tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post8404888462236826064..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: In a broken doll's eyes: vulnerability and abandonment in the American city: Ken Paik, Kansas City, 1973Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-43514889024188807602018-05-02T15:54:51.476-07:002018-05-02T15:54:51.476-07:00This comment has been removed by the author.Gerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01121453681621048899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-85942591327935904872018-05-01T22:18:32.857-07:002018-05-01T22:18:32.857-07:00Thank you, Geraldine.
You are the reader this po...Thank you, Geraldine. <br /><br />You are the reader this post has been waiting for. Continuity, completing the circle...TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-1953896117945873022018-05-01T18:03:03.175-07:002018-05-01T18:03:03.175-07:00I lived in this area! Actually, the home we lived ...I lived in this area! Actually, the home we lived in is shown in a few of the pictures. These pictures brought me back to a place I thought I would never see again. <br />Thank you! <br />Jeraldine Perala <br />Gerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01121453681621048899noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-78752082226546568882015-06-23T22:10:46.546-07:002015-06-23T22:10:46.546-07:00[continues:]
"By 1973 the buildings of Mulke...[continues:]<br /><br />"By 1973 the buildings of Mulkey Square had clearly been neglected for years, but at one time the area 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 architectural sensibility. Ironically, their decorative elements indicated to a 1971 team of architectural surveyors that home ownership in Mulkey Square originally exemplified a '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... With the departure of the middle class, banks stopped giving loans for the area and the houses were eventually subdivided and used as rooming houses. After World War II, with the area transformed into cheap, ill maintained rentals, the city constructed a new public housing project nearby and cut back on providing street repair and basic services. The middle class migration southward 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 expansion. Middle class migration was spurred by the construction of Country Club Plaza, the first shopping center planned around the automobile. The brainchild of J.C. Nichols, it was dubbed 'Nichols’ Folly'; when first proposed because city fathers were 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 Street (Mulkey Square is at 51st) and Nichols’ parcel began at 51st. But Nichols predicted the influence of the automobile, and in fact encouraged it. He created a planned residential development around the shopping plaza that included eight filling stations, parking spaces in front of the shops, and a private garage for each home.<br /><br />"Not only did the affluent middle classes move beyond city limits, they shifted the heart of the city from downtown to the Country Club Plaza district, where it remains today, and paved the way for further suburban expansion."<br /><br />-- Barbara Lynn Shubinski, 2009TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-45703776644278126342015-06-23T22:10:29.086-07:002015-06-23T22:10:29.086-07:00Many thanks to all for adding useful testimony and...Many thanks to all for adding useful testimony and text to help us appreciate Ken Paik's portfolio.<br /><br /> "...isolating and atomizing what once were strong bonds"..."the breakdown of an agro-industrial civilisation"..."My city was gone..."<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:<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. 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 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 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 North.<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 metropolis and thus heavily lobbied for by corporations and municipal governments, often in partnership. And, with high earning management positions occupied mostly by incoming non Southern professionals, uneducated native Southerners were left to the low wage jobs of the marginal manufacturing industries like biscuitmaking. 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 migration of African Americans from the deeper South, the destruction of low income inner city neighborhoods, and the loss of what manufacturing industry it had (mostly stockyards and meatpacking) over the course of the second half of the twentieth century. But here massive highway construction plans left the dislocated poor to their own devices, as Kansas City, unlike northeastern urban centers, never engaged significantly in the construction of public housing."TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-3496815222015656072015-06-23T11:26:07.880-07:002015-06-23T11:26:07.880-07:00The Pretenders - My city was gone
about Akron,O...The Pretenders - My city was gone <br /><br />about Akron,OH - live version<br /><br />https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvAYGz6Iwmcmistah charley, ph.d.https://www.blogger.com/profile/06303695341246058680noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-57583964886970599082015-06-23T10:55:46.506-07:002015-06-23T10:55:46.506-07:00Yes, that picture with the old man bent over doubl...Yes, that picture with the old man bent over double, with his trolley of things (soup cans?)is wonderful, as is the one of the quiet street under leafy shade on what must be a Saturday afternoon.<br /><br />Yep, the liveable, worn-out, perhaps even shoddy habitat vs the abstract plan of the designers and engineers. I think Sennett was right when he wrote that roads (highways) are just about getting from A to B (but there's no 'B' there when you get there-to paraphrase G. Stein). Isn't all the hype about the supposed connectivity of the internet highway really just the same thing? Speed, movement, restlessness, freedom..but to what end, what purpose (except it's all very convenient for the economic system). <br /><br />Strange, but where I used to live (S. Wales) was also a bit "run down", although we never really thought of it like that when we were kids.<br /><br />Tom, there's this great line in Hugh Brody's 'The Other Side of Eden' when Brody takes a Native American to Essex to show him what he thinks is closer to Nature (away from the city..since you mention Raymond Williams). But all the 'Red Man' could say was: "it's so built up!". <br /><br />Maybe that's what we're witnessing here: the break down of an agro-industrial civilisation?<br /><br />Khair..thanks again for pointing us to these wonderful, sad pictures. <br /><br />Best wishes,<br /><br />K.billoohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10716970909272480118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-33844523231550831422015-06-23T08:04:10.202-07:002015-06-23T08:04:10.202-07:00heartbreaking, poem and photos Tom...when I moved ...heartbreaking, poem and photos Tom...when I moved back to Jersey after forty years away I didn't know how to get around to nearby towns from where I grew up because there are so many "freeways" etc. cutting through old neighborhoods and the streets that connected them etc. ...isolating and atomizing what once were strong bonds etc.... the obvious but still tragic in my eyes and of course they mostly destroyed the poorer neighborhoods etc.Lallyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05310472614196384595noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-72201759544256405112015-06-23T07:57:58.224-07:002015-06-23T07:57:58.224-07:00K, what's worse than the national contagion of...K, what's worse than the 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. <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.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-3511156373804405262015-06-23T07:26:03.285-07:002015-06-23T07:26:03.285-07:00There are some great photos here, Tom. Thanks for ...There are some great photos here, Tom. Thanks for sharing them. Reminded me immediately of Solnit's article on Detroit. And the dolls..takes me back to that scene from one of the old Planet of the Apes films when they find a doll in the mud. Looking back on all that has been abandoned, all that has been accumulated and thrown away, you wonder what anyone would make of human civilisation: a waste, or the trace of some beautiful stories around each object?billoohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10716970909272480118noreply@blogger.com