Private for What-Portland Place (Writing Sample)

PRIVATE FOR WHAT? Risako Nozaki Private streets is a concept that many would be unfamiliar with if it hadn’t been for the McCloskey incident in the summer of 2020. However, many of our suburban enclaves and gated communities produce similar effects that their names can be used interchangeably. The following looks into Portland Place in St. Louis, one of the last private streets in the nation. By looking at its derivations and intent, we can understand values of privacy, safety, control, and the effects it has lead to now. The paper ends comparing private streets to any other residential neighborhood in saying that, to an extent everywhere we go has a level of private incorporated in them. Even if there are no physical visible gates, the streets we walk and drive on represent thresholds of value. The paper seeks through exploration to understand the balance of change and preservation, and the intents behind them. Who are the players on the micro level inside the macro system? As designers, we are constantly designing for the future but we must understand the past and history as well. By exploring concepts of privacy, safety, control in private streets, we can understand why suburbs have turned into suburban enclaves, or why HOA still remains powerful. We can either design to maintain these current structures and systems of inequity it maintains, or design a new neighborhood that will contain these values in an equitable way.

What we know about Portland Place, where St. Louis couple pointed guns at protesters, Essential reading on the McCloskeys, the St. Louis couple who used guns to confront protesters on a private street are some of the headlines one will see when they do a quick search on the McCloskey couple or on Portland Place. The couple pointing guns at protestors in 2020 caused national attention, and a reminder to all that private streets still exist. The following paper seeks to illustrate the story of Portland Place: why was it created and for whom, key events, and what will happen in the future. What is a private street? What does private mean? Are all of our streets in some capacity private?

By the end of the 19th century, St. Louis’s population had doubled to nearly 600,000 and with the city becoming a major manufacturing center, industrialization was in full swing.

However, along with its growth and financial movements, there was also a rise in crime as well.

In 1887 crime statistics in St. Louis City were “22 murders, 21 burglaries, 33 robberies, 19 rapes, and 255 cases of assault with intent to kill.”1 In addition to crime, “some of the city's health problems were caused by the heavy cover of industrial smoke...small wonder that at least 1293 St. Louisans died of respiratory illnesses in 1887.” With these factors combined, wealthier upper-class St. Louisans started to seek out different spaces that they could control themselves.

They sought out communities of neighbors who shared similar social backgrounds and ideals. In fact, this flight of wealth to avoid certain areas of the city was not a new phenomenon in the late 19th century. Some of the nation’s first suburban enclaves appeared in as early as the 1840s. As Julius K. Hunter, author of “Westmoreland and Portland Places” says, “The idea of creating a safe enclave, a ‘private place’ where residents could take on the responsibility for lighting, sewers, sidewalks, landscaping, security, and refuse collection in exchange for the right to privacy and to control over their neighbors was not a new one in 1887." 2 There was a desire for wealthy individuals to have a private control over their individual spaces. Oscar Newman states in his Defensible Space Theory that these areas of control account for territoriality, surveillance, image and milieu. Residents, who create areas of their own territorial influence will come to see these areas as their own spaces and exert more control over the activities occurring in them.3 Even though it would seem as if residents solely control these privatized locations, this ended up being used as a mechanism for segregation.

Not only did privatized and gated communities rise for individual privacy and security, it evolved to become a substitute for zoning before it was formally enacted in the U.S. in 1916 as we will see in the emergence of private streets in St. Louis. Figure 1 shows a map of private streets in St. Louis and their order of emergence. Lucas Place became the first private place in St. Louis where residents were given total responsibility and joint ownership over the street to the residents. James H. Lucas, banker and landowner set up an exclusive encampment for his friends and family members in 1851 using land in which he inherited from his father, Jean1

Julius K. Hunter, Robert C. Pettus, and Leonard Lujan, Westmoreland and Portland Places: The History and Architecture of America's Premier Private Streets, 1888-1988 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 20.

