"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera

My mission—with multimedia help from my colleagues David Eads, Patricia Evans, and Jason Reblando—is to place and ground the conversation that will unfold at this conference.

Let’s begin by locating the eight square blocks of the title. The coordinates are 35th and 39th, State and Federal: the footprint of the Stateway Gardens public housing development. Eight high-rise buildings—a total of 1,644 family apartments—on 33 acres. At full occupancy, the legal population was roughly 5,000. Others lived there off the lease. And then there were those who didn’t collect their mail or lay their heads on the pillow at Stateway, yet regarded it, in some sense, as home. I am one of them.

I first came to Stateway Gardens in the early 1990’s, following a set of moral intuitions where they led. As a citizen, I was moved to explore what it might mean to conduct oneself as a neighbor under conditions of urban apartheid. As a writer, I felt the need to earn the right to use certain words. I was, in short, deeply but actively confused. Over time and by degrees, the Stateway community embraced me with hospitality and kindness that changed the course of my life. Day after day, year after year, I kept coming back. I came back, because I found useful work to do. Because I formed sustaining friendships. Because I located a place to stand where I could resist the gravitational pull of the official narrative about inner city neighborhoods and see with my own eyes. That perspective, that view from the ground, became for me a personal necessity—a form of inquiry and intellectual accountability.