Great Expectations

Civic Leadership
Dan Tangherlini '85
City Administrator, Washington, D.C.

Expectations: Dan Tangherlini plotted their impact when he studied macroeconomics. Now, the power of expectations helps him explain how Washington, D.C. has changed, where it’s headed, and why.

Expectations for visiting the nation’s capital city, or for living and working there, have flipped from negative to positive, which is “pretty cool,” Dan confides. That process has occurred in the last eight to 10 years at the hands of talented and committed leaders throughout the city’s civic structure. Dan has played key roles—as the chief financial officer for the Metropolitan Police Department; as the director of the District’s Department of Transportation; and, most recently, as the general manager of the Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (or METRO system).
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Music in The Second City

Theatre Arts
Mike Descoteaux '98
Head of the Music Program
The Second City

The house lights go down and the music goes up. The audience becomes quiet. The actors in the wings plan to make things up as they go along, and the director couldn’t be happier. This is a typical production at Chicago’s world-renowned improvisational comedy mecca, The Second City—the training and performance center that is alma mater to hundreds of comedic greats.

Behind the piano, sparking the creativity, is the head of Second City’s music program, Mike Descoteaux ’98. His role is a hybrid. He sings, writes music, and plays a host of instruments, but won’t call himself a musician. “If I were a musician,” he laughs, “I’d have to practice a lot more.” As a teacher, a director and a collaborator, he says, “spreading the gospel of improv is the best part of what I do.”
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New Orleans: Choosing Responsibility and Optimism

Medicine
David Mushatt '78
Chief of Infectious Diseases
Tulane University Medical Center

“For the first two years, I really didn’t like New Orleans; it felt like a banana republic,” said David Mushatt, about coming to the city in 1989 as a fellow in infectious diseases at Tulane. Founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke was campaigning, after all; he ultimately won a seat in the Louisiana state legislature. The city grew on David, however—its European, old-world feeling, its Cajuns and Creoles and old jazz. He married, had a family, and “if you stay here long enough,” he alleges, “it grows on you like Spanish moss and you can’t leave.”

David’s commitment to the city now involves more risk and opportunity, more courage, than ever. The post-Katrina health care environment in New Orleans is chaotic and fluid; the future is unfocused. A researcher and clinician, David is the chief investigator for clinical trials testing different strategies for managing long-term treatment of HIV/AIDS. His patients are coming back to the city in disproportionate numbers. Most are poor; some had never left their own neighborhoods before Katrina; they are uncomfortable where they sought refuge and are steadily coming back.
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At the End of the Ambulance Ride

Medicine
Zachary Meisel '89
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine,
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

An ambulance—jarring pitch and relentless pulse—threads through a busy street. The scene is universally emblematic of a city. In Philadelphia, many ambulances bring their patients to the Pennsylvania Hospital, part of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, where Zachary Meisel ’89, assistant professor of emergency medicine, helps patients who arrive get the care they need, as quickly as possible.

Zach is interested in ambulances. He is both a clinician and a researcher, and his research has focused on the quality of care during those transitions that patients experience—for instance as they move from home, to ambulance, to hospital. You may have read one of his essays in Slate.com. His research indicates that relatively simple changes standardizing certain systems would reduce errors that may happen in ambulances; and he wants to make sure that valuable information and observations that EMTs or paramedics have gathered moves expeditiously to the decision-making team in the hospital.
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Architectural solutions that change the human landscape

Architecture
Anne Torney '83
Principal and Director of Housing,
WRT/Solomon E.T.C.

Anne Torney ’83, principal and director of housing at WRT/Solomon E.T.C., met the company’s founder, Daniel Solomon, when she enrolled in his urban design class at the University of California, Berkeley. Having earned her undergraduate degree in architecture at Princeton, Anne was interested in the way that design “combined theory with drawing and had the potential for a real humanistic scope.” Beyond architecture, she was compelled by the idea that design involved so much more than form and aesthetics—that it could be a tool for economic and social change, for individuals and for entire neighborhoods.

Daniel Solomon is a founder of ‘new urbanism,’ an architectural and design movement that promotes walkable, transit-oriented, mixed-income and mixed-use communities as an alternative to sprawl. Motivated and inspired by Solomon’s work, Anne joined his firm which, in 2002, merged with Wallace Roberts and Todd, a Philadelphia-based, multi-disciplinary firm that shares Solomon E.T.C.’s strong urbanistic and environmental focus. The firm approaches design as a continuum, embracing the full scale, from buildings to neighborhoods. Many of their clients are non-profit developers, providing much-needed housing for low-income families, for the working poor, and for San Francisco’s homeless. “We use design as a tool for social equity,” Anne says, “creating homes and neighborhoods that are economically and environmentally healthy. There is nothing like the sense of pride and respect people get from living in a well-designed, well cared for home.”
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Urban Landscapes

Architecture
Nina Brown '67
Landscape Architect,
Brown, Richardson & Rowe, Inc.

If you have recently biked along Memorial Drive in Cambridge, or taken the ferry to Spectacle Island in Boston Harbor, or boarded the “T” at the Charles Street/Massachusetts General Hospital station, you already know the sophisticated designs of Brown, Richardson and Rowe (BR&R), Inc. Injecting beauty into the cities and towns of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire, the firm is responsible for creating some of the green space that, as Nina Brown ’67 says, “balances the excitement of city living with access to the great outdoors.”

