July Archive Highlight - “Reject Park; Monument Lab Footnotes (pt. 1)” (Patreon)

Monument Lab is a nonprofit public art and history studio that cultivates and facilitates critical conversations around the past, present, and future of monuments.

While my work with Monument Lab this Summer will take me to the National Mall in DC for August and September, I first worked with them in our shared home base of Philadelphia, when their 2017 exhibition asked the question: “what is an appropriate monument for the city of Philadelphia?” Monument Lab brought together artists to build 20 prototype, temporary monuments at 10 public parks across the city. At each site they built a mobile Lab (read: spruced up shipping container), where Lab Managers engaged members of the public around the artworks and asked them to submit their own proposals and thoughts around the same question: “what is an appropriate monument for the city of Philadelphia?”

I was one of several Lab Managers for the City Hall location, where we took in over 1000 of the 4000  proposals collected that year. Over the course of the following year, I helped re-scan, transcribe, categorize and analyze those 4000 proposals for the purposes of archival, and preparing a “report to the city” on our findings.

At the time, I kept running notes on proposals I found interesting, or stories from my time at City Hall. As I prep for the Beyond Granite Exhibition next month, I though I’d look at some of those notes again.

CH 141

“I was hoping they were finally gonna build something”

I met the author as she passed through the City Hall site. She lives near the Lancaster site, a long-time resident, and had seen the site being established. “What are they going to make?” she asked eagerly. I explained, and she was disappointed to hear that the artist was working on an excavation. “I was hoping they were finally gonna build something there.” She spoke at length about the development of the area, and its history, and her frustration as development and renewal in the city had failed to reach her part of town. As she made to leave, I asked; “what would you want them to build?” She paused, thought, and then took a form.

CH144

Waikiki Natatorium

I remember being struck by this submission in a few ways. It was one of the first that I saw that made a case for a pre-existing “monument,” and remains one of the most impassioned of these arguments. I was also impressed by the way it so easily and naturally embodied the call for unity in a divided city that was already a constant in my conversations; “all can use it.” Monuments not just for celebrating ideals, but for enacting them — emphasis, interestingly not on the ‘all’ but on the ‘USE.’

That was week one. It did not take much longer for submissions for interactive, practical, USEFUL monuments to evolve from surprises to matters of course. For some, it was a matter of cost; “if they’re gonna spend my tax dollars, it’s gotta do something!” For others, they felt distant from the memorials that live in and often loom over the city. For almost all of them, they wanted something in which they could find themselves.

CH153

“...make a clean city the monument.”

The author spends a good amount of time in and around City Hall, asking for donations, which he generally collects inside his prosthetic leg. His submission came early, and for a long time I used it as an example of how a proposal for a “monument” could be something entirely different from the traditional plaque or statue. While I personally disagree with much of the reasoning he espouses, I was very struck by the action, and the last 8 words stuck with me for a while: “no more monuments. Make a clean city the monument.”

Eventually, that last sentiment inspired a submission of my own:

Submission text (in my distinct illegible scrawl): In each neighborhood of Philly, residents will collect garbage on their streets. Trucks will bring that garbage to city hall, where a team will build a trash-mandala-replica of the Penn’s Plan compass. Each neighorhood’s trash will fill in a section of the compass, and over the course of a week the garbage will accumulate and pile high, documenting the scope and distribution of trash in the city. And then, we clean.

CH 628

“Philly Jesus”

Philly Jesus first came to the City Hall courtyard in early October: a young man, with long hair and a matching beard, he was wearing a cross, flowing white linen robes, and carrying a wooden staff.  He’s a well known figure for Center City Regulars, often seen taking photos with passersby and giving out bible quotes. After a few such photos, he put his attention to the pedestals of “Two Me.”

“It’s a public art and history project,” I said, crossing the courtyard to explain the piece, and the project as a whole. He nodded attentively throughout until I finished.

“I can go up?” I nodded; “That’s the idea.”

Christ on the pedestal drew a predictable crowd, and after waving enthusiastically to the crowd, Philly Jesus stepped aside to let the line of tourists resume their selfie-taking. “Is there like, a time limit?” he asked, descending the ramp. “It’s a public space,” I replied; “anyone is welcome to use it as they wish, as long as they’re not harming the piece, themselves, or others. You share it like you do any other public space.” He nodded, and I watched him think for a beat . “Cool. Thank you. Jesus loves you.”

