Noble: Building or destroying our heritage; how T&T is shaped by its environment

In a Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), Rebecca Solnit wrote of the places in which one’s life is lived:

“They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and, in the end, what possesses you.”

In July 2011, Dr David Bratt wrote about growing up in Corbeau Town in the Trinidad Guardian. He remembered:

“Every afternoon when I was five or six and my sisters a bit younger, my mother would bathe us, dress us in clean clothes and at around four o’clock walk us up the road and around the corner to Victoria Square where we would meet up with other like-minded mothers and play hide and seek and hopscotch and other games.

“[Games] that, without thinking, taught us how to socialise with others and develop coordination, muscle, stamina and bone density, most of which, claims to the contrary by the pharmaceutical companies, is laid down in childhood by the age of 18.”

He said: “Victoria Square was an integral part of my life as a child. I still like to go there, sit down on my mother’s favourite bench and while away the time thinking of the children I played with and wondering where they are now.”

I grew up on The Coffee in San Fernando. I joined a Sea Scout troop after my stint as a cub. The Scout house was on the San Fernando jetty, half an hour from my home. You walked.

You passed the guy selling very greasy bara (no sophisticated doubles in those days) opposite the gas station which housed the Princes Town taxi stand. You made a note to keep your pennies for the return trip.

Passing the Library Corner, you would encounter Chancellor, the famed, eccentric San Fernando trumpeter, playing his music in an imitable manner. You walked down High Street with its steps (if you know, you know).

The Scout leaders taught you to swim in an area called “the Shallows”. You had to walk along the train line to get to that spot.

On your return from the Scout meeting, you turned right onto High Street, ensuring you avoided the Black Cat bar. Men always sat outside the bar, cursing or catcalling the women heading for their buses.

The bara beckoned. You did not want the man to pack up before you reached the spot. On your way back, you sometimes passed behind the Library to listen to Indian music from the movies in the Metro cinema.

Have you ever considered how the parks, buildings and streets you used as a child influenced you?

San Fernando made me who I am. Walking is never a problem. My favourite street foods are doubles and saheena (the best is in Chase Village!). I learnt frugality and delayed gratification. Accept that others are different from you, so treat them respectfully or give them a wide berth.

“Because there is constant interaction between society and the urban fabric, we cannot tinker with our cities without making some adjustment to society as well — or vice versa.

“Any description of a city’s shape that can be gathered from a citizen’s comments represents a constant and intimate dialectic between the citizen and the physical forms he or she inhabits; this may influence [the city’s] image as radically as its economic or political life.” (Rykwert, 2000).

There is an incredible story told about the development of Port of Spain. In June 1933, the Port of Spain Local Sanitary Authority discussed the ‘new village’ of John John at the southeastern edge of the city. The colonial government and private parties owned the land.

A medical specialist described the place as “an entangled conglomeration of unsightly, ruinous huts and privy cesspits placed helter-skelter on a sloping, steep and slippery hillside—a danger to health, life and limb for the local residents and a menace to the surrounding city population.”

A third of the city’s population lived there (Stuempfle, 2018, p 154).

The author notes that the tenants were afraid to complain to “the merciless, callous-minded agents” who collected the rents that were high relative to typical earnings for working people at the time.

 

Dr GH Masson, the City medical officer of health, discovered one yard on St Joseph Road with nearly three hundred persons living in approximately sixty rooms and other yards with as many as ten people sleeping in a single room. (ibid, p 157).

Steumple details a raucous process to clear the slums between Duncan Street and the Dry River. The politicians of the day tried to hold their meetings in private. They wanted to spend the money on fixing other homes (thereby enhancing the landlords’ interests).

A councillor, Albion Gooding, exploded: “You want us to build houses for you people to live in for nothing!” This outburst was in response to banners proclaiming: “The Slum Clearance Scheme must begin immediately” and “The Barrack Yard and its filth must go”. (ibid, 159)

In 2011, then-Port of Spain Mayor Louis Lee Sing was worried about the existence of 3,000 uncleaned latrines—some even in the beautiful Woodbrook area, in Port of Spain! Really?

It is instructive to note the assessment of the City councillors and other commentators in the 1930s.

“The basic assumption was that proper houses were fundamental to the order and stability of society. Such homes would contrast sharply with the various types of slum housing, which were considered congested, haphazard and depraved settings.

“Barrack yards, in particular, were perceived as spaces of degradation and vice that corrupted their occupants, especially children.” (ibid, 161)

The working people of the day understood the direction of the debate. While the councillors argued about who would maintain the properties and how the rent inflation would be managed, the working class challenged the society’s economic structure.

