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.

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.

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.

Enlisting in the U.S. Army at Fort Knox in 1942, he became the distribution officer of the European Edition of YANK Magazine, due to his experience as the rotogravure picture editor at the Courier Journal in Louisville.

Later promoted to Captain, Clay was placed in charge of the Alaska Edition of YANK.

In 1948, Clay was awarded a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard University and spent the year studying urban geography.

Returning to Louisville in 1949, 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).

In 1958, Clay was one of eight US citizens chosen to take part in the Netherlands' International Seminar on Urban Renewal at The Hague.

Clay also attended the annual congress of the International Federation of Housing and Planning at Liège, Belgium.

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.

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.

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 role as an urban affairs observer and reporter, Clay spoke of the popular press at an American Institutes of Architects (AIA) Western Mountain Region conference in Santa Fe the fall of 1965, saying "The architectural profession, i.e., that part of it represented by the AIA, will have to continue its efforts to understand and support a quality environment whether its members are in on the deal (get jobs out of it). If there's really 'No Time for Ugliness,' it's got to cut both ways; and ugliness committed by members will have to get the same rough treatment as ugliness committed by package dealers and other nonmembers of the AIA Anti-Ugly Club."

He also suggested that "the Institute (should) re-examine its rule that prohibits one member from making any public evaluation of the work of another."

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, while discussing real estate sections in US newspapers, Ferdinand Kuhn, a writer for the Washington Post, 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."

Clay left the Courier-Journal and Louisville Times in 1966.

Clay was considered one of the first authorities on urban design.

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.

Financed by a $1,092,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, Clay was hired to "shape its four-year program" to "offer fellowships" and "conduct briefings, short courses and seminars on urban problems for working journalists and news executives working on urban affairs".

Clay's expertise and opinions were sought across the US and the world.

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.

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".