You Say to Brick Read online

  “Oh, and his mother thought he was great,” Esther added. But Bertha could no longer serve as a source of local and immediate encouragement, for shortly after Lou lost his job, his parents left Philadelphia for good. The ostensible reason for the move was Leopold’s health, which the doctors thought would improve in the warm, dry climate of Los Angeles. At least one family member—an Aunt Martha—already lived out there and could help smooth their way. A series of postcards in a slightly Anglicized German marked Bertha and Leopold’s journey across the country (“We are just this Thursday gekrost into California State,” they wrote, using a verb that combined the English cross with the German perfect tense), and then, in the winter of 1930–31, came a letter from Los Angeles itself. “When I saw the first palm trees I felt all excited,” Bertha wrote to both Lou and Esther, though still in German. “You know, dear children, how much I love nature!” Then Leopold’s tinier, more elegant script took over: “Apologies, but your mother couldn’t write any more, it was already a bit much for her eyes.” (Bertha’s eyesight was beginning to worsen seriously, to such an extent that “during the day I go around with blue glasses,” she said.) Leopold reported on their nighttime visit to a “wonderfully illuminated” Hollywood, commented on the city’s wide commercial streets with their “magnificent and elegant stores,” and in general praised the superiority of Los Angeles over Philadelphia. In May he sent another letter describing their new landlords, “elderly Christian people who love us and let us take everything from the kitchen garden; the garden is in front of our apartment.” In an addendum to that letter, he asked Esther and Lou to “Please call Rosella and Sarah and ask them why they don’t write!”

  By June of 1931, when Bertha wrote to Lou about his sketching article, the language of communication had shifted permanently to English. But the concerns about being cut off from the family members in Philadelphia remained the same. “You refer to the house in your note, I am sorry, but I haven’t been informed about any thing,” Bertha said. “I haven’t heard from Oscar or Rosala for a month. Has anything happened to them? I am quite worried.” She had reason to be worried, for the family house at 2318 North 20th Street was in the process of being lost through a mortgage default. It was finally sold in a sheriff’s sale in September, which meant that Oscar, Rosella, and Sarah all had to find housing elsewhere. Eventually Sarah moved to Brooklyn, New York, with her Canadian husband, Joe Freedman, and her little daughter, Gerry; from there she wrote piteous letters to Lou and Esther about how homesick she was. Oscar and Rosella—now with two small children, a boy named Alan and his baby sister, Rhoda—stayed on in Philadelphia, as Oscar tried out various unsuccessful business ventures. In the long run all of these Kahn family members, with the notable exception of Lou and Esther, would end up out in California with Leopold and Bertha.

  Some of what kept Lou in Philadelphia was Esther’s family, of which he had become an integral part, but most of it had to do with his architecture career. For he continued to have a career even in those periods when he had no job. He was not one to become easily discouraged, and soon after he left Cret’s office he began making plans to go into private practice with another of the firm’s laid-off architects, Solis Daniel Kopelan. Kahn got as far as designing the new firm’s logo—a symmetrical, square-cut, blatantly modernist house—when he was rescued from this doomed venture by the offer of a job with the architectural practice of Zantzinger, Borie, and Medary. They had a contract to design the U.S. Department of Justice building in Washington, D.C., and since government work was practically the only guaranteed source of income for architects in the 1930s, it seemed advisable for Kahn to accept. He joined the firm at the end of December 1930, only three months after leaving Cret.

  Thirteen months later, however, with the design process completed and the project set to go out to bid, the practice had no further need of Lou’s services. The founding partner, Clarence Clark Zantzinger, let him go “with great regret” in January of 1932, and Lou was once again jobless. But if he couldn’t get paid for his work, he nonetheless resolved to do something useful and interesting. In March of 1932 Kahn joined together with a number of other unemployed architects to found the Architectural Research Group, whose stated aim was to address problems of housing and slum clearance in the Philadelphia area. The ARG had about two dozen members, and though they were all officially equal, the charismatic, philosophically minded Kahn was generally viewed as their leader. It was through their joint membership in ARG that Lou first met David Wisdom, the stalwart employee who was to be the cornerstone of his private practice in the decades to come. During this period Kahn also grew friendly with George Howe, a leading progressive architect who, with his partner William Lescaze, had already designed the Philadelphia Savings Fund Building (often described as the first International Style skyscraper built in the United States). His connection to Lou was not so much through the Architectural Research Group—the fully employed Howe, widely known for his work on a series of elegant private residences, was not an ARG member, though he approved of the group’s principles—as through the T-Square Club, which published Louis Kahn’s first piece of writing. George Howe, as president of the club, was in charge of the club’s journal, and it was he who had invited Lou to submit his article on sketching to its pages.

