The School of the Future The Social Construction of Environmental Hazard in the Post-industrial Fringe

Historical Commission Lore On October 12th 2001, an employee of the Cambridge Historical Commission CHC wrote a letter to two teachers at the Tobin School in Cambridge Massachusetts.. Th

The School of the Future:

The Social Construction of

Environmental Hazard in the

Post-industrial Fringe

A Senior Thesis by Bridget Corbett Hanna

Bard College, Annandale-on Hudson, NY

December 2003

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE 2

INTRODUCTION 8

Historical Commission Lore 8

THE BEST DOCUMENTED TOWN 15

The Great Swamp 15

Digging Holes 19

Transformations 22

Mapping the Neighborhood 27

THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT 30

Muskrat Pond 30

“A Midway Philosophy” 35

The School of the Future 39

Managing the Facilities 42

Testing the Air 49

Intuiting Danger 53

The National Weather Service 60

Russian Roulette 66

Hot Spots 74

CHANGING PLACES 76

Play Grounds 76

Open Spaces 79

Safety Zones 81

Waste Lands 84

Exporting Toxins 87

THE RIGHT TO KNOW 91

“Bhopal’s Babies” 91

An “Event” Occurs 96

Remember Bhopal 99

It Was Not Possible 102

We All Live in Bhopal 103

Safety in Knowledge 105

CONCLUSION 108

Relevant Differences 108

BIBLIOGRAPHY 110

APPENDIX 114

I was ten years old when I realized that my mother couldn’t protect me from everything But because I’ve never been a parent, I hadn’t understood until now, nearly thirteen years later, how much more traumatizing that knowledge must have been to her than it was to me “Don’t you understand?” she asked me intently last week: “don’t you understand that a mothers’ only job is keeping her child safe?” She paused “And I” she

continued, “…I have failed at this job.”

Of course she wasn’t talking about me She was talking about my younger sister Molly Molly died of a extremely rare pediatric cancer called neuroblastoma at the age ofeighteen, after fighting – with all the explosive energy and exceptional dignity of youth that approaches death – for four years against the disease Although my mother told me that her one consolation, when Molly died, was the knowledge that “I had tried

everything, and done absolutely everything that I could to save her,” she ultimately perceives Molly’s death as her own unredeemable personal failure

I think that most mothers would agree with her; that the failure to save their child

is unbearable I will speculate further that it is perhaps those deaths that are most

arbitrary that are the most difficult, when disease or accident arrives suddenly and

invisibly Though the poor must tolerate arbitrariness on a daily basis, cancers are among the ills that visit arbitrariness upon all classes Not in equal measure; but equally

suddenly, equally invisibly and violently

Everyone who has had a sudden calamity befall them has asked the question, Why? They have asked, How? With cancer, frustratingly, the answers are both

everywhere and nowhere The world is increasingly suffused with carcinogenic

compounds and untested substances, and yet the science does not exist that can prove, beyond statistical speculation, the exact cause of any given case And that is not enough

I would like to point a finger I would like to say there.

However, particularly within clusters of disease, there are often very strong

correlations In 1990 a book was published called The Truth About Where You Live

Using new computer technology to interpret statistics from the Census Bureau of the United States, Benjamin Goldman created over 100 maps that ranked all of the counties

in the US on the basis of mortality rates, toxin emissions and concentrations, and

demographics The vivid colors illustrating the distribution of illness make explicit the relationship between pollution and disease, and the tremendous geographic disparities in mortality rates Generally the maps show a strong correlation between disease and industry There is also a very strong correlation between those sites and demographics that are urban and/or poor and/or minority The distribution of arbitrariness, again, is notcompletely arbitrary And in some of the worst areas, there are so many industries and somany hazards, they are so suffused with poisons, that to point a finger at one, and say,

you, becomes similarly impossible

The neighborhood that I grew up in, North Cambridge, MA, is by no means poor Statistically, for diseases like cancer, it is not the worst place in the country to be living; but then, it is by no means the best either It is a gentrifying neighborhood in a

university town, slowly recovering from its tenure as the semi-industrial fringe of the growing city, and it has had some growing pains

One of these growing pains was the John M Tobin school, where my sister spent three years, and I spent less than one; the fifth grade, in 1990-1991 My mother had

transferred us to escape bad teachers at another school I immediately got sick: I

developed allergies to our pets, began to get repeated pneumonias, respiratory and sinus infections and colds and was diagnosed with asthma An article from the The Boston Globe (Landon, 1991) writes that I had “an immune-suppressed condition.” I just know that my health has never been the same: and for the first time, I realized that my mother couldn’t protect me from everything

As she would later do for my sister, she did everything absolutely everything she could She took me to every kind of doctor, she pulled me out of school early in the year and she became involved in a parents group that was convinced that the Tobin school wassuffering from “sick building syndrome.”

The story I remember as a ten year old about what was going on at that time went something like this:

I am sick because the Tobin school is sick It was built on top of a hazardous dump, and toxic gas seeps up into the classrooms, where the windows don’t open Almost everyone

in my class has an inhaler

My sister didn’t get sick then, and because the school was supposedly safe after a series of renovations, she remained there for several years with a teacher that she liked When she died, I couldn’t get the Tobin School out of my head, where it embodied, for

me, the environmental “problem.” I wanted to point I wanted to say, there

I went to the Cambridge Historical Commission and asked to see their file on the Tobin When I got there, the woman who helped me said “I remember when your mothercame in and looked at these same files ten years ago.” There were pictures of the “dump”from 1933, trash and old cars strewn across the landscape ; gritty, ambiguous and

suggestive

But suggestive of what? I took a photocopy home, and I kept looking at the smoking pit, staring in, trying to push through into the photograph where I could stand

up, sniff the air, walk around and touch the ground; pin down the rumors, thick as thieves,that were blowing round and round

I was not nạve enough, even then, to presume that I would find some kind of irrefutable truth in all this searching In fact, I wasn’t even sure what the question was I just desperately wanted to look I wanted to pinpoint the “environmental” problem I wanted to know where this story I knew so well had come from and whether it was true This was where I knew to begin

Because I was investigating one “environmental” problem, a professor suggested that I might be interested in a project on another “environmental” problem It was a project for the 20th anniversary of the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India: and I said “the what in where?” Although Bhopal had caused changes in the way hazardous chemicals were viewed and treated in this country that had impacted my life and my ideas about environmentalism, I had never in fact heard of it Having mentioned it to a lot of people since then, I know that I wasn’t alone

