The Significance of the Unbuilt Project

ArgGEO’s proposal for a continuous waterfront walk along Biscayne Bay in Downtown Miami, known as the Pink Link, had its roots in a number of waterfront proposals alongside Biscayne Bay. Beginning with a 2007 proposal called Miami Waterline, the firm began to think deeply about pedestrian connectivity alongside the waterfront edge. The effort would continue with a series of other projects spanning a decade: a 2011 proposal known as Biscayne Line; an art installation called “Migration;” and, finally, the Pink Link in 2017.

The fact that none of the proposals were realized, hardly diminishes their importance. Each iteration spawned a legacy that could have an effect on the city and future work at the firm. Aspects of the designs have already found their way to a number of other built projects, including the Perez Art Museum Miami and Icon Bay Park, both on Biscayne Bay. Several resiliency concepts from the plans were implemented at PAMM. A mangrove leaf motif from Miami Waterline found its way to Icon Bay, as well as in several designs at other projects where elliptical gestures have become something of a signature for the firm. 

But if one were to ask Laurinda Spear what inspired the elliptical motif, she’d likely point to opposing ellipses developed by 17th century Italian architect Francesco Borromini. Or she might suggest a reading of T.S. Elliot’s 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” to underscore the notion that whatever inspires an architect, likely comes from their own previously completed work or that of another artist or architect—and that’s OK.  

“You always draw from your own work or other historical work,” says Spear. “Somewhere in your education and your consciousness, there's a continuum and you're just part of it.”  

In Elliot’s essay, he eschews the notion of nostalgia as a negative, something to be dismissed by modern thinkers. Instead, he points out that contemporary artists, or in the case of his essay, poets, owe a debt of gratitude to “the dead.”

 He notes that contemporary artists often praise aspects of a work that least resembles the work of anyone else, hyping the artist’s individuality. But this egocentric view ignores the reality of how a work of art affects others, a particular concern to landscape architects working in the public realm.

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone… …What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.”

That Elliot uses the pronoun him is a sign of his times. But more importantly, in the case of this series of proposed projects, it could be argued that each project became an “existing monument” for the next iteration, and, eventually, for future projects, and ultimately for the language of the firm itself.

The initial idea of a continuous pedestrian link arose from a private client’s effort to give a contiguous waterfront park to the city. The client touted the proposed Miami Waterline as a “living edge” that would maintain a “delicate connection between the wild landscape horizon and the contemporary vertical city.”

Planned for the former site of the Miami Herald, just north of the MacArthur Causeway the project dealt head on with how the proposed development would affect its neighbors by attempting to connect with them via the waterfront and further developing the Baywalk, a preexisting pathway  along the bay.

 Plenty of physical hurdles stood in their way, including the causeway and a boat slip that would force a downtown detour for anyone hoping for a walk along the bay. By using the mangrove leave motif, GEO  sought to link the development to nearby Museum Park. Leaf-like islands connected by “branches” jutted out into the bay, creating haven for boats while building bridges above and below the causeway, as well as in front of the boat slip. Seagrass meadows and mangrove bosques were used to mitigate human effects on the natural environment. ADA accessible and solar powered water taxis were conceptualized to connect neighboring islands to mainland amenities. 

 A second developer-driven attempt at waterfront connectivity came with support from The Related Group . The newly renamed Biscayne Line proposal kept several aspects of the Miami Waterline plan, including the mangrove leaf formations. With participation from the University of Miami School of Architecture, the firm identified the “missing teeth” of Miami’s promenade by detailing the many property-owning stakeholders along the Biscayne waterfront.

While both developers were willing, indeed, enthusiastic to support a world-class public amenity at the edge of their projects, by 2018, the city’s planning department had rolled out Miami 21, a revised city code that favored pedestrian accessibility. The code required property owners to develop easements fronting their properties alongside the bay. The hope was that the new regulation would stitch together disparate connections to the rest of the Baywalk. But without cohesive design guidelines, each developer could design their bay front portion in their own manner and a hodgepodge of designs could proliferate. A request for proposals ensued and GEO, with nearly a decade’s worth of research already behind them, proposed the Pink Link.

As if channeling Elliot, the Pink Link was a wholly new work inspired by all the projects of the firm since it was incorporated in 2006—and many designs before that. For example, the color pink was chosen to brand the project. In 1978, Spear designed the Pink House with Bernardo Fort Brescia just as they formed Arquitectonica with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Hervin Romney. The Pink House became an iconic building frequently featured on television and in film nearly as much as the Atlantis Condominium, which was shown weekly across the nation as part of the opening credit sequence of Miami Vice. Five years after the Pink House, Christo and Jean-Claude created “Surrounded Islands,” a series of Biscayne Bay islands wrapped in pink. Nature gave Miami pink flamingos, commerce gave it pink neon. The new Bayfront identity would make it official: Miami is pink; pink is Miami.

To underscore the point, GEO incorporated an unbuilt work, Migration, to punctuate, identify, and brand the heterogeneous sites that made up the newly extended Baywalk. Migration was composed of Melaleucas trees harvested and painted pink. The tree groupings would be imbedded into existing hardscape surfaces. The installation, which would serve as bird perches, would be a reminder of the lack of much needed resting spots for the birds that funnel through the region on their seasonal journeys to and from the Caribbean and South America. Blue circles painted on the ground would symbolize lost canopies, while bird silhouettes would indicate major migratory routes. The use of Melaleucas, an invasive species to the region, would also call attention to how much unwelcome species have thrived in the region.  

The firm designed a  simple three lined logo for Pink Link: one long vertical pink line, with two offshoots vertically angled upward, one green, the other pink. The long line represented the unified Baywalk, while the pink offshoot represented the Brickel Key connection (a nearby island), and the green offshoot represented the Miami River Greenway, previously not included as part of the ensemble.

The new plan envisioned a diversity of access points to navigate east-west causeways, rivers, and boat slips. An ADA-accessible boat shuttle was proposed as a free amenity, that would no doubt attract tourists as well as commuters. A pink floating dock inspired by the logo would run beneath the MacArthur Causeway, finally connecting PAMM and Museum Park to future developments north. In addition to Migration, painted pink palm tree trunks, and other pink icons would continue to guide visitors along the route as well as encourage social media photos.  

The many plans received endorsements from past clients, elected officials, the press, and the public. Yet, all of the plans, spanning nearly a decade, remain unbuilt. Even with the support of public officials, the actual process of building in Miami has, like opinions nationally, fallen under the groundswell of noise fostered by social media, which can sway and mobilize public opinion in a heartbeat.

The change of heart on initially well-received plans can’t be explained in a single essay. Suffice it to say that Spear and Blanco dealt with the loss and got on with the work jobs at hand, though not without an initial bit of soul searching.

“I'd say it pierces our armor to some extent, I mean we're not ignoring it. I guess we're just plain old hardheaded,” said Spear. “It's the commitment to making, having an impact on the built environment and it's not just architecture. It's all the spaces in between, the spaces in the city. It's bringing nature in and helping people understand how to be connected to it. And that's a marvelous thing.”

