PHOTOS: Inside the Ruins of a City Museum
Residents line up at the Donetsk Stadium to receive humanitarian aid. (All photos by Alan Chin)
Donetsk in normal times was a bustling metropolis of a million people, the largest city in industrial eastern Ukraine, home to coal mines and steel mills. But for the last year, civil war has engulfed the region, despite ceasefire agreements and ongoing diplomacy.
The city serves as the capital of the self-styled “Donetsk People’s Republic” of pro-Russian separatists against the Ukrainian government in Kiev, and the front lines are only a few miles from downtown. Fierce fighting at the airport and surrounding regions has persisted for months.
Without air or rail connections anymore, Donetsk has become a surreal alternate universe of a city. The power is on, hot water flows from the taps and the garbage gets picked up, but all banks and post offices are closed. There’s a nightly curfew, and the streets mostly empty except for soldiers and armed men. Humanitarian aid trickles in from both Russia and Ukraine, and long lines form whenever there is a distribution. Thousands of people, especially the elderly and vulnerable, live in local community center or school basements converted into makeshift bomb shelters, either because their homes are too close to the front or were destroyed.
Kolya, whose house was destroyed, is living in a basement bomb shelter in Donetsk.
The war has ratcheted up in recent weeks with a separatist offensive and increased shelling killing civilians on both sides. President Barack Obama is publicly debating whether or not the United States should provide Ukraine with weapons as well as non-lethal assistance, and Donetsk’s isolation has increased with some Ukrainian mobile phone companies cutting off service because they cannot access or maintain their cell towers and equipment there.
One architectural casualty has been the Donetsk Regional History Museum, badly damaged by bombing last summer and still struggling to recover. An entire wing of the structure collapsed, and explosions shattered every piece of glass. Makeshift plywood and plastic sheeting covers the window frames of the surviving parts of the building.
The Donetsk Regional History Museum was damaged by shelling in August.
Nikolai Sklyalov, 53, the senior science curator, gave me a tour in late December. I found him in the dimly lit entrance next to two large stuffed moose that were saved from the debris. He explained that they have received no help other than from local volunteers: “We are repairing everything by ourselves. No windows, no doors. Our last regular salary was in June, and we received some emergency money in September, but that’s been it. We had 160 employees before, now we are down to 60.”
Nikolai Sklyalov, 53, is the senior science curator at Donetsk Regional History Museum. He’s pictured here with an architectural model of an Orthodox church.
Luckily, the bombardment came at night when the museum was already closed for the day so nobody was hurt. According to Sklyakov, the first impacts were near misses, nicking some of the statuary in the garden. Then the clock stopped at 8:43 p.m. with direct hits. He didn’t want to say whether he thought the museum was targeted, or if it was a mistake.
He admitted that there had been a “little bit of looting” afterward and that they don’t have an accurate inventory of what’s left. “We planned to reopen some halls before the New Year but now we’re delayed. We have to check against our register; some exhibits are under the ruins. Nor can we reach the archaeology collection in the basement.”
The halls have been largely cleaned up, with only the largest items remaining, including a woolly mammoth wrapped up in protective blanketing, its tusks protruding, composer Sergei Prokofiev’s grand piano, and an architectural model of an Orthodox church. The newest acquisitions lie on the floor of the main corridor: shards of twisted metal, the remnants of rockets and bombs collected from current battlefields.
Two taxidermied moose that were salvaged from Donetsk Regional History Museum’s destroyed natural history exhibit.
The collapsed wing formerly housed the museum’s natural history exhibit. Showing me the wreckage, Sklyakov said, “Here was the music of the forest: deer, swans and big fish. Children loved it.”
Like municipal museums the world over, Donetsk’s was modest in scope and mission, with students on school trips possibly being the largest audience. The 150,000 items in the collection were largely mundane, focusing on ephemera and flora and fauna.
Donetsk Regional History Museum
“While we’re here, we’ll survive,” the curator concluded, “but we will not be able to reopen on our own. We need financial and moral support.”