The workers asserted that the wages were too low to afford adequate housing (a point borne out by the re-pricing of the Gonzales housing plan) and were indefensible relative to the profits realised by many employers. The struggle remained unresolved for years.

Rykwert’s comment proved to be accurate. Are we not facing the consequences of this lethargic approach to housing? Why did Woodbrook take a markedly different route to John John and the rest of East Port of Spain?

Are we not paying the price for the short-sighted councillors who were more interested in the landlords’ fate?

We should understand and appreciate that the colonial authorities sided with agricultural and business elites, which was an unstable arrangement. The large number of working-class people lived in the east of Port of Spain and were the descendants of the Emancipated people. Much of the design of our capital city is the result of a tugging and pulling between the various groups.

Woodbrook was formerly a sugar estate, which the Seigert brothers (the Angostura people) bought. There were already tenants living there, but the Seigerts extended the grid of the streets.

In 1900, the Port of Spain town commissioners took over the maintenance and development of the streets. By 1910, the Port of Spain Gazette observed that Woodbrook “affords a residential quarter where clerks and better class artisans find some of the home comforts and decencies that are denied them in the older quarters of the town owing to congestion that exists there.”

In 1911, the town board purchased Woodbrook from the Seigerts. The board tore down substandard housing, making it difficult for the poorer sector of the city’s population to live there. (ibid, p. 75) East Port of Spain never had the opportunity to be upgraded.

Have our spokespersons for the marginalised communities become less articulate or focused today? Have our Black and Brown successful folk abandoned their heritage set by Audrey Jeffers?

She founded the Coterie of Social Workers, which was focused on helping working women and their children through their breakfast sheds.

We must thank her for the Maud Reeves Hostel for Working Girls and the Anstey House for middle-class young ladies in 1935. (Maud Reeves was the Secretary for the Coterie in 1936.) She also opened the Workingmen’s Dining Shed in South Quay.

Is anyone like Elma Francois? Professor Emerita Rhoda Reddock notes Francois would go to Woodford Square and take on any group of fellas, starting political conversations.

Parks are unique places, as noted by Bratt. He wrote: “Communities depend on public spaces as a place for friends and neighbours to gather, to develop social harmony, to get to know and respect each other, to develop a sense of identity and oneness and to pass on public knowledge about what’s happening in the community, rather than bad talk each other on the radio.

“Democracy depends on the gathering of citizens, and squares are made for this. Just think of our own Woodford Square and the impact it has had and continues to have on our politics. Tahir Square in Cairo is another that immediately comes to mind.

“Open public spaces are not only good for children, and they are certainly not luxuries.”

We are the blessed inheritors of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Governor Ralph Woodford, our first civilian Governor, conceptualised and developed it. The botanist, David Lockhart, was brought to Trinidad to design the gardens. The landscaper introduced several trees from the tropical Far East to Trinidad.

“Sir Ralph’s worldview was that all the ‘disorder’ in the new colony of Trinidad had to be calmed, structured, ordered and made more ‘civilised’.”

The objective has been fulfilled, judging from the Gardens’ Instagram site.

However, we are at the stage where some trees are dying and need to be replaced. We no longer provide informational tags for the trees, so visitors will have to guess at their names or flowers.

Yet, the Gardens were created to foster Conservation, Education, Research and Recreation. We had to depend on an American to establish a Butterfly haven. Sigh.

The gravesites of former state officials have not been cleaned in ‘forever’. Maybe learning from the past, the family of Sir Solomon Hochoy and Lady Thelma Hochoy has provided a more weather-proof site. The lettering on what may be the grave of William Souper (who died in 1819) is now indiscernible.

Each morning, visitors can see beautiful macaws and parrots overhead. Squirrels run around. There is a widely supported link between green spaces and positive mental health.

Green spaces and water channels in our new city buildings will allow us to engage with the calming influence of nature and enjoy the city activities. Does anyone recall the Koi fish in the Massy Headquarters pool when they first established a presence on Park Street?

Could we, the private sector and individuals, do something to lift our spirits this year? If the North American cities can do so, why can we not?

Additional reading:

Port of Spain: The Construction of a Caribbean City, 1988-1962 Stephen Stuemple, 2018. (It could be a challenging read.)

Port of Spain: An Architectural Record Brian Lewis, 2021 (A fine collection of photographs)

Growing up Woodbrook: A Tapestry of Then and Now Dylan Kerrigan with Ken Jaikaransingh, 2022. (A delightful read.)

A Walk Back in Time: Snapshots of the History of Trinidad and Tobago Angelo Bissessarsingh, 2015. (It’s worth the price for the photographs. A keeper.)