Grady Clay

Grady Edward Clay Jr (November 5, 1916 – March 17, 2013) was an American journalist and urbanist specializing in landscape architecture and urban planning.

In 1962, the American Institute of Architects said of Clay: "The editor of Landscape Architecture is becoming one of the best known and most widely listened to writers and speakers on the problems of land and the city today".

In his 1974 book Close-Up: How to Read the American City, Clay offered a way to "read" modern American cities, saying “A city is not as we perceive it to be by vision alone, but by insight, memory, movement, emotion and language. A city is also what we call it and becomes as we describe it".

Early life Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1916, Clay was the first of Grady Edward (1889–1946) and Eleanor (née Soloman) (1889–1941) Clay Sr.'s two children. Clay grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father was an ophthalmologist, eye surgeon and the head of the Emory University and Grady Clay Eye clinics.

Clay credited his early family experience for his curiosity that made him a successful urban expert. "I was very lucky to grow up in a family with a zestful curiosity about the world. I inherited a lot of that. I had 26 first cousins, the greatest boon a kid could have. They are surrogate brothers and sisters and confidants".

Clay's appreciation of urban design started early. He said Atlanta's Ansley Park was one of his favorite neighborhoods and an inspiration for him throughout his life. Growing up in Atlanta, he lived first on Walker Terrace, a block from Piedmont Park. Later his family moved to a Neel Reid house on Fifteenth Street. Clay explained the neighborhood, with its curvilinear streets was the first major subdivision added to Atlanta's north side that broke with the old rectangular grid of streets, beginning at Fifteenth Street. His mother gardened in Ansley Park which he said also enhanced his sense of design.

Newspaper career Clay earned a bachelor's degree from Emory University. After earning his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, Clay hitch-hiked to Louisville, Kentucky in 1939 for a job interview with the Louisville Times. His first job as a reporter there paid $25 a week. Later promoted to captain, Clay was placed in charge of the Alaska Edition of YANK. Clay continued to work as a reporter for the Courier Journal and The Louisville Times, reporting primarily on real estate and "urban affairs", (a post he apparently invented, possibly the first such position in the nation). wrote in the Summer 1966 edition of the Columbia Journalism Review: "Of the papers I have seen, the outstanding one in the field is the Louisville Courier-Journal. Its management proceeds from the assumption that the changes around us are too important to be left to the real estate advertisers and their handout men. The Courier-Journal renamed its real estate section, accurately, "City and Countryside" and reshaped it. It put the section, not in charge of a salesman who is called an editor but under an urban affairs editor, Grady CIay, and a building editor, Simpson Lawson. If downtown Louisville has developed a clutter of light poles, signs and other ugly street furniture, the Courier-Journal editors don't hide it from their readers. They put it in a feature, with pictures, on the front page of their City and Countryside section. If commercial zoning is gobbling too much residential space, they dip into this subject too. Their choice of stories is as wide as the field of urban design. They dig up examples, contrasts, ideas applicable to their city from other cities and countries."

Urban design career Clay was considered one of the first authorities on urban design. For example, in 1961 he was quoted in Jane Jacobs' seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, accurately predicting the damage that would be caused by the construction of Interstate 65 to the then-successful shoe district on Louisville's East Market Street.

Upon resigning from the Louisville newspapers in 1966, Clay joined Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism to help establish its new Urban Journalism Center.

In the 1960s, Clay served as a member of the Potomac River Basin Task force, providing advice to Department of the Interior Secretary Stewart Udall. In 1965, he served as panel chairman during the White House Conference on Natural Beauty. His presentation at President Johnson's conference discussed "Water and Waterfronts".

In 1966–1968, Clay served as a member of the Advisory Committee on Urban Development, providing advice to Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Robert Weaver. Clay served on President Johnson's Task Force on Suburban Problems in 1967–1968.

Clay also served as an advisor on many land development projects, including the Environmental Planning Advisory Council for the Amelia Island, Florida developments of the Sea Pines Corporation (1971–1975) and the Review Committee for Williamsburg and Busch properties, for the Kingsmill community development project in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Landscape Architecture magazine From 1960 to 1984, Clay was the editor of the then quarterly Landscape Architecture magazine, the journal of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

In an article from the July 2006 Landscape Architecture magazine, editor J. William "Bill" Thompson noted that Clay "once forecast that the design profession with the best information was going to dominate the others – and he wasn't at all sure that landscape architecture had the capacity to generate the best information".

Clay also served as president of the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Clay later said in March, 1983 "In retrospect, this is what we concluded about Ms. Lin's winning design. It reflected the genius loci, the spirit of the place, and went beyond it to echo the national trauma arising from the Vietnam war and its aftermath. It thus became a memorable work of art in itself."

On March 30, 1986, Clay was elected to serve as chair of the selection committee for the design of the Kent State Memorial. Clay said he believed the competition and the building of a memorial commemorating the events of May 4, 1970 would "serve as a catharsis for the university". Clay also said he hoped the Kent State memorial would encourage cities that experienced racial violence to consider memorial competitions so residents might "deal with their collective memories and to acknowledge the sometimes tragic events that took place."

Clay was a design juror for the Patriots Peace Memorial on River Road in Louisville, Kentucky. 2008 - Clay was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Urban Communication Foundation for his work as "a distinguished urban observer-critic and “extraordinary scholar/journalist who has written about the city for many years... He pioneered the recognition of the inherent connection of design, architecture, quality of life and communication technology". 2009 - The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) honored Clay with its Athena Medal for his early work in naming and helping define the "New Urbanism" movement. In Clay's 1959 article Metropolis Regained, he identified the principles of a group he named the New Urbanists: "We believe in the city, they would say, not in tearing it down. We like open space, but hold that too much of it is just as bad as too little. We want that multiplicity of choice that the city has always offered, but is now in danger of losing," Clay wrote. "I can only say that all great movements start in murmurs and that I can hear murmurs." 2021 - Clay was honored by having a new luxury hotel in Louisville, The Grady, named after him.

Death Clay suffered an inoperable blood clot in his right leg and died in Louisville, on March 17, 2013, at the age of 96. Real Places: An Unconventional Guide to America's Generic Landscape. 322 p., 100 halftones, 16 line drawings. 8½ × 9¼ 1994, Crossing the American Grain 2003,