That a firm led by two women continues to produce radically innovative work for world class clients, despite setbacks, speaks to a tenacity that should go without comment. But both agree that a whiff of chauvinism still wafts through real estate board rooms, municipal halls, and architecture studios. They’re not alone. In a previous generation, architect Denise Scott Brown and architectural theorist Ann Tyng, Ph.D., toiled in the shadow of male partners before getting their due. Tyng, a partner of Louis Kahn, didn’t get a retrospective till the end of her life and Scott Brown was denied the Pritzker Prize awarded to her partner Robert Venturi.  

Spear notes that as far back as the 1950s, when Mary Bunting, Ph.D., was the first female president of Radcliffe, Bunting identified the problem. At the time Bunting, herself a widow and mother of four, created a solution through what became known as the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, which helped “gifted women who wish to carry on independent scholarly or creative project” particularly as they continued to raise families. 

“There was quite a period when I was finding one thing after another that supported my basic hypothesis,” Bunting wrote at the time. “There was a climate of unexpectation in America about how women were likely to use their talents and training.”

It’s worth noting that Spear and Blanco, who were both already established architects, received their master’s in landscape architecture while working full time to start the firm. Spear raised six children while establishing her reputation as a world-renowned architect. And Blanco would go on to receiver her Ph.D. in 2019 in landscape architecture while directing the firm.

Miami Link, Biscayne Line, Migration, and Pink Link are part the ArqGEO canon, monuments that will inform and be informed by the new work produced by GEO.

“You just ignore all the noise,” says Spear.

 “Yes. We keep going and do the work,” concurred Blanco.

Barnard Archives’ Delicate and Distinct Approach

Photo of Nancy Friday, the author and pop psychologist who passed away in 2017, taken for Vanity Fair magazine.

Last year, staff from Barnard Archives completed processing the Nancy Friday Papers, a gift from the author and pop psychologist who passed away in 2017. Delayed because of pandemic pauses and the time it takes to handle sensitive materials like Friday’s — who believed that “wild, delicious, wonderful sex” could exist “alongside good manners" — the donation complements existing archival materials on women’s sexuality. It also represents an uptick in donations from donors outside of the College community who recognize its well-established feminist focus, said Martha Tenney, director of Archives and Special Collections. 

“Over the past couple of years, we’ve been trying to think critically about the resources we want to provide for research both for the Barnard community as well as international and national researchers,” Tenney said, of accepting Friday’s donation. “We are building collections that document not only the history of Barnard as an institution and the people who have come into contact with the institution but also broader feminist histories.”

Researching Sex Positivity, Archiving with Sensitivity

Amid the broader feminist histories rest several niche areas, including archives on sex-positive feminist thought that the Friday papers will help buttress. This includes materials from the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) spring 1982 Scholar & Feminist Conference on Sexuality, which is often cited as a high watermark of the “feminist sex wars,” when anti-pornography feminists crossed intellectual swords with sex-positive thinkers like Friday.  

For her part, Friday was most decidedly sex-positive. “How could it be, you might ask, that women today, at the turn of the century, would still think they were the only Bad Girls with erotic thoughts? What kind of prison is this that women impose on themselves?,” she asks rhetorically in the 25th anniversary edition of My Secret Garden: Women's Sexual Fantasies. 

Friday’s openness drew thousands of letters from fans who shared deeply personal details about their sex and fantasy lives, all of which can be found in her papers. Such materials couldn’t be donated to just any institution. When the collection was first offered to Columbia University, their archival team instead recognized that the content would be a better fit at Barnard, which has garnered the trust of donors, fellow colleagues, and institutions seeking the right home for feminist material of every ilk. 

The sexually explicit material prompted Barnard archivists to reach out to colleagues with similarly sensitive collections to come up with an ethical approach that preserved the privacy of those who probably didn’t expect their letters to end up in an archive. As a result, processing and ultimately accessing this archive required a different approach from other collections. Interested researchers must sign a nondisclosure agreement before being permitted to see the papers, the only requirement of its kind in Barnard’s archives.

“Before we began any major processing, we [had to] identify core issues and questions related to privacy and access within the collection,” wrote graduate assistant Mia Ciallella ’19 in the Archives’ blog. 

Together with records coordination and processing archivist Olivia Newsome, Ciallella thoughtfully created theme descriptions used as finding aids. 

“Due to the explicit, and at times offensive, content in the collection, we wanted to find a way to accurately describe the collection without using harmful or stereotypical language, while also giving researchers a list of potential triggers for sensitive materials,” Ciallella wrote.

Regardless of a collection’s sensitive or controversial nature, the end game remains the same, said Tenney. 

“Accepting an archival collection is commitment, essentially, in perpetuity,” she said. “When we embark on these kinds of relationships, we want to do so with the understanding that the collections will be used and that they will contribute to scholarship. At Barnard, we want collections to be useful for students and for the feminist scholarship that happens here.” 

Filling in the Silences and Gaps

Members of the Coalition for Women prisoners at a 2015 anti-shackling protest in New York

Tenney said that focusing on “feminist world-making” includes activism, organizing, and art-making, as well as addressing “archival silences and gaps” within the Archives’ overall feminist collection. The team intentionally seeks out voices and experiences that might not otherwise find their way into an academic setting. 

Another recently acquired collection came from the Coalition for Women Prisoners (CWP). That donation provides materials on anti-carceral organizing and the experiences of incarcerated women throughout New York State. The population of imprisoned women has grown substantially over the past 40 years, but their narratives are woefully underrepresented in archival collections. 

Because CWP has seen a rotation of leaders and locations over the years, incorporating the donation meant accepting a collection from multiple donors at multiple locations over time. Tenney said that some documentation understandably went missing, a gap the Barnard archivists were able to fill through oral histories conducted by Barnard students, supported by a Reproductive Health Grant from the College. For that, the team focused specifically on interviewing people who had worked on reproductive justice campaigns within the CWP.  

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Myoshi Benton speaks out against shackling pregnant women in prison.

“That included campaigns to ban the shackling of pregnant women while they were in the hospital giving birth, campaigns to allow for reduced sentencing for criminalized survivors of domestic violence, and campaigns for family members who are incarcerated to be located in jails and prisons that are closer to their family,” said Tenney. 

Though the CWP coalition came from outside the Barnard community, like the Nancy Friday Papers, Barnard’s connections and reputation played a role. In the case of the CWP, the BCRW once again entered the fore. 

Expanding the Feminist Lens

Sabra Moore’s “Gladys Apron #2”

It’s no coincidence that as the collection has grown, so too has its reputation as a safe haven for sensitive material. Tenney pointed to the Sabra Moore Women’s Art Movement Collection and the Dianne Smith Papers, documenting the New York art scene from the 1970s through the 2000s, as other “outside” donations requiring a discerning mindset. 