Working on the Bhopal project (and eventually traveling there briefly) alongside

my little investigation about the Tobin brought me daily to a frustrating state of cognitive

dissonance It did not make sense that these could be the same kind of issue The more I

looked at these two issues, the more they rubbed against each other in my mind, the morethe idea of an environmental problem began to separate into layers: one that was about people using all of the resources available to them to fight for the health of themselves and their families, and another that was about the vastly different informational,

economic and civic resources available to do that among different constituencies While the stories that connect cause and effect are as ubiquitous as the air that we breathe, it turns out that the process that converts them into evidence and ultimately proof is

terribly expensive and only available to a few

The issues at the Tobin are not, to this day, completely resolved However, in essence it is a story of successful activism and wielding of narrative: that is, a problem was identified and re-presented and then money and cooperation were procured in order

to stymie, if not recoup, its potential dangers Bhopal on the other hand, catastrophic twenty years ago, is, even today, a gigantic open wound, perpetually unresolved and intensely without justice The scale of the event is beyond my comprehension: it had

taken only one death, only one loss, to profoundly traumatize and forever change my

family and my community

Yet mothers in Bhopal have come out of traditional homes to take on the Indian government, and an American Corporation and fight for the health and welfare of their families and neighborhoods My mother, an artist, is returning to school at the age of forty-eight to pursue a career in “bio-informatics,” a field that she describes as “part medicine, part computer science, part biology and part chemistry.” All, in their own way,are continuing the fight to create safe spaces for the children they still have

And so although I am anchored in Cambridge, the undercurrent to this project has become the need to be able to face these two issues on the same page This has become

my way of trying to say, there Not at cancer, or any place, or anyone; but at the specter

of suffering and the logic of tragedy To the ways that ideas about environment, safety

and justice have to be able to negotiate with each other around the world, and what their implications are It is the best I can do

Historical Commission Lore

On October 12th 2001, an employee of the Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) wrote a letter to two teachers at the Tobin School in Cambridge Massachusetts The bulk of the letter was an apology, as follows

Now, I must correct a major mistake of mine- the fault, I think, of “Historical

Commission lore.” In my talk [to your group at the Tobin School] I said that, when the Callanan playground and the playing field were built (both substantially completed by 1938), the trash in the dump had not been removed, but compacted then buried beneath layers of sand Knowing how important it was to verify this, I looked again in the survey

files for the Cofran Pit site and the school for supporting documentation I could not find

any information on the treatment of the dump in the creation of the playground and playing field I asked Charles Sullivan, the Commission’s Executive Director, if he knew

of any additional information, which he did not I am very sorry for making such an important misstatement.(K.R 2001, emphasis in original)

The teachers had brought the CHC in to speak about the history of the site of the Tobin School, one that has been the subject of much conjecture and much investigation Still, it remains in 2001,at the writing of this letter, that in spite of themselves, no one alive knows, or is ever likely to know, what went into the onetime dump below the TobinSchool, or who put it there, and when and where precisely All that is possible is an understanding of the site as it is today, and the combined effects of the building and its history Why then this obsession with the history of the site? Why this incessant

retelling of a story that, as the letter above evidences, cannot even be proven by the

historians, who yet, continue retell the story? Why, as importantly, am I compelled to

re-tell the story?

There was a young woman who in my class at the Tobin in 1990-91 began

working at a house wares store near my mother’s home in Cambridge a few years ago When I walked by we would exchange a few words She said she was trying to get to

college As the years past, we exchanged fewer words Recently I walked by and went

in to speak with her and the conversation went as follows:

Bridget: Hey S Can I ask you a question?

S: (stacking glass mugs in a precarious pyramid) Yeah.

B: Were you ever sick with anything when you were at the Tobin?

S: No What’re you trying to be the next Erin Brockovich or something?

B: Um, no, not really… I’m writing a paper (pause)

S: I live right next to there and I never had any problem.

S: (pause) C St…(pause) Did you hear Ms C _ just died?

B: I heard Mrs S _ died too

S: Yeah but that was a few years ago.

S: Cancer But so what There’s a whole ton of people in Cambridge with cancer.(Hanna Conversation 2003)

I hadn’t thought the question was that strange: I’d been sick From my point of view the story made sense But this conversation is a microcosm: it shows the narrative

of neighborhood environmental activism in relief The question as to whether there is illness is a flat no The asking is, however, immediately identifiable: “What’re you trying

to be, the next Erin Brockovich?” Meaning making is part of a narrative world that is precisely separate from the actual world The story has already been told: any other protagonist is an imposter, an indulgent replica The question is tantamount to “what’re you trying to be, the next Julia Roberts?” However illness is a baseline, used in circular logic to reify its own normalcy

The appropriate reaction becomes “so what” because the normal situation is that

“there’s a whole ton of people in Cambridge with cancer.” She wasn’t the only to think

so either The first page in a binder full of notes from a teacher who had gotten sick while he taught at the Tobin begins with the header “Kids that, I know of, who died,” and

proceeds to list 5, along with anecdotal stories about their illnesses – mostly cancers (Z, archive)

In this project I address a question about the reproduction of narratives about environmental problems and the politics of collecting information that seeks to validate them I draw a loose curve which follows from Cambridge – my hometown – a city obsessed with mapping, whose residents in the face of an unknown hazard call on all of the resources available to analyze and re-present a story that can frame a set of

inexplicable ills at an elementary school, into the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India and the urge to document that it generated, and how the narrative of Bhopal has betrayed the city with its portability, that has betrayed the bodies of suffering people by

transporting the narrative with returning a meaningful effect

I compare these two situations not because they are comparable or in any way equivalents, nor because they have any particular connection That is, they are no more

or less related than any two “environmental issues.” It is in fact the paradoxical way in which they are both related and unrelated that I wish to plumb; the ways they are both participant in a global discourse about “the environment” and yet have utterly different ways of accessing it How does this disparity manifest itself through mapping, evidence and education?

There is particularly no basis for comparison of these two instances in terms of their scale as human tragedies One is tiny, contained, generic: the other gigantic,

catastrophic and singular (though not because the same chemical has never leaked in other places at other times) It is simultaneously not my aim to set up any type of

relative, hierarchical or moral scale upon which to place the activists and actors who have

worked on or are implicated in either of these issues Everyone wants a safe life;

moreover, everyone wants safe, healthy children It is my opinion, for what it’s worth, that everyone deserves these things Still the question of the differing scales of resources available to provide these things is very important; the imperative to protect and fight for the health of one’s family and community is, if not sanctified, far beyond my judgment

David Harvey writes in his book Justice, Nature and the Geography of

Difference, that “… the ‘environmental issue’ necessarily means such different things to

different people, that in aggregate it encompasses quite literally everything there

is.”(Harvey, 1996 118) So what does it mean to talk about the “environment” on

differing scales? Kim Fortun asks in her book, Advocacy After Bhopal:

environmentalism, disaster, new global orders, “What does it mean to be an

environmentalist when the label is shared by George Bush and a tribal from the hills of India? Is the mineworker who cooks his rice with firewood from ancestral lands a ‘forest thief,’ as conservationists contend?”(Fortun, 2001 182) Harvey defines the problem as one of perspective:

