident leaders in the Arlington neighborhood, but also to create a context to encourage the process of conversation, problem identification, and hope for improvement of conditions.

Lawrence/Methuen Community Coalition generously offered their space at 112 East Haverhill Street (at the Old Prospect School) to hold the meeting and I took some time before the meeting started to explore the building and take some photos in the great light of dusk. Harold Magoon, LMCC’s executive director gave me a bit of a tour through the space and the history. The School is an antique, small schoolhouse (housing only 3 of the youngest grades of students) from the early days of Lawrence. From the outside, it looks its age (peeling paint, towering steeples leaning, worn down stone front steps) and hasn’t changed its essential form much other than rough wood accessible ramps. Over the years, the building transformed internally into a Disabled American Veterans social club, complete with the bar, linoleum floor, drop ceilings, and fluorescent lighting, all embedded in the beautiful wood walls and banistered stairwells of the old schoolhouse. The building then lay abandoned for years, until the LMCC took it over 6 months ago, and so it is transformed internally again, with cubicles by the bar, a bathroom that looks right out of a grandmother’s residence, and a boarded up stairwells. It is here, inside a structure that has so much physical evidence of change inside, that eager MIT students convened with residents and activists hungry for constructive partnership.

So I naturally recorded the event by taking photos of the meeting, students standing in front of the room and formally pitching their expertise and ideas. But then also I captured the real exchange that happened across the big circle of plastic tables, each word translated into both English and Spanish as we went along, smaller side conversations floating among a larger flow of idea exchange of the larger group.

But I also took some time before the meeting to examine the building itself, as a physical context for this meeting. Many questions emerged. What did it mean to be having such a meeting there, instead of at MIT, or the offices of the Community Dev Dept or at one of the functioning elementary schools, or in a church basement instead? What did the bright shiny LMCC sign on the ragged looking building, with bright green weeds growing from the base mean for folks as they entered in the physical space for the exchange? What did Harold standing in the big welcoming antique school doorway mean in contrast to the aging steps and sidewalk? How did the beautiful dusk light welcome participants contrast with the strange blue quality the night took on as you stood inside and looked at the busy house stoop across the street? Did my feelings about the meeting change depending if I was standing outside looking in or inside looking out? How was this affected by the physical make-up and state of disrepair of the building affect the participant’s attitude? Did they take for granted the mix of deep history, disrepair and hasty, modern upgrades (as something they see everyday) so that it didn’t affect their communication process as it did for me as a newcomer? Did the deep context of the Prospect School building’s history have affect on the future actions that were germinated that night within it?

I also made another trip to Lawrence on Sunday to observe a larger, more celebratory gathering, the Canal Illuminations. Groundwork Lawrence (a local nonprofit focused on sustainable environmental change) and Live Lawrence partnered to create a cross-cultural event where families could come and participate in making a peace lanterns that were then dropped into the North Canal at dusk. There were also Italian and Hispanic themed musical and theater performances along the river, with every sidewalk lined with youth handcrafted paper lanterns.

As it says on their website: “Live Lawrence brings together the City’s key cultural institutions, local artists and performers in events…to bring new consumers to local businesses…and also transform key areas of Lawrence, such as the canal walk, into active community space in order to stimulate economic impact, increase marketability of the city, and preserve the community’s diversity.”

As I learned from talking to the staff of the Essex Art Center’s youth art programs, many of the lanterns featured in this event were made by youth in schools, community centers, libraries, and after-school programs at the Center and the Boys & Girls Club. I liked the mix of institutional light and individual handmade light reflecting and traveling down the river, which was essentially the first elemental context of the city of Lawrence. The original designers of the City chose these parts of the Merrimack River to take the most advantage of the waterpower. But as the industry fueled by this river’s power slowly leaked out of the economic fabric of Lawrence, the river now serves as more of a performance space for reflecting the City’s past and current history. This history is often spoken in a vocabulary of industrial decay and abandonment, but many local leaders are attempting to change this vocabulary through economic development and new multicultural events such as this one.

The organizing of this event made a conscious decision to change the conversation being held at this space, by adding objects adorned with overt and subliminal meanings of peace, hope and love that take advantage of the currents of the landscape context to concentrate community members awareness and participation in these new dialogs. Many of these new conversations are bilingual and celebratory of new cultures of new residents.

I wish more folks from the community had come out to see these dots of hope float down that river – their numbers seemed small in comparison to the just awakening but looming faces of the mill buildings. But the small, enthusiastic group of youth, who leaned over the bridge to drop their lights into the river, was at least a start.

To view the six photos I chose for my significant detail project, see my Flickr account.