Alternative Other Cities: San Francisco's Mission District Murals

In the heart of San Francisco's Mission District, between Valencia and Mission lies Clarion Alley, a sketchy service alley fronted by the sides of buildings and fences. Yet it's one of the most visited places in the neighborhood by locals and tourists alike. This is because Clarion Alley is one of a number of alleys in the Mission that are lined with mural art.

The semi-legal art of the alley is of varying quality. Some of it is obviously very purposefully inspired by the mural art movement of Diego Rivera, some of it is more akin to the well done graffiti of urban taggers. Most of it is highly political or social in nature. It's the kind of stuff that in more conservative cities would be totally unacceptable. It's freeform, tacky, occasionally offensive, and always critical of the status quo. It's also beautiful, daring, and incredibly popular.

The alley is loosely and organically organized like an outdoor gallery. Artists claim space, marking the area of wall or fence or asphalt that they intend to use, begin chalk outlines of their work, and inscribe (also in chalk) the apparently uniform statement "Mural in progress. Please respect." And, for the most part, people do. There are clearly some rivalries and grudges between artists occasionally at play, since a couple of these in-progress murals have been tagged with "cop lover," an obviously pejorative title in this context. But otherwise, it is a very democratic and open space, where artists work and others respect it. No one is paying for ad space, or being invited by a curator. Instead, artists contribute what they will on whatever space happens to come available.

A panel on the west end of the alley (which has, unlike the murals, been tagged prolifically) explains the purpose of the alley in both English and Spanish.

Inspired by Balmy Alley [another alley in the Mission] and determined to build more autonomy, a group of us got together, spoke to our neighbors, went to City Hall and Clarion Alley began its journey as a place that wants to be free. A place where culture and dignity speak louder than the rules of private property.

Embedded in such a statement is the understanding that the buildings and fences that line the alley may be private property, but they are public space. Thus, this is where local urban artists carry on a pubic discussion in a rather subversive aesthetic style.

As I looked over these murals, and took the time to consider their aesthetic quality and their messages, I couldn't help but to mourn the loss of the now gone "Legal Wall" in Oklahoma City's Automobile Alley district. Most people in OKC likely never even knew about it. It was well hidden in an unnamed service alley running between NW 10th and Park, just east of Broadway.

My understanding of the history of the Legal Wall is a bit apocryphal, a mixture of what I've heard from police detectives and street artists. It started, supposedly, when the building owner of the corner building at 10th and Broadway, apparently out of philosophical conviction,  agreed to allow some graffiti artists to work on the back of his building. The art soon spread to the other building that lined this alley, the other building owners either deciding to go along with it, or just not seeing the point of complaining.

A panorama of OKC's "Legal Wall"

When the building changed hands, the city quickly and quietly covered the graffiti up before the new owner took possession of the building. Where the bright colors, strange graphics, and curious text used to be, there are now only walls painted a brick red color. The artists, most of whom considered themselves serious and law abiding (though some where not) and a few of whom in fact had gallery shows at other location have respected the new owners, so the walls remain the drab false brick color.

Curiously, not long after the art on these walls was covered, the front of the very beautiful former Oklahoman building a few blocks away was tagged with South Town Barrio gang graffiti. Although one did not cause the other, for me, the incident highlighted was was tragic about the end of the Legal Wall.

The graffiti in the alley, artistic and in its own way subversive, may have been cluttered and tacky, and it certainly didn't represent the canonized aesthetic that conservative cities like OKC are willing to call "art," but it gave the alley a sense of place.  While the Legal Wall was there, there was the feeling that people cared about this place. Artists were coming to work on their pieces, interested hipsters were coming to look at the work, high school seniors were coming to use the cool, gritty urban setting as a backdrop for their senior pictures, and so on. The wall turned an empty and neglected alley into a pubic space with a life.