“Environment” is, after all, whatever surrounds or, to be more precise, whatever exists in the surrounds of some being that is relevant to the state of that being at a particular place and time The “situatedness” of a being and its internal conditions and needs have as much to say about the definition of environment as the surrounding conditions

themselves, while the criteria of relevance can also vary widely (Harvey, 1996 119)Therefore, it may be that exactly that imperative – though it sometimes pits

“environmentalists” up against each other – that constitutes grassroots activism

My decision, therefore, to re-tell this story about Cambridge, yet again, is not apolitical Because the Bhopal disaster in particular has remained unresolved over twentyyears, the inverse of my will to retell it and your willingness it to read about re-inscribes a

curve that allows for a glut of evidence where there already exists the most citizen power – allowing that to create more while maintaining a viewpoint that is global in scope is only to redraw the lines of inequity (a statement that requires, of course, gross

stereotyping)

Why, therefore, do I re-tell it?

The answer is unfair and yet quintessential of the problem: that is, I retell the

story because it is relevant to me I retell the story because I know the question without

knowing the answer I retell the story because the story is imbedded in my sense of myself: I simultaneously depend on it and disbelieve it.1

Harvey writes that “all propositions for social action (or conceptions of social justice) must be critically evaluated in terms of the situatedness or positionality of the argument and the arguer But it is equally important to recognize that the individuals developing such situated knowledge are not themselves homogeneous entities but

bundles of heterogeneous impulses, many of which derive from an internalization of

‘multiple othernesses’ within the self…” (Harvey 1996 363)

That is, each person constitutes themselves through identity with a series of groups, which are often externally conflicting I identify as an individual, as a former student of the Tobin school, as a daughter, sister and member of a family, as a person from Cambridge, as an American, as a student in the social sciences at a liberal college who has been trained and conditioned to be sensitive to and aware of global problems,

1 And is this retelling just? At base it is common: at best it is self-aware But what kind of academic work can it generate? And on what authority can it claim to rest? It is at times historical, working from primary and secondary source documents It is at times anthropological, analyzing the practices and discourse that have been generated by and through the topics that I am investigating It is at times theoretical; what constitutes these spaces, these different places? How do the geographical differences and imbalances and narrative commonalities established between groups? Who has a Right To Know and who does not?

practices, and hypocrisies, as a white woman without children, and as someone working with activists in Bhopal – among other things What is, therefore, my “proposition for social action”? What is my “conception of social justice”?

I know a story about the Tobin School anecdotally Yet because it is imbedded not only into my sense of self, but into the relationships that I have with both the people

and places involved, I have had difficulty separating what I knew from I have learned

There is no way to erase my “positionality,” just as there is no way to will a forgetting of what I know So I retell the story to find out what it was and what it is and what it is not,

so that I can move on and tell other stories, having, I hope, situated myself Having looked long and hard at the “geography of difference.”

I also try to write the story of the maps and documents that I have collected That

is, I attempt to write the story of the ways that those documents have and have not

succeeded in exerting power over it, in the Foucauldian sense This should not be

confused with writing the history of the site itself Although it is a history of the site, it is

an entirely and precisely secondary one that attempts to engage with documenting the historicizing of the site as such

I depend heavily on Harvey’s book in this paper, because the question that he concentrates on, namely how to achieve or even conceive of environmental justice (and environment and justice) in a world that encompasses so many environments,

communities and issues (that are often at odds with each other), underlies my

investigation Since, as he writes, “…words like ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ convey a commonality and universality of concern that can all to easily be captured by particularist

politics” (Harvey, 1996 119) this paper is left to consider the question of relevance Can

it really be that being an environmentalist is as simple as being concerned with that which

is relevant to you? What does this mean about “universality” then, or about “particuarlist

politics”?

I begin this story in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the time of its settlement by the British

THE BEST DOCUMENTED TOWN

The Great Swamp

The following narrative is pieced together primarily of from documents found in the files and atlases of the Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC), Arthur Krim’s 1977survey book of Northwest Cambridge (which was itself participant in the creation of the CHC archive), and articles from the Cambridge Chronicle These files contain a few pages at a time of material from various sources that discuss the precise location named

on the file tab – designated by address or sometimes theme (i.e “brickmaking”)

So although I am writing it, it was in some sense already written for me Atlases, though not individually cited here, gave the best general sense of year to year change of the spaces concerned, interspersed with commentary from the files Even the unit I refer

to, Northwest Cambridge (NWC), does not really exist: on the ground they are particular and quite distinct locations “north” and “west” Cambridge However, this is Krim’s distinction and I allow it, because the area I am talking about borders these two

neighborhoods – it becomes convenient because it the unit he uses

The story, was therefore all too easy to construct; it is very similar to several otherhistories written about the area (see, for example, Cook, Sheila 2001) The sources – photocopied pages from here and there – so accessible and well trafficked, have become agenre that produce “historical commission lore” and particular discourses about

marginality To write about this area is to participate in that discourse Harvey notes that

“The discursive activity of ‘mapping space’ is a fundamental prerequisite to the

structuring of any kind of knowledge” (Harvey 1996 111), even though the maps

themselves “are typically totalizing, usually two-dimensional, Cartesian, and very

un-dialectical devices with which it is possible to propound any mixture of extraordinary insights and monstrous lies” (Harvey 1996 4)

So a historical archive, particularly one like CHS that is geographically pre-sorteddown to street number, with atlases laid out year by year, is also creates miniature

mythologies that can have powerful social effects Which is not to say that they are untrue, only that they are a precarious towers of truth, each one exclusive of many others,dependent on a particular interpretation, and balanced upon the one before Which is only by way of a reminder, as I begin to build my own tower, to look for those moments when interpretations become capable of becoming their own truths, sudden social facts

Cambridge Massachusetts was “perhaps the best documented of all the early towns of the Massachusetts Bay Colony Because its field divisions were systematic and its records methodical ”(Krim 1977 11) This city, growing around Harvard University, was obsessively mapped, almost as though the construction of the city was itself an educational project, documented for posterity

Generally grounded by a basic grid pattern, American cities, have tended to bulge outward in the path of least resistance under the pressure of capital Since most sites werechosen for reasons of commerce rather than fortification as in many European cities, they have often been located on flat sites near water and so “accommodations to site have mostly concerned battling marches, bridging waters, and filling in tidal flats rather than overcoming choppy terrain.”(Conzen 1990 7)