2 Ibid, 20 3 Oscar Newman, Defensible Space, 1978.

Baptists-Charles Lucas. Lucas envisioned that his encampment could grow into bypassing the city. There were no physical barriers or gates that surrounded this private street. However, with its dominant Italianate style, and reputation of being St. Louis’s most prestigious street, people of means were attracted to it. 4 One of the key features of Lucas Place was a green space called Missouri Park, which had a fountain, benches, surrounded by a fence. This green space did reroute pedestrian and carriage traffic, so that there was essentially no public traffic near his house.5 The street was mostly residential, with the exception of schools and churches and traffic being limited to private vehicles. Residents would have to travel out of their area to access grocery stores, apothecaries, coffee shops, etc. During this period, attorney Charles Gibson was trying to set up a protected neighborhood around Lafayette Park in St. Louis.

Lafayette Square residents and the city of St. Louis raised $18,000 for improvements to the park, and placed a $50,000 ornamental cast iron fence around it, making the residential enclave look like a “model community.” Gibson’s vision of lasting exclusivity was slowly brought into action. However, in 1876 when St. Louis extended its city boundaries beyond Forest Park, wealthy residents chose to move west instead of south into Lafayette Square. When gaslights were introduced to Forest Park, the fields would be used by the working class to play baseball at night, which the elite considered to be rowdy. Slowly, residents started to move out and a lot of their residences were destroyed by a tornado in 1896. 6This started a movement for wealthier residents to seek out and create enclaves for themselves and for people like them.

George Lipsitz, in “The Racialization of Space and Spatialization of Space” states, “…these policies also emanate from shared cultural ideals and moral geographies based on a romance with pure spaces. This romance fuels allegiances to defensive localism and hostile privatism. It encourages well-off communities to hoard amenities and resources, exclude allegedly undesirable populations, and maximize property values in competition with other communities.”7 They are hoarding and protecting their own access to wealth and ability to display wealth, while keeping it from others. Private streets was one of the early ways prior to zoning but also to visibly show one’s values and project outwardly who was welcome and who wasn’t.

On November 7th, 1888 four prominent businessmen George C. Capen, William L. Huse, Thomas H. West, and Edwards Whitaker acquired land to create the Forest Park Addition that would be a subdivision to Forest Park. They split the land into two entities: Westmoreland (Forest Park Terrace and Lindell Boulevard) and Portland Place. Julius Pitzman, who goes on to design 47 private streets in St. Louis, serving on the board of these two entities, they were inspired by Vandeventer in that a street did not need to be a block in length, but it could be superimposed onto the city’s grid plan. Going forward, most of St. Louis’s high society chose to 4

Charles C. Savage, Architecture of the Private Streets of St. Louis: Architects and the Houses They Designed (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 15.

5 Hunter, et. Al Westmoreland and Portland Places, 20 6 Ibid, 21 7 G. Lipsitz, “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape,” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (January 2007): pp. 10-23, https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.26.1.10., 12

separate itself from the rest of the population by living in these suburban enclaves designed by Pitzman. In both of the entities, there were specific rules and regulations about the architecture. As stated in “Architecture of the Private Streets of St. Louis” by Charles C. Savage, each of the houses built in a private street had to cost no less than seven thousand dollarsmost of the times none of the houses would cost less than twenty five thousand dollars. The ownership and maintenance of the street was the responsibility of the individual property owners, who were all required to be a part of their street association or Homeowners Association.8 For those living in these private streets, these requirements were ways of proving their place and proving their wealth. They are using methods, such as “restrictive covenants during the industrial era; urban renewal and urban restructuring in the late industrial and early post-industrial periods” that created “interconnections among race, place, and power in the United States.“ 9 Through these methods, and for racially controlling neighborhoods, enclaves could afford bubbles of different kinds of neighborhoods. One thing all of these residents had in common, was the desire to exclude- and they enforced it starting out with how their neighborhood looked.

