After a white off‐duty police officer shot and killed James Powell, a Black teen-ager, in 1964, the writer and activist June Jordan threw herself into what she called “a collaborative architectural redesign of Harlem.”
In July of 1964, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Thomas Gilligan, a white off‐duty police officer, shot and killed James Powell, a Black teen-ager. Uprisings erupted in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant, which lasted six nights and then ignited protests across the nation. In the foreword to her book “,” the Black feminist writer and activist June Jordan wrote that, in the aftermath of the protests, “I realized I now was filled with hatred for everything and everyone white.
The uprisings coincided with a turbulent period in Jordan’s life. A week after the riots, Jordan’s husband wrote to say that he wouldn’t be returning to their home; Jordan, increasingly destitute, sent her son to his grandparents. She wrote to Fuller, he responded almost immediately, and they spent several months drafting “Skyrise for Harlem,” a plan for a neighborhood where residents had long been subjected to constant policing, cramped quarters, and dilapidated schools.
The proposal—with its emphasis on cars and highways and high-rise public housing—shared certain tendencies with Moses’s visions. But what critically distinguished “Skyrise for Harlem” from urban-renewal projects, in addition to its commitment to resisting displacement, was the emphasis on residents’ imaginations. This was a plan attentive to the creative possibilities of interior life and social space.
“Skyrise for Harlem” never made it off the page. Although Jordan insisted that the pair fully expected the plan to be carried out, its fate was hardly an anomaly for Fuller, whose spectacular ideas regularly outpaced his commitment to seeing them through. Unlike many of Fuller’s other brainstorms, however, engagements with “Skyrise” have been scattershot. A few sources have covered the project, without giving credit to Jordan.
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