The project they designed together was “Skyrise for Harlem.” Though this multiple-tower housing proposal for Harlem never came to fruition, it was an unprecedented and unequaled collaboration between a white designer who uneasily flits in and out of architectural history and a Black designer who is virtually never considered part of that history. It was a creative response to despair and negativity that was itself a form of annihilation. It was a complete redesign of a dense urban neighborhood, one of the most symbolically and materially fraught areas in the United States. It was a response to an urban rebellion devised at a moment when all of the words bound up in the project—Harlem, housing, architecture—were perhaps at the peak of their contestation. It was also an attempt, within a recognizably abolitionist framework, to provide a social solution to what was largely thought of as a community at once abandoned and self-consuming through violence.
“Skyrise” acknowledged Harlem’s history and future as a Black neighborhood—as the Black neighborhood—at a time when even sympathetic writers and thinkers worried over its wellbeing. Well into the 1960s, Harlem retained an idea of itself as a Black capital. But a range of observers argued that urban rebellions and displacement were sapping its life.
Jordan’s article for Esquire begins, “Harlem is life dying inside a closet, an excrescence beginning where a green park ends, a self-perpetuating disintegration of walls, ceilings, doorways, lives.” The urban historian Daniel Matlin has noted that her language here is “suffused with the liberal pathologist imagery of Black urban life that had intensified since the 1940s and now peaked in 1965”—the same year that saw the publication of Kenneth B. Clark’s psychological study, Dark Ghetto, and Claude Brown’s memoir, Manchild in the Promised Land, both of which were about Harlem’s degeneration, as well as the federal government’s Moynihan Report on the “crumbling Black family.” Jordan also pointed out in her article that half of Harlem’s children were living with one parent or none, echoing the obsession with Black family structures displayed by many contemporary observers. At times, these bleak descriptions took on a prophetic or even an apocalyptic tenor. “Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become,” James Baldwin wrote in 1960.