Our Legal Wall certainly wasn't as developed as the thriving mural scene in San Francisco's Mission district. In the Mission, the murals are rather sophisticated--portraits of people and landscapes, rather than the text based train-car graffiti of the Legal Wall. The Mission murals, furthermore, are a mature, living, visual political conversation, unquestionably of a public nature. The legal wall was amateurish and immature by those standards. But what the Legal Wall shared with the Mission murals was an important assumption about public space. The open source, democratic space of graffiti art supports a sense of co-ownership over the public space it inhabits.  The artists own it because they do their work there. The viewer owns it because he comes and goes to look at something he admires or just finds curious. High school seniors come to get the feeling that they are street savvy city kids, and have the pictures to prove it. Once the legal wall was gone, however, the co-owners of the space were gone, replaced by the distant, faceless owner of the building--a person of whose existence we have no real concept of.

So the STB gang graffiti incident, to me, became a picture if what happens when the people who feel a sense of ownership of a place, the people who have some reason to care about it and thus who watch over it, leave.

A Caution to Urbanists: The Ethics of Gentrification

Each year, the FBI publishes (in several steps) comprehensive data from its UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) reports. Media outlets gather the data and scramble to publish stories in which they produced rankings based on violent crime. Readers then eagerly look for their own cities on these notorious Top 10 lists. This year's lists (which use 2012 statistics) are showing an interesting reverse trend in which large cities, long regarded by suburbanites as dangerous, crowded, and dirty, are falling off the top lists. Perineal top seed Detroit has fallen to number 6 in violent crime per capita. Other usual superstars like Memphis, Atlanta (26th), and Washington DC (now 46th!) have fallen out of these lists entirely.

Over the past several years, these cities have been replaced on violent crime lists by old industrial hubs and suburban (but poor) cities on the outskirts of major cities. Memphis is gone, but West Memphis, AR is now number 4. Detroit is gone, but it's been replaced by Inkster, Flint, and Saginaw. Saint Louis remains on the top ten list, but number one on the list is East Saint Louis, IL (a horrifyingly polluted and poor city featured in Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities).

To those of us who grew up thinking about the suburbs as the upper-middle class, clean, safe havens defined by manicured lawns, pizza places, parks, and high school sports, this trend may seem strange. These are the images that the suburb brings to mind in the US, but in other countries, this is not the case. In large French cities, the banlieues (outskirts or suburbs) have long been the home of poor people in subsidized housing--the home also of crime, gangs, and political turmoil. They are more like what we here the in US would think of as the inner city--poor, under-served, and racially segregated. Such an arrangement, which seems a kind of reverse urban arrangement to us in the US, exists for easily traceable reasons. Large cities in France (and other parts of Europe) are old, beautiful, gentrified, highly walkable (which ensures a lot of people are always out, with their eyes on things), and well used. People want to be there, and people want to live there. This means that property values in the city are very high. As a result, undesirables in these cities, rather than being abandoned by white flight, have instead been pushed to the outskirts. In these cities, where there is high incentive to attract and keep tourists, public housing and social service agencies are built away from the core of the city--away from where tourists might see that Paris or Lyon have problems too.

In the US, on the other hand, the post-war industrial boom (namely in the automotive industry), cheap (heavily subsidized) gasoline, fear of the polluted industrial city, and good-old fashioned American spirit of expansion led to the opposite. People who could afford to fled the cities into the new suburbs, leaving behind the poor, undereducated, and minorities in the inner cities. When they left, they took all their resources (especially in terms of taxable property value) with them.

The result, in both countries, has been that large cities are highly segregated. Though the spacial arrangement is flipped, both countries have large cities divided into geographic areas whose residents know very little of the people in the other area. In both countries, this division is clearly drawn along lines that are class and race oriented. Here in the US, all respectable middle class children are taught that you are to stay away from a certain "side of town." Likewise, kids who live on that "side of town" discern quickly that they are not welcome on our side. What results from this geographical and social arrangement is a situation in which people in the inner city (in our case) are made to believe that the resources available to the affluent are not available to them, and the affluent, even if they are well meaning people, are not often acquainted with the plight of people living in the inner city. So people in the inner city live in squalor, while people in the suburbs live in affluence. The affluent especially are trained to see this as the natural way of things. It is, I would argue, a highly unethical arrangement. And it is, in part, perpetuated by geography.

