Foreword

After much internal deliberating, I decided to write my own foreword for this book. Ending homelessness in America is a lifelong commitment that I made to myself and as a result of many inquiries from colleagues, professionals and friends and others that I have encountered over the years to document my history and how to accomplish projects that I have done so that others could replicate my work.

As a child I grew up in Culver City, California, about a half block from the old MGM Studios (which is now Sony pictures as well), just minutes from the 40-acre “back lot movie studio” where movies and television shows such as “Gone with the Wind,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Andy Griffith Show,” “I Love Lucy” and many hundreds, if not thousands, of other TV and movie programs were made.

These movie sets and studios were my first exposure to architecture, planning and urban design resulting from years of me sneaking under the fences around the perimeter of the studio lots with my sketchpad. Looking at the replicas of the streets of cities like New York and Paris and seeing many old movies and westerns sparked an interest in me in treating form context as it related to architecture in the cities around the world.

I did not realize, in my early years, that by doing that I had set out on my educational path, or how important my simultaneous interest in Disneyland would be. I had no idea as to the complexities in the intensity of the thought process that went on in Walt Disney‘s mind at that point, but I knew something special was happening regarding the way that that one theme park became an iconic international tourist attraction and gigantic exposition. I remember very well the General Electric Carousel of Progress in Disneyland, Anaheim California. This exhibit was created by Walt Disney and WED Enterprises as the prime feature of the General Electric Pavilion for the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The attraction was moved to Tomorrowland at “Disneyland in Anaheim and remained there from 1967 until 1973.

It was an archival theater in the round that provided the joining of the industrial and urban world complex that Disney created through decades of experimentation in time. With each passing decade, Disney was able to illustrate how the world was changing at that point in time.

This culminated when this new theater in the round ride/exhibit was over. I remember walking down the hallway of that exhibit to encounter one of Walt Disney's visions, a scale model of a future city he called Epcot, a revolutionary prototypical community of tomorrow. It was an amazing three-dimensional peek at the future from the creative mind of mind of Disney which included, but was not limited to, a nuclear reactor and other cutting-edge components that he put into this master plan vision. As Disney moved to Florida from California, he implemented many of the ideas from those models, which we know today as Epcot, Celebration and the monorail system that links all the park's hotels. If power brokers, urban planners, and designers take a good look at Disneyworld and the many wonderful things that were laid out as part of it, they'll see that Walt Disney found many answers to perennial problems and put them on display for the world to replicate.

Prior to 1970, California was an economic and industrial powerhouse, but signs of urban and industrial decline began to appear in the 1980s. I was fortunate enough to experience life during Southern California‘s financial peak in the 1960s and 1970s while working for my father, Seymour Stalk, in Huntington Park, California. Our family owned a small business called Huntington Park paint company.

Since 1974, I’ve dedicated my life to the betterment of communities and society in the United States and abroad. As a graduate of Southern California Institute of Architecture in 1979, my education has allowed me to explore areas of urban development and given me many opportunities to serve for more than four decades.

The state was in the middle of an economic and industrial explosion such as in the cities of South Gate, Pico Rivera, Vernon, and others which saw the industrial revolution in America come to life and then start to decline. Factories run by Ford, General Motors, Chevrolet, Bethlehem Steel, Dupont Paint and Coatings, Lucky Aircraft, Goodyear, Firestone and many others employed tens of thousands of people. It was there that I also witnessed the once preeminent economic machine meet eventual demise, the working factories replaced by warehouses stocked with goods from abroad, principally China.

It was there during these times of the rise and fall, while working for my father at his paint store as a young kid attending Sci-Arc, that I discovered the beauty and wonder of industrial technology and design.

Walt Disney was a genius and visionary extraordinaire. It is my hope that when I leave this planet, I can say that Disney, who was my idol, was the biggest, most single visionary that had the most influence on my professional life to date.