Community Planning Process for the Design of the James Baldwin Memorial Outdoor Learning Center Begins!

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.   

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 90^th 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 [Photograph by Dmitri Kasterine, www.kasterine.com]

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."
 

Architect Linda Pollak

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. 

Sharing group generated ideas at Future Abundance.

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. 

Susanna Banks, Community Health Organizer for our school’s Montefiore School Health Program

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.  

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.”

Clinton Garden tomatoes 2015. [photo Ahna Pultinas]

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