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Dianne Smith’s “Ode to DJ Kool Herc,” 2023, Montana paint markers on wood, 30 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Moore organized anti-war protests and worked in New York’s first abortion clinic. Smith, based out of Harlem, has shown her work primarily in nonprofit and Black-owned spaces.

“Feminist scholarship doesn’t necessarily just mean the study of the history of feminism,” said Tenney. “It means thinking about any area of study using a feminist lens.” 

Professor Rachel Narehood Austin’s 20-Year Research Quest

The award-winning chemist publishes on critical carbon-consuming enzyme and is recognized for her dedication to the professional development of undergraduate students

In 1989, the Exxon Valdez supertanker spilled 11 millions gallons of crude oil into Alaska’s Prince William Sound; oil lingered at the site for decades. Though the disaster continues to affect wildlife generations later, remediation occurred naturally. As of 2015, only 0.6% of the spill remained, with much of the cleanup credit going to natural processes.

For the past 20 years, Diana T. and P. Roy Vagelos Professor of Chemistry Rachel Narehood Austin has worked with students in her lab to examine how nature cleaned up our mess. One of her primary research goals at Barnard has been to reveal an oil-degrading enzyme, alkane monooxygenase (AlkB), in its 3-D active state. The paper, “Structure and Mechanism of the Alkane-Oxidizing Enzyme AlkB,” was published this past April in Nature Communications.

Austin said the primary reason for solving the structure of the enzyme was to understand its structure and function. It’s particularly important as the enzyme functions in the global carbon cycle, which is critical to the planet’s habitability. The enzyme carries out the first step in metabolizing one form of organic carbon into carbon dioxide. 

The goal of the work is not to inhibit the enzyme to prevent carbon dioxide from going into the atmosphere, rather it’s to gain a better understanding of the carbon cycle itself. How AlkB influences the cycle’s functions is subtle. Austin said the active 3-D version is an important element in the scientists’ toolkit for fully deciphering the carbon cycle.

“There’s this whole question mark of what’s actually happening in our environment,” she said “And if we don’t understand the process of what’s happening, then it’s really hard for us to predict how human activities can change it.”

Several student-researchers assisted Austin on the project, but she credits three alumnae — Juliet Lee ’21, Shoshana C. Williams ’20, and Allison Forsberg ’20 — for  helping her bring this structure to fruition, alongside her in the lab, and serving as co-authors of the recent paper. All three are pursuing a Ph.D. in chemistry: Lee and Williams, both of whom were Beckman Scholars, are continuing their studies at Caltech and Stanford, respectively, and Forsberg went to USC. The alumnae’s professional achievements underscore Austin’s parallel priority — teaching students how to become scientists, how to handle successes along with failed experiments, resisting outside pressures, and maintaining the long view. 

“They’ve known [AlkB has been] a key ingredient in the bioremediation of oil [for 80 years], but nobody has known about the three-dimensional structure,” said Austin. “So, 20 years seems like nothing to figure that out.” 

Austin has always been intrigued by the interface between the environment and chemistry. While scores of scientists work on the environment in countless capacities, Austin’s niche in this area is that of an inorganic chemist interested in the role of metals in biological systems.

Shortly after Austin joined Barnard in 2015, a mutual colleague introduced her to Liang Feng, a professor of molecular and cellular physiology at Stanford. A postdoctoral fellow in Feng’s lab, Xue Guo, had solved the three-dimensional structure of a protein she thought might be AlkB. This protein was out of Feng’s area of expertise, and the mutual colleague thought Austin could help, and she did.

The protein that Guo had purified was crystallized in an inactive form. Eventually, Austin was able to show that the purified protein was active, it just wasn’t crystallizing in its active form — and it was AlkB. Feng, now fully invested in the research, joined Austin’s long-held quest to determine the structure of active AlkB. 

“We were holding out to get the active form, because that’s the most important thing [for the environment],” said Austin.

For seven years, the two worked together with several students in Austin’s lab. Lee spent two summers at Stanford working side by side with Guo to find a form of AlkB that was easier to characterize in its active form. Finally, more than 20 years into Austin’s research, Feng concluded that the structural data was ready to publish. Austin began writing, and it was, she believed, top journal material.

To get the word out, the team told a story that could be easily followed. “We cut out anything that wasn’t essential, and I think that’s partly why it ended up being so easy to review, because it was a simple story,” she said. 

During the seven years Austin was examining the inactive structure of AlkB, she had a sense of when she might find the active form. Nevertheless, the discovery has opened up a host of questions. She compared the experience to rock climbing, when a piece of protection is placed in a crevice to secure a climber while she moves up to the next level.

“Without having [the paper] out, I was always torn in multiple directions about how to spend my energy,” she said. “And now it’s really clear what we should do next. I feel like I’m ready for the next 20 years for sure.”

Austin said the active site of the enzyme, the place where the two iron ions are, is “mind blowing.” “Normally if you have two metal ions in an active site, it is really obvious to see how they work together,” she said. “In AlkB, the two iron ions are too far apart to directly work together. So the next thing is to better understand how the active site works.”

Discovery as a process is a lesson she imparts to her students. “Science is hard, and young students make a ton of mistakes, and there’s certainly a temptation for students to say, ‘I want to prove something,’” she said. “I sit them down [and say], ‘You know, that’s really not the point.’”

She said if they do four experiments and they get four different results, that is the reality. In light of recent cheating scandals in the scientific community, she believes that upholding standards like peer reviews and respecting colleagues is just as critical in teaching science as finding the 3-D active state of alkane monooxygenase.

“The end never justifies the means — it’s how you live your life that is always, in my experience, more important than any endpoint,” she said. “If I can help my students see that we can do really good and fun science and that we can do it carefully and ethically, that’s probably more important than anything else I’m going to do in my life.”

On September 7, Austin won the ACS Award for Research at an Undergraduate Institution from the American Chemical Society.

(This article is a slightly edited version of “A 20-Year Research Quest,” by Tom Stoelker, from the Fall 2023 issue of Barnard Magazine.)

Walloping Whitman

Fernando Contreras stepped into the role originated by Anthony Martinez Briggs with just two weeks notice.

This article was originally published in Art Blog on July 14, 2019. Photos by Theo Cote

Last week, The Bearded Ladies Cabaret brought a full-fledged piece of musical theater to La Mama in New York City as part of the Stonewall 50 Celebration. Not to disparage the genre, as cabaret’s intimacy remains integral to the new work, but this grand musical could easily scale up to fill a Broadway house with its daring premise, diverse talent, clever book, and lively score.

Not that the Bearded Ladies would or should care about taking the show to the Great White Way—no doubt the Ladies’ multi-culti team would incorporate a smack-down on “Great” and “White” and take on any semblance of white fragility in the audience, for they do no less with the reputation of Walt Whitman, the subject of “Contradict This!” a celebration and a “musical trolling” that marks the 200th anniversary of Whitman’s birth.

