Photo credit: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Whitney Gould recently was honored as a "Design Champion" by the CIty of Milwaukee Mayor's Design Awards.
Whitney Gould, known to many simply by her first name, launched an important initiative just six weeks before her sudden death last December. She convened a dozen people for a noon meeting at Waterfront Pizza in Milwaukee’s Third Ward. She enlisted me, as a newer colleague, to help her compile the guest list. Over lunch, she invited attendees’ thoughts and support to form an alliance “to promote awareness of cultural landscapes and the need to preserve them.” She wanted to join with others to document and advocate for significant local landscapes, ones that have been affected, influenced, or shaped by human involvement, whether as historic sites, or for their design or ethnographic character.
Last week, Whitney posthumously received a much-deserved honor. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s Design Awards program lauded her as a “Design Champion.” During 23 years at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, eventually as architecture critic, Whitney broadened civic conversations. The award announcement said, “Whitney Gould was never shy about sharing her thoughts, and she influenced many great architectural works around Milwaukee including the Calatrava pavilion at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the new Discovery World.” After retiring from journalism in 2007, she served on Milwaukee’s City Plan Commission and attended weekly Design Review Team meetings.
Looking for open dates in her retirement calendar, Whitney often chuckled that she had “too much going on,” including travel and nurturing many friendships. Meg Kissinger, a former Journal Sentinel reporter, recalled her in an obituary as “a cheerful friend who cheered all of us on.”
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Ambitious Project
Despite her full life, Whitney enthusiastically jumped into her ultimately final endeavor. When someone asked why she was taking on this ambitious project, Whitney said that when something upset or concerned her, she did not like to “just sit around and whine about it. I’d rather try to do something” to make positive change. Gathering this group was Whitney’s response to what she called the “scorched-earth” destruction of the Dan Kiley-designed grove at the publicly owned Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, across from city hall.
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Photo credit: Virginia Small
The demolition of the horse-chestnut grove at the Marcus Center for the Performing Arts, designed by Dan Kiley, spurred Whitney Gould to launch an initiative to increase awareness about Milwaukee's significant landscapes.
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Photo credit: Jennifer Current
Before photo of the grove
In April 2019, Whitney and journalist Mary Louise Schumacher (who had recently left the Journal Sentinel after 18 years) penned an open letter about the nationally significant grove, an unprecedented move for both. They wrote, “This site, especially its completely free and open-to-the-public oasis of green space in the middle of a rapidly redeveloping downtown, is beloved by many.” They asserted that “everyday Milwaukeeans [should] have a voice in what happens as the Marcus Center reinvents itself.”
Their detailed options and solutions, including disability accommodations, were ignored. A month later, then-Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele quietly approved razing the grove’s horse-chestnut trees, then in bloom. Abele alone controlled the fate of this public space (and thousands of other acres) after having wrested oversight power from the elected County Board of Supervisors. Neither Abele’s administration nor Marcus Center officials had conducted a minute’s worth of public hearings before chain-sawing the grove. A flat lawn and more concrete will replace it.
A Holistic Approach to Public Spaces
Whitney’s luncheon guests were practicing and retired professionals in varied fields, including landscape architecture, public history, heritage tourism and architecture. Whitney was pleased that four universities were represented, and that people suggested ways to collaborate and to involve students. Nevertheless, this was just a seed group. In Whitney’s informal minutes, sent with plans for a longer “visioning session” in January, she wrote, “We have the [Marcia Coles Community] room for the afternoon, with the caveat that it is a public space and must be open to anyone who wants to drop in. That’s fine, I think, since we want to expand our base anyway, right?”
Although Whitney knowledgeably wrote about architecture for the Journal Sentinel, she also reported often about urban landscapes. For example, her three-part series in 2003 analyzed the legacies of Frederick Law Olmsted in Milwaukee, particularly Lake Park and Washington Park.
Photo credit: Virginia Small
Washington Park was featured in a series Whitney Gould wrote about Milwaukee parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, America's most celebrated landscape architect.
She described their interwoven histories, assessed their current attributes and challenges, and interviewed park visitors and advocates. She also recounted stories about other revitalized parks.
For her article about Washington Park’s “Faded Beauty,” Whitney doggedly tracked down neighbors of Weequahic County Park, an Olmsted park in Newark, N.J. She wrote, “With federal and state grants and cooperation from an initially skeptical county government, the grass-roots Weequahic Park Association began restoring a silt-clogged lake and built a rubberized jogging path around it. They trained young people, some of them non-violent offenders, in tree-pruning and other horticultural work -- skills that will earn them $40 an hour when they leave the program. The transformation has been nothing short of miraculous, says Kevin Moore, the association's project director.”
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Whitney told the Shepherd in June 2019, “We need to think of public places, including green space, as essential to a humane, open city… We need to plan for them from the start, not just as add-ons or with land unusable for anything else.” She regretted that she and others had failed to convince civic leaders to set aside land for parks when the Park East Freeway was dismantled in the 1990s, and that publicly owned land was available. “That was really a missed opportunity,” Whitney said. “A citywide, integrative approach to public landscapes would greatly enhance Milwaukee’s appeal and quality of life.”
