Architecture fellow Emily Roush Elliott says that when it comes to community development, she doesn’t want to make any promises she can’t keep.
“Often volunteers come in and promise a lot of things, but it remains very academic. So we started saying, let's make this real,” the 28-year-old public outreach architect graduate said of the project she will help launch in Baptist Town beginning in January.
Elliott will spend three years in Greenwood working on the Baptist Town master plan, rehabilitating homes, building new ones and designing a community center, sidewalks, street lights and public outdoor spaces.
A native of Ohio, Elliott is an Enterprise Rose Fellow with Enterprise Community Partners Inc., a design company headquartered in Boston with 13 offices around the country. The company works almost exclusively with community development and low-income housing.
Baptist Town, one of the oldest black neighborhoods in Greenwood, was home to blues musician David “Honeyboy” Edwards and actor Morgan Freeman.
The Greenwood-Leflore-Carroll Economic Development Foundation and the Carl Small Town Center of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University will work together to host Elliott’s fellowship.
Bill Crump, chairman of the foundation, said he planned to talk to the Greenwood City Council this afternoon about the work Elliott will be doing here.
Elliott said that each year, Enterprise calls for submissions from host organizations, which are mostly nonprofit development agencies. Enterprise selects three to five bids and then goes about advertising the projects to potential fellows. “We were one of four projects in the country that were chosen for an architectural fellowship,” Crump said.
Other projects that received fellowships include ones in Asheville, N.C., Kewa Pueblo, N.M., and Little Tokyo, Calif., Crump said.
Elliott said that she was a finalist for the fellowship last year, but none of the projects fit her interest and experience the way that the Baptist Town project does. She had even worked with the Carl Center’s sister organization, the Gulf Coast Design Studio.
“It was a perfect fit,” said Elliott. “When this one came up, I had worked in Biloxi, and I’d worked in rural Africa, so I had the rural part and the Mississippi part.”
After graduating from college, Elliott sought to broaden her architectural horizons. She had learned how to draw and how to design, but she said it frustrated her that she hadn’t learned how two walls meet, or how to put together something as basic as a carport.
“So I moved to the Gulf Coast to do construction,” she said.
She arrived in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and learned how to build houses with a group of other volunteers. After six months, she moved back to Cincinnati to get her master’s degree in architecture.
While she was in school, she got bored. She said she had “gotten a taste of public interest,” and graduate school taught a more traditional architectural path. So when the chance came to go to Tanzania, Africa, to help design and build a medical clinic, she leapt at the opportunity.
Elliott spent seven months in rural Tanzania, close to the Kenyan border, trekking to the local hardware store to help a drawing become a building.
She is excited to begin yet another project in Greenwood.
In September, Crump flew to New York with John Poros, director of the Carl center, to review the candidates for the fellowship. The master plan, according to a Carl center press release, was developed by Mississippi State architecture and landscape architecture majors.
It “provides direction for restoration and revitalization of the area. Plans call for the addition of a public park, a community center and improved housing.”
The first component of the planned restoration will be the placement of donated Federal Emergency Management Agency “Katrina cottages.”
The houses were used to replace FEMA trailers after Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, but Elliott said that they are sturdy and attractive and have a “Southern vernacular” to their appearance. They will be available for purchase as early as February, she said.
Elliott said she has not had the chance to meet with as many Baptist Town residents as she would like, but she wants to wait for the right person to introduce her: “So much has been promised in Baptist Town,” she explained.
“So often people come from the outside, and they have a great idea, and they end up doing a survey or a questionnaire with residents,” she said. “There isn’t anything wrong with that, but once you do that and nothing happens, it becomes really disenfranchising.”
Crump said Elliott will be able to work on projects outside of Baptist Town, as well.
The prospect of having such an architect available is tantalizing for Greenwood Mayor Carolyn McAdams. Already McAdams has met with Elliott several times to discuss ongoing projects, such as the city’s planned linear park.
Elliott will also do other projects, working with Greenwood architects John Beard and Dale Riser, the mayor said.
“Whatever we might need, she’ll be able to put her input into it, which will be fantastic,” she said. “That’s a big expense that we won’t have to pay.”
Pushing the Baptist Town project forward is critically important, and Elliott’s enthusiasm and drive will help make that a reality, the mayor said.
Aside from the project, Elliott is excited to make Greenwood her home. Her husband, Richard, will be moving down soon, and she likes how walkable the city is. More importantly, she said Greenwood brings out her creative side.
“I love a place that brings out that inspiring, artsy feel. I love people who are makers, even if they don’t consider themselves artists,” she said.
“After I visited, I went home and I had all these carpet samples I didn’t know what to do with,” she explained. “And they reminded me of when you look out a plane window, and you see all the fields and they look all patchworky. I laid them out in a grid, three by four, and taped them together on the back. It became the state of Mississippi.”
• Contact Jeanie Riess at 581-7235 or jriess@gwcommonwealth.com. Contact Bob Darden at 581-7239 or bdarden@gwcommonwealth.com.
