Sam Davol and Leslie Taylor Davol Class of 1988 and 1987
A Street Lab Experiment
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C O N C O R D A C A D E M Y M A G A Z I N E S P R I N G 2 0 11
am Davol ’88 and Leslie Taylor Davol ’87 have been a couple since their days at Concord Academy, but they never expected their career paths would converge. He went to work for the Legal Aid Society in New York City after law school; she began a career in museum administration and cultural planning, eventually working on the revitalization of the neighborhood around Ground Zero after September 11 as an executive at the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. But about six years ago, they decided to leave Manhattan and relocate to the Boston area, where Leslie spent her childhood and where Sam’s family had settled. Besides working as an attorney, Sam is cellist for the Magnetic Fields, a band in which he performs alongside Claudia Gonson ’86. The time seemed right to focus on touring and recording with the band. And the Davols saw an opportunity for their young children, Malcolm and Eleanor, to live closer to their grandparents. The Davols have always been strong proponents of city life for the diversity and interaction it offers, so they chose to make a home in a topfloor condo in the heart of Boston’s Chinatown. From the time they moved in, the idea for Boston Street Lab began to develop. The nonprofit, whose mission is “to produce street-level installations that provide opportunities for learning, civic participation, and community life,” grew in what Leslie called “an organic process,” one that evolved from a need she and Sam saw and believed they could fill, rather than from any specific wish to start an organization. “Across the street from us was a vacant lot. We started to ask ourselves what we could do to activate that space, and we came up with the idea of offering a Chinese-language film series,” Leslie said. That experience inspired the couple to conceive ever more creative ways to use underutilized urban space, a concern Leslie said had been on her radar ever since enduring the 10
terrorist attacks of 9/11 as a Lower Manhattan resident. “That experience cemented our attachment to cities and made us think anew about the significance of working and living in a city. We wanted to support people who made that choice, and as we looked at other spaces around us in Boston — vacant storefronts in Chinatown, the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway — we started thinking about ways to create opportunities for culture, interaction, and education.” Following the success of the film series and some other small endeavors, the Davols incorporated their nonprofit in 2009. The project that put Boston Street Lab on the map
in Boston was a temporary storefront library in Chinatown, which caught widespread attention from locals and from the media during its three months in operation. As both Davols emphasize, it wasn’t simply a room full of books; it became a vibrant community institution. People went there to read, to volunteer, to practice speaking English, to help neighborhood children with homework. It’s that kind of community engagement that the Davols dream of fostering. Their newest project is something they call the UNI, a portable eight-foot cube that they will bring to different neighborhoods in Boston and New York. Sam describes it as “an institution-in-a-box: a structure whose contents can be transformed into a classroom, a film hall, an open-air reading room, a lecture hall. It’s similar to the storefront library, but the idea was to make something that was even more portable. This installation can be set up in a vacant lot, a plaza, even a shopping mall. The goal is to keep the infrastructure as light as possible.” Ultimately, Sam said, it comes down to new ways of looking at city spaces based on what matters most to a community. “The projects we produce make a statement about what we would like to see at street level,” he said. “I believe that our surroundings should reflect our highest aspirations, and when I walk down the street with my kids and see only chain stores, Dunkin’ Donuts, and ATMs, I don’t feel that. The reason we choose to live in the city is to surround ourselves with culture, public parks, educational opportunities. Those are what inspire people, and those are what we should be seeing all around us.”
Finding potential in vacant urban spaces: Sam Davol ‘88 and Leslie Taylor Davol ‘87