In its topographical nature, Cambridge, MA, founded as Newtowne in 1630, was just such a tract of land It was swampy and empty, as the various Native American tribes that had used it previously had been largely decimated by disease by the time that

settlement of the area by the British began(Krim 1977 5) However, the original layout

of the town was not in the form of a grid Newtowne was planned on a medieval model, with a village center at Harvard Square and agricultural land grants spreading about from

that point (the original intention was that everyone would live in the village – the fields

were at some distance(Krim 1977 9)) Harvard Square, the nexus of the college, and the lands in its general vicinity were lush and good for farming

Mt Auburn St is an old thoroughfare (originally a Native American route) leading out of Harvard Square to Watertown and marking the southern path, (the northernwould be Massachusetts Avenue) around a recessional moraine that had been deposited

as the last glacier receded Now known loosely as a series of residential hills – Avon Hill, Observatory Hill, Reservoir Hill, Strawberry Hill and Mount Auburn, this gentle ridge forms the original, natural divide between Old or Mid-Cambridge(MC) and

northwest Cambridge (NWC) (Krim, 1977 4) On the MC side the moraine angles gentlydown in dry, arable slopes However, on the NWC side, curving around the muddy shores of Fresh Pond, there was a wide, dank expanse known as The Great Swamp It was “a waterlogged landscape of swamps and ponds drained by the meandering Alewife Brook and the Little River.” Heavy deposits of blue and red clay contributed to the “poordrainage, which left much of the swamp stagnant and extremely susceptible to

pollution.”(Krim, 1977 4) – particularly because although the water table is very high, theclay is almost impermeable

It was mainly “a vacant wasteland of meadow grass, bramble thicket, and swampwillow” (Krim, 1977 28) all the way up until the 1800’s The swamp spread across several square miles – west to the edges of Belmont, northwest up past the Arlington

border, and north into Somerville Until then had been deemed useless for pretty much everything except burying Catholics – who at that time were too stigmatized to be

granted a downtown cemetery The shores of Fresh Pond were where the first industry ofNWC, Fredrick Tudor’s ice cutting business, began During the winter the frozen surfacewould be carved into blocks and packed into sawdust It was a very lucrative business Itwas in fact so lucrative that it attracted many other men to the shores for the same

purpose, and the city eventually divided the pond into ice-rights, triangular zones cut from the center, like a pizza

However, it was difficult to get the ice to downtown Boston and to the wharves of Charlestown to be shipped to South America, Europe and India (Krim, 1977 28) Tudor hired Nathaniel J Wyeth, the owner of the Fresh Pond Hotel – a little resort spot on the shores of what is now the city reservoir – as his manager In addition to making many technical improvements to the ice-making process, Wyeth partially funded the first railroad extension out to the pond in1840 for the purpose of transporting Tudor’s ice

Wyeth realized that a two-industry railroad would make more money than a industry railroad So, in 1844, he acquired a lot in NWC (now the site of the Jefferson Parks housing complex) He leased this lot to Peter Hubbell and Almon Abbott, brick makers hailing from the rich blue clay-banks of Coxsackie, New York The condition of their lease was that all material necessary for the kiln, such as wood and coal- as well as the finished bricks - be transported using the new railroad extension When this venture began to make money, Wyeth, along with a few other local players, began to buy up or lease the rest of the Great Swamp (Krim, 1977 29)

one-For the sake of ice, a firing industry was born Clay was excavated, shaped, dried

in on-site in kilns, and then shipped out as bricks The labor force was largely immigrant,and usually camped in tents on-site until, little by little, workers cottages were

constructed By 1893 the Cambridge Chronicle could admonish that

Cambridge people know, or ought to, that if there is one thing for which the University city is famous – outside of its college – it is its product of brick – both the quantity and the quality of that product Cambridge practically controls the brick market of Boston and the eastern part of the State, if not of New England.(Cambridge Industries: Their Rise and Progress 1893, CHS archive)

In spite of this proud sentiment, several sources note that the quality of the

Cambridge clay was “strictly mediocre.”(Long, 1971) It should be noted as well that already in 1893, Cambridge is the “University City,” defined by and arranged around Harvard University, an school producing knowledge of the most authoritative variety The exportation of brick, then, was second only to the exportation of ideas from the educational industry

Digging Holes

NWC before the 20th century was:

…vacant land where offensive odors, disturbing noises, cluttered shipyards and polluted water could be tolerated Here were established icehouses and brickyards,

slaughterhouses and tanneries, railroad yards and streetcar barns, carriage factories and cemeteries, a racecourse and a reservoir, the almshouse and an army camp And around this urban fringe settled the rural immigrants – the Irish and Italians, the West Indians and French Canadians – who labored to create the industrial fabric.(Krim 1977 18)

What does it mean to be an urban fringe? In this case, it meant to be an immigrantneighborhood; it meant to be in an area that was at the “fringes” of Old Cambridge and

Harvard Square It also means to be a place in a state of flux The 1977 architectural survey book of NWC opens with the following paragraph:

The modern landscape of Northwest Cambridge, crowded with three-deckers and

shopping centers, overlaid with parkways and cemeteries, is the culmination of

generations of past decisions that were ultimately founded upon the inherent qualities of the natural landscape Once the assessments had been made that a swamp was

forbidding, or that the plain was fertile, these decisions often became accepted as the definitions of the cultural landscape, and were perpetuated by succeeding generations building railroads across the swamps and farmsteads on the plain (Krim, 1977 3)

Noting that the future is informed by the past and that structures are built on the ground is, in and of itself, generic, and contributes to an essentializing view of spaces –

that is, inequities exists between them because they inherently must, rather than because

people have actively created them Therefore, as Krim’s introduction to the project that surveyed and entered a record into the archive of every single structure in the city, and that has become a primary to which people refer to understand the logic of its history, it is

in no sense uncomplicated

Whether or not these questions turn on the “assessments” (or possibly maps) made about the landscape, it is true that the most easily used land in Cambridge was settled first, and that the resources, such as clay, found in other areas, were used to build the structures erected on that land Cambridge consumed itself to grow

The halls of Harvard were built from the clay ground, fired in the brick kilns of Dublin St (now Sherman St.) and Vassal Lane In NWC, as in much of Somerville, and the Back Bay of Boston (Domosh 1996), the valleys and ponds were filled with the tops

of hills And not even the dirty work of brick making escaped a progressivist, idealist

interpretation, the earth from the ground mapped back into the cultural landscape,

rearranged and renamed

Dull, inanimate clods though (bricks) may be, yet are they connected with us by ties more close and strong than we sometimes dream of Both they and we are clay, taken alike from our mother earth, molded and tempered may be, by the fierce sun of adversity and every changing circumstance into the shape and quality which are to fit us for our respective places in the great economy of nature They into temples and shrines and tombs for the habitations of man; we into living temples and shrines, fit dwelling places for the spirit of the living God, or tombs, maybe, of blasted hopes, desires, and aspirations (Cambridge Industries: Their Rise and Progress 1893)

The transformation of the land is presented again, as in Krim, as its own logical conclusion: bricks, like people, are formde for the purpose of “taking our respective places in the great economy of nature,” and, as importantly into a the space of religion Here, we inhabit the transformed earth in the same way that God inhabits the transformedman Therefore the transformation of the land brings us closer to God Both man and brick come from nature and go to God through this process of moulding space and of building Though the language and manifest goals of this motivation will change, this idea of redemption through construction, transformation and progress will repeat itself Nothing is said, however, in these articles and files though, about, for example, the living conditions or experiences of these “immigrant workers.”