Alan Chin was born and raised in New York City’s Chinatown. Since 1996, he has worked in China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Central Asia. Domestically, Alan has followed the historic trail of the Civil Rights movement, documented the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and covered the 2008 presidential campaign. He is a contributing photographer to Newsweek, the New York Times and BagNews, an editor and photographer at Newsmotion and a photographer at Facing Change: Documenting America (FCDA). Alan’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
This Is What Happens When Cities Trash Equity
(AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
From housing to transportation and employment, chances are pretty good that your infrastructure is better if you’re wealthy and/or white. But a bill making waves in New York City looks at another kind of structural inequality, one that tends to receive less national attention than transit access or neighborhood segregation. Called Intro 495, it addresses trash — more specifically, the transfer stations where garbage sits before being carted off to landfills and incinerators.
Right now, facilities that handle up to 80 percent of the city’s waste are concentrated in just three neighborhoods: North Brooklyn, Southeast Queens and the South Bronx. According to Capital New York (and backed by a perusal of JusticeMap.org) “the most heavily affected areas tend to be low-income communities of color.”
Introduced by Council Members Stephen Levin and Antonio Reynoso last October, the bill seeks to “more equitably distribute the responsibility of solid waste management throughout our city by 1) decreasing permitted capacity for waste processing in overburdened communities, and 2) capping permitted capacity for each community district to ensure that no other community will take on more than its fair share.” Though Intro 495 originated last year, it’s been making headlines since protesters rallied outside City Halllast month.
According to Robert Bullard, a dean at Texas Southern University (who also holds the informal title “Father of Environmental Justice”), this kind of legislation isn’t new. Officials in many cities are confronting the placement of transfer stations, landfills and incinerators because they follow a clear but ugly pattern.
“Historically they were placed in the path of least resistance, which was low-income communities of color,” he says.
Bullard has written 18 books on topics ranging from land use to climate change, but his environmental justice career started with garbage. As he detailed in “The Mountains of Houston,” he realized in 1979 that although “Blacks made up just over one-fourth of Houston’s population, five out of five city-owned landfills (100 percent) and six of the eight city-owned incinerators (75 percent) were sited in Black neighborhoods.”
Like every built feature of systemic racism, the harm created by this kind of clustering doesn’t just go away. Often, Bullard explains, when officials propose a new facility, they’ll try to place it next to existing infrastructure like landfills or transfer stations because of proximity or convenience. But then the neighborhood already forced to contend with toxic waste, heavy equipment emissions and even, possibly, leachate, is given more of the same.
“Whenever a proposal for a new facility occurs, this always comes up, whether it be Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis or Los Angeles,” he says. “The policymakers are immediately confronted with: How can we move forward in a way that doesn’t build on past discrimination or injustice? It means trying to come up with a plan that minimizes the impact.”
He doesn’t point to any one city as a model for accomplishing this, stating that, from a political perspective, redistribution is very hard to do. Suggesting a solution that’s somewhat mathematical — “if we must have this facility, then those communities that have historically borne the brunt should come off the table” — he asks a question that policymakers often dread: What if the only neighborhoods left are “affluent, politically powerful and white?”
“I have not seen an ideal framework in place,” he says. “All communities are different, but often some kind of horse trading comes up.”
Communities will turn to aggressive recycling, composting or “some alternative that will be less controversial” to prolong the life of existing facilities, he says. And, yes, of course these kinds of disposals are better for everyone, including our methane-soaked air. But it’s aslo easy to see how they could become a good deflection strategy, while the same neighborhoods continue to process the whole city’s trash.
Certainly, this argument has come up in New York.
One opponent of the so-called “waste equity bill,” Council Member Mark Treyger, represents Coney Island, where a new (and very controversial) transfer station is planned.
“We’re having the wrong conversation,” he told a reporter after the City Hall rally.
“It is shameful that we have a 15 percent recycling rate when cities in California and Washington have triple the recycling rate. The answer is not to spread injustice. The answer is to end the injustice once and for all.”
Opponents of another transfer station, located on 91st Street on the Upper East Side, have made similar arguments (and spent more than $1 million on lawsuits to back them up.)
The racial politics of New York aren’t entirely clear-cut. While the 91st Street station is close to a whiter and much more affluent neighborhood, Bensonhurst, where the Coney Island facility is proposed, is neither primarily white, nor particularly high income.
For his part, Bullard doesn’t have an exact answer on the path forward, but he does advocate city legislation that acknowledges clustering as a historic (and current) problem.