The creators, which includes the songwriting cast, were directed by John Jarboe to take a deep dive into Whitman’s history. Each came back to the production with their own impressions, some influenced by previous experiences with the poet, others bringing entirely new revelations. A break neck history lesson infused with queer theory followed.

Whitman has become a gay hero hailing from a period when the contemporary notions of gay did not exist. Yes, he was homosexual, but blindly coopting his identity for contemporary LGBTQ+ sensibilities disregards the poet’s racist writings. For those not in the know, the fact that he called Black people “baboons” is pointedly delivered nearly halfway through the first act, but only after several cast members have sung love songs celebrating the poet.

On the love side, Daniel de Jesús (a friend of this writer) sang his sex kittenish ode to Whitman, titled “Daddy Poet,” while Pax Ressler, in a duet with Jackie Soro, revealed Ressler’s Mennonite childhood where the only gayness they experienced growing up was Whitman’s poems. Their rendition of “Best Sex I Never Had,” riled with rock that would make Hedwig proud.

With each of the performers collaborating on text and songs the entire cast jokingly sings “There is No Plot!” But, alas, there is a plot, and a very good one at that. Jarboe, with assists from Mary Tuomanen and dramaturge Sally Ollove, have so seamlessly woven together a series of stories created by the cast that it recalls Michael Bennett, Nicholas Dante, and James Kirkwood’s workshop-weaving that became A Chorus Line. But it’s longtime Bearded Lady musical collaborator Heath Allen who helped stitch a musical arc from the disparate genres, including: hip-hop, rock, opera, folk, and good ‘ol musical music.

After the love songs, a swift trial of Whitman’s legacy ensues, with Veronica Chapman-Smith’s lush soprano holding court. What was once a giant birthday cake of a stage, designed by William Boles, transforms into a courtroom thanks, in part, to crisp choreography by Jumatatu Poe. Both set and dance meld so thoroughly into the dialogue as to be considered part of the text. Tyler Mark Holland’s superb jester costumes add to the jovial atmosphere.

Another amusing conceit is the play’s unabashed self-consciousness. Performers don’t break down the fourth wall; there is no fourth wall. Concerns that exposing Whitman’s foibles will put funding from Penn Libraries and The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage at risk, get punctuated with cash throw to the wind while the cast sings out their worries about “the commission!”

Participants from the audience get called onto the stage as jurors, underscoring public opinion’s role in cancel culture—the notion that an idea, person, or work of art can be hounded out of existence via pressure from social media. Black Twitter muscles with in with commentary, as righteously represented by Soro, declaring that Walt Whitman has already been canceled, “Y’all just late to the party.”

If there’s any question as to the show’s ability to go on the road with the text so tied to the real-world personalities of its ensemble, that question was put to rest by Fernando Contreras, a gay Dominican, who stepped into the role originated by Anthony Martinez Briggs, who identifies as a straight Afro-Puerto Rican. Contreras, later said he related to the role beyond the artists’ parallel Latinx backgrounds. With just two weeks rehearsal Contreras inhabited the dense rap lyrics to “I Know We All Hungry,” to say nothing of the fully formed character that Martinez Briggs created for himself.

Indeed, the universality of each character is one of the show’s great strengths. Emily Bate’s approachable folk-infused music could belong to another. But while finding a young actor to play the role created by Elah Perelman could be done, it might prove difficult to draw out a similarly nuanced performance.

The show ends with a very contemporary question, that’s actually been asked by many a generation before social media arrived. What to do with the good things bad people leave behind? Do we stop listening to Michael Jackson? Stop watching Woody Allen movies? Should Warhol be banned? It’s the same question previous generations asked of Wagner. If we cancel them, where does it stop? Or will we all be canceled one day?

Elah Perelman’s character provides nuanced performance that evolves into the moral center of the piece.

Culture Pass

Originally Published in the Summer 2019 edition of Oculus, the magazine of the American Institute of Architects, New York. Text and photos by Tom Stoelker.

East Village, Manhattan: Ryan Haddad, Playwright and Performer at the Public Theater

“Multicultural can mean many things,” said Ryan Haddad, a 27-year-old playwright and performer. Haddad, who has cerebral palsy, holds a residency in the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater in Manhattan, where he has no problem getting around. He comes from the millennial generation often celebrated for its multicultural awareness, but which, more often than not, overlooks the disabled.

“Whenever somebody plans a party in Brooklyn—because that’s where you have the cool parties, the cool performances, the cool clubs, and the cool places to go—I often groan because it’s hard for me to get there,” he said. It’s not just diffcult for him as an audience member, he said, but also as a performer. When producers get behind a piece he’s written, they discuss access for him as well as for the audience, homing in on ADA compliance of nearby public transportation, which often falls short.

Haddad’s experience is one of many where infrastructure influences how communities form or fall apart. In other instances, housing and highways built by Robert Moses from the 1930s through the 1960s continue to sustain middle-class families far from Manhattan’s gleaming towers and Brooklyn’s farm-to-table restaurants. Old Jewish, Irish, and Italian neighborhoods are now home to Bengali hip-hop artists performing off the Bruckner Expressway, and Dominican writers holding readings in the shadow of the George Washington Bridge.

Bedroom communities that once housed white working-class families of police, firemen, nurses, and secretaries are now home to communities of color who have raised first-generation techies, artists, and activists—as well as police officers, firefighters, and executive assistants. These young New Yorkers, who have stayed on instead of moving out, are as much a part of Robert Moses’s legacy as the highways and bridges he built. They’re not looking for new neighborhoods closer to “The City” or Brooklyn—like their mid-century brethren, they just want to live close to Mom.

Likewise, there are the stalwarts who hunkered down when others headed out: the homesteaders of SoHo and the Italian butchers of Arthur Avenue. As E.B. White observed, there’s always “the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something,” the settlers who give the city its passion.

Here’s a small sampling of natives and settlers who posed for photos and talked about how civic infrastructure and their neighborhoods have helped and hindered the multicultural city.

SoHo, Manhattan: Charles Leslie, Founder of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, at the Museum

Charles Leslie and his life partner, the late Fritz Lohman, held their first exhibition of gay art in their SoHo loft the same month as the Stonewall riots, which mark their 50th Anniversary this summer. The couple were part of the original homesteaders who had settled in SoHo and fought Robert Moses’s plan to build a raceway through the Cast-Iron District. “We wanted 12 square blocks,” said Leslie, “and we ended up with 48 square blocks.”

When he moved to the area, it was called the South Village, if it was called anything. He remembers when City Planning Commission officials casually began using the term “SoHo,” instead of referring to the disputed neighborhood as the South Houston Industrial District. Many credit urban theorist Chester Rapkin with coining the term, a notion Leslie would hardly dispute. He remembers Rapkin standing in his living room, warning the activists that, though they’d won the preservation battle, the area was bound to undergo drastic changes. “‘You think you have a tiger by the tail, and you think you’re going to keep this fly in amber?” Leslie recalled Rapkin asking rhetorically.