For the next week or so, Philly Jesus became a Monument Lab regular; for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, he would hold the mount on the left pedestal, smiling serenely and blessing passersby. Sometimes he would willingly yield the space; sometimes someone waiting for a photo-op would get impatient and push past him (generally, when Philly Jesus occupied one pedestal, others were hesitant to claim the other). “I want people to know about the historical Jesus,” he explained back on the ground, filling out his form. “I’m just trying to be a way to connect people to him.” We had to pause a few times for photo opportunities, but eventually he completed his submission. As I walked his form back to the lab for processing, he already had his arms around another group seeking a photo. “Jesus loves you,” I heard him say over my shoulder. I wasn’t sure who it was directed to. Everyone, presumably.

CH????

“Reject Park”

At one of the entrances to Dilworth Park, there is a small, nondescript “NO SKATEBOARDING” sign. In even smaller type, it says this:

“If you skateboarded at the old Dilworth Plaza, recapture those memories at Franklin’s Paine Skate Park where 400 cubic feet, 75,0000 pounds of granite from the old plaza, was donated and recycled for your use.”

From speaking to skaters at City Hall over the 9 weeks of this project, I get the sense that most are not impressed with this gesture. Nor is Dilworth Park the only place they say they have been made to feel unwelcome—chief among them being Love Park. A cursory google search will find countless articles bemoaning the loss of this “Skate Mecca.” Even the designer of the park, Edmund Bacon, once skated the spot at the age of 92, in defiance of the city ban. Many skaters feel the series of renovations to the park were made specifically to eject them.

And yet submissions we’ve collected that reference skating are rarely angry, bitter, or defiant. Instead, they celebrate the culture and creativity of Skate spots in Philly, past and present, the constant reinvention and experimentation that happens there ( PT33, “never finished” is a half-pipe forever frozen in a state of development, mirroring the constructions and creations always being made and removed at skate parks across the city). These monuments call for new skate-friendly spaces, filled with local art, graffiti-friendly surfaces, and other “monuments to Street Culture” (WS164). Some just want their experiences remembered (CH971).

I heard all of these sentiments and more in conversations at City Hall. “Skaters have contributed a lot to the city,” one Philadelphian said, sitting on the ledge beside the table outside our Mobile Lab, where his friend was completing a submission of his own; “and it feels like we never get recognition. It’s like graffiti - Philly used to be a real center for Graffiti Culture, but the city did everything it could to get rid of it.”

He proceeded to describe his vision of a park for that accepted all of these subcultures: patches of grass for people to sit, play, or relax; a skate park, full of half-pipes and grindable surfaces; at the center of it all, a statue of William Penn, where graffiti was encouraged.

“It could be a park for all the people the city has kicked out, or overlooked. A reject park.” He laughed at that. “Yeah, we could call it Reject Park.”

Inside the lab, the managers all begged him to submit his idea. We handed him a form, which he looked at thoughtfully before folding it up and putting it in his pocket. “I don’t know … maybe I will later.”

He didn’t.

For me, one of the most important lessons I’ve learned from Monument Lab comes in equal parts from the submissions received and the time on the ground in city parks: the life of a park is shaped more by use than by design. Policies and plans may write one set of intentions onto a public space, but another story entirely is written by the ways the functions the public draws out of features and facts of a park. City Hall is a performance space, carved up into discrete and contested stages. It’s a meeting place, for running groups and scavenger hunts and tourists on their phones, shouting features at each other in a desperate bid to be located (“I’m in that one BIG building, with the arches and the fountains—there’s like a compass!”).

For those who use these parks every day, these functions define the space; I never once heard Thomas Paine Plaza referred to by its actual name—instead, Philadelphians called it “the skate park across the street;” “The MSB park;” “That game piece park.” Each public space has its own ‘regulars,’ its own group of residents who shape the park’s reality by bringing a part of their lives there. And when a change in the park can no longer support those lives, it can feel like a betrayal: a negation of all of the memories you’ve made in that place, and of the vitality you have brought the park in return.

In other words, it can make you feel like a reject.

A selection of submissions: