half-white, middle-class neighborhood were exciting. Our new street had giant sycamore trees, and I was delighted by the beautiful tree-lined street and the stately houses. In autumn, on our way to and from school, we loved to kick up the brown leaves piled high on the sidewalk and hear the rustling sounds. Four doors down was Clark Park, where we used to play. It had originally been an industrial area with a creek—Mill Creek—running through it. Subsequently, the creek had been enclosed in a culvert underground and the industrial buildings removed. In the middle of the park was a huge bowl, the former creek bed, where we would play.
Living in our new neighborhood, we felt that we could share in the life of the city, which was still in its heyday. The downtown had great department stores and movie houses. We had a sense that we might finally be part of the great urban life. Ironically for us, however, city life had reached its peak shortly after we moved into our middle-class neighborhood and then began a sharp decline.
We didn’t play or interact socially with the white children who remained in the neighborhood. We played exclusively with black kids, most of whose families were renters living in the two-story apartment flats on Forty-Fifth Street or in row houses on the side streets. A white family, anxious to get out before blacks moved in and “ruined the neighborhood,” had sold their house to our family for about six thousand dollars.
During the war years, my dad worked at the Navy shipyard helping assemble the bulkheads that became the central structural elements of aircraft carriers. We also rented out rooms on the third floor to three young single working women, and ran the house as a bed and breakfast, serving coffee and cinnamon buns to our roomers in the mornings before the sun came up.
After the war, Dad lost his job at the shipyard, and we lost our roomers, but he was an entrepreneur and started making a living as a handyman. When I was seven and Lewie was eight, we started working alongside him—cleaning and fixing up the houses that the white people had left behind, taking out trash, and whitewashing basements. At one point, Dad got a job as a paperhanger, and I became his assistant.
Dad set up a woodshop in the basement and created a hobby room for us. We got ideas for projects from the magazine Popular Mechanics and the book Fun for Boys. I began studying magazines like Better Homes and Gardens and sending off for catalogs for building supplies and other similar products. I also enjoyed attending home and garden trade shows with Dad.
I had my own room. Dad was into color theory, so he wallpapered one wall and the ceiling with yellow paper with an ivy pattern and painted the other walls a deep mauve. I felt honored by the special attention and spent hours contemplating the patterns and the colors.
Learning activities continued in our new home. Mother loved to diagram sentences and enjoyed teaching me the parts of speech. I filled many notebooks with diagrammed sentences.
Attending an Integrated Elementary School
When September rolled around, our parents decided to send Lewie and me to B. B. Comegys, an integrated elementary school where only ten or twelve of the three hundred students were African American. I entered kindergarten and Lewie first grade. Every day, we walked six blocks through both black and white neighborhoods to get to school. The rest of the students were Eastern European Jews, Irish and Italian Catholics, and some white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The black kids we knew and played with went to Woodrow Wilson, the segregated elementary school, which was only a block from our home.
I didn’t interact much with the kids in my class at school, who hung out in ethnic clusters. We were never invited to their birthday parties and other activities outside of school. Every day, Mother carefully packed my metal lunch box with a sardine sandwich on whole wheat bread and a healthy drink. The other kids all had their lunches in bags—baloney sandwiches on white bread and soda pop. Although I knew that my lunch was healthier than what they were eating, I was embarrassed that it was different. I would slink away and eat alone.
Going to an integrated school was supposed to be a privilege, but it was stressful in many ways. I was learning to feel superior to the black kids I played with after school, but I still didn’t belong with the white kids in my class. I wanted very much to bring the black kids from our neighborhood to my school, but I didn’t have the power to make that happen. I was beginning to be aware of the invisible forces that separated the races in the neighborhoods and at school. The experience of attending an integrated school left racial scars, and the feeling of being an outsider has stayed with me all my life.
Every year during Negro History Week,5 our dad worked with Lewie and me to prepare presentations about great African Americans to share with our classmates. At the time, I was embarrassed about doing it, but later, I came to appreciate it as good training. Now I see it as a precursor of the black studies programs that emerged in the 1960s. When I compared experiences with my friend who attended the local school for blacks, I learned that they were not taught anything about black history.
In third grade, Mrs. Aikens taught us about William Penn, our city’s founder, and his plans for Philadelphia, which means “city of brotherly love.” Penn was a Quaker who believed in peace and equality among human beings. Mrs. Aikens told us how Penn had made friends with the local indigenous people, the Lenni Lenape, and had purchased land from them, and then how he had laid out the streets between the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers and given the north-south streets numbers and the east-west streets the names of trees, an idea unheard of in the seventeenth century. Each house was to be set out on a large plot surrounded by a generous field of open space. He divided the city into four quadrants, each having a large public park. I was powerfully impressed by the notion that you could lay out a city based on ideas and dedicated to social justice and equality. I did wonder why there were no black people in the stories of William Penn and early Philadelphia though.6
Mrs. Aikens later took us to see the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, a display of aerial photos and models showing what Philadelphia would look like in twenty-five years. It was designed by the famous architect Edmund Bacon, who became Philadelphia’s chief city planner. It occupied two floors of a prestigious downtown department store and included a full-scale model of a street corner in South Philadelphia complete with public trash can. I was delighted by the opportunity to look into the future and deeply inspired by the aerial photos and models that allowed me to look down at the city from a God’s-eye point of view.
Many elements of the exhibition excited me. The sketches, aerial photographs, and motion pictures reflected my love of drawing and other modes of visual communication. My passion in math and science and my enthusiasm for making things were satisfied by the architectural plans and elevations and the various charts, displays, and models. Going to the exhibition was like magic. Something in me clicked, and I knew I wanted to be like the people who created the exhibition. However, just as I became enthusiastic about designing and building cities, I was dimly aware that white flight to the suburbs had begun. The dominant culture was losing interest in the urban environment and focusing primarily on building racially restrictive suburbs. Gradually, the pattern of suburban sprawl and inner-city decline was becoming established.
Growing up, my experience of the natural world was always linked to the human community. It was never an idyllic encounter with the untrammeled landscape of water, sky, rolling hills, forest, and mountains. I didn’t have such experiences until I became an adult.
Starting in early childhood and continuing throughout my youth, I developed emotionally and formed my sense of identity through my explorations of geographic space in the city of Philadelphia and beyond. As I