The good news is that influential, affluent educated people are moving back to the city in droves. The New Urbanists celebrate the fact that late Gen-Xers (like me), Millennials, and even aging baby boomers are packing up their advanced degrees and moving back into the cities. Those of us in this group desire walkable neighborhoods, mass transit options, shorter commutes, more night life and many other things that come with living in a rich urban environment. This is great news for a lot of reasons. But it also comes with a danger.

I am admittedly a novice (I'm a rhetorician who fell into New Urbanism through a love of the city and through researching rhetorics of space), but I sense a bit of a divide in the literature of New Urbanism. Architects and city planners, like Jeff Speck, often address the benefits of urbanism in terms of economics and conservation. Their focus tends to be the benefits of density, walkability/bike-ability, and mass transit options. To academics and authors, like Jane Jacobs and James Howard Kunstler (New-Urbanist doomsday profit), social ethics are more central. Kunstler talks at length (citing Jacobs often) about the potential for urban living to bring people closer together in space, thus forcing them into awareness of one another. For him, the mixed use, mixed income nature of naturally urban environments is a road to cure for many of the social ills brought about by the segregated communities indicative of sprawl. Though Kunstler is at times, I think, a bit reductive in his attitudes toward the poor (he believes a major benefit of mixed income housing is that the poor will learn how to behave by watching the affluent--an assertion that carries some problematic assumptions), he nevertheless understands that the way that we live in built space has important social-ethical dimensions.

I don't intend to suggest that urban planners and architects aren't interested in these concerns (many of them no doubt are), but their professions seem to make these concerns secondary in their writing. Further, since these are the writers who have the ears of public officials (and perhaps because public officials tend to listen to parts of things they like), it is possible for the economic progress promised by urbanism to become center stage in public discussion while the ethical dimensions of geographical space remain invisible.

This can very well lead to an inappropriate form of gentrification. As we invest in our rich urban environments (which we should and must do), it is possible to lose sight of the importance of mixed use, mixed income neighborhoods. It is possible that in our enthusiasm to attract well educated, relatively affluent people back into our urban cores, we may also drive others out. One of my few critiques of Jeff Speck's Walkable City (a current intellectual man-crush of mine) is his somewhat unqualified assertion that our downtowns should be the focus of our efforts because "downtown is the only part of the city that belongs to everybody (260). This certainly can be true, and should be, but it isn't necessarily true. As long as we keep social/geographical arrangements ethical, Speck's argument is unassailable: if we can't fix an entire city (we never can) we should start with the parts of city that benefit the most people. However, the work of Mike Davis in Fortress Los Angeles (and some of my own graduate research) suggests the ways in which space can and sometimes is effectually shut off from undesirable people. Davis's article is an extreme (but real-life) example of the ways in which it is possible to build a section of city for ourselves, then literally wall other people out.

As we move back into the city, we demand better schools, better security, and better housing. These are all good things and can, if done correctly, better the lives of both us and the people who already live in these areas. But they can also take the form of charter schools that can remove our kids from traditionally underserved inner city schools, police harassment of the homeless or addicted roaming the streets, and skyrocketing property values that drive out those who had lived there.

In other words, it's possible that our arrival can in fact make things much worse for other people. It's possible that, rather than bringing people closer together both in space and sentiment, we will instead just drive others out to make room for ourselves. It is possible for us to fail at changing the unethical arrangement of urban sprawl, but instead to simply to flip-flop it. If this happens, we have gone in the wrong direction, ethically, because we will have moved the poor out into the suburbs where the lack of viable public transportation and density of social services further isolates them. This may, I suspect, be part of what we are seeing in the crime statistics cited above. The popularity of urban living is creating a kind of reverse white-flight.