Westmoreland and Portland Place were the first private streets to have gatehouses and gates that define their entrance. These gates “were not simply ornamental entrances but barriers to limit ingress, even when the gates themselves were open. Gatehouses of some sort appear to have been part of the original concept of the [Forest Park] Addition" 10 There is no lock or gate keeper to these gates, but the added physical element sends a message of boundary- it shows that it is a space not meant for all- and creates an additional layer of privacy, which will come up with the McCloskey incident in the summer of 2020.

The summer of 2020, with the height of the COVID-19, there was also a rise in racial protests, started by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Streets were flooded everyday with protests, calling on the government and leaders for more responsible, moral action to be taken. In St. Louis, many were protesting against former mayor Lyda Krewson, who attempted to “doxx” protesters by publicly sharing names and addresses of those who urged the city to defund the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department. As protesters were approaching the house of Lyda Krewson, they passed by Portland Place. They were organizers exercising free speech and walked on (what to them was) “public” street and sidewalk. It is still unclear how they were able to get in through the gate. They aren’t locked, but until then the gates served as a signifier and sign not to enter. Seeing the protesters outside, Mark McCloskey, who lives and owns in 1 Portland Place, yelled out “This is private property” to the protestors. 1 Portland Place is a $1.5 million palazzo built by the heiress of Anheuser-Busch, where he lives with his wife Patricia McCloskey, both working as personal injury lawyers. Mark McCloskey describes the incident "A mob of at least 100 smashed through the historic wrought iron gates of Portland Place, destroying them, rushed towards my home where my family was having dinner outside 8

Savage, Architecture of the Private Streets of St. Louis, 43 Lipsitz, The Racialization of Space, 12 10 Savage, Architecture of the Private Streets of St. Louis ,45 9

and put us in fear for our lives.” However, there are photos and videos that show that the gate was swung and held open. (Figure 2) University of Missouri student Daniel Shular, who participated in the protest that day says, “People just walked up to it and opened the gate…it looked normal to me when I passed through.” Many of the protesters did not see the signs of private property, nor did they know that there were private streets in St. Louis and that they were trespassing. The McCloskey couple emerged out of their houses armed- Patricia McCloskey holding a small silver pistol, not only pointing it at the demonstrators but with her finger on the trigger-a known breach of gun safety, that responsible gun owners are taught never to do- and Mark McCloskey with a rifle. Protestor James Cooper tells the St. Louis Post Dispatch “I absolutely thought Patricia McCloskey was going to murder me and I haven't slept since she aimed her gun at my face.” It took a mere 12 minutes for the protestors to exit Portland Place and proceed to Lyda Krewson’s house- but this incident became worldwide news and reminded the world of the existence of private streets.11 “There is no public anything in Portland Place” Mark McCloskey coined this phrase when he told local news KSDK, “There’s no public anything in Portland Place. It’s all private property.

Being in Portland Place is like being in my living room.” 12 Creating private streets creates an exclusionary zoning that is a form of opportunity hoarding. Richard V. Reeves, who teaches at the Brookings Institution calls these upper-class residents “’Dream Hoarders’ keeping elements of the American Dream for themselves at the expense of others.” They are using their ability to restrict land access that leads to restricted opportunities. This restriction of resources leads to amenities being restricted, which leads to disproportionate political power.13 Exclusionary zoning was initially designed to protect home values, schools, and affluent neighborhoods.

However, this has distorted the American property market by operating simply to separate households based on their economic resources. Those wealthy Americans that already live in these enclaves are incentivized to protect their neighborhoods of affluence which leads to control of access to other goods in poorer communities. George Lipsitz calls this “defensive localism… Opportunities in this society are both spatialized and racialized. Inheritance based on home ownership enables white families to pass on the benefits of past and present discrimination to succeeding generations.” 14 For example, Portland Place is just 8 miles from Canfield Drive, where police killed Michael Brown in 2014. The U.S. Department of Justice investigated that Normandy Highschool, where Brown graduated from, drew forty percent of its funding from local sources. This shows how not just the school, but local institutions need stable, large funding. However, they are unable to access the property-tax revenue from Portland Place. With the added layer of residential segregation, local funding structures deprive 11

Jessica Lussenhop, “Mark and Patricia McCloskey: What Really Went on in St Louis That Day?,” BBC News (BBC, August 25, 2020), https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53891184.

