Kea's Ark

[ Music plays ] Cole: Kea was a magical, mythical being.

Krasovic: In the '80s, there was a woman who built an ark on a vacant lot in the Central Ward of Newark.

And so from blocks away, you could see the ark rising up.

Vergara: Newark began to epitomize sort of this sort of end-of-the-world situation.

But an ark was something different.

Sing-King: It was huge.

It was huge, and it just reminded me of Noah's ark.

Narrator: In the 1980s, Kea Tawana built a giant boat on the highest ground in Newark, New Jersey.

She chose a spot near The Humanity Baptist Church in the Central Ward, then one of America's most decimated neighborhoods.

"Kea's Ark" is her story.

"Kea's Ark" is made possible by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the New Jersey Historical Commission, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

[ Drums playing ] Narrator: "Port Jervis resident Kea Tawana died suddenly on August 4, 2016, at home.

Kea was a familiar face in Port Jervis but was known historically for building a 100-foot, three-story ark in downtown Newark, New Jersey, in the 1980s, using material from abandoned and burned-out buildings after the Newark riots.

Kea was an artist, creating beautiful stained-glass windows, a mechanic at Astroland Park, a writer, an inventor, and mapmaker.

Born on an Indian reservation, Kea ran away from home at the age of 12 and traveled down South before moving to Newark and eventually settling in Port Jervis.

There are no known relatives of Kea Tawana.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Birds chirping ] Raia: Kea lived on Mary Street.

She lived in the attic apartment, up three stories.

It was quite a hike every day up there in that little, teeny room.

But that little, teeny room was the most organized thing I've ever seen in my life.

[ Music plays ] Everett: Kea was my neighbor.

She lived across the street.

She was an artist.

She used to collect a lot of odd things -- doors and windows.

Some days I went to help pick the stuff up with her and take it back to her house.

I do have a piece that she made.

It reminds me of a church pew.

Over here in the corner.

She was gonna get rid of it, and I asked her if I could have it.

She said, "Feel free."

Raia: She had made these little intricate things out of little pieces of wood.

They're gone.

I mean, she would throw -- "I did a dumpster run today."

But she'd just clean out everything in her apartment that didn't fit in a box, and it would go.

Wilcox: This is about a third of the total cabinets that she built, and it was for everything that she owned.

She seemed to be preparing for a long journey somewhere.

Narrator: Not long after Kea Tawana's death in 2016, an exhibition of her work opened in Newark, New Jersey.

It was a project of Gallery Aferro and the Clement A.

Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University-Newark.

Krasovic: I think when Emma and I first started talking about the exhibit, for me it was mostly to fulfill this personal curiosity I had, which I think is how most people first come to the story of Kea and the ark.

You know, you heard some crazy story that this woman had built a boat in the middle of the Central Ward in the 1980s.

And that was about all I knew at the time that we thought of this exhibit.

So I wanted to know more.

And so through research, through talking to people, I think we were able to construct a basic timeline, a basic narrative of what happened.

Narrator: What Emma and Mark pieced together was the story of Kea's ark and what it meant to people who lived both in Newark and outside of the city.

They also discovered that Kea, an itinerant worker, church caretaker, and self-taught engineer, had created much more than the massive ark.

They found detailed architectural drawings and albums of photographs documenting specific neighborhoods, with notes on the ownership and condition of buildings.

There were also bundles, carefully organized, labeled, and filed, stored in cabinets that Kea had made for them.

Wilcox: Each of these bundles is this amazing, evocative combination of found photographs, paper ephemera, things that she collected that are of the time and place where she was.

So there's a Brooklyn bundle from the '80s.

There's a Port Jervis bundle from the '90s.

There's probably thousands of images here.

And the order and the way that they're arranged in each bundle is very significant, both as autobiography of Kea and as kind of cultural commentary going back many decades.

[ Music plays ] Narrator: She was always busy working on a project, such as one of her many bundles or the hundreds of silhouettes she made of famous or influential Black people, all carefully numbered and labeled.

[ Music plays ] There are contact sheets dating back to the late 1960s of demonstrations in New York and of drum circles in Prospect Park.

Kea observed and studied and planned according to a logic all her own.

We know this now, yet there are still basic facts about her life that remain stubbornly unclear.

Kea often claimed to be from Japan, but it seems likely that she was born in the American Southwest, perhaps on a reservation.

Wilcox: We know so little of her life.