He credited Friends of Cast Iron Architecture with making the most persuasive argument for preservation, positing that the prefabricated cast-iron building method represented a distinctly American contribution to international architecture. In addition, he credited gays. “Wherever artists, creative people, or gays live, change is inevitable,’” he said, riffing on something he recalled Rapkin saying. “Gay people have an interesting take on what’s beautiful. They can hit a walk-up tenement and find beauty. It’s a noticeable attribute wherever you go.”

Arthur Avenue, the Bronx: Michael Rella and Peter Servedio, Butchers at Peter’s Meat Market, the Arthur Avenue Retail Market

In an effort to get pushcart vendors off city streets in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia set up several public markets, and Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx continues to be one of the most vibrant. Though the utilitarian buildings project civic blandness at its worst, the vendors more than compensate in vitality and color. Merchants at Arthur Avenue, many first- and second-generation Italians, continue to speak the native tongue with locals and customers traveling there from Long Island and New Jersey.

In an effort to get pushcart vendors off city streets in the 1930s, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia set up several public markets, and Arthur Avenue Retail Market in the Bronx continues to be one of the most vibrant. Though the utilitarian buildings project civic blandness at its worst, the vendors more than compensate in vitality and color. Merchants at Arthur Avenue, many first- and second-generation Italians, continue to speak the native tongue with locals and customers traveling there from Long Island and New Jersey.Peter Servedio started there as a butcher in 1962. “The only two years I was missing was when I got drafted to go to Vietnam,” he said. “Then I came right back and I just loved it. I got discharged in ’69; in ’70 I took over.” He hired his nephew, Michael Rella, after Rella graduated from nearby Lehman College with a bachelor’s in economics, “in case something happens.” Rella had emigrated from Puglia, Italy, in 1966 after the rest of the family had already settled in. Just as they were making a home, the remainder of the borough was falling apart. “There was a time, especially in this neighborhood, when there were a lot of empty lots and many people moving out. But we loved the business, we loved the people,” said Servedio. “So we decided to build it up to what it is today.”

Soon Rella became a partner, and the two were joined by employees reflective of today’s revived Bronx.

“It’s a very diverse butcher shop: we have Mexicans, Albanians, Guyanese—all very excellent workers. They all have working papers, legal, which is important,” he said. “We take care of them, obviously. Most have been here for over 20 years, which is amazing, because usually you don’t hear that in a company anymore.”

Garment District, Manhattan: Nicola Caito and Camille Tetard, Patternmakers, at their Atelier

Late last year, in response to a decline in apparel manufacturing, the City Council lifted zoning rules in the Garment District that required landlords on the area’s side streets to offset any newly created office space with an equal amount of manufacturing space—most of it for the rag trade. But with much of the manufacturing moving overseas, the work that remains tends to be on the high end of the spectrum. It complements fashion showrooms and design offices nearby, to say nothing of the WeWork branches, non-profits, and tech firms moving in. For Camille Tetard and Nicola Caito, the 1920s loft-style buildings were perfect for them to put to their original use.

Coming from a line of Italian tailors, the French-born Caito spent several years working for the French couturiers before moving to New York. Here, the couple saw a market for his precise craftsmanship. Soon he was working with Thakoon, Carolina Herrera, and Hervé Pierre. With Pierre, he helped craft Melania Trump’s inaugural gown (and also created gowns for Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama).

The couple runs a multicultural firm with employees that have hailed from China, Korea, Japan, and Brazil. But the two said they hire based on humbleness, not culture. New York assertiveness, often encouraged by the big design schools, doesn’t fly here. “They come out of Parsons, where they don’t have a degree specifically in patternmaking, because it doesn’t exist, and they want $80,000 per year,” said Tetard.

Caito noted that the firm hired an “American apprentice—and she’s wonderful.” But the willingness to learn crosses international boundaries, particularly with couture-level craft. “The Italians and the French have hundreds of years of doing this kind of work, so it is a big part of the way we’re going to approach the world,” said Caito, adding that he can tell right away when someone is bluffing about their knowledge, usually because they’re aggressive.

“I look for that person who’s humble and not the bluffer,” he said. “You find these two kinds of people anywhere in the world: not only in New York, not only in Paris.”

Washington Heights, Manhattan: John Paul Infante, Writer and Teacher, at the Hispanic Society

John Paul Infante grew up in Washington Heights and feels no connection to the Hispanic Society or Audubon Terrace, the complex that also houses The Academy Arts and Letters, and long ago lost the American Geographical Society, the Museum of the American Indian, and the American Numismatic Society. Despite its name—and sporadic efforts—the society has held a fraught relationship with its Latino neighbors.

“It has nothing to do with me,” Infante said. “I appreciate it the few times I’ve experienced it, but I’ve only experienced it three times. Two times it was through an event I found out about through Dominican writers, the other time was when the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance had an event.”

Like most artists in underserved communities, Infante and his fellow poets and writers are on a constant search for space to congregate and share work. There’s Alianza Dominicana Cultural Center, a dedicated community space set aside in a new building at the Columbia University Medical Center that was fought for and won, but which presents a generational divide. “Alianza is serving the community in a real way for Dominicans and Latinos in Washington Heights and Inwood, but it’s run by an older group, and they have a set way of doing things,” he said. “We have a have a group with different ideas on how to use the space and do programming.”

Despite gentrification and recent developments, Infante has no plans to leave the neighborhood. He refers to the “Broadway divide,” where newcomers, co-ops, and condos sit to the west of the thoroughfare, and his old neighborhood to the east stays pretty much the same. It’s where he’s raising his daughter. “There’s that element where there’s some people like me who have a salary or have health insurance and are living decent lives who want to stay,” he said, “but at the same time, I see the segregation of the vision, like the Broadway divide.”

There are places where the community has always come together, he said. “When I was a teenager, I would go to Cloisters, and what’s interesting about that space is that you’ll see diversity in every sense—not only diversity in the people from all over the world, but people from the neighborhood, locals,” he said. “Which is interesting when you have a space like the Hispanic Society, because I don’t see locals in there.”

Infante said the area has three types: those who make money and want to get out, those who are stuck, and those who, like him, want to stay. “I enjoy this area, I know this area,” he said. “I appreciate it as a space, the proximity to everywhere. I love the community, the people, the diversity. And I might complain about segregation, but I like the fact that I can go to a bar, and it’s just an Irish bar. You have to readjust and look at the world through that Irish lens. You hear certain sayings and certain slang, and people are talking over you, and you just don’t get it.”