The result of this constructive fervor was that, mainly in the period 1850-1900, nofewer than 14 pits of various sizes and depths were dug in the area that had been the Great Swamp during the 19th century by a number of different proprietors Many of thesebrickyards were taken over by the conglomerate New England Brick Company

(NEBCo.) towards the end of the century, and it was this conglomerate that dug the most

significant hole, right in the middle of the former swamp Crowned by this 80 foot deep and many acre-ed hole, NWC at the turn of the century resembled a gigantic sandpit, interspersed with a few other of what Krim called “fringe activities,” such as the

poorhouse, the tuberculosis hospital, the cemetery and the stables

However, residential building was encroaching from the Old Cambridge (OC) direction, with it concern as to the problems inherent in digging very deep holes

everywhere The City Engineer’s report of 1893 even stated that

The increase in malarial affections which, while centering and finding their greatest activity in the immediate vicinity if these pits, are yet spreading over the city, is to us sufficient evidence of this… (Cambridge Engineer's Annual Report 1896)

The disagreeable nature of malaria drove the city to begin to edge the brick makers out of the area, though the last clay bed was not closed until 1955 By the middle

of the 20th century, the area had been totally transformed What had been first a “vacant wasteland of meadow grass, bramble thicket, and swamp willow” was then “totally transformed in a few decades into an industrial complex of brickyards, drying kilns, and clay-pits.” The clay industry left behind acres of “abandoned brick-works and flooded clay pits” (Krim 1977 28) in its activity of constructing the “temples and shrines and tombs for the habitations of man.”

However, the more affluent city center was running out of space and spilling over into the “fringe.” What had been romantic from a distance was distinctly unpleasant nextdoor Many of these abandoned sites fell into the hands of the City of Cambridge, which embarked on a process of transformation of the “fringe” landscape By the middle of the

twentieth century there was a “’substantial deficiency in all types of open space

facilities’” (Page, 1985)

Transformations

The bulldozers whine and creak as preparations continue for the next stage of development Before long, Cambridge will have long –awaited and badly needed playing fields When that happens, in the not too distant future, it will seem as though the former claypits and dump were never anything other than beautiful playing fields – From”Playing field emerges from former brick yard, dumpsite” Cambridge Chronicle, 5 September 1985

This desire to transform was actively pursued In 1970 the Cambridge

Community Development Department got a grant from the Ford Foundation to study the different ways that the Municipal dump site could be used The report came out in 1973; called “Cambridge City Dump Site – Re-use Analysis” it concluded that that best use for the space would be “recreational”(Page, 1985}) In 1985 the NEBCo site, the largest pit,and subsequently the municipal dump from 1951 to 1971, one block away from the Tobin, was regraded as the Danehy field.2

However, the nature of what lay below, so to speak, was also well understood Shippen Page, in his 1985 article on the construction of the new park, wrote that “The area behind Bellis Circle is still referred to as ‘the dump’ even though it hasn’t been used

as one for almost 15 years Memories are important here.” (Page, 1985) Though the plans of the city were rewriting the surface of the neighborhood, both the neighbors and the land remembered the dump that had been there Engineering considerations

2 Of living behind the dump, one resident spoke "of the fires that burned in the dump ‘Sometimes,’ she says, pointing to the corner of her yard, ‘we had to take our hoses and put the fires out.’" She also

remembered the "sight of the horizon shimmering with the movement of rats." {Page, 1985} The rats had come with the next great railroad expansion – the Porter Square subway stop (the station is the second deepest in the world because they had to very far down to get past the clay and to the bedrock) Another railroad extension was built from the subway site to the dump so that, on top of the soft municipal dump, all of the rock and soil from the excavation could be dumped on top Between these land dual disruptions, the rats fled in panic- infesting entire neighborhoods.

concurrently had to be made to this history, and were then re-presented to the public as controlled safety concerns What became a high hill was then covered by a layer of thick plastic, and layers of soft sod, and surrounded by gravel pits to release the methane breathed up by the dump.3 A section of a city pamphlet on the Danehy park called

“Environmental Monitoring” (CHS file on Danehy), maps the site, showing the borders

of the clay pit, the borders of the park and the methane vent trench and gas monitoring wells.4

The space was being rewritten, and this change to the landscape was accompanied

by changing demographics and residency patterns In 1989 the city published a “North Cambridge Planning Report,” which in addition to putting forth a vision of the future of the neighborhood, narrativized the contradictions inherent in these transformations – progressivism mixed with nostalgia

As early as the 80’s it writes, already 47% of the residents living there had moved

to the area within the past 5 years "Historically,” states the report correctly “the

neighborhood has been home to generations of French Canadians, Irish and Italian families While this is still true today, other immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbeanand Central America have moved into the neighborhood in recent years During the past decade, growing numbers of higher income professionals have also been attracted to North Cambridge While in the past, the majority of residents fell into low or moderate

3 Unfortunately, like so many great ideas, this didn’t work very well Rainwater couldn’t drain from the park; for years, weeks on end of soccer and football games would be canceled when the rain that fell would sit several feet deep on the playing fields, refusing to drain Meanwhile, the unfortunate buildings at the bottom of the hill, outside the park, would end up with thirteen feet of water in their basements during bad storms It took years of engineering experiments, including a machine that roamed back and forth across the sod, punching holes, to resolve the problem.

