NDC Stories: Projects Making a Difference

NDC's First Project : Workers Allied Toward Community Unity (WATCU)

In the late 1960s there was a movement across the United States to create community design centers – places where architects and planners could provide volunteer technical assistance to help communities that could not otherwise afford professional services.  In the Fall of 1968, members of the Urban Design Committee of the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and American Institute of Planning banded together to create a community design center in Baltimore.  Led by David O’Malley and Charles Lamb, and supported by architects including Howard Downing, and Mark Beck, they reached out into the community and began identifying design and planning projects where they could make a difference.

The first project undertaken by this group of young volunteers was for Echo House and a group called the Western United Front, who wanted to renovate a series of buildings where they could offer social services in West Baltimore.  The project, which would take the name of the Workers Allied Toward Community Unity (WATCU) consisted of five separate buildings—two located on Baltimore Street, one on the corner of Lombard and Mount Streets, one at 1701 West Pratt Street, and one on Fayette Street.  The program for the project included a neighborhood health clinic, a social services office, a daycare, a halfway house for alcoholics, and a cultural center.

Because of the size and ambition of the project there were several people involved.  Frank Gant (RTKL) had the major coordinating role for the entire project, while other architects coordinated efforts on individual buildings.  Joe Mason (J. Prentiss Brown) was responsible for 1701 W. Pratt, a former school  building.  Bill Bonville was responsible for Omega House, the halfway house, on Fayette Street.  Joe Scalabran, Peter Powell, and Harry Hess III (Smeallie, Orrick & Janka) were also involved.  Near the end of the project Jay Steinhour, one of NDC’s early VISTA volunteers, assisted with the project.

We are fortunate to have a video of Frank Gant discussing the formation of NDC, including his involvement with this first project.  You can view the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHGQLqkl0gY.  Additionally, the following comments are by Harry Hess and Ron Kreitner, both of whom were involved in the WATCU project (thanks to Mary Potorti for her interviews with Harry and Ron, from which these excerpts were taken).

As Harry Hess III recalls, “So at one point or another after the riots [of 1968] somebody suggested or somebody encouraged or somebody made a contact.  And I don’t know how the contact was made, but we met in West Baltimore —in the basement of this house that seemed to be a community-based operation….  And they [Western United Front] ushered us through the front door and we sat in on the stair hall and… they took us down to the basement and the basement had this single bare bulb you could make out as you walked in, individuals on one side of the room and we were ushered to the other side of the room.  So we had this face to face.”

“To paraphrase, these guys basically said, ‘okay, whitey, what are you doing here?  What do you want?  What are you up to?’  Because they were very suspicious that we were just another way of gathering information about who was whom and what were the circumstances and who was fomenting.  The upshot of most of the meeting was productive in that we tried to say ‘look, we’re here to try to broach the differences between City Hall and the white power structure as they saw it and themselves.  You know, let’s now try to work together.”

"And so it was critical [for NDC] to show the ability to actually do something rather than just talk about it and good intentions aside … to have physical manifestation of a project is different than just the good intentions."

Ron Kreitner, who at the time was a planner for Baltimore City, worked with the volunteers from NDC on the project.  As Ron remembered, “It was a concept that developed out of Echo House, which was a settlement house, a fairly traditional settlement, serving West Baltimore.  And working with people from the neighborhood, Echo House leadership came up with this concept of getting … city services and state services and federal services to locate in the neighborhood by developing a facility or set of facilities to accommodate them and it would be neighborhood-owned and operated.”“So they developed this concept for taking existing buildings that were vacant in the area and renovating them for their… range of services.  And they got architects to volunteer in coming up with concepts.  And packaged the whole effort then as a neighborhood facilities grant application to HUD [which they were successful in receiving].”

The HUD grant, Ron explained, “…was set up as a two-thirds, one-third grant so that in effect it had to be matched by $405,000 worth of cash or in-kind services, and that’s where the …Neighborhood Design Center played a key role because they were donating their services.”

“… this was a period of … very significant commitment and engagement.  And I think the WATCU project probably represented a big reach in that regard because it was … one where NDC was a large part in actually making the project happen.  By [NDC] donating the professional service that they did really made the project viable in terms of getting the federal resources.  It was a big commitment to a community … that had been left out of a lot of things, a community that was really struggling in many respects.”

In addition to some of the other broader societal issues that WATCU was dealing with “… West Baltimore was reeling from the expressway proposal and the destruction of a large part of the community fabric there.  … having professional architects working with neighborhood people very directly as they did was a pretty significant thing. … people really wanted to be able to do something, and to get directly involved, and you know have this sense that they were a part of some change, some real positive change.”

Although nothing physical remains of the WATCU project, the spirit of this first effort, and the drive of these young architects and planners to make a difference in their community, is as strong as ever at the Neighborhood Design Center.  Forty years has not dimmed our commitment to serve the public good through the power of planning and design.