Grand Concourse, the Bronx: Basma Sheea, Bengali-American Singer, at the Andrew Freeman Home

Fully the Bronx and fully Bengali, Basma Sheea has a sound of her own: R&B merged with Bengali music and rap. She was set to perform at the Andrew Freedman Home for the “It’s the Bronx” music festival last spring, but when the promoters’ ties to real estate developers came to light, social media caught fire, with other Bronx collectives, like Hydro Punk, agitating for an embargo on Instagram. The pressure shut down the event. “I understand why this was such a big deal for them to go against it and to protect their community, but most of us artists weren’t really aware of where the funding was coming from,” Sheea said from the steps of the Freedman home, itself a dichotomy of blessings and curses, not unlike the concourse.

The Andrew Freedman Home was built in 1922 for rich industrialists who had come on hard times in their old age. The limestone Palazzo Farnese-esque edifice cost $1 million to build, which is more than $27 million in today’s dollars. Today, the Freedman home has slowly crept back from decay and anomaly to house artist studios, Fifth Avenue-worthy exhibitions, and events. The owners have become de facto leaders in the Bronx arts community, eventually holding a town hall for the opposing parties of the shuttered festival. Like the concourse, the once-grand facility has seen better days, but the organization has stepped up to its new role as the borough bounces back—though amidst persistent poverty. For many activists, the Bronx represents the last stand against gentrification.

“This whole drama brought together a group of artists,” said Sheea, “even though you didn’t get to perform.” Sheaa joined Yo-Yo master/rapper Richard Pigkaso and other Bronx artists to meet at an open mic night at an Irish pub in Pelham Bay, NY, to compete for a spot on NPR’s Tiny Desk Contest. For Sheea and her newfound artist friends, including Hydro Punk, simply finding an open mic and audience was a triumph. Lest one forgets, this is the borough where hip-hop was born and where boogaloo, salsa, and bebop grew up—in spite of urban decay. Gentrification presents an unexpected challenge. “It’s music that ties everybody I know” said Sheea. “You have this story to tell, I have a story to tell. For me, it’s never really been about class. Honestly, I’ve never really thought about that divide until now.”

Midtown, Manhattan: Ness McKelvey at Home

Ness McKelvey lived for years in the Bronx before securing housing at Henry Hall, which bills itself as “a new concept in luxury living” that is designed “to feel like a boutique hotel.” Through the city’s effort to diversify housing, McKelvey got his space as part of the city’s affordable housing lottery, which stipulates that 20% of new housing be set aside for moderate-income families. But while he loves his apartment, he said high-rise living, while culturally diverse, isn’t economically diverse. Just a stone’s throw from Hudson Yards, the West 38th Street building exudes a hip vibe with rap playing in the elevators. McKelvey said he likes hip-hop but feels uncomfortable in the elevator with his more upscale neighbors when the N-word blasts from the speakers. “It’s supposed to be high class, it’s supposed to be upper echelon,” he said, “but people don’t act like that—they act like other people are peasants, beneath them.”

McKelvey is starting a new blog called NewCityNYC.com that talks about what to do for little or no money on Midtown’s burgeoning West Side. When asked how people in the new West Side developments can foster multiculturalism, he was blunt: “People need more involvement; they’re being too exclusive. They need to open up more—and say hello on the elevator.”

Astoria, Queens: Admir Ekmestic, Former Soccer Player, at Mrki’s Place, a Yugoslavian Private Social Club

Queens is by far the nation’s most diverse urban area, and Astoria, notably settled by Greeks, gives Jackson Heights a run for its money in terms of cultural diversity. Just off the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, one block of 30th Avenue is home to an Italian baker, wine merchant, salumeria, and Catholic parish; a Bosnian butcher; Mexican, Chinese, and Thai restaurants; a Greek-owned laundromat; an Egyptian tobacco shop; an Irish pub; and two social clubs, one Greek and the other Yugoslavian.

Admir Ekmestic used to play soccer in Yugoslavia, until the civil war there. He and his friends from Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, and Croatia escaped the worst of the war, and now sit in front Mrki’s Place, drinking beers and nursing shots. “This gentleman is from Croatia,” Ekmestic said, gesturing towards a friend. “They fight over there; now everything is fine, now we enjoy.”

When asked why everyone gets along in New York City and not at home, he responded, “There’s a million-dollar question. Over there, the politicians just make a big setup for all of us—you know what I mean. And here it’s  the right thing. It works.”

Tomkinsville, Staten Island: Veronica Arze, Café Owner at Duzer’s Local

Born in Manhattan’s Bellevue Hospital and raised in Flatbush and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Veronica Arze found herself on Staten Island’s South Shore 21 years ago “chasing schools” for her three children. Indeed, she initially settled on the borough’s South Shore with her ex-husband because of the schools. But the North Shore, where she now owns a café, always reminded her of home just across the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The first-generation Bolivian started the business with her childhood best friend, Annette Bruno.

With Staten Island being the city’s only majority Republican borough, the South Shore stands apart as liberal and decidedly more diverse, though not Brooklyn-liberal. If a café has a point of view, this one is left of center with a dash of politically incorrect. One hears a CUNY student disparaging a professor’s film taste using the descriptor “retarded.” Shades of queer, nerdy, button-down, and retired were all represented on a recent Saturday. The café also serves as a venue for poetry readings and the spoken word. “I wanted it to be a space for everyone—that everyone would feel comfortable. It’s just a neutral space,” said Arze. “People here run the gamut from Trump supporters to non-Trump, and we can sit, we can have coffee. We can agree to disagree. Everyone is entitled to their views.”

Arze sees the borough through a parent’s lens, as a good place to raise kids. (She’s photographed here with her son Nicholas Silvestro.) She remembers her dad driving her from Flatbush to a Bensonhurst Catholic School every day until fifth grade. “I appreciate it now as an adult; I see what they did for me,” she said. “The schools in this area are lacking, and I’ll be perfectly honest with you: I wouldn’t be able to afford to send my children to a private school.”

Parents not unlike her own are stepping up locally. “There are groups of parents forming who want to improve the schools,” she said. “Kids need a foundation, they need structure, they need good food, and they need to know they’re safe. Nobody can learn in bad conditions.”

Astoria, Queens: Dee Flattery, Pub Owner at The Quay

Dee Flattery moved from a small town in Ireland because “there was nothing happening at home, really,” she said. Her pub in Astoria not only welcomes families, but it looks out for them, too. Several years ago, when a local boy was diagnosed with cancer, neighbors descended on the pub for a benefit. Gabriel Santini, the boy, is now a teen, and is pictured here standing to her right. The pub, like the block, is filled with a multiplicity of cultures. On a recent Saturday, however, it was decidedly Gaelic, with an Irish mother visiting her New York-based daughters, who filled the pub with Irish music and shoeless step dancing. The mother supervised the activities with a keen eye—and her own step at the ready.

There are more recent immigrants, too, Flattery says, from Brooklyn. “Five years ago, I’d meet people every day who say they’re moving to Brooklyn. Now I hear people are moving back from Brooklyn,” she said. “You can’t take my word because I don’t know Brooklyn, but I don’t think it’s as cool as people think it used to be. A lot of people are definitely moving back.”