12 Teo Armus and Kim Bellware, “St. Louis Couple Point Guns at Crowd of Protesters Calling for Mayor to Resign,” The Washington Post (WP Company, June 30, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/29/stlouis-protest-gun-mayor/.

13 Richard V. Reeves, “'Exclusionary Zoning' Is Opportunity Hoarding by Upper Middle Class,” Brookings (Brookings, May 24, 2017), https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/exclusionary-zoning-is-opportunity-hoarding-by-uppermiddle-class/.

14 Lipsitz, The Racialization of Space, 12

communities of services (many like education) that deprive individuals from meeting basic human needs that will lead to future success. The structures of hoarding take different forms but follow the common goal of racialized exclusion; white wealth is passed down generation by generation, while depleting the needs and opportunities of their neighboring families of color.15 The McCloskey’s (even prior to July 2020) were known to problematic in Portland Place. They have constantly sought to “force their neighborhood trustees to maintain the exclusivity of Portland Place, accusing them of selectively enforcing the writing rules for living in the neighborhood, known as the trust agreement.” The McCloskeys are known for their many lawsuits, including “on obtaining land, keeping people off of it, and forcing people to follow rules.” In 1992, Patricia McCloskey was impeached as a trustee when she fought to enforce the rule that prohibited unmarried people living together even more. The trustees who voted her off accused her of being anti-gay. In 2002, the Portland Place Association sued to foreclose on the McCloskey’s house because they were refusing to pay dues. The lawyer representing the McCloskeys asked them”[is] it possible the issue was the trustees were allowing a gay couple to live there?” to which Mark McCloskey responded “the trustees weren’t doing something, which was their obligation under the Trust Agreement.” 16 While a private communities standards are technically approved by members of the trustees, even those living inside an enclave can have different ideas on who is allowed into their enclave. If they have money do they get a free pass?

What race, identities, qualifications is one required to have? What does private mean to people like McCloskeys-privacy or control? From their hoarding of resources to delegating who lives there, it seems as if privacy is not a concern, but the desire to control what is going on in their surroundings. Originally gated communities were using privacy to feel safer- but now it seems to have shifted to controlling for a sense of safety.

The idea of private enclaves represents more than the physical spaces, but the desire for control over those unwelcome. During Donald Trump’s campaign for reelection, he invited the McCloskey’s to participate as a part of the Republican National Convention. They accused Democrats of “protecting criminals from honest citizens” and trying to “abolish the suburbs.” 17 Even though the McCloskey’s live in a private street, Trump was using their incident as a message of protecting the “suburbs”, mixing up an urban private gated community with exclusive suburbs. Even though the logistical aspect of a private street and exclusive suburbs are different, the effect and public view are viewed interchangeably. “[It] is not that suburban whites are innately racist and consequently favor land-use policies that have increased the racial gap, but rather that prevailing land-use policies provide extraordinary inducements, incentives, and encouragement for a system of privatization that has drastic racial 15

Brian Highsmith, “The Structural Violence of Municipal Hoarding,” The American Prospect, July 6, 2020, https://prospect.org/civil-rights/the-structural-violence-of-municipal-hoarding/.

16 Jeremy Kohler, “The St. Louis Couple Charged with Waving Guns at Protesters Have a Long History of Not Backing Down,” STLtoday.com, May 18, 2021, https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/portland-placecouple-who-confronted-protesters-have-a-long-history-of-not-backing-down/article_281d9989-373e-53c3-abcbecd0225dd287.html.

17 “St Louis Couple Who Threatened Black Lives Matter Protesters Speak at RNC,” The Guardian (Guardian News and Media, August 25, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/24/st-louis-couple-rnc-markpatricia-mccloskey.

consequences." 18 Not only are individuals like the McCloskeys the ones continuously pushing for enclaves to be just suburbs, and not gated communities or private enclaves, but there is a whole system that benefits rich white individuals to stay and maintain them.

