tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post4057072147513445316..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Joseph Ceravolo: Road of Trials | In a broken doll's eyes: vulnerability and abandonment in the American city: Ken Paik, Kansas City, 1973Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-71522684476822766032018-05-03T05:24:08.573-07:002018-05-03T05:24:08.573-07:00thx kthx kTChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-38435285331458788752018-05-03T00:44:07.459-07:002018-05-03T00:44:07.459-07:00TC,
Stunning. I'll be studying this one for y...TC,<br /><br />Stunning. I'll be studying this one for years. We all should.<br /><br />kkenthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12448791356455016794noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-48969128691495044532018-05-02T17:18:16.800-07:002018-05-02T17:18:16.800-07:00[Shubinski continues:]
"Two enormous effect...[Shubinski continues:]<br /><br /><br />"Two enormous effects of this were visited upon Mulkey Square. First, highways became the key determinant of growth, necessary to the functioning of the sprawling<br />metropolis and thus heavily lobbied for by corporations and municipal governments, often in partnership. And, with high earning management positions occupied mostly by<br />incoming non Southern professionals, uneducated native Southerners were left to the low wage jobs of the marginal manufacturing industries like biscuit<br />making. In many ways, Kansas City experienced some of the major trends of the Northeast, such as the emptying of downtown districts in favor of suburbs, a great in<br />migration of African Americans from the deeper South, the destruction of low income inner city neighborhoods, and the<br />loss of what manufacturing industry it had (mostly stockyards and meatpacking) over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. But here<br />massive highwayconstruction plans left the dislocated poor to their own devices, as Kansas City, unlike northeastern urban centers, never engaged<br />significantly in the construction of public housing.<br /><br />.<br /><br />"By 1973 the buildings of Mulkey Square had clearly been neglected for years, but at one time the area<br />was a prosperous early suburb of Kansas City. Built in the 1870s, the houses are large and exhibit styles designed to express a conservatively fashionable<br />architectural sensibility. Ironically, their decorative elements indicated to a 1971 team of architectural surveyors that home ownership in Mulkey Square originally exemplified a<br />'best foot forward' attitude intended to 'create the best social impression possible.'<br /><br />"By the 1970s, no such attitude of social impression is possible for the kinds of residents who live in Mulkey Square. The middle class began to move southward around 1917 and,<br />by ignoring the particulars of this story, Paik could not parse his subjects in light of the complicated history of incentives and disincentives, public investment and private<br />interest, in their neighborhood. With the departure of the middle class, banks stopped giving loans for the area and the houses were eventually subdivided and<br />used as rooming houses. After World War II, with the area transformed into cheap, ill maintained rentals, the city constructed a new<br />public housing project nearby and cut back on providing street repair and basic services. The middle class migration south<br />ward in Kansas City is particular to the city’s history and also contains a national story, in fact helped shape the national story of suburban<br />expansion. Middle class migration was spurred by the construction of Country Club Plaza, the first shopping center<br />planned around the automobile. The brainchild of J.C. Nichols, it was dubbed “Nichols’ Folly” when first proposed because city fathers were<br />convinced people would never venture that far outside the established city limits. At the time of his purchase in 1915, the streetcar lines ended at 47th<br />Street (Mulkey Square is at 51st) and Nichols’ parcel began at 51st. But Nichols predicted the influence of the<br />automobile, and in fact encouraged it. He created a planned residential development around the shopping<br />plaza that included eight filling stations, parking spaces in front of the shops, and a private garage for each home.<br />Not only did the affluent middle classes move beyond city limits, they shifted the heart of the city from downtown to the Country<br />Club Plaza district, where it remains today, and paved the way for further suburban expansion."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-61132151874288659362018-05-02T17:15:49.745-07:002018-05-02T17:15:49.745-07:00What's to my mind even worse than the massivel...What's to my mind even worse than the massively destructive national contagion of "urban development" -- which systematically demolished tens of thousands of liveable if well-used structures in the cities -- was/is the freeway wastelands which have replaced them. For me what's most affecting here are the shots of old people trying to get on somehow with their rickety shopping contraptions in neighborhoods that are literally coming down around them. The subsequent suburban tract sprawls and malls and megastores that were to contain a bright synthetic future have left us with a hazy, polluted coast-to-coast concrete parking-lot that bears little trace of what Raymond Williams once called "knowable community", a term now overborne alternately by nostalgia and memory loss.<br /><br /> The photographer here, Kenneth Paik, was Korean by birth, a veteran of the Korean Marines, who became a respected photojournalist for a number of city papers, in Kansas City, later Baltimore, and also went on to work internationally in Africa, among other places. His success in getting up so close with his common subjects here is a result in part of his familiarity with the region, where he'd been working steadily on journalistic assignments, and in part of his necessary ability to see the American Heartland, so called, with an outsider's objective eye. And at the same time I think his Korean cultural understanding underlines his distance from folks whom he pretty clearly considered white trash.<br /><br /> This assignment for the EPA came from the Documerica project, a short-lived, extremely interesting early 70's photographic survey designed after the model of the terrific Farm Security Administration surveys of the Depression era. The project survived only the early years of the decade. There's been nothing like it since.<br /><br />The process by which American countryside, with its myriad local variations in landscape, social and economic presence, and relative human habitability, was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century into a massive, more or less continuous industrial/ commercial strip, organized by capital accumulation and distribution, is writ small in the lives of the people Ken Paik photographs here.<br /><br />Some historical context on the specific location Paik was documenting in Kansas City (from Barbara Lynn Shubinski, 2009):<br /><br />"...That meant that the cities became spatially enormous and far flung, geographically huge but with densities half that of the national urban average.<br /><br />"In this regard, Kansas City was quite typical. Although not a deeply Southern city, it occupies the edge of Missouri’s southern inflected culture. By the 1970s, it had become<br />five times as large in area as it had been in the 1940s. The spread was accomplished, as it was across the Sunbelt, by annexation. The “growth” in southern cities was largely a<br />matter of retaining the tax base northern cities lost to their suburbs. Mild climate, relative lack of industrial blight and, anti-union right to work laws lured businesses from the<br />North.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com