“People Have to See Something”
by Peter Brown, Knight Fellow and Director of the Mercer Center for Community Development in Macon.

Before last fall, I doubt many people in Macon had ever heard the word charrette.

But visit now and you’ll hear citizens and city planners alike saying: “But the charrette says É” before plunging into an informed discussion of the possibilities of Macon’s long-neglected Beall’s Hill neighborhood.
In early November, we took a giant step in this Georgia city of 94,000 during a five-day public workshop - a design charrette - turning community ideas into graphic visions for the future. The exercise brought two Knight Foundation initiatives together in an unexpected way.

Unexpected, and frankly marvelous. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, the renowned Miami architect, educator and advocate for New Urbanism, presented the charrette results as 150 participants - residents, neighborhood association leaders, architects, planners, students, the media, Mayor C. Jack Ellis and other elected officials - packed Macon’s City Council chambers. They saw renderings of a neighborhood as a whole: an elementary school, a restored city park, shops and grocery stores, attractive housing, all adjoining nearby Mercer University. Julie Groce, president of the Intown Neighborhood Association, had tears in her eyes. “It was exhilarating,” she said. “Why can’t we do this for all our community planning?”

In 1996, former Macon Mayor Jim Marshall and Chester Wheeler, his director of community development, invited Kirby Godsey, president of Mercer University, to take a ride through the Beall’s Hill neighborhood directly across the railroad tracks from the university. The 30-square-block neighborhood, originally the turn-of-the-century home to white railway and millworkers on some streets and African-American teachers, preachers, and civil servants on others, had been in steep decline for 40 years as white families and the black middle-class moved out after desegregation. Amid the dilapidated two-story Victorians, Queen Anne cottages, and indigenous “shotgun houses” are numerous vacant lots and two large public-housing projects. Businesses and amenities are sparse.

And right there all along, as the inner city grew to adjoin it: Mercer University. It’s a classic Southern Baptist liberal arts institution, with red brick Collegiate Gothic structures and a five-story administration building whose towers and cupolas were designed by the Chicago firm of Louis Sullivan. I’ve been at Mercer since 1971. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the university turned inward, protecting itself from the increasing blight. Fences went up. Roads were closed. Part of Beall’s Hill was “urban renewed” to make way for Mercer’s School of Medicine.

The tour was a wake-up call for our president. Godsey committed the university to seek ways to cooperate with neighborhood residents and the city for the revitalization of Beall’s Hill. Within two years, he founded the Mercer Center for Community Development, and I became its first director.

The university had a mountain of suspicion to overcome. We found that residents had a very pragmatic take on our newfound zeal for their well-being. As Ernestine Watts, the backbone of the Willing Workers Neighbor- hood Association, said, “I don’t care if it’s good for Mercer if it’s good for the neighborhood, too.”

We were ready, then, when Knight Foundation established a $3 million commitment to Macon in June 1999, including $1 million to NewTown Macon, a public-private partnership spearheading the revitalization of our attractive, walkable downtown. Knight’s staff and local advisers recognized that downtown revitalization was closely tied to the future of intown residential districts. Several related efforts to address issues in inner-city, predominantly black Central South Macon and its neighborhoods - Beall’s Hill, Tatnall Heights - were under way, but unconnected, at the time of the NewTown grant. The foundation set aside $2 million in a Macon Opportunity Fund to support future projects and urged us to work and plan together.

We did, bringing together in conversations more than 100 organizations as diverse as Mercer, the city, the housing authority, neighborhood associations, the Macon Heritage Foundation and Goodwill Industries. The result was a new vision in Macon of a wide-ranging partnership for comprehensive community change in Central South Macon. With HUD grants and other funding, for example, we’ll demolish and rebuild Oglethorpe Homes - public housing built for whites only in 1941, now home to 188 of the city’s poorest black families, in the center of Beall’s Hill.

The scope of the initiative is a strength and a potential barrier. If the several community partners sometimes found it hard to understand how their specific roles were to come together, the 2,000 residents of Beall’s Hill were often mystified about the outcome and whether it would be good or bad for them. Their deep suspicions of the city, Mercer, and the housing authority persisted. And all of us were eager for visible progress. Ernestine Watts had told me again and again: “People have to see something!”

Help was on the way from an unexpected source. In the spring of 2000, Knight Foundation had just funded a unique national program at the University of Miami, where Plater-Zyberk heads the School of Architecture. The Knight Program in Community Building intended to bring together from across the country a dozen leading midcareer professionals in a variety of community development fields for a series of seminars and case studies examining best practices in smart growth and urban design. I was honored to be picked as one of the inaugural Knight Fellows.

The center of this unusual program: an annual public design charrette in one of the 26 Knight communities involving the Knight Fellows and faculty and graduate students from the School of Architecture. Last June, we chose Macon and Beall’s Hill as the site of the first Knight Fellows’ charrette.

Something extraordinary was about to happen in my back yard.

Extensive publicity brought out people in droves. We set up in the education building of Macon’s Centenary United Methodist Church, where the university meets the neighborhood. A dozen first-year architectural students and their professor worked day and night on one side of the main hall while meetings with residents and others unfolded across the room or upstairs. For two days, the Knight Fellows facilitated an intense discussion between citizens and the visiting professionals. Then the designers went to work to turn neighborhood ideas and visions into specific designs. Something you could see.

People of all stripes and persuasions felt free to drop in frequently during the next two days to view results and make suggestions. By the end of the dialogue, the community owned the project - and could see its vision embodied in real-time designs and renderings.

The talents brought to bear by my fellow Fellows made it a once-in-a-lifetime experience. They strongly engaged the religious community. They enabled us to see the neighborhood as a whole. They incorporated the university’s campus plan into a neighborhood of well-scaled, walkable streets. They envisioned a mix of housing filling in those vacant lots that would recapture the historic urban density and foster mixed-income redevelopment.

Over five days, a neighborhood of complex parts and a community of diverse parties came together in vision and in spirit. As Mike Caldwell, a property owner in the neighborhood for over 30 years, exclaimed, “They got me to see things in my own neighborhood I’d never seen before!”

Today the dialogue is continuing. The Intown Neighborhood Association “up the hill” sees their Willing Worker neighbors “down the hill” as sharing a commitment to preserve the best of the past while infusing neglected areas with new life, new residents and new investment. “But the charrette said” is a common refrain as Macon moves to turn vision into reality.