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