  Over the course of its two-year existence (the group disbanded in 1934), ARG produced housing studies, made recommendations for rehabilitating slums, submitted proposals to local agencies, and engaged in heated group discussions about the role of architecture in the modern world. ARG also submitted entries to various national and international competitions (none of which won); among the more noteworthy of these was Kahn’s 1932 design for a Lenin Memorial in Leningrad. The projects all came to nothing, in practical terms, and yet they both reflected and confirmed the intensity of Lou’s engagement with his chosen profession. Though unremunerated, the work itself satisfied for a time his desire to be doing something new and self-determined in his field. It also brought him to the attention of people who would later be able to help him toward paid employment. As Esther put it in a July 1934 diary entry, “In the 2 years out of work Lou has formed A-R-G and did fine work in architecture—too bad that he has no income to continue studies. [He] has learned much in housing & made many connections.”

  As for herself, she noted that though she had managed to obtain her master’s in psychology, she was “still working for Frazier at 125 a month.” (By this time, though, the aging and somewhat difficult Dr. Frazier had been joined at Jefferson Medical College by the younger neurologist Bennie Alpers, whom Esther had included—along with his wife, Lillian—in a list of her and Lou’s new friends.) That pretty much covered the 1934 updates devoted to “Lou” and “Me.” Under the heading “Us,” she wrote: “Quarrel a great deal because we are both on edge. Hard to get along financially which is bad & which helps us keep on edge. Both tired from hard work & neither doing the things we want.”

  This marked a severe contrast to her entry three years earlier, in July of 1931, when she had concluded after one year of marriage: “Our life together has been truly beautiful. Fortunately our likes and dislikes and more strongly our interests and ideals coincide. We find our pleasure in music & theatre & friends. Our days are filled with work we like and our evenings with work of our own and home. We love each other dearly and respect each other’s wishes & desires. Lou is a perfect darling—considerate sweet quiet—gentle and extremely brilliant. I am sure neither of us would wish for a better life.”

  That this was not just Esther’s rosy-tinted vision is suggested by some of the letters Lou wrote her during the summers in the 1930s, when she was vacationing up in Katonah with her friend Kit Sherman and he was hard at work in the city. “Dearestest:” begins one of these notes, written on a hot Monday night and filled with amusing, cartoon-like sketches, including one of himself naked at a drafting table. “Had meeting with Zantzinger this after noon. Everything coming along … I am slated to get a synagogue job
—good opportunity … Bees Buzzin’ But no honey produced yet. But we’re young. Miss you! Miss me? Regards to Kit. Love, Lou.” Another talks about an afternoon spent with several colleagues (though “It turned out to be a beer party instead of a serious cooperative architects office”), during which he engaged in a conversation about psychology with a woman named Sally Montgomery. “I was audacious enough to express myself in Psychological terms,” Lou wrote, “racking my brain for all the terminology which you acquainted me with. The others joined in to unroot the metaphysical ‘Human Nature’ angle, the existance of which was not accepted by Sally nor myself on the basis of it not being definable.” He reassured her that the subject of psychology only came up because “Sally inquired very affectionately about you and your work. I told her what a hell of a time you had accomplishing your aim and how you were waiting for my 1,000,000 job to clear the deck.” After mentioning that he’d give her more details when he saw her over the coming weekend, Lou closed, “With love and kisses, Lou”—his name, in block capitals, composed entirely out of tiny x-kisses.