So, my charge here is that as we continue advocate for urbanism, we make a purposeful effort to keep the conversation balanced so that our city leaders see not only the economic benefits of urbanism, but the ethical dimensions as well. As we pressure them to allocate resources to attract the educated, we must also pressure them to stay attuned to the needs of those already living in the urban areas into which we are trying to move. We do this by making sure that they understand that part of what makes urban living attractive to us is the diversity of the city. In order to maintain a level of diversity, it will be important that housing options remain diverse, that schools serve privileged and underprivileged students equally, and that our downtown truly does, as Speck suggests, belong to everyone.

Alternative Other Cities: Portland, Maine; Good-Bad Urbanism

Yesterday, we stopped briefly in Portland, Maine on our way from Boston up to my grandfather's hometown of Bath, Maine. This little blog about Portland  is not at all scientific. It's a travel journal based on spending about an hour in the city, looking for a place to eat and park (and finally settling on Subway, by the way; a cop-out I know, but it was getting late and we had grumpy children and another hour of driving ahead of us).

What was interesting to me was how the city's downtown is such a salient example of what should be bad urbanism. It looks like everything that people were fleeing from when they fled to the suburbs. The sidewalks are narrow, the few street trees are skimpy (in a state with a lot of beautiful trees, like, everywhere), and there are a ton of one way streets. It breaks all the rules of New Urbanism. Portland is a classic Industrial Revolution city, designed without cars in mind. And this, actually, might be what makes it work. Now that the smoke and smog of the Industrial Revolution are gone, this old urban model is somehow really inviting.

Street trees are lacking in much of downtown because the sidewalks are so narrow. But these sidewalks are classically charming. They are paved with very old brick (as are some of the older streets), and they are faced by granite curbs. More importantly, the buildings are all (and I mean ALL) built to the sidewalks, so that the walks are lined with small boutique stores, pubs, and restaurants.  The sidewalks team with life. A very diverse crowd fills downtowns sidewalks: families walking to games at the city's minor league park, hipsters in their fitted pants and outsized glasses, old fashioned hippies with dreadlocks selling knitted bracelets, and primped old women looking at the shops.

And though there are a lot of one way streets in Portland, there is also plenty of curbside parking. If the city wanted to convert the one ways into two ways, it would have to either close on street parking or remove the granite curbs and brick sidewalks. But these two things seem to be much more important than two way streets. The sidewalks are responsible for the city's charm, and curbside parking is incredibly important for pedestrian safety and comfort. There is a hierarchy, it seems, of urban elements, and Portland has chosen these elements correctly.

Perhaps the most important thing about Portland is its incredible density. The city is small, at just over 66,000 residents. This makes it a lot smaller than the OKC suburb of Edmond (83K) and almost half the size of the college town of Normal (110K), but its downtown goes in all directions further than downtown Oklahoma City, albeit without the sky scrapers (those oh-so-overrated phallic monuments to capitalism). Its design is classically European: most of the buildings are four or five stories tall, and built to the sidewalk. All buildings have windows facing the street, including the parking garages which have shops on the first level, hiding the fact that they are garages. Plus, there are bike routes everywhere.

The impact is noticeable. There are people everywhere. It has the feel of, well, the other Portland. (My wife, joking about this connection, says "we're real hipsters because we were here first. We were Portland before it was cool.") It's a little hard, without having spent enough time in Portland, to put a finger on why it works so well. I suspect it's the romantic notion of a European style city here in the States that makes Portland so attractive. Maybe the fact that the city is really a compact small town that makes it work so well, despite all that is theoretically "wrong" with it. But something here is working.

The Importance of Districts

A couple days ago, Collected Thread in the plaza district tweeted a picture of the owner wearing one of DNA Galleries' "Support Local Art" shirts. This is hardly surprising to anyone who has spent any time hanging out on the Plaza; it's a pretty tight knit community (this is evident even to an outsider like me). It does, however, provide a salient example of why and how urban districts work, and why they are so important to a city's sense of community. I have no doubt that none of what follows will be news to anyone who knows anything about city planning or urbanism is general, but I'm a rhetorician and writing teacher, and not a city planner, so this is revelatory for me.