4 The only other thing built on this site is the Bristol Arms Apartments, which is surrounded by gas monitoring wells I do not know anything about health concerns in this complex.

income groups, many of these newcomers are causing the median household income in North Cambridge to rise substantially.” (NCPR, 1989)

Additionally it showed that the newer residents were younger and had higher levels of income and of education than the older residents (NCPR, 1989) The

demographic, like the geographical transformations of the area over the past two hundred years had been quick and drastic The parallel and interrelated transformations of the contours of the landscape and the inhabitancy caused confusion among both planners andresidents, as is evidenced by the 1989 North Cambridge Planning report commentary on demographic change

The degree and rate of population change occurring in North Cambridge has been noted

by many residents with concern Long time residents, often the elderly or first time homebuyers, are increasingly unable to remain in North Cambridge, while only those new residents with substantial incomes can afford to move in Residents fear this trend will alter the fabric of North Cambridge and threaten to destroy the very qualities which make the neighborhood an attractive place to live (NCPR, 1989)

Here, the writers of the report spell out gentrification as the tragic logical paradox (that it in fact often is) A neighborhood is so nice that new affluent people move there, replacing the nice nature of it, and making it unpleasant for the nice people who can no longer afford to live there Thus the newcomers whose presence has ruined the authentic and poor nature of the neighborhood, are blamed, and blame others, for having caused theplace that is now their home to become unpleasantly rich What are the stories of the place within which these ideas about change get situated? There is certainly a resistance

to change, even to “improvement” on some level There are ideas about “authenticity” and about class Mostly though, these speculations center on ideas about class and income

Housing costs in NWC concurrently skyrocketed There are dozens of new condo complexes – on the site of the former truck yard of Portland Stoneware and in front of W.R.Grace Chemical Co There are co-housing – communal living – complexes There are fewer “family” neighborhoods because the houses are worth more if you divide them

up into smaller apartments, and there are fewer families In fact, school age population is

on the decline, and one of the schools in Cambridge will probably be closed soon

In the mid-nineties Massachusetts held a state referendum on the subject of rent control, which was still in use in only three cities: Worchester, Boston and Cambridge Even though voters all three of those cities wanted to retain the system, the statewide voteabolished it Although the visiting international scholars still arrive every fall to fill the graceful dorms at Harvard and the long hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,the international immigrant population has declined, as has the school age population

There is, however, some affordable housing in NWC One of the ways that the

“authentically” working class feel had been to some degree preserved was through the construction of three large housing developments – Jefferson Park, Walden Square and Rindge Towers All three were built by private developers and are constructed on formerclay pit sites

Therefore, the majority of the affordable housing in NWC is built on these industrial sites whose contents are mainly unknown NWC in the 19th century had been full of slaughterhouses, tanneries and chemical companies like Dewey & Almey and W.R Grace What is the relationship here between “affordability” and the “unknown” nature of what lies below? This project does not deal with health concerns in these housing projects; in fact I do not know if there are any

post-There may not be any environmental problems at these sites; but the fact that I did

not investigate it, I begin to realize, investigating instead a school that parents went out of

their way to send kids to (rather than having no choice about where to live), deserves

consideration Is NWC a different place to those who occupy or use former clay land?

In the 20th century Cambridge transformed 14 large pits, up to 80 feet deep, into playing fields, schools, housing projects, an army base and a mall Nearly all of these sites are now regulated by the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) under the Massachusetts Contingency Plan, the state version of the Right to Know legislations that I will discuss later Two issues begin to emerge about these sites: firstly, who knows that they were there? And secondly, who knows what went into them?

The first establishes whether there can be a narrative made between health

concerns and what is in the ground; the second establishes what kind of narrative Both have implicate access to the historical record in questions about the health of bodies and spaces

Mapping the Neighborhood

Between 1965 and 1977 the City of Cambridge, in conjunction with various surveyors, historians, and the Cambridge Historical Commission conducted an architectural survey

of the entire city, from east to west and A-Z This project generated a file, for each address, with a survey sheet and any other relevant documents inside announcing

everything from the first city map upon which the building appeared, to the type of siding(clapbd? shingl? brick? stuc? asbs?…).5

This town, known “first for its university,” had become obsessed with its own

architecture, creating systematic mirror reflections of itself in section by section of the city (starring, of course, those buildings built of brick) While the books generalize about

5 However, it is worth noticing that, they in fact missed, according to Krim, (Hanna, Interview with Krim, 2003) quite a few buildings Among other locations, they missed the strange Fireplace store, poised on the remains of the old railroad track next to Fresh Pond and squeezed alongside Chico’s Sunoco station, and they missed 445 Concord Ave., the uninhabitable U-store complex between Tobin and Danehy, that happens to be a Superfund site.

the neighborhoods, the files make of them tiny demarcated parcels, each with their own collection of historical Xeroxed pages

However, this does not exclude the process of mapping, much advanced now in the age

of computers Older maps of the city are kept at the historical commission, but online at the Cambridge Information Systems portion of the City of Cambridge website, it is possible to download in PDF format nearly any type of current map that one can conceive

of These include, but are not limited to:

* Census 2000 Demographic Atlas

* Cambridge Bus Transit Map

* Sewer and Drain Atlas

* Water Distribution System Atlas

* Tax Atlas 2000  

* Residential Taxing Districts

* Parks and Playgrounds (http://gis.cambridgema.gov/maplibrary/index.html)

The urban landscape of Cambridge has been written and rewritten It is a layered

text Harvey says of cities that they “form what we might call a palimpsest, a composite

landscape made up of different built forms superimposed upon each other with the

passing of time” (Harvey, 1996 417) What the Cambridge Map Index shows us, is that they form similarly multiple layers of knowledge of those spaces, and that in this affluent,self-conscious town, there are both the desire and the resources to produce and to share that knowledge

Maps have essentializing functions not unlike those that Krim attributed to the landscape – that is, a map freezes a space into a moment in time and erasing all others This can allow the reasons for their structuring to be made invisible; or obscured by a rewriting that explains why it already existed that way For example, the parks and playgrounds maps write NWC as one of the most desirable areas to live in citywide The demographics maps write it as ethnically diverse, albeit without comment of which residents live on clay pits and which do not Parcel maps show us the unit of the archive These are the ways that Cambridge is accessed today.

There is another PDF map of Cambridge online that is not shown on the City website This is a map from the Center for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) This map shows two sets of data: one is the locations of Federal Superfund Sites, and the second is the location of schools within half a mile In section four of Middlesex County there are twenty-five schools on the map One school, though, is nearly on top of the black dot of the superfund That is the John M Tobin School

THE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

Muskrat Pond

Beyond the narrative that I knew about the Tobin school, what is really known?

That is, what does the archive say? That is, what is really documented? Here I begin again where everyone else begins: by going back and exploiting the maps & systems as best I can to generate the story of one clay pit in particular I want to understand the story, but I also want to understand how it is constructed

I begin with an excerpt from a bird watching guide, found in the Cambridge Historical Commission’s file on “Cofran’s Pit.”

