Eve M. Kahn

DETROIT — Colorful little homes are springing up alongside an arid freeway bank in the Dexter-Linwood neighborhood here, a few miles northwest of downtown. Although tourists sometimes think the buildings are playthings and knock on the doors, the site is actually intended to help solve desperate urban problems.

“Every single house is different on purpose,” said the Rev. Faith Fowler, the executive director of Cass Community Social Services, a nonprofit group that is building the property’s two dozen homes of a few hundred square feet each. Low-income adults, including people formerly homeless or incarcerated, are moving into the compound, which is surrounded by long, sad stretches of Victorian ruins.

Cass’ eclectic oasis is meant as the antithesis of monolithic public housing. Its builders have scattered gingerbread ornaments on exteriors made of brick, stucco, shingles, clapboards and recycled barn boards. Breezes rustling through mature trees help drown out the freeway noise, and butterflies are descending on the residents’ new flower beds and vegetable patches.

Gladys Ferguson, who is in her 60s and has severe arthritis, rents Cass’ yellow gabled house for $350 a month. (Seven years of her accumulated rent will eventually finance her outright purchase of the property.) “It’s just a gorgeous little thing,” she said. When she first entered the house for a preview, shortly before she moved in a few years ago, she sneaked away for a nap in the tucked-away bedroom. “That was the most serene thing you’ve ever seen,” she said.

Charities nationwide are creating similar tiny-house clusters for people in need. The building type, best known in recent years for starring in reality TV shows like “Tiny House, Big Living,” is gaining gravitas. It can offer reassuring domestic coziness for residents, and its nonthreatening appearance also appeals to wealthier neighbors, who might have raised “not in my backyard” objections to nonprofits’ proposals for more institutional designs.

“It looks like their own house, but on a smaller scale,” said Andrew Heben, the project director at SquareOne Villages in Eugene, Oregon. At the nonprofit’s enclaves of minihomes, roofs are arched, gabled or slanted and facades come in earth tones or candy colors. The cuteness factor and the quick construction turnaround time have helped persuade volunteers to raise money and provide pro bono services. Dan Bryant, SquareOne’s executive director, said contractors had been known to stop by works in progress unprompted and ask, “What have you got left over to do?”

The Community First! Village in Austin, Texas, is providing hundreds of tiny houses and places for their residents to work, raise produce and access medical care. “It’s succeeded beyond any of our imaginations” since it opened in 2015, said Alan Graham, the organization’s founder. Residents prefer the “refuge and safety” of having their own four walls, however small the enclosure — many suffered trauma on the streets and ended up considered “the most despised outcasts,” Graham said. A handful of longtime tenants are now working with architects and builders to customize their own new homes.

“We’re treating them like they’re billionaires,” Graham said. One proposal, he added, resembles a Japanese pagoda: “It looks, on paper, cuter than all get-out.”

Dozens of gabled prefab homes from Champion Home Builders have been shipped to Eden Village in Springfield, Missouri, as havens for homeless people with chronic disabilities. The columned front porches and exteriors are painted in beiges, mint greens and brick reds, among other hues, and solar panels are being installed on the roofs. A donor has stitched new patchwork quilts for the residents’ beds. “We decided not to give them hand-me-downs, which they’ve had all their lives,” said David Brown, a founder of the project and its umbrella organization, the Gathering Tree.

Glossy stone columbaria have niches that residents can reserve for storing their cremated ashes someday, in hand-turned wooden urns. “This is a place of permanence” for people who have long felt unrooted and not expected anyone to commemorate their lives, said Nate Schlueter, the Gathering Tree’s chief operating officer.

Individualized and well-crafted small homes for the 99% have been around since at least the 19th century, when Henry David Thoreau described his ideal quarters as an “airy and unplastered cabin, fit to entertain a traveling god.”

Other proselytizers have included Gustav Stickley, who popularized oaky bungalows; Frank Lloyd Wright, who came up with relatively modest streamlined prefab homes; and Buckminster Fuller, who envisioned utopias studded with geodesic domes.

New Urbanist planners have recommended incorporating petite dwellings into subdivisions, to accommodate lower-income residents. But sometimes the results have turned out a little too desirable; in Seaside, Florida, for instance, adorableness can now set you back nearly $1 million. Vacationers spend about $300 a night to stay at Think Big! A Tiny House Resort, a 2-year-old attraction in South Cairo, New York. (Full disclosure: This reporter hugely enjoyed an incognito stay there this summer, in a snug driftwood-gray shoebox named Mocha alongside goat pastures and mossy waterfalls.)