  A more extended separation than these summer breaks began at the end of 1935, when Lou was offered a full-time job working under Alfred Kastner at the Resettlement Administration in Washington, D.C. Despite the lack of regular employment, 1935 had already been a good year for Kahn. He had passed his Architectural Registration Examination in May, allowing him to put at the head of the new stationery for his home-based practice: “Louis I. Kahn • Registered Architect • 5243 Chester Avenue Philadelphia Penna.” Soon after this, in September, he received his first independent commission, for the Ahavath Israel synagogue in Philadelphia. It did not turn out to be a particularly distinguished building—completed in 1938, the functional brick-clad structure suffered from both the architect’s inexperience and the congregation’s insufficient funds—but it was certainly “nothing to be ashamed of,” as one architecture critic was later to point out, and the commission itself marked a definite step in Kahn’s progress toward having his own practice. Then, in late 1935, came the irresistible offer to work under the much-respected, Hamburg-trained Kastner on an entirely new workers’ housing project. It was a dream job for Lou, even if it did require him to live in Washington during the week, and he accepted the position of “assistant principal architect” at the Resettlement Administration on December 23, 1935.

  Jersey Homesteads—later renamed Roosevelt, New Jersey, after the president whose New Deal had financed its construction—was a utopian scheme designed to relocate impoverished garment workers from their cramped city tenements to a verdant, healthful community run along mildly socialist lines. Located a few miles south of Hightstown, the farming-and-factory cooperative occupied over a thousand acres of rolling pastureland and forested glens. The factory at its center was designed to employ 160 garment workers, all members of either the International Ladies Garment Workers Union or the Amalgamated City Clothing Workers of America, and all paid at the union rate. The co-op village (which also included a school, a community center, and various other local facilities) was to be run on a one-member, one-vote basis, with the members buying into the system up front and paying only $18 to $24 per month for their housing over a thirty-year period. The initial plan was to house about 200 families, or 1,000 people, in three- and four-bedroom dwellings, with each house set in its own sizable garden. A communal farm of 500 acres would surround the houses, offering a buffer zone against encroaching growth and employing an additional six workers from the community.

  Kahn’s designs for the houses, which borrowed elements from both Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus, were simple yet pleasant, with concrete-block walls, overhanging flat roofs, and mainly white exteriors. The houses were set well back from the curving, sidewalk-free streets, lending a rural or perhaps semi-suburban air to the place. Driveways led up to small attached garages, and large windows looked out onto the front yards. Asymmetry was more prevalent than precise symmetry, but whether the front door was placed in the center or toward the side, each building had a sense of balance. Some of the houses were duplexes while others were single-family; some had two stories, some had one. There were twelve different housing styles, but all the buildings shared a similar look, lending the whole place a kind of forward-looking, egalitarian yet decidedly leafy feel, not at all what the words “factory town” might conjure up.

  And in fact the factory element was to prove evanescent, for the unions in the end decided they didn’t want their valuable workers exported to the countryside. Lou’s contribution to the project was finished in early 1937, when the houses were completed to his specifications. Within two years, the utopian experiment had failed. Yet the low-priced homes remained, and in 1939 the artist Ben Shahn (who had earlier been brought in to do the mural in the community center) moved with his wife from their tiny New York apartment to one of the Jersey Homesteads houses. He was to remain there the rest of his life, and the place became something of an artists’ colony as a result. The clean-lined houses Kahn had designed for workers were appealing enough, it turned out, to suit an aesthetically focused clientele.

  In the meantime, though, life had changed significantly in the house that Lou himself occupied with Esther and her family. In February of 1936, less than two months into Lou’s new Washington job, Samuel Israeli died of a heart arrhythmia. The family was devastated; even his in-laws “both cried like Babies, we loved him very much,” as Leopold wrote in a condolence note to Lou. Esther herself was so shaken that a year later she could barely refer to the death. “So much has happened since the last entry that I haven’t had the heart to write,” she confided to her diary on January 28, 1937. “Feb 5 We lost our Daddy. No need to write about that since every detail will always be in my heart & mind and so will all the consequences. I cannot place on hard, unfeeling paper the agony, sorrow, and all that followed … Since then I have been only part a woman—part of me is gone and as a result I seem to be ill all the time.”