The term "district" as used in urban contexts can mean a number of things. I live in an Urban Conservation District, which simply means that I am supposed to abide by certain covenants in order to maintain the look of the neighborhood. All sorts if districts like this, which deal mainly with public policy, exist: urban redevelopment districts, TIF districts, etc. Of course, there are also districts that are primarily associated with specific minority groups, like the Asian District here in OKC, where specific nationalities have historically gathered in a city. These districts, like the famous Chinatowns of New York and San Francisco and the Italian North End in Boston, are very important in their own right. But my interest here is the kind of district where similar businesses have gathered in one spot, sometimes in haphazard, slapdash fashion, and sometimes very purposefully.

The most famous of this type of district is, no doubt, the Broadway Theatre District in New York. This very important district gives us an example of how/why such districts happen. This type of district invariably involves a particular niche. Most people don't go to the theatre, and even those who do don't go particularly regularly (I'm a former professional actor, but I've been to the theatre maybe a half dozen times since 2008, when I finished my Master's degree. . .in playwriting) . So to survive, theatres opened near each other. This allows a kind of one stop shopping for the kind of weirdos who go to the theatre. In this way, a theatre becomes visible to folks who've actually come to go to a different theatre.

This same dynamic exists on a smaller scale in our own districts, especially Paseo and the Plaza District. Any of the businesses on the Plaza, with their relatively small and firmly artisan inventory, would likely have a difficult time surviving in a suburban mall (which is, by the way, just a high overhead, indoor counterfeit district). But, perhaps counterintuitively, these "weird stores" (Gopnik) thrive when they open in a row--next to all their competition. This works because the fact that these stores exist in a district attracts the niche customers interested in these businesses. Beyond this, the highly walkable nature of these districts makes it inviting to hang out--to spend lots of time looking at and buying things.

Again, none of this is particularly ground breaking information. What's significant about it, however, is that it points to an economic model that is uniquely urban. In urban districts like these, survival and success comes not through competition, but cooperation. Most large businesses treat commerce as a zero-sum game. If Walmart is to succeed, K-Mart must fail (it did). But in the urban district, if DNA Galleries hopes to succeed, Collected Thread must attract people, and vise verse. Though these are very similar businesses (one is an art gallery that doubles as a boutique, the other is a boutique whose designers are artists in their own right), they realize that they don't benefit by "beating" the other. Instead, each of these businesses benefits when the other benefits. When one place thrives, the whole district thrives. When the district thrives, the individual stores thrive. But, this unique economic model doesn't quite explain why these districts are so appealing to those of us who hand out in them.

Perhaps more important than the economic model districts provide are the social benefits that come to a community built around these districts.  By serving, and thus attracting, a relatively specific particular crowd, these districts also provide a sense of community that becomes definitive. People who live, work, or spend a great deal of time in Paseo think of themselves as Paseo people (have they named themselves?). To an extent, this ultimately involves many of the social aspects that define communities such as shared community ethics, behavior systems, discourse conventions, and so on.  Though these districts may often start out as primarily commercial zones, they morph quickly and naturally into something much more meaningful as people who like to be in the district begin to move close to it. As people begin to work, live, and socialize in a district, it becomes a neighborhood. And neighborhoods are what cities are made of. These are what give big city life flair and personality. For this reason, the health of our clever local districts is, I think, far more important to the sustainability of our cities than are all the tourist amenities we can plan. Now, if you don't mind, it's a pleasant day; I think I may get on my bike and ride down to the Plaza.

Biking in OKC: First Impressions

I've been teaching James Howard Kuntsler, Jane Jacobs, Adam Gopnik, and Mike Davis for several years. In fact, it is, in part, these readings (which I use to teach argument to freshman writing students) that have led me to my interest in urbanism, placemaking, and the politics of space. I know about the importance of walkability when it comes to quality of life, public health, social cohesion, and so on. Ultimately, my reaction to all I've read to this point has been to wish I lived downtown. But that's really as far as I've gone.

