Getting to Know the People
The first few community events that took place at LSC were designed to get to know the community. One evening early in the fall of 2014 LSC hosted a S’mores and Bagels night inviting neighbors to contribute their voices to a wall of hanging green tags. The tags were stamped with prompts, “I wish, I am, and I want.” This was my first glimpse of the beautiful and surprising community in Friendship and Garfield. Further, reading the green-tag-responses helped our team put answers to the following questions…
1) Who are the stakeholders? Are they parents who walk by every morning to drop their children off at day-care across the street, the lady down the street who walks her dog by its gate each afternoon, bikers who travel this direction on their way to work, the baristas who work down the street?
2) How do they want to see this place transform?
3) What are the immediate and long-term needs in this community?
*The two precious women seen above were my advisors (and bosses!) throughout my internship with LSC. Kristin Hughes (Communications Design professor at the CMU School of Design) and MaryLou Arscott (Associate Head at the CMU School of Architecture) are the persistent leaders behind ongoing work at Latham Street Commons and I was incredibly blessed to work under and learn from their example.