Celebrating our East Side Community: 44 America Street

Photo provided by Susan Williams

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph. D.

No, that’s not a historic single house. It’s a work of art: House of the Future by David Hammons.

In 1991, during the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo, Spoleto Festival U.S.A. mounted an ambitious art exhibit called Places with a Past. Twenty-three artists chose locations across the city and created art installations that would lead people to explore parts of the city and its past that were little known to the average visitor.  

Assisted by contractor Albert Alston, David Hammons chose two vacant lots on America Street and worked with members of the Eastside community to construct an extremely narrow rendering of the classic single house, featuring architectural elements and identifying plaques in the hope that if neighborhood children recognized that their homes were similar to those downtown, they would “take pride in the place in which they lived and in their place in history.” One side of the building was left windowless to accommodate a quotation from African-American author Ishmael Reed. 

Across the street Hammons and his helpers constructed a small park featuring a flagpole flying the Black Nationalist flag. A billboard behind it still shows African American children gazing up in “a pose of hopeful determination.”

For a longer description of the original installation, see Places with a Past: New Site Specific Art at Charleston’s Spoleto Festival, edited by Terry Ann R. Neff. New York: Rizzoli, 1991. Also, the installation is now maintained by the Charleston Parks Conservancy.