A Master Class in Place: John T. Reddick Returns to Allegheny Mountain Radio

A Master Class in Place: John T. Reddick Returns to Allegheny Mountain Radio

By Danny Cardwell · Allegheny Mountain Radio

The last time architect, preservationist, and Harlem historian John T. Reddick sat down with me was April of 2024. He was in town to deliver the keynote at the Preservation Bath Lecture and Awards, a talk he called “The Pools and Their African American Legacy.” I was in the room that afternoon at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Hot Springs. I couldn’t quite tell if I was listening to a historian, an architect, a sociologist, or a philosopher. It was a master class.

So when John agreed to come back on the show, it wasn’t a small thing for me. His father was born and raised in Bath County. He grew up in Mount Airy, Philadelphia. He studied architecture at Ohio State and then at Yale, where his classmates included Clarence Thomas, Hillary Clinton, and Meryl Streep. Today, he is Director of Community Engagement Projects for the Central Park Conservancy and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. His fingerprints are on a great deal of Harlem’s public memory — the Ralph Ellison Memorial, Harriet Tubman Square, the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Circle, and New York’s LGBT Memorial, among others.

I wanted to start where a career like his starts — in the curiosity of a kid. And John did not disappoint.

“I really encourage some people,” he said. “The same philosophy goes today. If you have something you really love to do, pursue it, because that alone will give you another burst of energy to go further and further. And even if you change courses, you will realize that I can perfect something if I focus my mind to it.”

That through-line — internal passion, the discipline to chase it, and the willingness to change directions when the work asks you to — has shaped every phase of his career.

John spent his early years in New York doing architectural design and rehabilitation work, but eventually turned toward preservation and public projects. When I asked him what pulled him in that direction, he pointed back to Yale, and to one of the two professors who shaped his thinking.

“In college, I had this great architectural professor, a gentleman named Vincent Scully,” he said. Scully, John explained, was a poor Irish student who came back from World War II and went to Yale on scholarship. At a moment when everyone in architecture was writing about the German modernists, Scully instead wrote his dissertation on the shingle-style house — a Victorian form the profession had dismissed. It was a small act of intellectual courage that stayed with John.

He pointed to a shingle-style porch here as an example — the long, low porch just to the left of the entrance at The Homestead in Hot Springs. Once you’ve heard him describe it, you can’t drive past it the same way again.

The other Yale professor John names is Robert Farris Thompson, who spent his career tracing the African footprint on American culture — in dance, in music, in language. “A lot of my African-American art friends always thought Farris Thompson was African-American,” John said. He wasn’t. He was a white professor who chose a subject his field wasn’t paying attention to and stayed with it until he was a master of it. Jean-Michel Basquiat would later draw on Thompson’s African Art in Motion for his own paintings.

“Both of them were willing to take a chance,” John said of Scully and Thompson. “Not doing what was standard practice really helped me look at other things.”

I asked John about the memorials — Ellison, Tubman, Douglass, LGBT — because from the outside these projects look like they simply appear in the landscape. They don’t.

The Frederick Douglass Memorial and Circle at 110th Street and Central Park West, he explained, came together through his work with the Abyssinian Baptist Church’s development arm, headed by Karen Phillips. From there it drew in Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, the founder of the Central Park Conservancy. John and one other African-American woman at the Conservancy rewrote the federal grant application together and secured several million dollars for the project. From application to finished work — eight years.

“That’s how long it took,” he said. “So it’s not something to sneeze at. But you need these mixed resources. You can’t really do these things without somebody who really is thinking about the longer-term range.”

He described his own role on these projects in a way that stuck with me. On a federal project, he said, the work has to be open to everyone. So what he does is spend a lot of time early on making sure the most excellent talent from the community the memorial belongs to — African American, LGBTQ+ — is in the mix. Then he steps back.

“I’m never a voting member at the end or whatever,” he said. “I do my deep digging in the very early part to make sure really talented people get into the mix. And so at the end, you still see who gets it. It’s right for the project, but it’s right in a fair way.”

That is how Elizabeth Catlett came to create the Ralph Ellison Memorial sculpture. It’s a philosophy of preservation that isn’t only about buildings.

John also gives Harlem walking tours, and the way he described what he sees when he walks his own neighborhood — the way architecture tells the story of a people — was the same voice I remembered from the pools talk two years ago.

“Look at a picture of Garvey’s parades,” he said. “He’s parading in front of palatial buildings. He’s not parading in front of shanties. Those kinds of things, I thought, were empowering to the African-American community. You could see yourself in an elevated way.”

Harlem’s streets, he pointed out, were laid out as broad Paris-style boulevards. When Black soldiers came back from the First World War, they marched up Fifth Avenue and turned into Harlem on Lenox. They walked into a neighborhood that looked like Paris.

That reading of the built environment led John into a research project he first mentioned to me the last time we spoke — Harlem’s Black and Jewish music culture from the 1890s through 1930. Ragtime evolving into jazz. Two outsider communities living side by side, socializing around synagogues and churches, and shaping what became the American songbook.

“Ragtime was the hip-hop music to Gershwin,” John said. “It’s not very different. They wanted to learn how to play it. They had to learn it from African-American musicians. And so all the American songbook, the early part of the American formation of music, it really is a dialogue between those two people. And those two people got to know each other through the physical environment of Harlem.”

I asked where the book is now, and where all that research is heading. It’s heading somewhere significant.

The sheet-music collection John acquired for the research led to an exhibition at the Society of Illustrators in New York. That show was seen by a curator at Poster House, which then borrowed from his collection for its own exhibition — a six-month run that just closed. And this fall, the Morgan Library will open a major exhibition on ragtime.

“I’m actually going to moderate the opening conversation at the Morgan Library between the curators of that show in November,” he said.

The final stretch of our conversation was about Seneca Village. For anyone who doesn’t know, Seneca Village was Manhattan’s first significant community of African-American property owners, founded in 1825 and cleared out in 1857 to build Central Park. It is a story John has done a great deal of work on — and one the Central Park Conservancy is now permanently commemorating with support from the Mellon Foundation.

John explained that the community was largely unknown until the 1990s, when historians working on the book The Park and the People began surfacing census records showing predominantly African-American families who had bought land. That land was originally purchased for burials — the city was restricting burials near the downtown population, and African-American New Yorkers went north looking for sites. Seneca Village grew to a population of around 500. There were three churches, a school, some 50 wooden structures.

“Because of Central Park,” John said, “people say, ‘Oh, God, they took the property away from them and all of that.’ Which is true, in the domain. But I always say, you can’t have loss without having something wonderful there. And we don’t spend a lot of time talking about what the wonderful part was.”

Then he made the turn that only John makes.

“I see a lot of connections in that story about Seneca Village,” he said. “It resonates whether we’re talking about Hot Springs or Charlottesville or other places. There’s a parallel history in these communities that needs to be talked about.”

That is why this conversation mattered to me. John’s work in Harlem is his life’s work. But the way he thinks — the way he insists on holding the wonderful part alongside the loss, the way he reads a landscape for what a community once was and what a community can still become — is a lens that belongs everywhere, including here.

There is a lot more in the full interview than I could fit in one story. You can hear the whole conversation with John T. Reddick below: