 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the National Trust Preservation Leadership Forum webinar series. I'm Sarah Warden, Senior Field Director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and Project Director of the Title Basin Ideas Lab, and I am delighted to participate in today's event. First, a few notes before we get going. Preservation Leadership Forum is the professional membership program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and we sincerely thank our forum members for making this webinar possible. Today's discussion is developed with our friends at the Trust for the National Mall. They were our very close working partners on the Title Basin Ideas Lab and the online exhibition. And tonight's discussion is the first in a series of conversations about the Title Basin and the many complexities of this really treasured memorial landscape. A couple of technical requests. We will take questions from the audience throughout the webinar. Please send those questions via the Q&A function directly to panelists. You're welcome to submit at any point, but we will be waiting until the end of the session to answer those questions. And you can certainly use the chat function to communicate amongst the participants. Following the program, we will send out a recording of today's webinar directly to the email you used to register. And now I'd like to introduce our panelists, and I will say we're having slight technical difficulties bringing in one of our panelists, and we hope he will join shortly either via video or or phone. And so first I'd like to introduce Donald Albrecht, who is one of the curators of the Title Basin Ideas Lab online exhibition, as was Tom Mellon's. Donald is an independent curator and author. His exhibitions and books have ranged from overviews of cultural trends to profiles of prominent visual and performing artists. He has worked for the Library of Congress, the Detroit Design Museum, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Museum of the City of New York, among other institutions. Thomas Mellons, who hopefully will be joining us soon, has curated exhibitions on a wide variety of architectural and cultural subjects from 400 years of residential architecture and domestic life in America to the history of the New York Public Library. Additionally, he is the co-author of three volumes and an award winning series of books on architecture and urbanism in New York City. So the way this will work, following a brief presentation by Donald and Tom, we will be joined by Professor Sethillo, a distinguished professor of environmental psychology, geography, anthropology, and women's studies, and director of the Public Space Research Group at the Graduate Center at the University of New York. She's been awarded a Getty Fellowship, NEH Fellowship, Fulbright Senior Fellowship, a Future of Places Fellowship, and a Guggenheim for her ethnographic research on public space in Latin America and the United States. So I will now turn it over to Donald. It does not look like Tom has joined. So Donald and I will talk a little bit about the ideas lab and the title base in itself. Thank you. Thank you and welcome everybody. We're going to talk initially about a small PDF, a small PowerPoint presentation of a group of images that are going to prompt this evening's conversation. We're going to start with a few images from the proposals. The title base and ideas lab was a reimagining of the great title basin, which is the site of the Jefferson Memorial, and the famous cherry trees as well as other memorials. And as a way to reimagine it, which is the site is currently in grave danger of climate change, overuse by pedestrians, there are lots of controversies around the memorials, it's a very fraught site. And the National Trust and the trust of the National Mall approached five leading landscape architecture firms to come up with reimagining of the title basin. So to start, these are a few images specifically dealing with congregation and circulation. So James corner the upper left hand corner James corners site created a kind of a seawall with a pedestrian and bicycle path along it. So read Hildebrand lower left corner, created what they called independence walk, which was a raised walkway that was on axis with various monuments within Washington. GGN, another of the three firms created a new kind of forest that had very picturesque paths going through it. And I have the next image. The next image please. Some of the more speculative proposals created new land masses. One of the firms decided to actually create a new land jetty off of the Lincoln Memorial, move the Jefferson Memorial to so they created a new land mass a new pier into the Potomac River. And what this does is actually create a stronger relationship between Martin Luther King by moving the memorial and the Lincoln Memorial behind it. And another scheme, Walter Hood created a series of islands within the title basin series of sort of hexagonal shaped walkways. Now, within this context, there are a few additional images that's going to prompt more conversation. First, specifically about the relationship between nature and people nature and public space and people are more specifically between usage of public space by people and the preservation of nature. And secondly, we're going to talk about public space and political and civic activism here from New York City are two examples of this scheme. For the first on the left is Battery Park City in Manhattan, which was created in the 1980s and 90s. It takes what I might call a hard edged people centered approach. Walkways and fences divide bicyclers and runners from the Hudson River with walks and fencing that as you'll see in the lower left hand corner is sometimes breached with rising seawater. A far more recent example is on the right. It's Hunter's Point South Park along the East River in Queens in New York. It takes what I might call a softer nature centered approach, which meets the river with a title marched able to absorb rising waters. So the one is more structural more people oriented and the other is more nature oriented. Could I have the next image. The next theme we're going to be exploring amongst many many myriad themes are going to be exploring is the idea of public space as a generator of activism and a civic engagement. On the left. These are two examples from the title basin from the online website that we created in conjunction with the proposals on the left is 1932 with the title basin. It's what's called the bonus army protests. World War one veterans who are seeking their pensions during the early years of the Great Depression and new marched on Washington, taking habitat at the title basin, but also at the nation is his capital. And on the right is an example of a Vietnam War protest during the 1960s at the title basin. And then finally more recently on the left is occupied Wall Street protests, which occurred in Zuccotti Park, or an early part of the last decade. And of course, this is all brought more relevant today. As demonstrations over the spring and summer over the murder of George Floyd instantly come to mind as the activation of public space with civic engagement. Okay, so now we're going to go to a series of questions and I want to turn it over to set up. I know, well, thank you, Donald, just that our our efforts in conjunction with the trust for the National Mall were really a way to to confront in a really bold innovative manner these really complicated challenges facing a treasured public space and not only does it have these great monuments and these great fields, it's also a place people go running and there are ball fields there so it's very much used by the public as well so I think sometimes that is forgotten when we start thinking about these sort of grand grand plans for the title basin, and I am assuming that will be part of our conversation today with set this I just wanted to mention that as well. Yes, there was both swimming and fishing at the title basin, which has a very interesting history. Let me start with the first question. We know that you set as an anthropologist have conducted extensive research for the National Park Service and of course the title basin is a part of the National Park Service. Could you outline for us what it means to take an anthropological approach to assessing public space. How does this approach differ from say that of an architect or an urban planner. Thank you, Donald. Well, I mean an ethnographic approach which is something I've worked on was take for example working at Independence National Historical Park where the park managers came to us and said well you know nobody in Philadelphia is really using this park and we don't know why. And we've tried redesigning it we've tried changing the graduate and we tried all these sort of physical things. And what an ethnographic approach does is we go in and actually talk to everyone who was involved in this case it was all the different neighborhoods that lived around the park. They in particularly asked us to look at African American communities they looked at Puerto Rican communities very big Philadelphia, we looked at actually Vietnamese community but all these different communities that lived within walking distance of this park, and asked us how do we change this way that people would use it. And what as ethnographers do is we go into those communities, and we do mapping with them we do memory evocation of how they imagine the park in it and we interview extensively and we look at the history of the park just like you do Donald I was thinking there's so much resonance here the history of the relationship between people in the park, such that we began to get a view of the people but people over time, people from a point of view of different cultures, different points of expression, meaning and ethnography is a cultural description. It's something that we pride ourselves in particular to public space research group that gets at the diversity of points of view and meaning, but from a person point of view. And when you start that way when you start by looking first at the people and the history as you just brought up. I remember I asked you, did they fish did they swim, you know, did they have boats on them, you know what were the kinds of human and the diversity of kinds of populations, we go in and try to understand who those people are before you even begin designing, and in order to accommodate and make sure that everyone has a voice I mean Siri we're really right. I used to run by the title basin, I mean you're absolutely right when I lived in Washington and I now walk. And yet that wasn't a big focus so you saw the designs. I mean, think of the diversity of people uses and and concepts that Hi, there's Thomas, hi, that are going on there so an ethnographic approaches is a method by which you can capture all that diversity, bring it together before we move ahead with a program is that. Yes, and one of the I should point out Tom can you hear us. Okay, welcome on to the first question. The park. One of the things which Tom and I found fascinating and alarming about the history of the title basin is that swimming was in the early part of the 20th century. Part of the program. And because the government didn't want to have integrated swimming in 1925 swimming was canceled, but fishing was allowed and fishing was always integrated. And that even the difference between the difference between the activity and the demographics changes over time. Well, and I would argue from an ethnographic point of view, those differences and the history of segregation is something that needs to be considered and how people experience that any park at this moment in time that the history. It's not that passive, you know, I've tried to write a lot about that history is very much a part of the meaning in the moment. And so one might argue, Donald, knowing that history and not him, and maybe they can mission anymore. That's a really meaningful part of their use that that then becomes incorporated into what we're designing and thinking about not just walking, not just the tourists, and as serious as not just the civic and symbolic parts that these are living breathing public spaces are living breathing fabric, as far as I'm concerned of any city and the title basin is both a civic national symbol, but it is also part of an entire network of public spaces that people are using in a variety of ways, and understand that's rather complex. There, therein lies the ethnographic tool of kind to go in and trying to really present that complexity so that you're responding to all the kinds of needs that people have, and all the different may I say meaning. So segregation seems to me the title basin might have meant has a history of segregation is that something that we want to address very directly through design. In Walter Hood's design. He talks about bringing the marshlands back as a kind of hush harbor, which is where enslaved people had their religions, because they were more secretive, and he talks about bringing the history of that at the title basin, more to the four. And he talks about bringing back in narratives and one of the things that I'm most interested in in a lot of our park work is to try to get voices that were silenced, which in the case of Philadelphia with gentrification of society hill African American institutions were torn down in order to build this kind of pure colonial space. And that when those symbols went then African Americans really felt that they were being excluded from the space I mean it's, it's, it's by what Walter hood's trying to do was he's trying to bring back narratives that have been erased and pushed away. If I can jump in for a minute. It seems to me that the link between what you're talking about with history as a static entity and history as something that very much informs our experience today so in other words it's not an add on, but it's essential to our experience. It seems like the missing link there is education. So the question that comes to my mind is, where does that education take place, and is the audience self selecting in a sense, or in other words, does it start with curricula across the nation and young people or does it start the moment that I show up at the site and I'm reading a sign. And how do you reach the people that you need to reach. I mean, we've never talked about this in our prep. Of course education plays a role but I would argue that I will argue with you I guess I'm taking you on this, that the site in and of itself, and the people who are there and the diversity and the way everyone is welcomed and in terms of what they want to do there, and what they're there for, which can be in this place, incredibly different right from the to the protesters to me taking my run someone else walking through and and that and the history of segregation and at the same time, trying to reconceive a nation that is diverse and collective in some ways. Those things need to be represented I think Tom just on the site, because evidence is I'm very sorry to say that education in and of itself has not cured the the ills. I would say that most of us learn that America is a democratic country and we all have equal voice, but in fact our public spaces, I would argue are where you're going to see the practice. And to do that you need to understand what the diversity is you want to welcome in, make spaces for them. And some of these designs and all fairness. And ask a question of where the people or where are different kinds of people, or where are the multiplicity of uses. Have we so specialized it in trying to deal with the ecology of the situation that we are muting some people and not inviting others, particularly where we go to the next question is, where is protest going to occur in these new designs. If you agree, which I'm hoping we all agree that public space is incredibly important to protest, just, you cannot look at this year cannot imagine America. I'm writing a book now of why public space, and I write about health, which is very important and we talk about blue space being friendly. All of these and we talk about children, we talk about socialization. We talk about real estate values, we talk about all of that but most importantly, public space is the one place we come together and who's the we, ideally everyone in the United States be able to come and they need and in a way that is safe and secure and comfortable for all. I would say that this is a really important site to in order to accommodate that which was not clearly in the program, or wasn't to me so clear in the program from what we've been seeing. I think what may I think you're 100% right when Tom and I looked at the site. Most of the action, shall we call it is happening nearby at the mall. And the title basin is a lesser site of activation and protest, not that it needs to be, but it seems to be the poor stepchild of the mall. All right, but show the slide that was incredible of those edges of the title basin, being where veterans were protesting I mean again. Look at Zuccotti Park is a private space right and I've been talking private space but it was a piece of legislation really it was a legal thing that allowed Zuccotti Park not to be cleared. It could have been and it ended up being one of the most visible expressions of what was going on in the, in the work and in the world at that time. So, you know, just because the edges aren't being used now doesn't mean that they could be. If I could just add something to, I think part of what is special about the title basin is in some ways it's a place of reflection and contemplation, as opposed to an association with protest. And that can be a very important aspect to, to more fully explore at the site to think about the past of segregation to think about its connection as a, as a place of reflection to a place of real action at the National Mall. And I would just like to add that when we conceived about this project it was certainly before the pandemic, and before the Black Lives Matter movement really took, took hold. And this project has only evolved and taken on more importance and new levels of meaning. But our friends at Trust for National Mall and the National Trust, we've always wanted to ensure that the people's voice was heard in this project. And while we are so proud of the really beautiful proposals and designs our fantastic firms created for this to bring attention and awareness. We also wanted to ensure that the public's voice is heard and incorporated and that's done through our online exhibition where people can leave comments and, and notes and images. And we really want to take that message to the National Park Service and Capitol Hill to say look this is how this is how people are using the site and I will say one of the biggest respondents to our surveys are our tour group leaders. And they're there every day and they see the flooding they also are extremely aware of the challenges of interpretation at the site. So that's been a really interesting audience to interact with when talking about all of these issues and challenges at the title reason. If we can move on a little bit I think whether the public space is focused on as a place of congregation or a place of circulation or a place of contemplation, whatever identity it has at that moment it seems that underlying it if you are going to have a diverse audience, and the space itself is going to tell diverse stories that safety is essential. You have to feel safe. I would venture that most of the people who go to the title base and particularly on tours safety doesn't even occur to them as an issue. They occupy Washington they occupy the city they come from they occupy public space. It's not on their radar and yet I think it is an essential reason why the audiences perhaps are not more diverse or the stories told or not might or not more diverse that someone feels unsafe it's almost I think hard for people who feel safe to remember to imagine how many people don't. So as both a specialist in public space and as an anthropologist I'm curious what do you look at as signs that a space will read as safe to a diverse audience. Also, let me just add not just safe but welcoming to everybody. And I was going to say that back to Syria I was saying one of the things is yes, you've done I think that the website is amazing you've done an incredible start up job, but there are a lot of people, a lot a lot of people as I've been writing about during cove it with the virtual website is limited in terms of who has access. And again you're hitting the same dynamic demographic as Thomas asked about one of the things he had mentioned to me. You need to remember that what looks safe to one group of people does not look safe to another. If you have a lot of surveillance and policing and barriers. You don't have to color in the United States will not use that space, nor immigrants who are maybe worried or worried about their status. If you have these beautiful dark glades. And you want people to go on the plate and those forests may look really appealing men and maybe not so appealing groups of women alone. We have extensive data extent we have we have 30 years of data of how everybody does not want exactly the same thing, nor does everyone feel safe and secure, much less welcome Donald in in in these places and it has been a park and I'm honestly honest, I'm the most welcoming of this information and say tell us how to do it differently, but state parks and city parks that I've worked with have had much more resistance that everyone wants to walk, but we don't go all too far and that and that we all want to be surveilled or police or controlled. And I think that we have to be very careful when we think about public space is imagining that young people on their bicycles and in their homes or going. Is there a place that they can hang out and feel part of the national. In this case this is a national symbols or are these kinds of large scale national mall title base is really being defined and being redesigned in a vocabulary read lots and lots of people. What about I in the beat in the opening of the little PowerPoint. I showed battery Park City and hunters point park, South Park. Could you talk a little more about the lessons that in general can be drawn from those and the lessons specific to the title patient. One of the things is everyone need to remember that there's always been a struggle between the sort of ecological approach to flooding and using hard bear, you know that hard bear. I think the real change for our future is to that places flood and at the same time have places for people to use. And one of the nice pieces of some of many of the proposals is to begin to think about soft edges. You know, that's one of the things that occurred to me, you know, don't allow them multiple narratives but I'm not quite answering your question. Battery Park City, as well as the Highline have not been used what particularly battery Park City was seen as a very elite space, even though Lori Olin really sees it as a universal space. And it's been loving to live there. In all of our inner parts of it. Other neighborhood, particularly again use what did not feel in my mom and skateboarded by their bicycles or whatever and that had to do with the aesthetics, but I want to be quite clear that aesthetics are not all of it. Battery Park City has a huge army of people who are constantly cleaning and supervising as part of the, the battery Park City, what is it called it's not, it's not a partnership it has another name. Yeah, there's, there is incredible amount of surveillance going on and people cleaning up so that again, lots and lots of people don't feel comfortable being there. Yeah, and it has this other issue is this flooding right Donald it did not take the rising, but it was another moment in time and earlier than today. But it's also that battery Park City residents, and there's plenty of evidence did not really want to welcome all of New York into their site. They write time they will they have this been their books about it that they did everything possible. I was interviewing there after 911. They didn't want to West Street change that people could easily get into their site. This was their own private set of parks playgrounds and walkways, even though I know that the landscape architects didn't see it that way. They did not want other people. So, isn't just the design, or just the aesthetics. It's also the amount of surveillance the kinds of controls, the visibility of those, those controls, and in this case, neighbors really doing everything possible to make it not accessible. What I don't know about the new site at Hunts Point is how accessible is it. But my understanding is that it is being much more successful. I haven't actually been there. I mean how accessible is, is that the new look and everything is being used? Can you report back? What do you think? Yes, I actually went from Manhattan and took the ferry boat on a Sunday in the summer and it was extremely active. And I had a similar experience, but even that, even empirical evidence, it seems to me is complex and needs interpretation because I'm in my skin and I'm walking from the subway and I have a certain experience, but it's hard for me necessarily to understand if I had a different public identity. One of the things that I think is interesting in terms of the elitism issue is that it can sometimes work the other way as well, which is to say a number of years ago I did considerable research and work about public housing in New York. And from my perspective, part of a problematic aspect of the public space in public housing is that people who don't live there don't go into that space. It feels great to go into that space. It feels very cut off from the city. People talk about how these are pockets that are isolated. And so when I see people who I assume don't live in public housing walking through now, which I didn't see decades ago, this feels to me like these spaces are being knitted back into the city in a successful way. That's not always how it's perceived by the people who live there. I was told by a resident of a development. This did not seem like progress to them. I was told, if you live in the suburbs, you have your backyard. I don't just walk through it. This is my backyard. I don't want somebody just walking through it. So it sort of stands the elitism issue on its head. And so I think these things are very complex and hard to experience in a broad way. That's absolutely right. I read an article last night about fencing of a very more Vista Park in Los Angeles, where Latinos from the other side of town come to play soccer, and it's a very white middle class neighborhood, and how they've been, and they've been trying to work out putting up fencing to, quote, keep the Latinos out. Nobody ever in this case, though, considered having the Latino soccer players and the white middle class neighbors all get together and really talk about a way to really think through solving, quote, the problem without putting up a fence. I mean, and it's fences and walls. I think New York has, in all fairness, made a really big gesture to try to bring down fencing, you know, to open the parks up much more. And I think it's had a good result, but there are neighbors and neighborhoods like in Tompkins Park, where the neighbors do not want the eight foot fence to go down to four, four feet because of a variety of issues that nobody is also interviewing them about. So back to the ethnographic method, the ethnographic method is trying to go in and understanding the best of our ability through research, what these competing needs and conflicts are all public spaces have them. How can we really understand them to the best of our ability and how can that be incorporated into our design programs and proposals. I mean, how do we get the people in there on the ground floor, along with the ecology, I have a note here. I think of the environment as having a voice. You know, it's a constituency to me with all these different kinds of ways of communities and they're all constituents and we need to be having conversations all together. It's complicated. It means a lot of community engagement. It means trying to advocate for the environment, just as much as we advocate or I would advocate for young for youth, teenagers who get pushed out of every one of these spaces or new immigrants who are pushed out of these spaces who are afraid to go out. Maybe I want to advocate for them but we can all be advocating together to kind of come up with programs that will in fact be complex enough to deal with these problems, including the inversion Thomas of what you're trying to talk about. I mean, that seems to me that conversations have to be occurring. And maybe they're not. I think it's hard to start these conversations. One of the things that I think is fascinating about this project is that the title basin can be a lens through which you explore public space in general. And so these all these issues of identity and access and safety will come up in a broad variety of public spaces. At the same time it's a unique space, and it has a particular look to it it has a particular history to it and it has a particular meaning to it. It is what I would say widely perceived resonant with national themes themes about national identity. In this particular moment, that's incredibly fraught, as we saw just a few weeks ago, the protesters were not, or the, however you want to identify the people the mob, the protesters were not simply in an open space they were occupying a particular space for a particular reason, because of that meaning that it had that level of symbolism that becomes real. And so that it so the title basin is both I think a way of looking at public space generally but also very much its own case. And now more than ever, I think it raises questions not only about community engagement but what kind of nation you know at the risk of sounding at the risk of sounding cliche what kind of nation do we want to be. And look at the inauguration I watch we all watch tomorrow. Right, we all did a whole lot. Yes, yes. What was the foreground. What was the foreground, where that water where was that platform, who was looking across the title basin was as much a part of the the fire or the all of it is as anything and here we are so it's iconic. And at the same time we have all the granular, fascinating problems of creating a park, may I use the word park now a blue space, based along a waterway, which both floods, but people want to use an in a myriad of ways, be it swimming and fishing or promenading or being a tool. I mean, so how do you accommodate these very granular these very every one of the one of the great parts about the title basin that I think other spaces have, and it's what makes a public space wonderful is the relation between the permanent and the ephemeral. And that's where the title basin is a great lens, because you've got this cherry blossom festival that lasts all of three to four weeks. And then you've got the Jefferson Memorial that is about what we do with American history and permanence, and the most significant public spaces like that, have this relationship between the permanent and the ephemeral and the two together is what makes them really resonant. And there should be the basis of your design, along with protest this and and there's in cultural diversity at a moment that our country is being ripped apart, even though things seem calmer look at what's you know underneath it all. Yes. Well we have about 15 minutes left. So I suggest we transition to q amp a from the audience. Wonderful. And actually cherry trees are a perfect segue. I would first say that there are many challenges of the title basin and interpretation and memorialization and connectivity I mean personal connectivity is one of them but it's also there's also a lot of flooding, which we haven't talked about today, and the title basin does flood the walkway twice a day, every day at high tide and this is a major issue and a question from the audience is, how is that impacting the visitor experience at the title base and as well as how is it impacting the cherry trees. I can answer that but if anybody'd like to take a shot go ahead. Thank you know the answer. Why don't you tell us, I'll tell the answer. I kind of know the answer but you are the expert. Well, I don't know about that, but I've learned a lot about cherry trees recently. There are very, very few original cherry trees left. I've seen statistics around two to 3% maybe of the original cherry trees are remaining and the National Park Service has told us that they are in a perpetual cherry tree because that's an expectation as a visitor you expect to see that chain of cherry trees around the title base and every April. So, so it's very challenging and the reasons those trees are dying is certainly because of brackish water and then dating the roots twice a day every day, as well as massive visitation and this is one of those famous iconic places that's being put to death in many ways so those cherry tree roots are being are being trampled down. So, yes it's very challenging and that's, I think, definitely one of the themes that the designers have addressed is how to how to think about these cherry trees in a new way. All right, I'll look for another question here and take me a moment to pull those up. A lot of questions yeah. Okay, that was the cherry trees. Okay, here's a question about was any thought given to linkages between the title basin and Teddy Roosevelt Island. Is there a strategy for pedestrians and cyclists ferries water taxis. I think Walter hood. Yeah, in his proposal talks about a larger circuit that includes the title basin, the island, our own to National Cemetery Lee's house. You know the African American Museum, I think it actually does is a larger story that he talks about. And I see Susanna Drake is also talking about it as well. To me one of the things that that raises in is in addition to the specific relationship of theaters both island and other places is simply, how do you arrive at the place. And how does that begin to frame your experience. Is it difficult to get to do you wander upon it. Do you have to make a reservation, you know, so physically arrive at a place is is one of those dimensions that is maybe not thought about particularly by the general public, but that is really definitive in terms of framing and experience. So I think that that how you get there how the story starts is so important. Yes well actually Susanna Drake, one of the images that I showed I created this peer into the Potomac, and then created a new dialogue between Lincoln and and King, which actually is a spot that could be a place not only as a recreational space, but to give space to have great dialogues, great conversations about what's going on in our country, because that link is now would be made more overt than it is now. Yeah, yeah. I'm having in a similar way I'm not couple of the questions. There's a question here about the design, the Hildebrand thing that had called his design and open work. When I went and looked at it it didn't look as open as as as maybe he meant but I did think that this idea of open work because how are we going to imagine constituencies that aren't here today. For me, I think the title basin is is so incredibly important because maybe for the first time we will really take on the sort of climate change flooding issues with people in a park and civic concerns, all at the same time this is our chance, I think, and the designers have all taken on it all I'm very very differently. Some to me prioritize the environment, others I think have prioritized people. The question is, where for the future moving towards the future. This is the one of the key issues that must be resolved. And we, and, and I know at one point you if you wanted to ask me well what was the most important part from the people side and I would say it's social justice that know what or what happens that, no matter how we deal with the water the water, but it that that whatever we do that we keep social justice in our sites at this moment in time, and that a public space is a way of expressing the public sphere, but that tells us nothing, nothing about how we begin to resolve the ecological threats that we're facing and here is a perfect place to have that conversation. So I'm saying your questions I'm saying this to me seems the perfect perfect place to have this conversation that has always been with us, but now must be confronted in an effective way can we have environmental justice and social justice at the same time and how do we, how do we do that to me that is the question of our time. Another question. All right. So the question about connectivity to the neighborhoods of DC, and, and dealing with all of the highways, it for those of you that have visited the title base and it's not always the easiest place to reach comments about that. I'm not sure, sorry. I'm going to say that again I'm not connectivity to the rest of Washington DC, much of the title business somewhat cut off. Yeah, it's difficult to get there. I mean, I started out, I think in the very beginning trying to say that the public space is, is this is the infrastructure of a city and that it does need to be integrated so maybe looking at the title basin in and of itself needs to be part of a larger plan for the interconnection of public spaces throughout Washington which I think is well on its way but you know again some of the proposals do create stronger pedestrian links between the mall Washington and the title base and some of the schemes do do that. One of the things that I found fascinating about this project and I think, I think I can speak for both of us that Donald and I both really enjoyed working with the landscape architecture firms, because of the scale in part, because of the design on which they think, and that it's so large both geographically and temporally that they're not just thinking about a particular building site, but they're thinking about a region. They're not just thinking about the next 30 years of use they're thinking about centuries of use. And we found that really fascinating and a good reason why I think that the trust reached out to landscape architects, was of that breadth and that you ultimately have to consider all of the connectivity at some point in the process you have to consider how it's needed into the city and not cut off by highways or if it is cut off by highways what are the implications of that, both environmentally and socially. I think that's really smart. You know, one of the things that I often try to think about is that no spaces is inherently public, regardless of ownership that that's not an adequate definition of public space that what makes a space to public public from my point of view, it is is is in the act of people and coming and making it theirs and connectivity communication and circulation are fundamental pieces of that infrastructure and that without that public spaces can't be made public back to the battery Park City, if you couldn't get in there, you know how how public was battery Park City, how public did it really become in the sense of access but if if the title basin and whatever is there is connected back into the city, then we can transform a public space throughout the entire throughout the entire throughout the entire area. And it is much more likely to be inclusive if that happens. Again, connectivity circulation communication will in fact create greater access to everyone, which is the sort of social justice part of our goal. You want to reduce barriers. And I think all of these plans do a very effective job of that. I mean of trying to reduce barriers to get people into the last year but I mean