One of the firm’s two founders, Nina grew up in Milton near several hundred acres of unused farmland; she feared the day the land would be developed. As a college student, Nina visited many of Boston’s public schools and recalls, “I was appalled by the city’s school yards. They were asphalt and nothing else. I wanted to do something to improve [these] public spaces.” Along with partners Clarissa Rowe and Alison Richardson, Nina’s business has been urban landscape architecture and land reclamation for over 25 years.
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San Francisco Living
Rudy Reyes '90 finds what he needs in the city

Urban Lifestyle
Rudy Reyes '90
Regulatory Policy Lawyer,
Verizon, Inc.

His friend and classmate, Adam Wolff ’90, lived in San Francisco and
loved it. That must have been enough for Rudy Reyes ’90. His move there after law school, in 1998, was also his first view of San Francisco. The last nine years have repaid him for that leap of faith, over and over again.

For one thing, life in San Francisco reconnected Rudy with “an old joy in [his] life, singing.” As “a scholarship kid from Texas” entering in Class II, Rudy found Milton a big culture shock. “I had never really been away from home,” he says. During those early disorienting weeks, Rudy found his way to Scott Tucker and the Chamber Singers, auditioned, and made the group. That year the Chamber Singers toured Africa, and singing for Rudy became an enduring passion. He carried that passion to Harvard, where he sang baritone for the Collegium Musicum under Jim Marvin, eventually serving as secretary of the group in his sophomore year and president in his junior and senior years. Also interested in choral conducting, Rudy then returned to Milton for a year, as a teaching intern, thanks to a DeWitt Wallace grant. He taught under the mentorship of Scott Tucker. (Scott, says Rudy, “was truly inspirational, one of the brightest spots in my life.” The two remain close to this day.) At the outset of law school the next year, Rudy told himself he didn’t have time for singing and dropped it.
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Writing Center for the Greater Capital Region
Tri-city children pair with Times Union to build skills and enthusiasm in Schenectady

Education
Lori Cullen '87
Founder, The Writing Center for the Greater Capital Region

Three years ago, Schenectady resident Lori Cullen ’87 was teaching English at the State University of New York, Albany and at the same time home schooling her son, Justin. “Children from the neighborhood would drop by the house and, out of curiosity, open Justin’s texts to see what he was up to,” Lori explains. These occasional visits stepped up in regularity; the children started making it their weekly—sometimes daily—routine to solicit help from “Justin’s mom” with their writing and grammar. Lori not only embraced the opportunity, but encouraged it to grow.

As the children’s enthusiasm for these ad hoc sessions mounted, Lori realized their interest was more than casual. She organized a field trip to the Times Union, the Capital Region’s chief newspaper. “The students were invited to a news meeting,” she says, “and the people at the Times were so impressed, they asked the children to do some writing for the paper—and they were serious.”
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A Brand-New City

Real Estate Development
John Hynes '76
President & CEO,
Gale International, LLC

John B. Hynes III ’76 is a mega-city developer; he is guiding the creation of New Songdo City—“a brand-new city, built from the ground up, in the perfect setting.”

As populations around the globe migrate to urban centers, as Asian countries increase their impact on the global economy, as commerce continues to stimulate global roots, the feasibility of master planning brand-new cities, mega-cities, is real.

John, as CEO and managing partner of the real estate development and investment firm Gale International, is well along the path of developing a new city at the “Gateway to Northeast Asia,” as Songdo’s Web site proclaims.

New Songdo City, now known as the Songdo International Business District (IBD), has been called the “Hong Kong of the 21st century” and “the Venice of Northeast Asia” by media outlets around the globe.
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The Emergence of Urban America
Issues of the 21st century are not unlike those of the 19th century

“Charity and Skills Justify It All” proclaims the headline of the New York Times article on the attitudes of today’s “richest of the rich” chief executives and entrepreneurs (New York Times, July 15, 2007). The Times’ lead article compared today’s concentration of wealth among a relatively few “titans” with the similar situation during the Gilded Age. At the end of the 19th century and during the years preceding World War I, barons of business “ushered in the industrialization of the United States.” They took risks with new technologies, speculated on growth and predicted social and economic patterns. Their domain included railroads, oil, coal, manufacturing, retail sales and finance.
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Chinatown
Academic, service, research and social connections with Boston's Chinatown

Boston’s Chinatown has historical roots beginning in the mid- to late-1800s, when the city’s population was changing. Located adjacent to the hub’s Back Bay area, Chinatown is built on what was once ocean and beach front property. Approximately 8,000 people live in Chinatown; nearly 10,000 people, in any given weekend, spend time in this area of the city—dining or shopping, enjoying entertainment or enlarging their cultural world.

Before coming to Milton, history department chair Vivian WuWong worked with the Asian American Resource Workshop, located on the corner of Harrison Avenue and Beach Street—the heart of Boston’s Chinatown district. Founded nearly 30 years ago, the Resource Workshop gives tours of the neighborhood for school groups, tourists and other organizations, sharing the community’s history and current day experience.

Vivian teaches Milton’s History of Civil Rights course and advises the Asian Society. She is a resource for all kinds of Chinatown connections for students—for their research assignments, senior projects, history term papers, urban experiences or even a taste of home.
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