  One of the consequences was that the family finances instantly grew more straitened. Luckily Lou was fully employed for the whole of 1936, and the $4,599 he brought in from his Resettlement Administration job, when added to Esther’s $1,500, more than made up for the extra expense of housing him in Washington. But Annie Israeli now depended more than ever on her oldest daughter, emotionally as well as financially, and Esther felt this as an additional source of pressure on her already weakened self. Meanwhile Annie continued, somewhat guilt-inducingly, to do all the housework: “She forgets that she is almost 60 and should let up on her activities but she doesn’t,” Esther wrote to Lou. Eventually the household’s composition altered even further when Annie decided to rent out Olivia’s now-empty room to a paying lodger, Catherine McMichael, a Catholic woman who was already known to the family as “Aunt Katie.” All of this, combined with Lou’s frequent work absences, made Esther feel slightly estranged at home, and she only seemed able to relax fully when she was with her friend Kit at Brookwood, their summer refuge in Katonah.

  Nor did the needs of Lou’s own family decline during this period; if anything, they increased. Over the course of 1936, Lou and Esther sent $500 to his parents and gave (or loaned) an additional $75 to his brother. Bertha Kahn came for a brief visit to Philadelphia in the middle of 1936, and shortly after she returned to Los Angeles, Oscar’s and Sarah’s families both moved out there as well. But life turned out to be far from easy in the Golden State, and in 1938 Leopold and Bertha were forced to file an application for state aid under the Old Age Security Law. In the letter Lou received from the County of Los Angeles, the Department of Charities representative informed him that under California law, “adult children are responsible for the care and support of their parents. We are, therefore, requesting that you give careful and serious consideration to the matter of your parents’ care. What plan or suggestion can you offer for this care, either in your own home or elsewhere? To what extent are you now aiding your parents and to what extent will you be able to aid in the futu
re?” Lou and Esther’s response, after filling out the requisite “Statement of Responsible Relative,” was to continue sending monthly checks, each of which was met with a grateful thank-you note from the elder Kahns.

  After the Jersey Homesteads job ended, in February of 1937, there was again a lull on the employment front. But “Lou is not discouraged,” as Esther noted in her diary. “I feel that he may soon begin to be recognized. He has such talent and ability, plus the enthusiasm & desire for his profession, that he will get ahead. But I hope it will be soon.”

  * * *

  In 1937 and again in 1938, Lou finally had time to go with Esther on a couple of substantial vacations with Kit and Jay Sherman. The Shermans—he was a mathematician, she a medical researcher—were among the Kahns’ closest friends. Esther had listed them, along with the Alperses and the Osers, as the people who were kindest to her in the terrible months after her father’s death, and Kit had even helped Esther out financially during the periods of Lou’s unemployment. The two couples had often vacationed together, and now, in the summer of 1937, they visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, and then drove north to the Gaspé region of Quebec, taking in parts of the Maine and Canadian coast on the way. The following year they went back to Canada and spent nearly two full weeks in Nova Scotia. Perhaps the northern coastal landscape reawakened Lou’s childhood memories of the Baltic island where he had spent his first five years. What is certain is that, on both vacations, he eagerly recorded this fresh yet somehow familiar setting in numerous evocative sketches.

  The lighthearted atmosphere of these summer trips was captured in two paintings that Lou made from his sketches when he returned to Philadelphia. In the partially abstract but recognizably figurative Nude in a Doorway, painted in tempera on paper, a tall, naked, faceless woman (her russet-colored nipples are her most distinct feature) strides past an open doorway as a much shorter, darker man sits or squats in the background. She is either outdoors or in a bright, sunny room; we, looking out at her, are definitely indoors, in a space that is paneled in green, yellow, and gray, with lively blue rectangular panels on the cinnamon-colored door that stands, ajar, between us and her. Esther Kahn felt that this painting commemorated the meager, squalid accommodations the Kahns shared with the Shermans on their trip to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where indoor plumbing and other niceties were sorely lacking. But the evident humor in this somewhat risqué picture suggests that even the deprivations were part of the fun.