But I have to say, just as an artist and as a gay person and as a feminist, you can sometimes sort of read between the lines of history a little bit.

It's pure conjecture on my part, but a picture does kind of emerge of a person who was really wholly self-made, who may have emerged from some pretty serious traumas.

We're not sure.

But she wanted to be known as a woman and lived as a woman, and if you look at the years of her birth and the decades that she lived through, that was an act of incredible bravery.

Tawana: I worked in a marble quarry then traveled on up through the mountain states, working in the mines.

Anywhere where I could find a job.

They didn't ask too many questions.

Interviewer: As long as you were willing to work.

Tawana: That's right.

I'm not a bit lazy.

Krasovic: What struck people about her was her incredible creativity, her ability, her vision.

And I think the challenge that she presented -- I think to the neighborhood, to the city administration, perhaps to all of us -- is the sort of challenge of, you know, "What do we do when we encounter difference?"

[ Birds crying ] Narrator: Camilo Jos Vergara is an urban historian and documentary photographer who came upon the ark early in its construction.

Vergara: Newark and many other cities, you know, they sort of began to epitomize sort of this sort of end-of-the-world situation.

So the end of the world, you know, of course, you can mark it by showing street after street after street full of abandoned houses or empty lots and wild dogs and all of that stuff.

But an ark was something different.

[ Vehicle passing, sirens wailing ] Narrator: In 1987, Camilo described the ark, saying that "local residents, who had become accustomed to buildings being burnt, abandoned, and vandalized, started to pay attention to something new and different -- the rib cage of the boat beginning its slow rise over the fence on the Camden Street side of the empty lot."

Sing-King: I remember it just being big.

It was huge.

It was huge, and it just reminded me of Noah's ark.

Krasovic: So, Kea began building the ark in 1982.

So it was 15 years after one of the most important events in Newark's 20th century, which is the 1967 uprising.

And, you know, the uprising grows out of a much longer history of disinvestment in the city, of migrations in and out of the city, of police violence, of discrimination.

And so Kea is really is building this ark in the Central Ward, which was ground zero for the '67 uprising, amidst widespread destruction and dismantlement of housing, of factories, of storefronts.

Sing-King: I remember her actually carrying the board pieces.

I remember her walking down the street back and forth, carrying -- At that time, I didn't know where she was getting the stuff from, but I later learned that because the neighborhood, it was during the riots, right after the riots, there was a lot of buildings that was tore down and things like that.

So from my understanding, she was getting those boards from the neighborhood.

[ Music plays ] Krasovic: She was hired as sort of a demolitionist, I suppose, to take down buildings and did it fairly cheaply because the deal was that she would get access to whatever material she wanted out of the demolition.

Tawana: When they wanted a building tore down, they'd contract with me that I would take it to ground level and they would backfill the hole.

I would pack the building up and bring it home.

Then, what I didn't use, what I didn't need for myself, I would either sell it or I would saw it up for firewood to feed that coal stove I got in the kitchen that makes my heat.

[ Shutter clicks ] Vergara: I've never seen a person with so much energy as Kea.

I mean, talk about working 12 hours or 15 hours.

Talk about getting up in the middle of the night to push this thing up the hill.

Kea was strong.

T. West: Can you imagine one person single-handedly building this ark?

And what she had been was a demolition contractor working for the city of Newark.

Let's go, Lulu.

Narrator: Troy West was a professor of architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology in the 1980s.

He arranged for Kea to be a guest lecturer.

[ Indistinct conversations ] T. West: All of the students coming over and piling into the ark.

And afterwards they said, "That's the best lecture we've ever heard."

Which it was.

I think there was a film crew from Japan that came.

And then the city didn't get it at all.

Narrator: On April 1, 1987, ABC's "World News Tonight" featured the growing controversy surrounding the ark, now 86 feet long and three stories high.

Reporter: Its builder is Kea Tawana, a 47-year-old scavenger and dreamer who says she wants to live on the sea to avoid being displaced by developers and urban renewal.

Tawana: I'm building it because nothing else on land seems to be safe anymore.

I can't change what's going on.

I can't stop it.

So if I have the ability, I'll simply step aside and get out of its way.

Reporter: But the city of Newark now plans to sink Kea's hopes.

McLucas: It's an unsafe structure.

It's a hazardous structure.

It's unfit for human habitation.

It will not -- It will not sail.

It is not a boat.

