By Al Cross, director, Institute for Rural Journalism & Community Issues
The Rural Blog might not be expected to note the passing of a "noted urbanist," as one obituary headline put it, but we're also about journalism and the connections between rural and urban areas, and my friend Grady Clay, left, cared a great deal about those things as well as the urban landscape.
Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation Friends told The Courier-Journal of Louisville that Clay alerted professionals to such issues as “sprawl, historic preservation, watershed management and ecological design. These are things we deal with as second nature today, but they were pretty revolutionary stuff” when he took over as editor of Landscape Architecture.after serving as C-J real estate editor. (Read more)
"Clay was an authority on urban design," Gabe Bullard writes for Louisville's WFPL. He was president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University; a research associate to the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, where he grew up, and lectured extensively was a visiting professor at universities in U.S. and abroad.
He was married to an architect, Judith McCandless, and was chair of the jury that chose Maya Lin's then-controversial design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and "I’m sure at some level, guided" its final design and execution, "which transformed memorial architecture and the way we commemorate events of historical significance," Alan Brake, executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, told Bullard. His books included Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape.
Grady Clay kept track of how journalists described the landscape, urban and rural. In 1990, when I wrote that a Kentucky bond issue would build roads in "the far reaches of the state," he was taken with the phrase. Our correspondence then is lost in the electronic ether, but we kept in touch, last seeing each other in 2008 when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Urban Communication Foundation.
In the 1990s, he recorded a series of timeless, insightful commentaries for WFPL, titled "Crossing the American Grain" and collected in a book by that title. For rural listeners I recommend No. 5, about a summer night on a Michigan beach; No. 7, about a sawmill, a cotton gin and hard work on his grandparents' farm at Walnut Grove, Ga.; No. 8, about building the Alaska Highway; and No. 10, about moving.
Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation Friends told The Courier-Journal of Louisville that Clay alerted professionals to such issues as “sprawl, historic preservation, watershed management and ecological design. These are things we deal with as second nature today, but they were pretty revolutionary stuff” when he took over as editor of Landscape Architecture.after serving as C-J real estate editor. (Read more)
"Clay was an authority on urban design," Gabe Bullard writes for Louisville's WFPL. He was president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University; a research associate to the Joint Center for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a Guggenheim Fellow. He was a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, where he grew up, and lectured extensively was a visiting professor at universities in U.S. and abroad.
He was married to an architect, Judith McCandless, and was chair of the jury that chose Maya Lin's then-controversial design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and "I’m sure at some level, guided" its final design and execution, "which transformed memorial architecture and the way we commemorate events of historical significance," Alan Brake, executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, told Bullard. His books included Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape.
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| Clay at his Louisville springhouse. (Photo by Spcsnvsnjmc / Wikimedia Commons) |
In the 1990s, he recorded a series of timeless, insightful commentaries for WFPL, titled "Crossing the American Grain" and collected in a book by that title. For rural listeners I recommend No. 5, about a summer night on a Michigan beach; No. 7, about a sawmill, a cotton gin and hard work on his grandparents' farm at Walnut Grove, Ga.; No. 8, about building the Alaska Highway; and No. 10, about moving.
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