Muskrat Pond lay on the opposite side of Concord Avenue, near the foot of Vassal Lane and less than one hundred yards from the eastern end of Cambridge Nook It was a pretty pool, not unlike some of those in the Brickyard Swamp, but much larger than any of them, and very much deeper As its name indicates, it abounded in muskrats, who built their conical houses all about its quaking, treacherous margin …Here it was that I shot

my first Duck – a Pintail – in 1863 or 1864, and here Ruthven Deane and I found several Florida Gallinules – two of which we killed – in the autumn of 1868 There was a wide stretch of boggy meadow just to the eastward, where Snipe and Yellow-legs alighted at times, and where Carolina Rails were accustomed to breed Both Pond and meadow have

long since disappeared, and in their place yawns a deep and unsightly clay-pit –Birds of

the Cambridge Region (from CHS archive, undated)

That the only description of the Tobin site before the brickyard that is in the archive comes from a bird watching guide allows for two related conclusions Firstly, in reading the file, it romances the pre-clay land as an untouched wilderness teeming with nature – allowing for the construction of an anecdotal narrative in which the creators of the clay pit function (in spite of bricks’ supposedly lofty place in the relationship betweennature, God and man) as the destroyers and disrupters of this idyllic spot It becomes the springboard for the story that tells about land that is destroyed and contaminated Also, however, it calls attention to the ways that discourses about space change over time: it is

quite possible (in fact likely) that there is no other description of the pond because a bird enthusiast would be the only one who would find the space documentarily relevant – to others it had no discursive significance

Muskrat Pond was adjacent to Fresh Pond, and probably resembled the two small ponds that still remain on the far side of Fresh Pond’s perimeter – protected as part of the reservoir basin According to the account above, it was the largest natural pond (save Fresh Pond) in what was already by the time of his writing, known as the “Brickyard Swamp” rather than the earlier “Great Swamp.” It was also the southernmost of these ponds, save Fresh Pond itself

Vassal Lane is one of the older roads in Cambridge Originally it skirted the marsh by Muskrat Pond, and looped away south from Concord Avenue (then Concord Turnpike), the first highway to cut through the swamp out of Cambridge to the west Half of the chunk of land enclosed between Vassal Lane and Concord Ave was

purchased in 1843 by Samuel M Cofran (Cambridge Industries: Their Rise and Progress 1893) from a local landholder, and in 1885 he expanded the holding by purchasing the part of the site with Muskrat Pond on it from Frederick Tudor, who was an investor in theice industry.(Long 1971)

S.M Cofran opened a brickyard on the site, which he passed along to his son about ten years later The enterprise became known as Noah Cofran & Co – Co being his partner Joseph Broussard By1892 the business made three million bricks per year, and employed 85 men, but “made all (the) brick the old-fashioned way, by horse power.”

In comparison to the huge Bay State Brick Company, operating just a block away and manufacturing about twenty-five million bricks per year, the scale of the Cofran

operation was quite small.(Brickmaking 1893) However, the Vassal Lane site had the additional disadvantage of being one of the only clay-pits without access to the railroad line, a handicap that confined sales to the local Boston area market, across which they were distributed by horse and wagon, more likely to sites within Cambridge such as Harvard University.(CHC archive)

However, the operation was significant enough to transform the site from the hunting playground described above, into the described “deep and unsightly clay-pits.”

bird-In 1900 Mr Noah Cofran stated that he was “out of health and cannot expect to continue

in active business.”(Long, 1971) He offered the land to the City of Cambridge for

purchase At the time, the sixteen acres of land was valued at $39,400 including $9,100 worth of structures on the property These structures included two boarding houses rented to men with families, a house for the co-owner, and a house for the keeper of the teams Also, there was a “line of sheds, with engine and boiler, shafting and other

machinery.”

Mr Cofran offered the land to the city for the low price of $37,500, because he thought “that the city could make good use of his land by ‘improving it’ as was done to a part of the Bay State brick property,” that is, landscaping it into some kind of a park Cofran himself seemed to be begging for a force to fill and renew the space that he had wrought His business had run him “out of health;” the space, it implies, is unhealthy, and should be “improved.”

At the time, “the clay had been worked down to an average of 15 feet, and he was sure that there was clay enough remaining to allow work for 30 years or more.” Thereforethe property was still a viable investment for another brick company Since the city had

dawdled in making a decision, the property was sold to the New England Brick Co (NEBCo) in 1901 NEBCo had been created with “the avowed purpose of getting rid of the confusion of many small manufacturers” (Long 1971), an interestingly earnest

rationale for the creation of the conglomerate that swallowed up almost all of the

brickyards in NWC at that time

However, the brick industry had bigger problems Both the clay and the patience

of the increasingly close residential neighbors were wearing thin by the turn of the century The 1896 City of Cambridge Engineer’s report commented that “for a number

of years the question of restricting the excavation of lands in North Cambridge for making purposes has been agitated The clay from enormous areas has been dug out to a great depth, to the positive detriment of adjoining lands, the disfigurement of the locality

brick-as a whole, and, it wbrick-as feared, to the injury of public health.” So, despite its remaining un-mined resources, Cofran’s pit, as it had come to be called, was closed in as an active brickyard in 1905.(Long 1971) It was now not just Cofran’s health that was threatened

by this site, but the “public health” as well Even before the hole was filled, therefore, it

is already inscribed as a place transformed from an Eden to a malady

Subsequently the land passed through several hands, and the pit filled with water The 1916 atlas of Cambridge shows a large pond and names the site as the property of an Abraham T Thompson Tax records have the city acquiring a lien on the property, then held by Frank L McAlister, in 1919, for a failure to pay taxes (CHC archive ) However, the city did not foreclose the parcel officially until 1927

In the1931 Parks Report the city announced plans to have the street department fill and level the Vassal Lane parcel within two years In photographs dated1933, the

pond, known as “Cofran’s Pit” no longer exists In its place a smoky wasteland of abandoned cans, trucks, and garbage expands towards a distant row of houses (the blocks bordering the parcel to the south, east and north had been slowly subdivided and

developed into two and three family homes between 1890 and1946) Between 1931 and

1938 half of the site was developed by the Parks Service (through a WPA grant) into a playing field and baseball diamond called Callanan Playground (named after a Rev Patrick H Callanan of St Peter’s Church on Concord Avenue) (CHC Archive) The other half of the site continued to be used as a municipal dump until approximately 1952(C.D.&M 1997)

The land became public According to neighbors, there were victory gardens planted on

the edges of Callanan Field during World War II In any case, it is certain that in 1946 eight barracks were constructed on the field next to the park to house returning veterans and their families These barracks were demolished in the early 1950’s In 1958, on the end of the site closer to Fresh Pond, the Massachusetts National Guard Armory was built.(CHC)

Through planting gardens and making parks, the city begins to rewrite the space But does that return it to the idyllic land of Muskrat Pond? After these changes it still remains that to landscape an industrial site is to make its history invisible

But so what? Before the European settlement of New England, the indigenous tribes who lived there had heavily regulated the landscape Burning maintained the

“forest edge” conditions that supported their preferred game (Cronon 1983), and the tribes living in the Cambridge area were also engaged domestic agriculture, cultivating

“maize (corn), beans, squash and tobacco” (Krim 1977 5) In 1855, just as the Brick

Industry in Cambridge began to grow in earnest, Henry David Thoreau could sit down at Walden Pond, only a few miles a way, and, bemoaning the loss of various species of plants, birds and mammals, ask “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am

conversant with?”(Quoted in Cronon 1983 4) There is no such thing as a “natural” site: every site has a history, the vast, vast majority of which, is, and will always be, utterly invisible and unknowable to its occupants Humans have settled these spaces for

thousands of years The paradise of birds therefore, was no more “inherent” than

anything else

Yet there remains the question of the dump What was put into it, and by who?

