Portraits From the Numbered Streets / December 13, 2019 by Eric Etheridge

On our trips to the Numbered Streets, I would tape an interview with residents who wanted to participate in Cocoon and then they would pose for a portrait — we lined part of the procession route with large black-and-white prints. Many people shared their family photographs, which Eric photographed, some of which were hung inside the Cocoon.

Some of these were formal portraits of parents or grandparents or themselves, from much earlier times, or more recent portraits of children and grandchildren sent back home from far away. Others were snapshots of themselves and family and friends, many of happier, safer times in the Numbered Streets, when work was easily had in the steel plants, and their apartment leases weren’t threatened by city officials.

“I Miss Everything About Hungary” / December 5, 2019 by Kate Browne

To emigrate is always to dismantle the center of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments. — John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

A partial view of the abandoned Diósgyőr steelworks, once the economic engine of Miskolc and even the country. Beyond, the houses and apartment buildings on the western edge of the the city and the Bükk Mountains.

A mother talks about leaving Hungary forever

I lived forty years in Hungary.
I gave birth to four children over there.
My parents passed away over there.
We are seven of us, brothers and sisters.
I miss them very much all my sisters and brothers who are in Hungary.
I cannot go to the cemetery to see my parents,
and I miss that a lot too,
and I miss everything about Hungary.

But over here I can keep my children safe,
and over here I see a future for us.
So over here my children can become somebody, and they are not going to be treated differently because of the race difference.
Nobody’s going to hurt them. We can have a calm normal life.

So I know my children are going to be safe over here as long as I live.

We were sitting in her Toronto kitchen eating the chocolate palacsinta (Hungarian crepes) she had just made when she said this. She and her family fled the Numbered Streets as the evictions and demolitions began. They moved to another neighborhood in Miskolc, to evade city inspectors and the risk their children would be taken away by authorities. Then they sold their furniture and other items to buy plane tickets to Canada, where they recently received their permanent residency status.

Looking east on Vasgyári út, Iron Foundry Street, the central street in the neighborhood. July 23, 2019, just after 5:30PM.

Photographs and video by Eric Etheridge.

Watching Neighbors Leave / November 27, 2019 by Eric Etheridge

Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been. — John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

What follows is just such a poem — an interview excerpt yes, from a man standing in front of his home on 9th Street in the Numbered Streets neighborhood in Miskolc, Hungary. But a poem nonetheless. It is about loss, a loss so ephemeral and hard to grasp it cuts deeply at the soul of the neighborhood and the people who lived and still live there today. Eric’s photographs here are of the people who have not yet left. They have had to say goodbye to family and neighbors who were forced to leave. They have had to witness the neighborhood disappear.

On Saying Goodbye

Continually. In batches. They left one by one.

Everybody is suffering for the neighbors. Because you know if you meet people on the street you stop and have a conversation, and ask them how they are doing.

We respected each other. We loved each other. If we needed something, we helped each other. We went round to each other's.

When they left, the people who were living here?

“Take care of yourselves. Take care. Find a good place for yourself.” Because this is the only thing I can tell them. Because they have no money to buy something. They can only find some small things to rent. And that, “It hurts that you have to go.”

Bad, to be honest. I miss them. Just imagine, I often come out here to the gate. No one, no one comes along here.

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See more photographs from the Numbered Streets.

Destroying Home / November 17, 2019 by Eric Etheridge

Eric began photographing in the Numbered Streets neighborhood of Miskolc on our trip there in March 2018. We didn’t realize at the time how the landscape would change from visit to visit.

After eviction: The house at the corner of 6th and Foundry streets in March 2018. The residents in the apartment on the left have been evicted, the door and windows removed, and all the wires inside ripped out. Backyards in the Numbered Streets usua… — After eviction: The house at the corner of 6th and Foundry streets in March 2018. The residents in the apartment on the left have been evicted, the door and windows removed, and all the wires inside ripped out. Backyards in the Numbered Streets usually include a secondary building (here on the right, with its roof already gone) to provide more bedrooms. These were legal structures.

An extended family lived for years in the house at the northeast corner of 6th and Foundry in the Numbered Streets. They had already been evicted by March 2018, and their home was in the early stages of destruction.

On a later trip I interviewed one of the adult sisters in the family, who talked about the night they lost their home.

”The police came in the evening and they cut the electricity and lights. Because my great-grandmother was so old, we could not stay in that house anymore. It was wintertime. It was dark.”

Then a relative who lived one street over showed up. “He and his wife came over and said we should get our things together. They had pity for us. They said we could come stay in the room they had emptied for us. I could not process it up to this day.”

“My soul was destroyed by that,” she said.

“It was a very good house. I lit a candle in the church for that house.”

March 2018: Streetside view from 6th street. Though one apartment has been emptied and gutted, the apartment in the rear — note the windows and TV satellite dish — may have have still been occupied.

Causalities of Demolition 1929-2019

The sisters’ extended family included their great-grandmother, who had survived World War II. She died in 2019, after they were all evicted a second time from a home in the Numbered Streets. A Hungarian NGO worker once said to me, no one has accounted for the numerous deaths of the elderly who were removed. This assault on their lives, he meant, is what killed them.

*The sisters’ great-grandmother in 2018*

The great-grandmother and I had sat in the sun one day in 2018, and she talked to me about the war. “We were just hiding. Some people put coal on their faces so they were not taken away. I had 11 siblings, and I took care of them. It was very bad. They were coming [down the streets] and they were dropping bombs. We heard the noise so we had to run. I took care of the kids, they could see the fire in the sky and we did not have even a piece of potato.”

Her great-granddaughter said, “She would sit here outside in the yard [on 6th street]. She loved watching people passing by. We’d have to bring her out of the house in the morning. There were trees and she loved sitting under the trees.”