Narrator: The larger the ark became, the more the city wanted it gone.

But during the first four years of its construction, Kea had pretty much been left alone.

Krasovic: The key moment where the ark becomes a problem, in that larger, public sense, is when Sharpe James comes into office in 1986.

And he's run on a campaign of bringing a "sharp change to Newark."

James: The New York Times, in its editorial, asked a searing question -- Who can lead Newark?

Ladies and gentlemen... [ Applause ] ...I stand ready to accept that challenge.

[ Cheers and applause ] Krasovic: So when the Sharpe James administration came in on this real sort of mission or message of progress and redevelopment out in the wards, the ark was seen as somehow a barrier to that.

Some people called it an eyesore.

Narrator: Others thought it could become an attraction, similar to the Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

For two years, Newark city officials tried to get rid of the giant boat, yet Kea and her supporters held them off.

There was even a Friends of Kea's Ark committee formed.

Letters were sent from the Library of Congress, the Museum of American Folk Art, the School of Architecture at Columbia University, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of American Art, all calling the ark worthy of preservation and a work of art.

Cammarieri: Apparently she never saw it as art.

But, you know, it was viewed that way, mainly -- well, almost exclusively by outside people.

I could easily see how some of these -- you know, the Black politicians would say, "Well, screw that.

Why are these people telling me what to do?

This is our city."

You had issues of race, issues of class, issues of political power.

There was a lot of friction there.

Krasovic: You know, in the earliest reports, she talked about it as if it were quite simply a boat and she wanted to get it to water and she wanted to sail back to Japan, which she claimed was her home, to visit her mother's grave.

And so it was a very just sort of pragmatic thing to do.

And then it seems again that as it gained more attention that the meaning sort of changed for her.

You know, it seems in a sense that it became this place -- a place that people could visit and that Kea really welcomed them and welcomed the questions.

Tawana: What do you want a picture of this for?

Man: Listen.

The builder of the ark has to be in the picture.

Woman: What are these?

Tawana: I made full-scale drawings.

So each yellow line is a frame.

Krasovic: And later, she saw it as -- She called it a museum of the city, quite literally in that it was built out of pieces of the city.

She saw it as a potential community center that could be sort of the anchor for a larger park development around it.

One wonders if the ark were built today what the city might make of it.

Narrator: But in the late 1980s, it was a shiny new vision of progress and redevelopment that won out.

On March 10, 1988, the Newark Star-Ledger reported that Kea Tawana had ended her long fight with city hall.

By June of that year, the ark was gone.

Krasovic: She was ordered to take it down.

And I think it's at once very moving and kind of poetic that she did it herself.

I assume if she didn't do it, if she had just disappeared, that the city would have come and taken it down.

But we have photos of her with huge crowbars, with saws, taking it apart.

Sort of the poetry in that for me is that she gathered all this material, built up an ark, then she slowly took it apart and that material sort of went back out into circulation.

[ Music plays ] Sampson: And I've always been a little annoyed that the city tore it down and that it's never got the prestige that it deserved.

I mean, that was monumental.

Had we been in any other city, it would be -- I mean, that's Newark's Watts Tower.

Narrator: Kevin Sampson lives and works in Newark's Ironbound neighborhood.

In 2018, he was one of 14 artists commissioned to create work for the exterior of a gigantic new electrical switching station.

It's in Fairmount Heights, not too far from where the ark once stood.

For his piece, Kevin created a memorial to Kea Tawana and her ark.

Sampson: Can you imagine that big ark in the parking lot here or across the street?

'Cause that thing is enormous.

It would almost dwarf the church.

I mean, whatever was there is gone.

Everything's covered over in cement.

There's new apartment buildings.

It doesn't even look like...

It doesn't even particularly look like Newark.

I mean, there's so many new buildings and stuff here, so... A.

West: I don't have a feeling of Kea from being here.

Sampson: Yeah.

No.

A.

West: They wiped her -- They wiped it out.

They wiped her out.

Sampson: Yeah.

Yeah.

No, there's nothing here.

[ Music plays ] Cole: I had heard about the ark, of course.

I actually never saw the ark, though.

By the time I met her, that had been torn down.

Narrator: In the late 1980s, Willie Cole was a young artist with a studio in Newark.

Cole: She helped me out because I hired her to tar my roof.

So she was around a long time doing that.

[ Laughs ] And I decided to make her my studio assistant.

And I believe -- You know, I believe in magic.