Now more than ever, suburbs are seen as private enclaves, even though some don’t intend on being one, since suburbs have the power to act like private streets if they wanted to.

There are many similarities with enclave neighborhoods, suburban developments, the Homeowners Association (HOA), and private streets. All have the ability (and often work) to exclude and segregate members from different backgrounds. HOA (or also known as Residential Community Associations) is a form of private government that has an immediate liability and responsibility to support private interests. Private enclaves, HOA and privatized streets all seek to do the same thing- exclude the poor and non-white. The image of the temporary gate in front of the gate shows just how ineffective the current gate was, but also how there are gates everywhere, not physical but very much visible. The fact that these private streets exist- and the fact that it was publicized reminds the rich that they can make immediate and definite change in the neighborhood they live in- by buying and owning it. Wherever we are, we are passing through some sort of gate- one type to keep people out, and another to keep people in.

As designers, planners, and city makers, we need to be mindful of the thresholds we are creating. Are we working to keep people together or exclude? Are we building these values for privacy or for control? How can we as designers- in a world where money can let one have so much control and power- create residential neighborhoods that are safe and inviting? What is the financial and social cost of safety? Control or privacy, which is better suited for safety? Do organizations like the HOA need to evolve? Or is there even a need for neighbors to have similar values if that means the neighborhood is exclusionary?

18

Lipsitz, The Racialization of Space, 19

Figure 1 Freixas, Catalina, and Mark Abbott. Segregation by Design: Conversations and Calls for Action in St. Louis. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.

Figure 2 Lussenhop, Jessica. “Mark and Patricia McCloskey: What Really Went on in St Louis That Day?” BBC News. BBC, August 25, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us2020-53891184.

BIBILIOGRAPHY Armus, Teo, and Kim Bellware. “St. Louis Couple Point Guns at Crowd of Protesters Calling for Mayor to Resign.” The Washington Post. WP Company, June 30, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/29/st-louis-protest-gun-mayor/.

Freixas, Catalina, and Mark Abbott. Segregation by Design: Conversations and Calls for Action in St. Louis. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019.

Highsmith, Brian. “The Structural Violence of Municipal Hoarding.” The American Prospect, July 6, 2020. https://prospect.org/civil-rights/the-structural-violence-of-municipal-hoarding/.

Hunter, Julius K., Robert C. Pettus, and Leonard Lujan. Westmoreland and Portland Places: The History and Architecture of America's Premier Private Streets, 1888-1988. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988.

Kohler, Jeremy. “The St. Louis Couple Charged with Waving Guns at Protesters Have a Long History of Not Backing Down.” STLtoday.com, May 18, 2021. https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/portland-place-couple-who-confrontedprotesters-have-a-long-history-of-not-backing-down/article_281d9989-373e-53c3-abcbecd0225dd287.html.

Lipsitz, G. “The Racialization of Space and the Spatialization of Race: Theorizing the Hidden Architecture of Landscape.” Landscape Journal 26, no. 1 (2007): 10–23. https://doi.org/10.3368/lj.26.1.10.

Lussenhop, Jessica. “Mark and Patricia McCloskey: What Really Went on in St Louis That Day?” BBC News. BBC, August 25, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-202053891184.

Newman, Oscar. Defensible Space, 1978.

Reeves, Richard V. “'Exclusionary Zoning' Is Opportunity Hoarding by Upper Middle Class.”

Brookings. Brookings, May 24, 2017. https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/exclusionaryzoning-is-opportunity-hoarding-by-upper-middle-class/.

Savage, Charles C. Architecture of the Private Streets of St. Louis: Architects and the Houses They Designed. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987.

“St Louis Couple Who Threatened Black Lives Matter Protesters Speak at RNC.” The Guardian.

Guardian News and Media, August 25, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/usnews/2020/aug/24/st-louis-couple-rnc-mark-patricia-mccloskey.