Project description

The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project

A public art installation by Whitfield Koelsch Collab

To be installed on Dean Street between Third and Fourth Avenues from April 15 to May 15, 2014

The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project

What creates a queer neighborhood?  A gathering of places queer people call home. In the late 1960’s through the 1980’s, for a number of gay men, the block between Third and Fourth Avenues on Dean Street in Brooklyn was their neighborhood and distinguished, for a while, by an outward display of domesticity and pride of place. For a while, because these neighbors, had a gardener who filled their front yards with hardy large violas, and create a place known to the inhabitants in and around the area as Pansy Patch. 

In the spring of 2014, Whitfield Koelsch Collab will commemorate the transformation of that block with a public art installation recalling the visual pleasure of these gardens while exploring what it means to make a home as a LGBTQ person. Highlighting stories gathered in Queer Home Sweet Home events that will inform a Queer Home Manifesto that will be written during A Queer Home Summit in November, The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project will help us envision the happy and healthy queer home of the future.

The installation will consist of eight 4’w x 2’d x 3’h wooden planters filled with pansies.  In a cavity beneath the container that hold the plants will be installed PIR Motion Sensors, equipped with mp3 players utilizing an SD card for the pre-recorded audio.  The sensors, brought to the surface of the planter, will detect light change:  once a threshold is reached with a change in the light surrounding the planter, the mp3 track will play a narrative.  Once the user leaves the sensed area, the audio will cease.  Additionally, once sunset occurs, an LED lighting inside the planter will complement the colors of the planted flowers. Emanating from the speakers will be edited stories of queer home life that have been recorded during Queer Home Sweet Home sessions in the fall of 2013.  The exterior of the planter will be silkscreened with text from the manifesto produced during the Queer Home Summit.

Preliminary Phase: Queer Home Sweet Home

Queer Home Sweet Home is a workshop designed to gather stories about the queer experience of the notion of home.  How do we define home? What defined that as we grew up?  What defines that for us now? What is the home we imagine? How do we go about realizing that concept?  This workshop is the first of several sessions that have been arranged during which interviews will be held with diverse groups of queer people of varying ages and backgrounds.  Their stories will be recorded and edited for inclusion in motion activated loops that will be intrinsic to The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project, a public art project that will be installed in Central Brooklyn in the spring of 2014.  These stories will also provide the background for A Queer Home Summit at which a manifesto will be produced geared to codifying what queer people should be able to experience and achieve in their home lives.   Additional Queer Home Sweet Home sessions will be held on November 2 from 2:30 to 4:30 pm at Great Small Works, 20 Jay Street as well as other locations. Visit http://pansypatchhome.blogspot.com for more information

The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project: Background

By late 1960’s, the block between Third and Fourth Avenue on Dean Street in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill, had become the home of a community of gay men, many of whom lived in rooming houses and communes, were young, working class, and active in NYC’s layered gay culture.  To define the community and beautify the rundown gathering of wooden townhouses, one of the building owners hired a young gay man to serve as the neighborhood gardener, tending to the small yards in front of their homes.  The gardener embraced the task and planted pansies throughout the string of gardens.  Eventually the area became know as Pansy Patch to the inhabitants, the surrounding community and the local bureaucracy including the police.  Among the neighborhood’s most famous occupants was Ernest Aron, later known as Liz Debbie Eden, the transsexual partner of John Wojtowicz, the gay man whose story was the basis of the film, “Dog Day Afternoon.”

In addition to these residents, that block was also home to Sarah J. Hale High School which would eventually be designated a “failing” school by the Board of Education.  In the last decade the school has become the Brooklyn High School of the Arts, a successful magnate school (www.brooklynartshs.org).

Since that period the block has been home to generations of queer people who took part in successive waves of gentrification transforming the area from a low income largely black and Latino neighborhood to an affluent, largely white enclave of nuclear families.  This classic gentrification story was influenced by AIDS and the fact that it hastened the turnover of ownership of these properties, as well as the major Central Brooklyn real estate project in the old Atlantic Terminal railroad yards (now The Barclay Center,) two blocks away.

Whitfield Koelsch Collab, a partnership between Tony Whitfield and Christopher Koelsch, will seek to unearth the history of that area during a Pre-AIDS era when an early wave of gentrification took place and the neighborhood, characterized by group or communal living, was known as Pansy Patch.

The Project’s Genesis

With the redevelopment of Atlantic Terminal in its early phases numerous articles appeared on the area.  One in particular caught the attention of Tony Whitfield, then a resident of the block of Deans Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenue (one block closer to the contested real estate.  That article was written by Josh Goldfein in the Village Voice under the title, “Beyond Pansy Patch.” (www.villagevoice.com/2004-01-13/news/beyond-the-pansy-patch/) It revealed a history of the neighborhood that he had not known despite the fact that he was queer and recognized the presence and relative comfort of the neighborhood for queer people. For Whitfield, who was ultimately pushed out of the neighborhood by the wave of gentrification that ensued, the story of Pansy Patch remained resonant and spurred on by the opening of the Barclay Center, Whitfield enlisted his creative partner, Christopher Koelsch in the development of what would become The Pansy Patch Queer Home Project.