An art history major who studied architecture at Harvard and lived for a time in Manhattan, Whitney also had been Madison’s first environmental reporter and covered the hearings that led to the nationwide banning of the pesticide DDT. Journal Sentinel editor George Stanley said in her obituary, “She loved meaningful conversations about any subject that could improve the quality of peoples’ lives. She overflowed with enthusiasm and good will.”
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Photo credit: Virginia Small
The Reiman Pedestrian Bridge connects downtown to the Milwaukee Art Museum's Santiago Calatrava-designed pavilion. It offers an aerial view of the museum's forecourt garden designed by landscape architect Dan Kiley.
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Photo credit: Virginia Small
Dan Kiley envisioned Milwaukee's lake-walk, which connected Veterans Park to the art museum and subsequent waterfront public developments. Kiley designed the section bordering the Milwaukee Art Museum with pairs of honey locusts framing custom benches. Whitney Gould interviewed both Kiley and Santiago Calatrava, the architect of MAM's addition, who closely collaborated on the project.
Fostering Thoughtful Stewardship
Whitney’s lunch-meeting minutes summarized the benefits of well-stewarded public spaces, a list extending far beyond scenic beauty. [They] “add value to nearby real estate…; reinforce a sense of place; reinvigorate neighborhoods; enhance public safety with more eyes on the street; reduce urban heat islands, soaking up carbon dioxide; reduce runoff into overloaded sewer system and waterways; promote environmental justice; enhance public health, filtering air pollutants and providing recreation; save ethnic and immigrant history, [and] species diversity.”
After that luncheon, Whitney catalogued ideas generated by the fledgling group for how to build awareness and appreciation of cultural landscapes. They included “public advocacy; research; possible publication of a book (online and/or print) celebrating particular spaces and their history; listing of spaces on National Register of Historic Places and local historic designation.”
It was suggested that area college and graduate students could possibly be enlisted to help with documentation, that partnerships could be formed with existing organizations and “neighbors and interested faculty and students at UWM, MSOE, UW-Madison, Marquette.” One timely suggestion was to explore participating in the nationwide Olmsted 200 celebration in 2022, being coordinated by the National Association for Olmsted Parks.
The group discussed complementing, not duplicating, existing entities and efforts. Whitney suggested The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) as a model, having interviewed TCLF’s founder, Charles Birnbaum, when he spoke in Milwaukee in 2005. A national advocacy group, TCLF educates and engages the public “to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards…Collectively, cultural landscapes are works of art, narratives of culture, and expressions of regional identity.”
Whitney’s minutes identified several over-arching goals: “Need to raise profile of landscape architecture in shaping and preserving cultural landscapes by establishing new, permanent [teaching positions for landscape architects in UWM’s] School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the pipeline for city planning jobs,” She also mentioned what she considered a pressing need for the City of Milwaukee: “adding a landscape architect position to planning staff at Department of City Development.”
The people Whitney gathered were invited based on their expressed interest in cultural landscapes. James Steiner, a landscape architect and long-time lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, volunteered to help coordinate communication and logistics. After Whitney’s death, he reached out to everyone who had attended or expressed interest in the project. Steiner said, “Whitney brought us all together and we were energized by that first meeting. We decided to carry on and move forward, both to honor Whitney and because we believe that the needs and prospects that she identified are important.” Another participant, J. Patrick Mullins, a Marquette University assistant professor of history and public history director, said in an email, “I hope that this city won't forget her happy-warrior activism on behalf of beauty and good taste.”
Photo credit: Virginia Small
Whitney Gould (in navy coat) was interviewed by WUWM in November 2019 with historian John Gurda (right) for a live event in the Brewery District. They posed with singer-songwriter Trapper Schoepp (left) and former "Lake Effect" host Bonnie North.
The group that Whitney convened has since met twice, and named itself the Milwaukee Area Cultural Landscape Alliance (MACLA). It will co-sponsor an MSOE University Scholars Honors Program free virtual event on Monday, November 9th, with Harvard-based historian Lizabeth Cohen on her recent book, Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. A panel will include Lafayette Crump, Milwaukee’s new Commissioner for the Department of City Development, as well as Sherman Phoenix developer JoAnne Sabir, and Antonio Butts, executive director of Walnut Way Conservation Corporation.
COVID-19 has accentuated the incalculable value of parks and public spaces in supporting personal and community well-being, as Whitney had long asserted. At 76, before the world-changing pandemic, she chose to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness. Her optimism that individual people and collective action can indeed make a difference serves as a beacon for anyone wanting to improve our community. She envisioned collaborative efforts to spotlight and care for landscape legacies shared by all—to deepen Milwaukee’s sense of place, history and identity—for the benefit of present and future generations.