“Every major city getting low on landfill space is faced with this system,” Bullard says. Building in what he calls “an equity analysis” is a start. That, at least, “makes it plain and clear up front what you don’t want to do.”
The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Rachel Dovey is an award-winning freelance writer and former USC Annenberg fellow living at the northern tip of California’s Bay Area. She writes about infrastructure, water and climate change and has been published by Bust, Wired, Paste, SF Weekly, the East Bay Express and the North Bay Bohemian.
3 Cities Make Affordable Housing Plays to Hold on to Artists
The old Pillsbury mill, a national historic landmark in Minneapolis, has been converted into artist lofts. (AP Photo/Jim Mone)
When the root causes of gentrification are being discussed, artists and arts groups often get caught in the cross fire. But while the arrival of sculptors, mixed-media painters and the like may foreshadow rising rents, there are many artists who struggle to afford city life. Across the country this week, several cities took steps to ease that struggle.
Mayor Bill de Blasio Touts Affordable Housing for Artists
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio used his State of the City address on Tuesday to highlight his plan to create 1,500 new units of affordable housing for artists by 2024. This move will bolster New York in its aim to remain the cultural capital of the country. (In December, the executive director of Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space announced a relocation to Detroit, saying, “New York City has simply become too expensive for us to be able to function as an art space.”)
In New York, Mayor Bill de Blasio used his State of the City address on Tuesday to highlight his plan to create 1,500 new units of affordable housing for artists by 2024. This move will bolster New York in its aim to remain the cultural capital of the country. (In December, the executive director of Brooklyn’s Galapagos Art Space announced a relocation to Detroit, saying, “New York City has simply become too expensive for us to be able to function as an art space.”)
In addition, de Blasio’s plan designates that 500 workspaces will be developed, with one of two city-owned sites for those to be selected by the end of the year. Funding will come from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the Department of Cultural Affairs and private foundations.
Brokelyn does point out that 1,500 units is still a drop in the bucket when considering the number of New York-based artists struggling to make ends meet. When applications for the Artspace PS109 building in Harlem opened up last year, around 53,000 people applied for just 89 units.
$200K Grant for Live-Work Spaces in Nashville
Also on Tuesday, the Nashville Scene reported that a local nonprofit CDFI, the Housing Fund, has received a $200,000 grant from the Kresge and Surdna foundations to help lower- and middle-income artists buy, rehabilitate, and construct live-work spaces in Nashville and Davidson County. (Next City receives funding support from the Surdna Foundation.)
Also on Tuesday, the Nashville Scene reported that a local nonprofit CDFI, the Housing Fund, has received a $200,000 grant from the Kresge and Surdna foundations to help lower- and middle-income artists buy, rehabilitate, and construct live-work spaces in Nashville and Davidson County. (Next City receives funding support from the Surdna Foundation.)
“Musicians, artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs add the special sauce for our community,” Jennifer Cole, executive director of Metro Nashville Arts Commission, said in a statement. “Increasingly, artisans and creative small business owners are challenged by finding affordable housing and production space. As a city, we must support those individuals who write the songs, make the belts and boots and design the things that make us Music City.” (The Next City feature “Why Nashville Is Still America’s Music City” has more on how Nashville supports its artist population.)
Minneapolis to Open Artist Lofts in Historic Landmark
In adaptive reuse news, the A-Mill Artists Lofts will be opening this summer in Minneapolis. One of only four national historic landmarks in the city, the former Pillsbury mill shut down in 2003. It has now been converted into a 251-unit apartment building at an estimated cost of $156 million, with $46 million coming from state and federal historic tax credits. The average rent will be $974.
In adaptive reuse news, the A-Mill Artists Lofts will be opening this summer in Minneapolis. One of only four national historic landmarks in the city, the former Pillsbury mill shut down in 2003. It has now been converted into a 251-unit apartment building at an estimated cost of $156 million, with $46 million coming from state and federal historic tax credits. The average rent will be $974.
The developer of the loft building, which is located on the east bank of the Mississippi River, is spending $200,000 to remove and restore the building’s iconic “Pillsbury’s Best Flour” sign, replacing the neon components with LED technology. The building will also offer community spaces such as a dance studio and multiple art galleries.
The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Alexis Stephens is Next City’s urban economics fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce, Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
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