RIP JOHN FREGONESE

HE MADE HIS POSITIVE MARK ON THE BUILT 
ENVIRONMENT FOR FOUR DECADES

Lucy Minogue Rowland, a dear, sweet librarian by training and career – who facilitates an online list serve that serves as a forum for Urban Designers and those who love urban places and want to make them better – posted the sad news of John Fregonese’s passing.

I met him in spring 2010, when I was freshly dismissed from the City of Miami – after nearly a decade of service – because my boss was termed out of his City Commission seat and he lost the mayor’s race.

Trying to figure out what my next step was (after a decade plus as an urban affairs journalist and nearly a decade as an urban policy advisor), I drew an invite from Anthony Flint (a former urban affairs journalist and public servant) to the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge.

Eager to network and make it to greater Boston, despite the near freezing temps on my Miami skin, I accepted the invite and prepared to see Miami Mayor Manny Diaz -- the leader my boss campaigned to replace at the end of Manny’s term limits – speak about Miami 21, the form-based code that I worked on as a freelancer then oversaw as a policy advisor for the chairman of the City Commission.

One day of speakers, at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, featured John Fregonese. Somebody next to me in the audience whispered that Frego, as friends called him, had a unique heritage in that his mother Faith Domergue was a Hollywood actress and a protoge' of Howard Hughes and his father, Hugo Fregonese, was an Argentinian and Hollywood director.

John wowed me with visualizations that spoke to walkability. Some might even say his presentation was a prelude to what we today call complete streets. I approached him after the panel program and introduced myself.

I loved a minute-long video clip that he showed, possibly made by Disney Studios in the 1950s, of a future world where everyone got around via Jetsons-like pods. The pods pulled right up to school desks, negotiated shopping aisles and parked right at dead’s work desk.

At the end, John wryly observed “apparently, the best possible future involved no use of the legs at all,” to a roar of laughter from the pedestrian-sympathetic crowd.

I found John’s email on the Lincoln Institute’s conference materials and asked for the clip. While I was reinventing myself as a content creator and marketer of professional services, I showed the clip in some of my mini presentations. I think I even took it to a public sector job interview and showed it, herky jerky, on a laptop that then was top of the line, but now would have a joke of a processor.

We kept in touch. I had been to Buenos Aires shortly before I met John and he was interested in the days of photos I took while on the back stretches and least-touristed parts of El Tigre.

As a word person, I always have sought mentors, collaborators and helpers that are visual. John certainly filled that role.

We never saw each other again in the flesh. Thumbing through my emails, it looks like we last had a flurry of e-chats in summer 2014, shortly before I became the Communications Leader of Miami’s PlusUrbia Design – where we’ve won a national APA award for Urban Design and been honored with 10 other design awards in the past three years.

I copied John’s irony-filled, archived city of the future video clip from desktop to desktop. Again, he had no hand in creating it – but he sure did a good job of curating it and underscoring its ironies and influence on mid 20th century ruinous highway and civic design.

His kindness and creativity had a huge influence on my transition to using my storytelling ability to support the creation of healthy, context-sensitive design.

Descanse en paz, amigo Frego

https://frego.com/