Storming the Gates of Paradise (17 page)

After seeing Cruz present the project, San Francisco landscape architect and city activist Jeffrey Miller commented that Cruz is designing spaces similar in some ways to the old courtyard housing projects that failed in the inner city, and that if this one works, it will be as much because the Latino residents inhabit that space differently as because the scale is far more humane.

“What sets Teddy apart,” says the distinguished New York architect and critic Michael Sorkin, “is his quest to realize the social through the beautiful.”

He’s an exceptionally talented architect who devotes himself to projects for people for whom most “artistic” practitioners show little interest. Teddy, on the other hand, is not simply politically dedicated, but he is able to produce tremendous innovations from the very exigencies with which he deals. The work is not about foisting some arcane and incomprehensible aesthetic on unsuspecting subjects but about finding the measure of beauty in the actual circumstances of their lives and situations and in responding with authentic sensitivity to the particulars of site and need. The work is not “popular” in the sense of some phony channeling of the ineffable wisdom of the people but in the sense of offering a genuinely artistic collaboration with no compromise on either side. This is incredibly
empowering. His vision is strong for being flexible, for a certain panache for hybridity that never lapses into surreality or parody, and for being squarely rooted in a still-lively set of modernist formal traditions that are globally shared. Marvelous things can happen at the intersection of modernity and conscience. . . . What’s exciting about Teddy is both the fierceness of his talent and its youth, the fact that none of us know what he’ll be doing in ten years’ time.

Living Rooms at the Border is part of a larger scheme by Casa Familiar, spearheaded by Skorepa and architect David Flores, to create a community that works. The day after our detour through Tijuana, I went down to talk to Flores and Skorepa, who work out of offices in a low-slung, shady house and speak with passion of the long, slow process of transformation they have set into place—not the utter transformation of the whole fabric of a city section, but a few catalytic interventions into how it works and how people might perceive it. Toward this end, they’ve been trying to formalize the paths people use to navigate this hamlet of about forty-five thousand people, asking homeowners to set back their fences so that safe walkways with benches and lights can be built apart from automotive spaces—a radical reorganization of public and private, organizing meetings where people can talk about what they want the place they live to be like.

San Ysidro is an immigrant community. Skorepa says, “One thing that identifies our community as more Latino than Chicano—the Latinos here say hello to you, teenage kids say hello; when you’re walking down the street, they greet you.” People are still pedestrian, though they’re increasingly reluctant to let their kids run free—but a system of jitney buses runs through the community, since nearly half the households are without cars. They are also seeking to get density ordinances waived so that people can build (or legalize the already built) second and third units on their property. “San Ysidro,” Flores tells me, “was the only community in San Diego to say, ‘We don’t have a problem with density: our houses are full of cousins, aunts, grandparents, anyway.’ ” If these and their other innovations work, Skorepa, Flores, and Cruz can make a case for relaxing or revising zoning codes throughout the vast expanse of San Diego (if not for abolishing them altogether; some of the wildly precarious cinderblock houses of Tijuana
serve as reminders that municipal codes serve a purpose). Skorepa and Flores share Sorkin’s enthusiasm for Cruz, speaking of him as the visionary they had been waiting for.

Around the corner from Living Rooms on the Border, on a triangular parcel with two large trees, recently acquired by Casa Familiar, will go Cruz’s second prototype of an alternative urbanism, Senior Gardens—Housing with Childcare. The structure addresses two often overlooked facts: that seniors frequently care for their grandchildren and need spaces that accommodate the young, and that the young and old have in common a need for secure spaces for socializing, playing, and walking—safe from cars and from crime. Twenty housing units will open onto a communal garden promenade, with frontages that can either be opened up for informal socializing or closed down for privacy. A childcare facility can be used by both seniors and children and adapted at times to other community uses. The archetypal architect is supposed to aspire to build something grandiose, a big civic or cultural institution, an airport, or, these days, an upscale flagship store; but Cruz’s quixotic ambition is evident in these small housing projects for society’s most vulnerable in an overlooked border barrio.

The projects grew in part out of a series of community meetings about how spaces could be designed and how they are designed. For community members who were not familiar with the language of planning, moveable three-dimensional models were set up so they could see how many ways a given space could be used to open up or close down access, accommodate many or few. Cruz and Skorepa were delighted when one old woman from Guadalajara, Mexico, exclaimed in surprise about a classic suburban structure, “This house is selfish!” Their designs look toward how spaces can be less selfish and more sociable. These two projects will house perhaps a hundred to a hundred and twenty people, but architect and developer see them as prototypes to argue for another urbanism, one that opens up how we live. It’s a beginning.

When you tour the museums of the California Gold Rush, you see picturesque sepia-toned photographs of the men who made a killing in the mines. But if you want to know who picked up the bill, look in a mirror. The profits were quickly spent, but the costs are still rolling in, both as an inventory of what we lost and an assessment of what still needs cleaning up.

By 1857, California gold miners had extracted 24.3 million ounces of the metal, but they left behind more than ten times as much mercury, along with devastated forests, slopes, and streams. Today, there’s a new gold rush underway on the other side of the Sierra Nevada, and it too is racking up huge bills for the public, bills that will be coming due for centuries to come, bills that we will pay in taxes for restoration, and bills that can never be paid, for pure water, cultural survival, wildlife, and wilderness. All the gold that multinational mining corporations are taking out of the country won’t buy back an extinct trout species or a pristine aquifer. When you tour the museums of the Gold Country, as the Sierra Nevada foothills are still called, you see children dressing up in historical costumes and playing at panning for gold—but it might be more educational for them to play at testing for clean water, imitating mercury-poisoning madness, reading a corporate prospectus, or conducting a wildlife survey. More educational, but less fun—and there’s nothing romantic about the current gold rush in Nevada (unless you like multinationals and heavy machinery), which might be why we hear so little about it.