So that might be a little strange.

But it's not just an expression.

I'm serious, you know?

[ Laughs ] To me, Kea was a magical, mythical being.

So I like being around people who have that kind of energy.

She said that all her knowledge was 19th-century knowledge and she's from another time.

So she taught me so much.

She taught me that I could make anything out of anything, and I do that now.

Narrator: Kea had been on her own early, possibly by age 12.

She learned to build and wire and weld and do whatever she needed by working hard jobs and from books that she collected and studied.

Tawana: I found my books in the ruins of burned-out buildings.

I bought them rummaging through old bookshops.

And I built myself up a library that is pretty much tailored to my needs.

It's mostly a technical library.

Vergara: It's more than skills.

It's a vision.

You know, with skills you can do things, but without the vision, you can't -- What do you do with the skills, you know?

Work for the man.

[ Music plays ] Wilcox: It's important to understand the ark as a very personal project but ultimately connected to her larger and very passionate interest in some of these major issues of the urban community and specifically the needs of working and poor people.

Narrator: What Kea saw happening in the Central Ward made her angry.

Realistically or not, she thought Newark's older buildings and neighborhoods should be saved, rebuilt, not torn down and replaced.

About the time she left the city for good, Kea wrote a kind of manifesto called "The Neighborhood Reconstruction Act."

"Simply put," she wrote, "this is a proposal to bring together the people squeezed out of citizenship by our profit-hungry society, to provide them with tools and instruction and let them go to work on the empty and abandoned buildings in this city, then move in.

The people who haunt the streets, subways, hallways, doorways, carton boxes would have homes and marketable skills where they could earn and pay their own way."

Keene: What does it mean to imagine a world that challenges the power of capitalism, that does not put money and greed at its center but other ways of living in the world, thinking about the world, being with each other?

That, I feel, is a core value that one sees in her work.

A vision that might be viewed as eccentric by some is revolutionary and visionary, you know, in other ways.

Narrator: Kea continued to explore new ideas.

In the late 1990s, she even created a series of large drawings for a sort of utopian city, complete with studios and housing for artists, a senior-citizen center, and even a substance-abuse-recovery house.

Wilcox: The city is incredible.

It's beautifully designed.

Her interest in shelter, her interest in reimagining what housing could be for working people is totally fascinating to me and has a lot of relevance to our day and age.

I think she really believed that everyone had the right to beauty in their life.

Krasovic: So, as far as I can tell, she left Newark in 1989 and seems to have moved around a bit and then eventually settled in Port Jervis, New York.

It seems as though her social life came to center on this small gallery in downtown Port Jervis, and she would hang out there.

In addition to having some shows there and going to events there, she would just hang out there.

I was told that she had a table where she would sit and put together jigsaw puzzles at the gallery.

Raia: So, somewhere along the line, somebody got her Social Security.

And it was $700 a month.

Her rent here was $500, $550 plus utilities, so she really didn't have anything.

So she shopped in The Salvation Army.

She would walk up to the mountain.

She would cut through and walk to the Save A Lot.

But most of the time, she was walking down the tracks to her favorite part, right here.

And she used to cut through there and sit on the banks of the river.

She was just a unique individual.

She was smart.

She just knew so much stuff.

Krasovic: Her experience in Newark ended up being very traumatic for her.

She felt really burned by that experience in Newark and that it might have taken her some time to settle down in a place again but that perhaps that's actually what happened in Port Jervis.

The other thing that Port Jervis had that maybe she didn't have in Newark was pretty direct, easy access to nature.

And she spent a lot of time wandering those trails -- in fact, mapping that area.

Wilcox: I think she found solace in the natural world.

And there's an incredible attention to topographical features and the kind of deep history of a place, including the Native American inhabitants of a place.

She loved place names, the names of mountains, the names of plants and trees.

She was incredibly creative in her later life.

There's this sense of this kind of restless creativity.

She built radios.

She did metalwork.

She created stained-glass windows.

I think she sought endless ways to express herself.

Keene: She represents someone -- she was someone -- who had an alternative vision for the world, a vision that the larger society did not really have a place for.

But her work, I think, reminds us that we always should be open to voices from outside, voices that are running against the current, cutting against the grain.

Because sometimes those visions are the visions that might be the ones to point us to a better future.

[ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] [ Music plays ] "Kea's Ark" is made possible by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the New Jersey Historical Commission, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.