Civic Plaza
This alt. series visualizes how placemaking methods would work in our daily urban settings.
This plaza is a typical [corner plaza] in a city- a wide sidewalk with monolithic brick paving without any focal points. Like many other government buildings, the administrative center operates from 9 am to 5 pm. After office hours, this substantial corner plaza suddenly becomes a dark and dead spot without activities. Creative Placemaking could help revitalize an open space like this by bringing more cultural and social activities to the plaza and making it vibrant again as its heyday.
The Republic Theatre Photograph courtesy by Robert McNeill
Black Broadway
The image above shows a movie house on U Street. The U Street corridor was primarily a Victorian-era neighborhood developed between 1862 and 1990. It was named "Black Broadway" during its heyday. This commercial, intellectual and cultural hub for African Americans in D.C. held this name from the 1920s to the 1950s.
See where this place is on the Story Map and Google Map.]
Dolores Kendrick
Dolores Kendrick (1927 - 2017), an American poet, playwright, and educator, was born during Black Broadway's heyday. She served as the second Poet Laureate in the District of Columbia.
Her book "The women of Plums: Poems in the Voice of Slave Women" won the Anisfield-Wolf Award. An opera also adopted "the women of plums" as its theater opening piece in New York in 1995.
Did you know? Providing publicly available on-site events, amenities, or programming could bring economic and social benefits to the local community and promote fair site use. (Site Design - Human Health+ Well-Being)
Voice on the Rise
Kendrick's book inspired the pavement design at this place.
The plum-color-shaded bricks represent fruit, the swirl textile pattern depicts women's clothes, and those engraved characters symbolize her contribution to literature, which became a voice that spoke to people and inspired the vibrancy and history of Black Broadway.
Existing lobby glasses are replaced with electrochromic glass that can manage its opacity level. The glassy box becomes a backdrop for evening outdoor events. Floating letters projected from the ground create a theatrical feel during the nighttime.
Did you know? Micro-climates exist in dense urban areas where a lot of hardscape causes the local atmosphere to heat. Using vegetation and high solar reflectance Index (SRI) or solar reflectance (SR)/albedo coating could reduce the urban heat island effect, mitigate harmful distractions for pedestrians, and support their mental restoration.