We will never know, and that is part of what makes it a powerful story

“A Midway Philosophy”

The trend that emerged after the end of the brick industry, was for the former sites

to be used for public projects (whether city projects like schools and parks, or

constructions of housing “projects” by private developers) The fact that they were something of public hazards to begin with, contributed to their falling into the hands of the city These sites became the manifestation of a city and neighborhood that were reinventing themselves as progressive, liberal, civilized urban environments All of the clay sites became implicated in this shift, most explicitly through the education project ofthe Tobin School

This also continues the discursive shift, wherein the language is explicitly cast in terms of the public good, which will be projected “progressively” into the future The contents of the past, or the contents, so to speak, of the pit, will then begin to inhabit an

exterior discourse of rumor and history, because the progressive space of the public plan does not, without some forcing, allow for the past

In1969 construction began on three new Cambridge schools; the Martin Luther King Elementary School, the John F Kennedy Elementary School and the John M TobinSchool,6 which was slated for the Vassal Lane site In preparation for the construction on Callanan Field, test borings were done across the property in 1966 and 1968 by the New England Test Boring Corporation in order to determine the composition of the ground Differing types of landfill were noted across the property, down to a level of about twentyfeet, with clay below and a water level of about seven feet below ground (H&A memo

to Conry 1987

The three schools were designed to exploit the most exciting educational and architectural ideas that the late 1960’s had to offer That is, they were designed to

combine education and architectural ideas into the ideal “learning experience.” The Tobin

School, opened in 1972, was built by the Aberthaw Construction Company from an award winning design by Pietro Belluschi –“one of the world’s leading modernist

architects and Dean of the MIT Architecture School.” (Kay, 1972) The “improvements” hoped for by Noah Cofran were finally, seventy years later, being executed The site was

no longer going to be “out of health.”

Tobin was built for five million dollars, and was designed to hold seven hundred students A description from the Cambridge Chronicle June 3 1972 describes the “light shafts descending from the roof to rotundas …The carpet forms and alcoves are a special feature of the building, designed by the architect to provide students with alternate spaces

6 Mr Tobin had been Superintendent of Schools for many years and was remembered as “tall and gruff.”

to conduct learning activities outside of the classrooms yet within the school building.” It was a space for “alternatives” and experiments, it was “special.” The Tobin was not going to be like other schools

Another article from that time opened “What did your child get out of his school building this week? Did it teach him that life is a monochromatic prison? That teaching

is a wide open loft or a contained box?” This phrase makes the discursive turn so

quintessential of the Tobin: while talking manifestly about the spatial attributes of the school, the sentence is actually an indictment of various educational philosophies – traditional education being the “prison” while the open school movement is the “wide open loft.” The Tobin, this article implies, is more progressive than any of that – it has moved on, melded the failed trends of the past, and has created the final synthesis The article continued –

Styles, fads, philosophies appear and disappear in plants outmoded before their education devices Between the vast often-dull spaces of the open school and the rigid boxing of older schools stands Cambridge’s new Tobin School

At the Tobin, a midway philosophy – half open loft, half enclosed classroom – is treated with care and vitality in hexagonal arrangements… The two-story $5 million dollar structure tempers or individualizes the institution as it clings to the neighborhood side of its 10-acre lot – adjacent to a clutter of billboards, semi-factory structures, and a parking lot The cluster look springs from the double-loaded corridors based on hexagonal shape

“An optimal relationship between the permanent and the flexible,” say architect Kenneth DeMay The grouping also gives the odd-angled classrooms gaily appointed playground corridor corners, and varied hallways which relieve the large innards from tedium … The architects like to look to the uniform material inside and out – the soft-toned concrete blocks – as an element linking the community view with the student view Though to the visitor this seems a somewhat abstract conceit, the inside of the building is appealing in is color, carpet, and finishings.” (Kay 1972)

As noted in the article, the experience of the interior is not very different from the

experience of the exterior The school, all in all, is very experimental But what does it

mean to say that it has “‘an optimal relationship between the permanent and the

flexible’”? What is flexible about the building? It is manifestly playful, that is certain The architects are concerned about the “tedium” of the hallways, it is individualized

Importantly, it is built to balk the trend: it is an experiment, but it is meant to be a

permanence, not one of the “styles, fads and philosophies that will “appear and

disappear.” It is already perfect: it will therefore resist change Additionally, the school

is involved in recasting the neighborhood, “softening” as it does, the “semi-factory structures.”

Most of the classrooms were built as six-sided polygons with one window, not designed to open Part of the modern vision of the school was that it would be incredibly efficient to heat With a centralized HVAC system and tightly sealed windows and doors, the environmental load of the school, in terms of burning fuel, were designed to be

as minimal as possible Influenced by the recent energy crisis, the design of the school took environmental and economic concerns as tantamount Albert Giroux, director of public information for the Cambridge School Department described it as a “sealed

building with little intake of fresh air”(Landon 1991)

The Tobin was a “new” vision, gloriously metaphorical and egalitarian, even in the presentation of the drab concrete to all concerned It was to mediate between the increasingly wealthy zone to the south and the semi-industrial and now “modern fringe” zones on Fresh Pond parkway But what about the past? What about the pit? They will become important, but they will simultaneously remain as unknown as they are at this moment We must remember that it is not precisely upon the past that this interaction with this “school of the future” will occur, but upon the map, the remaining evidence, the

ephemera (that, having past, is now nearly as inaccessible as the future), and the

interaction between that archive and the original vision

The School of the Future

The Tobin was designed to create learning “alternatives.” This project is an alternative way of learning from the Tobin What does the Tobin teach this investigation and how is that knowledge different from what it intended to represent?

Designed to house two specific “alternative” programs, the idea that the

educational experience inherently spatial as well as pedagogical, was encountered at every bend in the corridor of this school The two programs originally located at the school were a “Follow Through” program, and the “School of the Future.”

The “Follow Through,” at Tobin was one of many nationwide It was designed to

be the “follow up” to the successful Head-Start daycare program, a program that supportslow-income, “at-risk” students The Cambridge “Follow Through’” programs were structured on the Bank Street Model, a hybrid of the open school movement that required

a bit more structure and organization In theory at least, the Tobin was the perfect place