I live in an Urban Conservation District several miles from downtown. It's a decent compromise for a parent who knows that the good public schools and sidewalks are out in the suburbs, but who refuses to live there. Where I live, I have the benefit of a big, nice yard but I'm close to most things I need and want. My neighborhood's Walk Score is 52. But, in Oklahoma City, where the car rules, I have no sidewalks and there is almost no pedestrian culture in the neighborhoods around mine (though my particular neighborhood is full of hip, young professionals, so we are systematically building a walking culture for our few square blocks). I even drive an SUV, sometimes alone (in my defense, it's a four cylinder).

The result of all of this is that, despite my wishes and intentions, I still require a car to do most things. At the very least I need to extend my range beyond a ten minute walk, and that has always meant driving. Listening to the speakers at OUIQC's Placemaking Conference, which featured a panel on biking, and reading Jeff Speck's Walkable City, I realized that I could extend my reach without resorting to driving if I had a bike. So, for the past couple of months, I've been planning to get myself a halfway decent bike and replacing my car for short trips whenever possible.

So, over the weekend, I bought myself a Schwinn Suburban bike. I've wanted a Schwinn since high school, when a classmate had a classic Schwinn so cool that he used to bring it into class rather than trust a bike rack to protect it.

In order to test out time/distance, and the overall bikeability of the city, I spent the day biking around many of the places I like to go that are within biking distance. I made it, ultimately all the way to Bricktown, stopping to eat lunch with a friend at Big Truck Tacos, to visit my mother at work, to shop for t-shirts, to drink a soda at Coffee Slingers, and just to look around. I went through the Paseo Arts District, Heritage Hills, Midtown, Downtown, Bricktown, the Plaza District, and the neighborhood we lived in when I was born. Here is what I learned:

Biker Safety: Roadways

Speck's book has an entire section on biking, so I went into my ride with a theoretical base with regard to what I expected on certain kinds of roads (I'm an academic; I can't do anything without a theoretical base). I know enough from living in OKC to know that main arterials would be a problem. These are pedestrian killers (literally and figuratively) because the wide roadways and high speed limits allow cars to drive very quickly, scaring away any would-be pedestrian or rider. This is true anywhere, but the problem is compounded in cities like our's, where there are no sidewalks (because the car has ruled for more than half of our city's history). Unfortunately, I live neatly nestled in the corner of N. May, a five lane monstrosity where traffic is so bad that I hate to leave on heavy shopping days, and I-44. This means that I have to carefully navigate my way out of my neighborhood through alternative routes, since there's no way I'm riding a bike on May. I don't intend to get smacked by an SUV being driven 50 MPH by some person on a cell phone, thank you very much.  Once I get out of my neighborhood, though, I have several different kinds of bike routes in my path. As I'm very familiar with the interior of the city, I knew where these were, so I was able to plan my route in advance.

Sharrows:
I spent most of my ride on a sharrow. This is a wide street where, on the right side, a bicycle placard has been painted on the road to alert drivers to the presence of bike riders.

In Oklahoma City, these are mostly roads that were wider than they needed to be. When the city decided that it wanted to invest in biking and walkability, it simply painted decals on the street, occasionally eliminating lanes where the streets were wider than they needed to be. This seems to have worked remarkably well. On all of these roads, passing cars were very respectful of the distance between their car and me, and they invariably slowed down to a speed comfortable for both of us. A few of the arterials have been turned into sharrows, but many of them are through quiet, and often lovely, historic neighborhoods.

Dedicated Lanes:
Closer to downtown, the city has painted bike lanes. I likes these okay, because they gave me a sense of legal standing. In the sharrows, I felt like I was in a place that was, ultimately, designed for cars. I was a trespasser, not necessarily welcome to people who had to slow down ten miles an hour for an entire block to deal with me. In the bike lanes, I had the empowering feeling that I didn't have to care if drivers found me inconvenient; I'm in my own lane. On the other hand, the closer to downtown I got, the less comfortable I felt. This is because, downtown, the bike lanes sit right against marked parking spaces for parallel and sometimes even angle parking. In these areas, I pathologically worried that a car would pull out without seeing me.