In most parts of the American West, frontier families came to turn places—
often someone else’s places—into homes. But miners came to grab and get out, and they laid waste to their surroundings with gleeful abandon (for example, in
Roughing It
, Mark Twain’s book about his mining years, he recalls how he accidentally started a colossal forest fire at Lake Tahoe, watched it burn as entertainment, and then picked up and moved on without a backward glance). Tens of thousands of miners stormed the Sierra Nevada foothills with picks, shovels, and rifles, an army of mostly young men making war on the earth itself for its hidden gold. For the Native inhabitants of the Mother Lode region, whose sustenance depended on an intact ecology, the Gold Rush was Armageddon. At Coloma State Historical Park, on the site where, in January 1848, James Marshall found the few flakes that started the rush, a museum wall text says, “For most Nisenan [the local tribe], the Gold Rush meant death from disease or violence. For the survivors, it spelled the quick destruction of their culture and habitat.” Marshall himself, a nearby text states, “was temporarily driven from Coloma because he tried to prevent a massacre of local Indians.” In the twenty years after the Gold Rush began, the indigenous population of California declined by four-fifths.

In 1853, an Indian agent in El Dorado County reported:

They formerly subsisted on game, fish, acorns, etc. but it is now impossible for them to make a living by hunting or fishing, for nearly all the game has been driven from the mining region or has been killed by the thousands of our people who now occupy the once quiet home of these children of the forest. The rivers or tributaries of the Sacramento formerly were clear as crystal and abounded with the finest salmon and other fish. . . . But the miners have turned the streams from their beds and conveyed the water to the dry diggings and after being used until it is so thick with mud that it will scarcely run it returns to its natural channel and with it the soil from a thousand hills, which has driven [out] almost every kind of fish.

Salmon historian Michael Black reports that the mighty Sacramento River had its last healthy spring salmon run in 1852, and fish runs died out altogether in some
rivers during the Gold Rush. Even the mostly boosterish Gold Country museums acknowledge that the Gold Rush was an atrocity for the local environment and those whose lives were intertwined with it.

At the museum of the Mariposa Historical Society near Yosemite, hand-lettered texts record that a miner panning in a stream could work about a cubic yard of earth a day. Greed and a constantly diminishing ratio of gold to ore prompted new technologies that allowed more and more earth to be worked over with less labor and thus made lower-grade deposits worth working. As the technologies became more elaborate, the capital costs increased, and the era of the miner as rugged individualist rapidly gave way to the era of corporate operations and distant investors. If mining was a war on the earth, the heavy artillery arrived when hydraulic mining was invented in the early 1850s. Its high-pressure water cannons allowed mining operations to wash away gravel, earth, hillsides, whole landscapes at a hitherto unimaginable rate. To bring the water and generate the pressure, vast quantities of water were diverted from river and stream beds into flumes and pipes and stored in wooden dams—and the construction of both flumes and dams called for more and more timber. By 1855, a total of 4,493 miles of canals ran through the Gold Country.

A wilderness had been turned into an outdoor factory; rivers into washing machines, conveyor belts, and drains; hills into holes; forests into plumbing supplies. The only part of the landscape these miners valued was being sent out as bars of bullion, and what they didn’t value they were turning into sludge and desolation. Hydraulic mining, reports John McPhee, sent 13 billion tons of the Sierra Nevada downstream. Of this, 1.146 billion tons washed into the San Francisco Bay, diminishing its wetlands and raising its floor. The rivers en route rose far more dramatically. The Sacramento rose an average of 7 feet. The town of Marysville, which once sat securely above the Yuba and Feather rivers, began to build levees that rose higher than the housetops, as the rivers rose higher than the streets, but in 1875 a torrent of toxic mud buried the town. The Yuba was at one point 110 feet above its original bed and is still 65 feet higher than it was in 1849. Mine tailings were burying the rich farmland of the Sacramento Valley—about
270,000 acres were severely damaged, 40,000 destroyed—and it was farmers who fought back.

In a momentous decision, hydraulic mining was outlawed by Judge Alonzo Sawyer on January 7, 1884, in response to the farmers’ lawsuit. It was the first time American courts had ruled that the general welfare outweighed individual profiteering, the first environmental victory in American legal history.

The men who profited are all long dead, but we’re still paying for their Gold Rush. No one took much account of the mercury used in gold mining, but about 7,600 tons of it—243.2 million ounces, if you describe it in the same language used for gold—entered California’s lakes, streams, rivers, and the San Francisco Bay just from the mining in the central Mother Lode, and it’s still there. Sean Garvey, executive director of the South Yuba River Citizens League, told me that gold mining “is the single most destructive event that’s happened in the Sierra Nevada ever. There’s no other environmental degradation that even comes close: not logging, not road building, not extirpation of species. Almost all the environmental issues we deal with are in some way related to the impact of hydraulic mining 140 years ago, whether it be flooding, a clean water supply, Superfund sites, airborne toxins.” He told me of the enormous problems with mercury and arsenic, of the thousands of hydraulic mining sites that “used to be forest land here that no longer grow any type of vegetation” and increase flooding because they can’t hold the water of storms and snowmelt, of the dilemma of dams that keep mercury from moving downstream but turn it from inert to methylated mercury, which readily enters the food chain. The Gold Rush is still poisoning the Golden State.