*July 2019: All gone. New topsoil waits to be spread on the empty lot, and on the empty lot behind, where another home was razed.*

*July 2019: Sisters on the site of their former home on 6th Street.*

COCOON Miskolc: Following the Removals / November 6, 2019 by Kate Browne

This is the sixth performance installation of Cocoon, my series on migrations.

On July 27, 2019, the people of the Numbered Streets walked through their neighborhood carrying lanterns, one for each family the city has evicted and whose home has been razed. People gathered at the Cocoon, hung their lanterns inside, illuminating… — On July 27, 2019, the people of the Numbered Streets walked through their neighborhood carrying lanterns, one for each family the city has evicted and whose home has been razed. People gathered at the Cocoon, hung their lanterns inside, illuminating the sculpture, and then they listened to their own histories of life before, during, and after the removals.

Removals and Demolitions

This summer I completed my sixth Cocoon installation in the Numbered Streets, a neighborhood in Miskolc, Hungary. Miskolc is an old city in the country’s northeast, a center of steel-making since the 19th century, and like most steel towns one that has fallen on increasingly hard times.

For generations Hungarian-Roma families have lived in the Numbered Streets and worked in the plants. In 2014, the city government, controlled by members of Fidesz, the country’s ruling party, began to evict them and destroy their homes. The city’s publicly-stated goal was to renovate its football stadium and expand parking, and it framed the project in the predictable phrases of urban renewal: “Do you support the elimination of slums in Miskolc? There must not be slums in the 21st century in Europe.”

But their real agenda seemed clear. Destroy the neighborhood, and drive the Roma from the city. Playing to old hatreds of the Roma paired nicely with their party’s anti-immigrant fervor. By the summer of 2019 half the houses in the neighborhood had been destroyed, and though the new stadium had been open for some time, the city was continuing to evict and raze.

One resident who watched the city destroy her home described it to me. “They started to pull everything down. There were some small legal houses in the yard and they started to demolish them, to pull away the roofs, to pull away the doors. Then they started to demolish the big house. They pulled up all the fruit trees from the yard, I could not do anything. I couldn't guard my house.”

Before: The Numbered Streets in 2010, before the removals started. 100 quartered-flats — 100 houses, 400 flats. Roma and non-Roma lived together here for generations, many working in the nearby steel mills.

After: The Numbered Streets in 2018. The new stadium with a new parking lot and empty fields where 20 houses once stood. Through the summer of 2019, the city continued to evict Roma as they could, and tear down homes far from the stadium, as the red… — After: The Numbered Streets in 2018. The new stadium with a new parking lot and empty fields where 20 houses once stood. Through the summer of 2019, the city continued to evict Roma as they could, and tear down homes far from the stadium, as the red rectangles — destroyed and partially destroyed homes — throughout the Numbered Streets indicate.

Working in Hungary

I made my first trip to Miskolc in 2017, and multiple trips over the next 2 years. I conducted more than 80 interviews for this Cocoon with current and former residents of the Numbered Streets, including some who now live in Canada.

I was always happy when I was in the Numbered Streets. I loved talking with people through the big casement windows that opened onto the street, and looking at their many family photos of ancestors and descendants. Some streets were so beautiful with massive, ancient trees that scattered their yellow-green blossoms on the street. Here there was a fleeting memory of my childhood as I watched kids ride their bikes under these trees.

Especially in the summertime, with lilacs, trumpet vines and concord grapes, the Numbered Streets reminded me of where I grew up, in central Pennsylvania. My father was an engineer who worked for Bethlehem Steel, first in Steelton, until his part of the plant shut down in the early 1960s, and then in Williamsport. Many of the people in the Numbered Streets reminded me of the close-knit families of friends and neighbors from my childhood who through hard work and generosity made a community.

But everytime I returned I noticed more destruction and fewer people. The grief and trauma on the faces of the people who remained was evident. Some Roma who lost their flats managed to squeeze in with family elsewhere in the neighborhood. Others moved elsewhere in Miskolc, or to a settlement just north of town. Some went to Budapest. Some families fled to Canada. Others sold everything and tried to fly to Canada, only to be turned back at boarding gates in transfer cities, like Paris and Amsterdam.

The city kept on with its grim business. Officials carried out frequent door-to-door checks of identification papers against leases against addresses.

“We didn’t want them to take our kids,” a father told me, explaining why and his family had risked the trip to Canada. They had made it, and secured permanent residency status. “If you don't have a mailing address and a house, foster care comes and takes your kids.”

*Above and below: flats and homes in various states of demolition.*

*Once a building’s remains were carted off, bulldozers scraped the ground flat, then spread new topsoil that had been trucked in.*

Please stay tuned

I have a lot more to share about Cocoon in the Numbered Streets over the next few weeks. In addition to more stories and more photos, I’m finishing up a video of the procession and illumination which I will post soon.

In all the previous sites I’ve built Cocoons, the stories I’ve collected centered mostly on the ongoing repercussions, years and decades later, of intense historical traumas — slavery in the MIssissippi Delta, colonialism in the Goutte d’Or neighborhood of Paris. Working in the Numbered Streets was different. Here it was as if the old trauma had been brought back to life; not an echo of the past, but the deadly thing itself.

Lanterns hung in the Cocoon. Each lantern bore the name, street address, and flat name of each family driven from the Numbered Streets.All photographs by Eric Etheridge with the exception of the satellite maps from Google Earth. — *Lanterns hung in the Cocoon. Each lantern bore the name, street address, and flat name of each family driven from the Numbered Streets.*
*All photographs by Eric Etheridge with the exception of the satellite maps from Google Earth.*

art + public space