In 1964, following the unrest in Harlem roused by the police murder of James Powell, age 15, the poet June Jordan received an invitation to write for Esquire. Perhaps the invitation reached her in a manner that would feel familiar to some during our time. That is, perhaps she had been invited to explain.
But Jordan elected not to account for the conditions that had led to the boy’s death that July, or for the subsequent six days of violent protests, wherein steel-helmeted members of New York City’s Tactical Patrol Force descended on Harlem by the busload. They confronted peaceful crowds of up to 1,000 marchers as well as less decorous assemblies who greeted the police with their own tactical operations: bottles and debris hurled from the rooftops. All were met with the uniform dispersal strategy of shots fired into crowds.
Rather than explain any of that, Jordan responded with a dream. She proposed a collaboration with the architect R. Buckminster Fuller: a radical/visionary redesign of Harlem to create an environment where such events were not possible. The poet undertook this project while newly separated from her husband, having sent her young child to live with relatives because her poverty could not sustain them both. Her dream of a transformed Harlem was composed at a moment when her personal precarity met the larger crisis. Years later, she called the project “a beginning,” and perhaps it is helpful to hold on to that feeling when contemplating the resulting design. Its most striking feature was 15 conical towers, 100 stories high, intended to house 500,000 people, insistently lifting Harlem and its population to the skies: upward, forward, and out of history.
Those same towers would furnish a complicated network of roadways, walkways, a rainwater-harvesting system connected to the city’s reservoirs, government buildings, shops, and cultural centers. Each apartment would be substantially larger than in typical public housing, boasting balconies and parking spaces—“every window would have a view.” New highways would connect Harlem to its surroundings, conveying people in and out of the neighborhood and opening up what had been cut off by borders literal and imaginary. It was a design that yearned for expansion and connection—but also a total obliteration of what had come before. “Partial healing is not enough,” Jordan wrote in a text accompanying the proposal, “a half century of despair requires exorcism.” When the article was published in April 1965, Jordan’s byline appeared (under her married name, June Meyer), but the collaborative design—though the collaboration was at her instigation—was attributed to Fuller alone. The title she had chosen for the piece, “A Skyrise for Harlem,” was changed to “Instant Slum Clearance.” Jordan’s text offered specifics indicating that she and Fuller “fully expected its enactment”: a construction time line of three years, prefabricated elements to be delivered by helicopter, a budget financed by private investment. But the illustrations, as Jordan later noted with some despair, were captioned as “utopian details.”