The Quay, like most Irish pubs in the area, plays host to a variety of performers. Flattery quickly rattled off the names of other area pubs that provide home to artists. “We have open mic on Thursday nights, and then everybody bar hops—all the music industry stays together,” she said. “They go to The Shillelagh, The Brewery, Passage, Wolfhound, Irish Whiskey Bar, The  Irish Rover, Conan and Finnegan’s, and Stones Corner. Everybody has different nights, and everybody comes together and stays together.”

Grand Concourse, the Bronx: Elissa Carmona, Lead Singer and Founder of the Marrisania Band Project, at the Bronx Museum of the Arts

Elissa Carmona agrees about the need for Bronx artists to find a venue. She grew up in Morrisania in the South Bronx and Park Hill in Staten Island, and her voice was discovered early, at church, taking her on tour at a young age. But as a teen she started working. She soon joined the service, raised a daughter, and got her master’s in social work. Singing was put on hold until seven years ago. Carmona’s experience in grant writing for non-profits spurred a local effort to clean up Reverend Lena Irons Unity Park in Morrisania—aka Unity Park. Her skills also came in handy when founding her band sprung from the park cleanup, with support from the Bronx Council for the Arts. The band still performs at Unity Park each summer, describing its sound as “a blend of hip-hop soul, neo soul, afro punk, jazz, and funk.”

Carmona, who had looked forward to appearing at “It’s the Bronx,” had performed on the Grand Concourse only a year previously at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She enjoyed meeting artists from across the borough, something that doesn’t happen enough. “We’re culturally diverse, but we tend to be clannish; we stay within our own separate enclaves,” she said. “Occasionally we mingle if we work together, but that’s not always the case in the arts.”

Artists in the Bronx, she said, need to be “strategic and very creative to find and create opportunities here in the Bronx that provide venue space.” For her, the social media pressure that shut down “It’s the Bronx” shut down a lot of opportunities, too. “It’s no secret that the Bronx is one of the poorest cities in New York State; we have a lot of homelessness, and people are hungry,” she said. “People figure the arts are not as important, and the limited funding that does go to artists goes to school-age youth—and rightly so, they need it—but it leaves us adults having to leave the borough to find any opportunity.”

St. George, Staten Island: Bain Coffman and Gui Junta, Restaurant Owners at Chang Noi Thai

“This is our home, this is our business, this is our neighborhood, and you have more connection,” said Junta. “In Manhattan, people might come in only one time in their lives, and then they’re gone. The tourists come, sit down, laugh, and don’t come back. In the restaurant here, I feel more connections, that everyone is like a friend.”

As the center of government in the city’s most Republican borough, the two see more customers from across the political spectrum than most city restaurants, even though the immediate area sways to the left. On a recent weekend, customers coming and going in the cozy eatery numbered about a dozen. Three languages were spoken at different tables. “It would be great,” said Coffman, “if people could understand each other and not say, ‘That’s weird,’ and instead say, ‘That’s just different; why do you do it like that?’”

Junta thinks the multicultural city would thrive if more people saw things through an immigrant’s eyes. “This is not my culture,” she said, “so everything is new in this country. As Bain said, I wish everyone would treat us kindly in the same way—if you are white, Asian, black, or anything.”

She has experienced prejudice, even in her own neighborhood. “Some people don’t like that I’m not the same color, the same culture, or the same people,” she said. But she believes that simply operating a business in the area has the potential to change perceptions. “People leave here and respect me and the restaurant; everyone respects each other. You can make peace together.”

Bain Coffman and Gui Junta met on the Staten Island Ferry when she was showing the city to friends who were visiting. Coffman grew up in upstate New York’s dairy country, and Junta grew up in Thailand. He lived in Staten Island; she lived in Queens and ran a restaurant in Manhattan. Junta had partnered in restaurants on the Lower East Side when he encouraged her to come see his neighborhood, which sits in the shadow of Borough Hall. Like every borough downtown, St. George has a big lunchtime crowd. But few business owners live in the neighborhood, even with its large residential population. The potential to connect with customers was something that drew Junta to the area, as her Manhattan customers were more transient.

Influence vs. Influencers

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and while most insiders muscle their way to the front row to soak in at what the industry has to offer, one of its most distinguished arbiters is more interested in what her students will see.

Last fall Robbie Myers stepped down after 17 years as editor-in-chief of Elle magazine, one of the fashion industry’s—and the magazine industry’s—top-performing publications. This fall she is teaching fashion journalism to Fordham students. Their first assignment? Get into a show.

“That’s your job as a journalist: Get yourself into places that are hard to get into and get answers to things that are hard to get answers to,” Myers said she told her students. “I’m equally interested as to whether they get in or do not get in the shows, but I’m most interested in what resources did they pull to try to get in. Because that’s the job.”

In some ways Myers takes an old-school approach to the increasingly social media-driven medium of fashion magazines. But at the end of the day relationships matter; talking—not texting—matters. Having been an editor at Seventeen magazine, as well as a staffer at Rolling Stone and Interview, to say nothing of being a mom who just dropped her daughter off at college for her first year, Myers knows a thing or two about youth culture.

“There’s this fear of talking to human beings if they can’t communicate digitally,” she said. “There’s nothing like a human voice, there’s so much misunderstood in digital communication. Being with a human being gives you so much more information.”

As Fordham students fan out across New York City trying to get in to some of the most difficult-to-access fashion venues in the world, Myers said that they’ll see New York in an entirely different light. The resourcefulness and people skills they’ll be using would serve them as well in banking, politics, or any other career path, she said.

“What you don’t get to do can be as instructive as what you do you get to do,” she said.

“They’ll learn to use whatever connections they have,” said Myers. “There’s no one ‘official channel’ to get into the shows. It’s actually human. You have to figure out how to make that connection.”

And that’s just the first full week of class.

In the following weeks Myers plans to walk students through the realities of what the fashion business is and what it isn’t. They will deal head on with body image, advertising, craft, mass marketing, and, most importantly, the difference between being an influencer on social media and being a journalist.

“Everybody has an opinion, there’s nothing you can see on the runway that a consumer can’t see the same second I see it,” she said. “But fashion editors are informed and bring a lot more to the edit.” Influencers get paid to wear clothes, and consumers are beginning to realize that, she said. But the notion of trendsetters is nothing new.

“Influencers have been with us forever,” she said. “Why was the paparazzi chasing Natalie Wood around? To see what she wearing or how she was behaving.”

If a consumer likes what the influencer is paid to wear, then Myers sees it as a legitimate transactional relationship between the influencer, the merchant, and the buyer.

“But as an editor-in-chief of a large magazine, my job was to create editorial that was relevant for my reader. We believed that for Elle, which was journalistic in its approach, it wasn’t pure opinion.”

Myers is serving as an adjunct at Fordham for the Fashion Studies program and the Department of Communication and Media Studies, and said she is particularly honored to be called professor, though she quickly adds that she doesn’t hold an advanced degree. She’d prefer students call her Robbie, but they respectfully do not. They call her professor.

