I had the good fortune to land in the East Village upon graduating, when it was still affordable. The unlucky part was that Reagan was elected president, the New York Stock Exchange went from paper to electronic trading, and the first cases of what became l own as AIDS were detected.
I lived in a low rent railroad tenement flat across the street from Madonna and walked to work in the 12th floor of Union Square West, under the penthouse where Grace Jones resided. My commute between two divas crossed legendary Tompkins Square Park, Saint Marks Place, Astor Place and the used book stores and f Lower Broadway.
As a social subject mapped in Neil Smith’s narrative of revanchist gentrification and a member of Act-Up, I could not help but develop an activist architectural practice from my DIY workspace in East 4th Street. My friends tilted more toward dance, performance and film, and the Ouramid Club, La MaMa and storefront galleries were our haunts.
My nightly bike rides and walks between the East and West Villages took in the passing of one queer utopia of the West side gay ghetto to the gender bending cultural mix of the East side. A corner bar, basement porn theater, bathhouse, dance clubs and piers of abandonment were common stops.
After working in an architecture office long enough to get licenses, I took a year off and lived in Rome. As Goethe said, to educate myself before I turned 30. I started teaching at New Jersey Institute of Technology upon my return and brought students to Rome to study for three subsequent years. Moving between the East Village in New York and Trastevere in Rome from 1985 to 1990 made a lasting impression on me and informed all my subsequent work which has focused on how cites adapt and change over time...
While my first architectural job was drawing a brick walled timber framed factory building in Springfield, I found a new home and work space in an old toy factory of similar vintage in the Ironbound Neighborhood of Newark New Jersey. Logistically, the Newark live-work space was ideal. Two blocks from Newark Penn Station, I could take the Northeast Corridor north to Springfield to look in on my parents, or south to Baltimore, where I began to collaborate with the Baltimore Ecosystem Study in 2002. It also was ten minutes to EWR and a flight to Bangkok twice a year, where I became deeply involved in new personal and professional experiences.
With a new millennium I started a new firm, urban-interface, llc, that sought to combine the activist damage control work of the 80s with the more techno-utopian 90s possibilities of broader communication around urban and environmental design. The practice model juggled three areas: pro-bono environmental justice work.especially with the Ironbound Community Corporation, funded urban ecological research in Baltimore, and the bread and butter of New Jersey real estate development...
I spent the first 20 years of my life in Springfield, Massachusetts, a once prosperous industrial city in the Connecticut River Valley that began its long economic decline during my childhood. Called Tobacco Valley, it is the most fertile on the East Coast, and a few long wooden tobacco leaf drying sheds can still be found south of the city.
I went to the same Catholic primary school as my parents and brothers, but my generation of cousins scattered across the country. Although I half-heartedly played all the organized sports my dad coached, like my brothers, I felt most myself on my bicycle, depriving myself of the daily evening newspaper.
My maternal uncles built a cabin on a lake in the Berkshires, and I built a small backyard shed for myself with some of their left-over wood. It soon sported an adjacent garden...
I don’t know what the next two decades will bring, but we have moved to the Hudson Highlands in Upstate New York. The renovated lakeside cabin is the same vintage and reminds me of the cabin in the Berkshires where I spent many childhood summers. I also found myself in an office in the same block between Union Square and 5th Avenue where I had worked from 1981 to 1985. Life is an eternal return.