Nonprofits can keep costs low for small homes, but some experts wonder whether the trend will spread widely enough to make a noticeable dent in the nation’s problem with homelessness.

About half a million Americans every night, after all, have nowhere safe to lay their heads. Matthew Gordon Lasner, an associate professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College in New York, said he could not quite envision diminutive dwelling compounds turning into “a scalable solution.” Yet the sites do raise awareness of a critical societal need — more engagingly, perhaps, than politicians’ affordable-housing manifestos — and they attract visitors including scholars. “I love poking around them,” Lasner said.

Ferguson said she had lost count of how many journalists and researchers had interviewed her. She has prepared a handwritten list of talking points about the advantages of tiny-house living. She explained how she carefully researched flowers to introduce in her garden, to maximize appeal to butterflies. She and her neighbors are encouraged “to feel proud of themselves,” as they tend the buildings and grounds together, she said. She added, firmly, “We are a friendly community — you can write that down.”

This article originally appeared in

A Roof of One's Own, With or Without the Gingerbread

(Home)

Weingarten, a partner in Ace Architects in Northern California, has spent spare time over four decades scouring flea markets and antiques shops for 20th-century miniatures. (A few acquisitions cost over $10,000 each, and the collection’s value has been estimated to be around $1 million.)

Taj Mahals, sphinxes, Notre Dames and Empire State Buildings coexisted on the shelves of his home with representations of more obscure towers like the Barclay-Vesey Building in lower Manhattan as well as now-vanished follies built for world’s fairs. Many pieces have hidden purposes — they doubled as coin banks, inkwells, lamps, ashtrays, thermometers, lipstick holders, pens, puzzles or salt and pepper shakers. They were manufactured in stone, metal, cork, wax, ceramics, plastic, wood or soap. His museum gift also includes the factories’ sales catalogs and original molds. A museum team spent days at his house packing up boxfuls representing a “very, very, very narrow slice of the world,” Weingarten said. As the packers labored, he said, “I couldn’t quite bring myself to watch.”

Among his gifts now on view at the museum are some metal Notre Dames and an Empire State Building under assault by King Kong. Nancy Bateman, the museum’s chief registrar, described the donations as “quite impressive individually, and as a group they’re mind-boggling.” Chase Rynd, the executive director, added that the miniatures are “playful and fun” yet can also convey serious messages about demolished beloved buildings and people’s memories of travels and skylines.

Weingarten and his housemates, Margaret Majua and Lucia Howard, have been restocking empty shelves at their home with pre-1900 models of ancient ruins. “As time marches forward, we march backward,” he said.

He is still seeking rare 20th-century pieces, including a 2-foot-tall bronze version of the Woolworth Building that was given to employees in the 1910s. “That one’s still out there,” he said, and if it turns up, he will add it to the museum’s large holdings of small things.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/arts/design/national-building-museum-donation.html" id="52c5ed49-fbbb-3335-a6f3-9cbbb96cdcd7">The New York Times</a>.

Neighborhoods of tiny structures will soon be assembled under the soaring ceilings at the National Building Museum in Washington. David Weingarten, one of the world’s most devoted collectors of architectural souvenirs, is donating 3,069 shrunken landmarks to the museum, which is already putting them on display.

Tiny Neighborhoods Sprout at the National Building Museum

<h1>NEW YORK — Fans of contemporary art will be crisscrossing Manhattan this weekend, visiting fairs on Midtown’s Far West Side, an East River pier and points in between. One should not live by art alone. Consider this: The New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, which is running through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory (which hosted another art fair — the Art Show — just last week).</h1>

This weekend visitors to the Armory can review a cinema memorabilia collection that shines a light on LGBTQ performers in Hollywood’s early years and a Bible containing details about the tragic fates of slaves on a South Carolina plantation. This wide-ranging fair is a vivid reminder of, among many things, the importance of history and the hardships humans have endured. Here are six highlights from the dealers’ inventory.

Walter Reuben Inc.

Walter Reuben, who owns an eponymous cinema-memorabilia gallery in West Hollywood, California, has a collection of photographs and paperwork about LGBTQ performers, directors and writers, and gay-themed productions. The collection (priced at $95,000) contains 1920s and ‘30s publicity shots of actors, like William Haines, whose careers came to an abrupt end after they were outed, as well as Elton John in concert regalia in the 1970s and stills from Lily Tomlin’s 1980s films. Reuben has also acquired photographs, scripts and advertisements for early films and shows with LGBTQ characters who were open about their sexuality, including “The Boys in the Band.” Reuben said he hopes to find a buyer who will keep the archive intact, in order to foster research in a lesser-documented aspect of film history.