one thing we haven't talked about is, what about retaining wall things that keep you away from the water versus designs that take you towards the water or into the water. I don't see as much of, I don't know, Bodie as imagining it is becoming a watery estuary in which I would go kayaking, but you know how how wet is it going to be coming and can we imagine it is a completely different kind of landscape that is public and reached in other ways. And so I think some of the designs did try to imagine be it boardwalk or other other ways to interact with water plan are bringing swimming back and swimming and fishing is one of those things that really crosses across all kinds of cultural areas and brings people together. It's been very important in every, every single park and site that has water that I've worked in that and religious activities water and religion and sacredness and what Siri, you were sort of talking about the spirituality the the pastoral the the contemplation the reflection often is linked to places that have water and we have lots of exemplary sites that we could think about parks that deal with this in in a spiritual way that in fact enhances the water's capacity to calm and bring a sense of spiritual spirituality to everyone. And there's a nice kind of circularity to that because as Donald mentioned earlier, Walter hood talks about hush harbors which was a term that I didn't know. And as Donald explained it, it was a portion of a tide water plantation, where African American people who were enslaved, they were still enslaved when they went to these areas but they had slightly more autonomy. In this area that was considered a waste because it couldn't be developed by in terms of agriculture or or building. This was incredibly valuable to the black community because they had slightly more autonomy and this is where the first churches of black churches were built in America. And in terms of that being close to water, water is very, very often a part of a lyric of a spiritual of a Negro spiritual, many, many of them crossing the water. And that was crossing the water waiting in the water, the baptism, and that was a kind of as I understand it. This was a kind of code. This was a kind of way of communicating because water was symbolic of freedom of movement of progress. And this was not necessarily widely known by the power elite. So it was worked into the lyric, because it could seem benign, but it was really a kind of. It was part of a demand for social justice and so it's, it's kind of interesting how the water works its way in in the physical landscape, but also in the literary landscape and the imagined landscape. Well, yeah, most places that I've studied that actually back to the fishing fishing is one of the ways that lots of poor people supplement their, their, their food. And we forget that and that public spaces are also places of work in that sense, but of being able to provide if they're wild grasses or wild plants. I mean, we go back to thinking that these are commons also for goods, and if I think the designs do evoke a kind of creation of a wetland where wild things would grow and, you know, something something there could be happening. I'm trying to look at, yeah, there's a question about education. Yeah, we have time for maybe one quick question and answer. We have questions of education at the site which we have generally addressed. And how clean is the water in the area is another question. That's a good, that's a good question. The title basin no longer works as a title basin where water comes in and flushes back out. So the specific cleanliness of the water I would, I would have to get back to you on that. But I will, I will just say that I think for those of you, you join us you can see there are many ways into this project. We could talk for many hours about this talk topic about climate change about design about agriculture. There's there's so much we could, we could talk about here. And I hope that you all will join us at upcoming webinars on on the title basin. But with that I think we should, we should probably end. And I just have a couple follow up announcements. We have had great comments and questions from from our participants and we encourage you all to keep the conversation going on forum connect which is free and and open to anyone to join. We have a number of webinars coming up in addition to this one today and a few others over the spring. We will have preservation advocacy during the first 100 days of the Biden administration and that is happening tomorrow at 3pm Eastern. And we have another great webinar on Brown v Board of Education, which is a major initiative we're working on where we are creating a national park site with these various sites across the country. Okay, next, and, and we're just on time so I would love to thank all of our participants who have joined us today. I appreciate the national trust thank you and our partners at the national mall. Thank you. And you can certainly reach out to us with any questions about this really engaging an interesting conversation I think it's given us a lot to think about, or, or, or any questions in general, general, you might have and the special thanks and gratitude to our panelists and taking your time out. Thank you. Thank you for hosting. Thank you for doing such a lovely job. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Siri for hosting us. Okay. All right. And I think the anthropologic look I think was really edifying and illuminating so thank you set them. Oh, you're more than welcome. Thank you. It was a great perspective. Well, we all should work together. I mean, I guess that's that's what we all work together. Thank you. Bye.