"Country" Cousin Encounters The City

By Nina Cooke John

When I arrived in New York City in August 1989, it was not my first time in the city. I had made the trip from Jamaica almost every summer, visiting my grandmother, aunts, uncles and cousins in the Bronx, Brooklyn and East Orange, New Jersey over the previous 16 years. I saw the city at its darkest during the blackout in the summer of 1977 when my most vivid memories are of filthy streets and subway cars covered in graffiti. I moved my cousins from their apartment in the Marlboro Housing Projects in Coney Island, which made the list of the worst NYCHA buildings in 2013, to their new house in Kensington. And I danced to Kurtis Blow’s ‘These are the Breaks’ over and over in my cousin’s room in Co-Op City as she introduced me to hip hop in its infancy. But this trip was different. New York City, the Bronx in particular, was to become my new home away from home as I began studying architecture. My uncles had mentioned that City College had a good architecture program, and that was enough to convince my mother that’s where I should go.

Convent Avenue, photography by James Maher

In preparation for my having to navigate the city on my own, my mother taught me everything she knew about the subway system, how the streets are ordered north to south and that the East Side Avenues went Lexington, Park, Madison, Fifth. I would come to define my own routes around the city, finding my way and my confidence on the street and underground. Without realizing it at the time, I was learning how the built environment defines our relationships to spaces - determining how we navigate and engage with our surroundings - both as a new resident and as an architecture student. Looking back to my youth, as the country cousin of sorts, I had been following along and engaging with the city from the point of view of my city cousins – retracing their geographies as second-generation Jamaican immigrant children making their way in the city. Now I would be writing my own story onto the city through the lens of my own intersectional realities as a young, Black, Jamaican, immigrant architecture student. From my new vantage point, I would understand how rich, urban environments sponsor and support creativity through the seemingly limitless possibilities for the realization of self. At the same time, however, the invisible boundaries, borders and markers that define the limits of where women, people of color and the poor can freely explore would reveal themselves.

City College

City College of New York was established “to provide the children of immigrants and the poor access to higher education based on academic merit alone” providing “educational and social change opportunities for students for over 170 years” In my calculus class, one of my first as a new student, I was one of only two women and the only Black student of the otherwise all-Chinese group. I had landed in this class only after my mother (herself a math teacher) had advocated for my going into the class into which I had tested instead of the lower level that the counselor recommended. Within two years I would take charge of my own advocacy when, I, along with other students, took over campus buildings in protest of proposed tuition increases. The makeup of that one class, however, was atypical of the rest of my City College experience. The affordable price tag ensured that the student body generally reflected the diversity of New York City more directly than I’ve seen in any other institution.

My commute was really short. I took the C or D train from 161st St./Yankee Stadium two stops to 145th Street in Harlem. (My first trip on my own, I waited for the D train like I did with my mother. The train platform would fill up, a C train would arrive, then everyone would get on, emptying the platform, and the train would leave. Another C train would arrive, and the same thing would happen again. I stood on the platform watching C trains come and go a few times before I finally called my uncle who let me know that the D ran express during rush hour, but the C train would also get me to campus). The townhouses along my walk from the subway station, one block from historic Sugar Hill – home to W.E.B. Dubois, Thurgood Marshall and other members of the African American elite – reminded me of the outdoor scenes from the Cosby Show: my first real introduction to upper class African American life. My awe at the splendor of Shephard Hall, the gothic revival building that housed the architecture school atop the tree-lined hill of Convent Avenue just inside the college gates, never diminished even as I experienced it day after day. This building would become the center of my life for the next two years as I came into my own as an architecture student.

City College is a commuter school. My classmates traveled in for classes from the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, Harlem, Washington Heights, the Lower East Side and New Jersey; by foot, bus, subway and car. We were from the Dominican Republic, Hong Kong, Jamaica, India, Haiti and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. But our new, common experience, would be the bittersweet hazing that is an architecture education. We slept under desks and showered in the gym. We made regular trips to Chinatown, traveling the fifteen subway stops from Harlem, to Pearl Paint whose six floors of art supplies demanded restraint for our light purses. We made late night runs down the hill to Hamilton Heights for Chinese food from a shop whose Chinese workers grew up in Cuba before arriving in New York. We also learned that New York City in 1989 was a very different place to the cities that many of us came from.

The Limitless City

In 1989, David Dinkins was elected mayor. Though I wasn’t tuned in to the details of the politics, I remember how delighted everyone was that New York City had elected its first Black mayor. I also remember the shooting murder of Yusuf Hawkins, a young Black man who, along with his brother and friends, were attacked in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn by a gang of white teenagers. They had crossed into the predominantly white neighborhood shopping for a used car. Murders in the city hit a record high in 1990. Living in the city for the first time, I felt both the danger and excitement of the place and how it confined and expanded where I could go and how I could move about. I learned to change my sauntering pace to one that would catch the lights at the cross walks before they changed so that I could keep moving and keep up the pace. I quickly caught on that if I stood next to a white commuter on my ride home on the 4 train, I would likely get a seat after 96th Street. I never really felt intensely afraid, except the one time, on a sunny Saturday afternoon when, as I was standing in the lobby of our apartment building, beyond the sidewalk, but not fully inside the building, a man walked by and flashed me. He walked back and forth on the sidewalk telling me to look at his ‘power’. There would have been people moving about behind me in the lobby and behind him on the street, but, somehow, at this threshold, no one saw, or cared, but me. When I recounted the story to my mother and aunts, none of them indicated the slightest surprise as they had their own stories of indecent exposure in public space in the city. In spite of all this, I soaked up all the creative energy that the city emitted. I spent as much time as I could on St. Mark’s Place rubbing shoulders with Cooper Union students and people watching. The expressions of individuality seemed so different to the conservative environment in which I grew up.

Glimpsing the Future

That year I worked in City Hall at the Department of Transportation drawing brickwork onto a plaza in the Bronx and with an interior designer in the West Village who taught me that Salmon was a color as I typed her contacts onto salmon-colored rolodex cards in the biggest apartment I had ever been into up until that point. I would pick up lunch for us both at Jefferson Market on Greenwich Street after heading up to the D and D building to exchange fabric samples. I finally got a job in an architecture firm in my second year, doing administrative work. Once a week, I would walk a mile across 23rd Street from the 6 train stop to the city’s edge. I walked under the FDR highway, past the UN school to Waterside Plaza, the Mitchell-Lama mixed use development where the sliver of an office overlooked the East River. I stapled receipts to invoices as I stared at the boats making their way up and down the river. I caught glimpses of the partners’ perspective drawings of a vacation house in Vermont and construction sets for a private school in the city. It is in this office that I got a glimpse into my future juggling professional practice and parenthood as I cooed at the couple’s baby boy. He spent as much time in the office as at home with his grandmother. But my life as a working parent was still more than a decade away. I was just at the beginning of my architectural journey.

The City, New York and others around the world, would continue to be a teacher of lessons, both personal and architectural. A place to observe and engage with cultural vibrancy, artistic accessibility and plurality of ideas, its bounds are limitless. At the same time, however, if we look, we can see that there are real limits to full engagement for the disenfranchised to the very things we value in urban living.