By Raymond Pultinas
On June 4, Future Abundance, the first community-envisioning
workshop for the expansion of The Clinton Garden and the creation of the James
Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center took place in the DeWitt Clinton
Library. The idea was to initiate a
process for including ideas and voices of those community members who will most
benefit from the creation of this space.
The late afternoon event was begun with a performance by the DeWitt
Clinton High School Chorus under the direction of Dawn Sotello and accompanied
by Tim Bayless. Their rendition of
“Homeward Bound” was beautiful and poignant.
Here is the chorus: “Bind me not
to the pasture;/ Chain me not to the plow./ Set me free to find my calling/ And
I’ll return to you somehow.” (Lyrics by Marta Keen Thompson) The idea in these lyrics of giving someone the
gift of freedom in exchange for their potential loyalty reminds me of what The
Welcome Table, the key feature of the James Baldwin Memorial, can and will
enable. A place to return to, yes,
alumni included! A beautiful and productive garden: a source of subsistence, food
prepared from abundant growth. The
Baldwin Center will be a gathering place, a place to return to and a place to
belong to. This is why we are proposing
The James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center.
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| The area of expansion including outline of The Welcome Table [photo Marpillero Pollak Architects] |
The James Baldwin Memorial
Outdoor Learning Center is being named after the American writer who graduated
from DeWitt Clinton High School in 1942.
The time seems right to honor James Baldwin. This past year has marked
what would have been his 90th birthday and throughout the city there
were a number of public programs and events to mark the occasion. When I published a post about our project on
the James Baldwin Facebook page in April, I promptly received 581 “likes” and
137 “shares.” In the context of recent
events that remind us that racism has not departed from the American scene, the
prophetic voice of James Baldwin is relevant once again.
James Baldwin models for young people what it
might mean to be outspoken, truthful, honest, and relentless in one’s
profession and in one’s life. He encouraged
intra-racial dialogue and personal introspection and would often defy genres
and expectations to achieve unique and lasting literature. As Kalil G. Muhammad, director of the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture put it in a recent New York
Times article, James Baldwin was “one of the fiercest critics of the
American race problem who ever put pen to paper.” When one of our
guests at a recent planning event heard that we were naming our project after
James Baldwin she used the word sassy to describe him. Yes, James Baldwin was
sassy. He wasn’t afraid to speak his
mind and say things that people were not yet ready to hear. James Baldwin insisted that “all men are
brothers."
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| Architect Linda Pollak |
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| Project Leader Ray Pultinas |
After greetings by Principal Taveras and
presentations by Project Director, Raymond Pultinas, and Architect Linda Pollak
about present space, need for expansion, an architectural review of the present
conditions and argument for creating an outdoor learning spaces, four groups
were formed among the over forty attendees.
Each group represented one of the four seasons. Each group was provided a brainstorming
worksheet and given the task to imagine what could happen in the garden during
that season. The results were
amazing. Why couldn’t we sponsor cross
country skiing instruction in the Winter and host "a spoken word
event centered around the axis of power or agency - stories told through
poetry…all Stories All Narratives shared from voices that might not usually be
heard" in the Autumn? These are
both fabulous ideas for activities and functions that the James Baldwin Center
will enable. Our first Future Abundance was an amazing
success and yielded numerous suggestions about what we could do in the space we
are creating. These ideas will be considered throughout our planning phase.
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| Sharing group generated ideas at Future Abundance. |
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| Clinton Garden Summer Interns and DWC Chorus members at Future Abundance. |
A follow-up event, Future
Abundance II, was held on July 20 in The Clinton Garden on what might have been
the hottest, most humid and intolerable evenings of the summer. Still we had a crowd of over thirty community
partners, parents, students, teachers enjoying the wonderful culinary offerings
of Chef Noah Sheetz, of Chef’s Consortium, and a partner in our project. Project partners Susanna Banks, Community Health Organizer for our
school’s Montefiore School Health Program and Monica Ortiz
Rossi Active Design Coordinator from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
shared some of their background and involvement in the project. More
ideas were gathered. One that
particularly intrigued me was from friend and former parent coordinator at
DeWitt Clinton High School, Milton Roman.
His idea was to invite Native peoples “to connect” with us. James Baldwin himself claimed Indian
heritage. Might The Clinton Garden be
the site of Native American ceremony? I
love this idea.
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| Susanna Banks, Community Health Organizer for our
school’s Montefiore School Health Program |
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Monica Ortiz
Rossi Active Design Coordinator from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
[photos Marpillero Pollak Architects] |
This fall we will continue to host events and
programming that will showcase our present and our potential as a Learning
Center while continuing to invite suggestions and ideas from our community. We plan to host a bioblitz to survey and map
the plant species that could be found on the Clinton campus and compare our
results with the 1927 Landscape and Planting Plan that we have recently obtained. We also hope to entice the Tracy Towers community
in particular to participate in our Harvest GreenMarket Sale in September.
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| Tracey Towers |
For more information and to stay connected,
please email me at raypultinas@gmail.com and if you are looking to support our effort,
look us up on IOBY where we will soon be launching a new fundraising
campaign. Search for “The James Baldwin
Memorial Outdoor Learning Center” or “The Clinton Garden.”
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| Clinton Garden tomatoes 2015. [photo Ahna Pultinas] |
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