Geographicus Rare Antique Maps

A 19th-century linen map ($25,000) marked with French officials’ plans for carving up Vietnam’s central coast is on offer at Geographicus, a map dealer in Brooklyn. In the 1810s, Vietnamese cartographers used black ink on the cloth to outline riverbanks, rice fields, villages, roadways and the serrated perimeter of the Great Wall of Vietnam, which has been uncovered in recent archaeological digs. In the 1890s, French colonists used brown ink to add notations about property borders for potential seizure and subdivision. There’s a sense of foreboding in the contrast between the invaders’ dense lines of inventory notes and the original Vietnamese mapmakers’ flowing land contours.

Tamino Autographs

In 1914, dancer Vaslav Nijinsky signed the insole of a cream-colored leather ballet slipper that he had barely worn. He had just married a Hungarian dancer, Romola de Pulszky, which enraged his former lover, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. A few years after he signed the shoe, Nijinsky’s life and career were derailed by mental illness, and his wife was left to tend to their two young daughters. Tamino Autographs, a dealer based in Manhattan, is offering the footwear ($29,500), which has loose threads along the toe where a sparkling ornament had originally been stitched. Tamino also has a signed copy of Romola’s 1935 biography of her husband ($400); in it, she recalled how, in his prime, his wiry feet had destroyed several pairs of shoes during each ballet performance.

Read’Em Again Books

American slave owners typically kept minimal records of enslaved people’s lives, aside from listings of births, deaths, sell-offs and escapes. Read’Em Again Books, a dealer in Montclair, Virginia, has an early 19th-century Bible ($30,000) in which the Wilson family, owners of a plantation near Darlington, South Carolina, detailed some of their slaves’ tragic fates. Physicians in the family apparently had coroner-level interest in the subject. A girl named Caroline was fatally injured when she fell under wagon wheels, but with “little injury to bone.” An enslaved man named Stephany died after fracturing his skull “in a fall from the second to the first floor.” The Wilsons’ former plantation has largely disappeared, and it is not known yet whether traces remain of the slaves’ cabins and graves.

Schulson Autographs

In the early 1900s, inventor Nikola Tesla imagined networks of transmission towers that would power millions of pocket-size, wireless communication devices. He was widely mocked for his ideas but kept experimenting. In a 1908 letter now for sale at Schulson Autographs ($19,500), based in New Jersey, he asked a close friend, engineer Bernard A. Behrend, to send him a 220-volt motor for a machine in progress. (It is not clear which one.) Tesla’s stationery depicts the domed tower that he had just built in Shoreham, New York; it was a financial flop and never activated. Its adjoining laboratory is now being converted into a science center.

Whitmore Rare Books

A lightly worn copy of the National Woman Suffrage Association’s 1876 Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States is for sale ($37,500) through Whitmore Rare Books in Pasadena, California. No one knows which original owner may have folded it in her purse for safekeeping; a handful of other examples are known to survive in institutional collections. The text warns that “woman’s degraded, helpless position” and disenfranchisement violated America’s founding governmental principles. Activists handed out the flyer in Philadelphia during the Centennial Exhibition. At a ceremony in Independence Hall, politicians accepted a copy in “respectful silence,” an eyewitness noted. Among the signatories are familiar suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, as well as minister Olympia Brown, who lived long enough to legally vote.

New York International Antiquarian Book Fair

Through Sunday at the Park Avenue Armory, Manhattan; nyantiquarianbookfair.com.

This article originally appeared in <a id="584a02b6-ad5b-4bec-9c0f-2717a475f7fc" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/arts/design/antiquarian-book-fair-park-avenue-armory.html">The New York Times</a>.

Vivid Reminders of History and Human Hardship

Walter Reuben, who owns an eponymous cinema-memorabilia gallery in West Hollywood, California, has a collection of photographs and paperwork about LGBTQ performers, directors and writers, and gay-themed productions.

Vivid reminders of history and human hardship

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Eve M. Kahn

Articles written by the author

A Roof of One's Own, With or Without the Gingerbread

Tiny Neighborhoods Sprout at the National Building Museum

Vivid reminders of history and human hardship