“All I have is 35 years of experience reporting on the fashion industry, where there’s still room for informed voices,” she said.

“One of the things we were talking about in class is the difference between opinion and informed criticism,” she said, adding that diverse and original critics are the future of the fashion industry. “I think smart people want to follow people who have informed, interesting ideas.”

Myers said she also talks about body image with her students, though she hesitated to sum up her thoughts for this article.

“Discussing body positive is something that’s very hard to get into in 800 words, you end up getting single quotes that sound like platitudes,” she said.

Myers said she spent her entire career examining body image. And while she acknowledges that models’ lithe physiques get the lion’s share of attention, she also oversaw content that explored women’s accomplishments. During her tenure, text rivaled image. Fashion spreads could share feature space with a first-person piece by Michelle Obama and an interview with Chief Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She added that fashion is often the place where the “weirdest kid who gets harassed in class can end up writing” or “where young designers who never felt like they belonged anywhere” are celebrated.

“It’s a very open industry,” she said. “We all need to be responsible for promoting messages giving women and men a broader of idea of what’s beautiful. The models are not the bulk of the magazine.”

In her farewell letter to her staff written last year, she listed the many firsts for the magazine during her tenure, including partnering with Project Runway, which “helped to bring fashion to an enormous audience in the days before Instagram.” There were also forays into augmented reality and virtual reality.

But despite all these innovative projects, or maybe because of them, Myers has always been someone who sees the bottom line as, well, the bottom line. She said she recalls sitting in her office in 2015 contemplating the industry and the fate of print. In conversations, she distinguishes the medium from the brand, adding that regardless of how many images of one sees of Beyoncé on their phone, seeing the name Elle above her face separates that image from the many others.

“Now Beyoncé does very well by herself, but what I’m saying is the consumers are looking at their feed and they’re seeing a million pictures of her, but there’s so much equity in that brand idea,” she said. “When we shot Beyoncé, we got over two billion views.”

When she thinks about the future of fashion magazines, and the future of fashion in general, she questions the effects of constantly evolving technology.

“I wish I could see the future. I tell my kids the next generation is going to think Snapchat is so old and dated,” she said. “Who knows, we may have chips in our foreheads where we just think about somebody or something and it appears in our eyeball. But the big question remains: Do you still want to hear from people?”

For now, the printed magazine remains the flagship for brands like Elle, Vogue, and others, just as the bricks and mortar stores are for the top name designers on Fifth Avenue. Of course, their websites and social media extend their reach to billions. But it’s the magazine cover that generates the most attention.

“I see so many young women in my class who want to work in print,” she said. “Sure, the economics have changed, but there’s still so much equity in magazines for 18- and 20-year-old college students. They understand the difference between digital and print for fashion.”

She said that her “long lens” on the industry helps her screen out the noise and prioritize original reporting, storytelling, and great editing—something she hopes to impart to her students.

“I was at one of the top three magazines in terms of the number of pages we produced every month,” she said.  “I really want to give them that insight into the industry.”

From Street Theater to Broadway

Clint Ramos was a first-year student at a high school in the Philippines when he was introduced to street theater. At the time, he wasn’t fully aware that he was about to engage in a political demonstration that could have him staring down the barrel of a water cannon.

A Tony and Obie award winner who was recently tapped to head Fordham Theatre’s Design and Production track, Ramos was identified as gifted when he was young. He was dispatched to a school set up by the Marcos regime that offered free room, board, and tuition to talented students.

“In theory, it was wonderful because of everything available to us, but of course it was all very corrupt,” he said.

He was enticed when an iconoclastic drama teacher encouraged him to perform at a small plaza in the middle of Manila.

“We would do these seven-to-10-minute allegorical pieces in a business district. In the beginning, I didn’t know it was against the Marcoses.”

His job was to hold a red pole with a flag so people knew where to gather and when the performance began.

“And then we had to really finish on time because otherwise the cops would arrive and they would come with water cannons,” he said.

“I come from that generation, the last generation, that was able to really interface with some sort of consciousness against the Marcos regime.” Political consciousness and theater have been intertwined for him ever since. Now, as a teacher, he hopes to impart a moral consciousness into students’ view of theater.

“I kind of fell in love with the idea of political theater, which is often different from the theater I do here, but I still carry the same core,” said Ramos, who came to New York in the mid-’90s to study theater.

Ramos is at a point in his career where he can turn down jobs that are not a good fit. In addition to his Tony, his Obie Award in 2013 was for Sustained Excellence in Design. He’s also taken home three Lucille Lortel Awards, two American Theater Wing Henry Hewes Awards, a Helen Hayes Award, and three Drama Desk nominations. His scenic and costume design credits on Broadway include Eclipsed with Lupita Nyong’o, Torch Song, Six Degrees of Separation with Allison Janney, Sunday in the Park With George with Jake Gyllenhaal, Violet with Sutton Foster, and The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper. He’s also designed on London’s West End and for the National Theatre there.

“I would turn down something that is opaque, something that is so blatantly commercial that it won’t say anything, or doesn’t really move the conversation forward,” he said. “And by conversation, I mean the conversation we’re having right now as a country and as a society—about race, about injustice, about gender—all of that.”

The 2017 revival of Once on This Island earned him a Tony nomination for his costumes. Though it was a commercial effort, he said the musical dealt with issues he is concerned about both beyond the theater, such as global warming, and within the theater, such as inclusiveness (the cast is entirely composed of actors of color).

He added that while Broadway bears the reputation of its blatant commercial successes, there are plenty of important stories being told. He cited Eclipsed, the play for which he won the 2016 Tony for costume design. The story of five Liberian women surviving the Second Liberian War, it was the first play with an all-black female cast to premier on Broadway and was noted for its mostly-female creative team. For his part, Ramos became the first person of color to take home the Tony in the costume category for his work on that show.

“I think with bigger profile jobs come a bigger audience, and through that I can say a lot of things that are important to me,” he said “When we did Eclipsed on Broadway, that was major. I feel like we underestimate the audiences too much. Every single human being who walks into that theater has a political point of view.”

All of which fits directly into the Jesuit mission, he said, adding that he and his siblings were educated at Jesuit grade schools.

“I actually got really giddy when I saw that Fordham students have to take three classes of theology,” he said. “When I saw that, it reminded me fondly of my high school. That’s part of my consciousness.”

In his new role as assistant professor of theater design at Fordham, Ramos began teaching theater history this semester. In the spring, he will team with the established production staff and begin to teach courses on set and costume design as well as run a design production workshop.

He said that as designers and “as aesthetic curators,” artists and students need to take the “pulse of the popular culture to be able to create some sort of reaction from the people viewing it.”

What that looks like on stage is up to the student, he said.

“I don’t really try to think of teaching as ‘I want to create these theater artists.’ For me, I really just want them to come out of the program as really good citizens with a solid identity. That’s above anything else.”