Marble Hill artist Corey Fields preserves community memories one T-shirt at a time

In the summer of 2009, a resident of the New York City Housing Authority’s Marble Hill Houses, Cedric Gadsen, fatally crashed his motorcycle near West 225th Street. That August, thousands turned out to Marble Hill Day, an annual neighborhood festival, soon donning shirts that friend and fellow resident Corey Fields designed in Gadsen’s honor.

It was the first instance of a community tradition that has prevailed for 17 years. Each batch of shirts features a new, hyperlocal design that Fields sketches and then replicates digitally for printing. On the front, an homage to Marble Hill Houses, and on the back, a growing list of deceased neighbors who were known and loved by many.

The artistic feat came naturally to 57-year-old Fields, who cofounded a graphic design company in the late 1990s called Meteorhouse.art. He is also the founder of publishing company Nukleus Comics, where he   works as editor-in-chief, a writer and an artist.

The first Marble Hill Houses shirt was released under Fields’ lifestyle apparel brand Broadway International, which he started that year. He creates New York-inspired tees, and is working on adding a poncho and a jacket.

Back when Fields was growing up, Marble Hill Houses was a different complex, he said.

Fields was born and raised in the complex in an era of milkmen and paper boys. He recalled the “Sherwood Forest,” a nickname for the grassy patch near the Marble Hill Playground, once shaded by a much denser canopy of trees. Some days he’d gaze out of the window of his building and watch workers at Country Delite — a dairy processing plant on Exterior Street that shuttered in 2014 — pour fresh milk into glass bottles and seal it with a red top. Kids would later reuse the tops, filling them with clay or wax and sliding them across the park pavement in a game of skully, a popular children’s street game.

Walkways weren’t swallowed by scaffolding, leafy bushes lined the grass and a low chain prevented the greenery from falling victim to foot traffic, he said. As time went on, conditions and other circumstances started to weigh on the community, Fields said.

When Gadsen died, there was a shift, Fields said. He described his friend as inspirational, loyal and a “day one, baby.” Marble Hill Day had long been a tradition, but had waned in the years leading up to 2009 due to poor weather or disinterest. Fields and others saw the turnout to Gadsen’s funeral service and repast and knew that year was different.

“We got to change this,” Fields recalled saying. “We got to come out here heavy. We got to be in this park, that park, playground across the street, parking lot. And that’s what we did.”

He got together with a friend and designed the first of many shirts in honor of the neighborhood — old-fashioned lettering that read “Welcome to Marble Hill Houses. Bronx New York Native Society Authorized. Est. 1951.” On the back, “Ced Dog, RIP.”

Fields estimated the celebration drew about 3,000 attendees. In the new age of Facebook, the invitation reached not only current residents, but ones who had long moved on to different states or were overseas serving in the military. Everyone came up, because “everyone loved Ceddie too,” Fields said. Most uttered the same phrase to one another: “We’ve got to stop meeting for funerals.”

The next year, a friend of Fields’ proposed expanding the back of the shirt to include the names of other loved ones who had died. Grandparents, grandfathers and friends were memorialized in fabric.

Fields’ process starts with a sketch — on a napkin or a loose piece of paper — and is then recreated on a computer. He sends the design to a direct-to-film printer, specialized for clothing, then sells them online and in person at Marble Hill Day. At $25 a pop, Fields usually makes a few thousand dollars from the shirts annually.

This past June, Fields started feeling fatigued, confused and irritable, soon discovering he was undergoing kidney failure. He has been receiving dialysis treatment three times a week and will need a kidney transplant in the next few years. But, the experience actually jump-started his creativity, which had been in a lull recently, Fields said.

In the next few months, Fields plans to move out of Marble Hill Houses. But his ties to the complex run much deeper than its losses and hardships. Bad days coexist with ones where he and childhood friends come together on a warm summer evening, the smell of lamb chops and shrimp kebabs wafting through the air.

“I have a love for this community that will never be touched,” Fields said. “The way we have each others’ backs, that’s something that will never be replaced.”