The ethnically and culturally diverse city of Paterson and the site of Hinchliffe Stadium in New Jersey holds the collective memories of the Lenape Native Americans. Forcibly displaced by the expansion of European settlement since the 18th century, Lenape people annually come back to their home, called Lenapehoking, and celebrate heritage at Paterson’s National Historic Great Falls, and the Negro Baseball League, which provided African Americans the first opportunity to participate in professional baseball when racial segregation was the norm. Through analysis and exercises, this project tries to answer fundamental questions regarding human migrations and displacements. How do we deal with ceaseless changes and perpetual oddness we encounter in migration? How do we reconnect migrated or displaced people and form a continuity of identity in the movement or pass knowledge from generation to generation? Focusing on the state of in-between, new programs are suspended from a newly created roof structure––which resembles the winding Passaic River––at different heights above the existing U-shaped seating areas. They become throughways for the people to experience the overlapped cultural landscape, learn about diversity, and respectfully bridge past, present, and future.