Shared Space:
In a perfect world, all roads would be shared roads. There would be an understanding that roads are public spaces to be shared equally by pedestrians, bikers, street cars, and automobiles. In fact, in Europe, Hans Monderman has made this a reality in many public squares (to the chagrin of some advocates for the blind).  And, in fact, most roads are shared space. Neighborhood streets, places not designed for bikes, and even some downtown streets where biking is encouraged are all shared space.

Once one follows the well delineated bike lanes into the financial district downtown, the lines disappeare into the shared space of the street. The "bike route" signage remains, but the separate lane is gone. Surprisingly, I felt very comfortable on shared streets downtown. When the bike lane disappeared (or turned back into parallel parking, to be exact), I simply merged into car traffic and became part of the traffic flow.  Though this may sound terrifying, I found that it was actually very pleasant. It was, in fact, one of my favorite moments on my day of riding. The blocks are small, so there are lots of lights stopping cars. Plus, there are pedestrians everywhere: professionals walking to their offices or to lunch, tourists walking to and from hotels, and construction workers tearing things up. All this meant that cars were going very slowly.

Some discomfort expected:
All in all, my trip was well planned (though I called a lot of audibles), and so I felt pretty comfortable biking most of the day. There were, unsurprisingly, some places where I did not feel comfortable riding.

When I wrote on facebook that I was testing the bikeability of the city, a police officer I know commented "is this based on the armed or the unarmed." Well, I went unarmed, as I usually do when I'm running around, and I never felt in danger because of the neighborhoods I was in or the people I ran into. Instead, requisite to the actual data on the subject, the real danger came, not from strangers looking to rob white hipsters, but from cars.

When I got west of Penn, the roads got wider, the speed limits got higher, and the drivers got more careless. This was not surprising. The area where I felt uncomfortable that did surprise me was in intensely urban Bricktown. This probably should not have surprised me. Though it's downtown, it;s full of people who are not from downtown, or from town at all. It's where suburbanites come to drink (which is why I intend not to talk about it much on this blog). So it's probably not surprising that the people here drive like suburbanites on wide arterials. What is surprising is how little the city has done to mitigate this.  Though, again here, there is signage indicating that these streets are bike routes, there is nothing done to slow cars. There are not placards painted on the pavement, the curbs are high (which means no escape for a biker), and the lanes are very wide. The only place I felt in more danger was crossing 23rd street at Villa (a two lane that everyone speeds on where I also felt out of place).

Legal Issues:

In Oklahoma City, riders of bikes are treated just like drivers of cars. A biker must follow all traffic laws and controls. This is not a problem with regard to speed, since the average speed of a biker is 12 MPH. But it also means that a rider must stop completely at all stop signs, maintain his lane, signal, stay on the right side of the road, and so on. This might seem reasonable, but perhaps my biggest lesson of the day is just how impractical this is. I found it very helpful to act like a car downtown. I stayed in the in the middle of the lane, used turn lanes where appropriate, and stopped at the lights along with all the cars. Following these ordinances was helpful downtown because the ordinances made me feel safe. I didn't cut between cars to advance on red lights, since, had someone opened a car door to spit or to get out of their car, I would have crashed into their door. Instead, I held my place in line, just like a car. Also, maintaining my lane let others know that I was there and was going to stay there, so I wouldn't be hit by a car coming around a corner unable to see me popping out from between cars. Here, traffic ordinance worked for me because I knew what to expect of the cars around me, and they knew what to expect of me.

But in neighborhoods, ordinances designed for cars are often impractical. I can only imagine how quickly I would have tired out had I actually stopped for every stop sign, having to pedal myself back to speed after each of them. Beyond that, some fluidity with regard to position in my lane allowed a lot more negotiation between me and other drivers. In order to maintain the flow of traffic and to keep myself safe, I often found it helpful to move out of lanes in intersections and stop on corners, allowing cars behind me to pass. I also found myself driving left of center to show that I was about to turn left, thus avoiding turning left across traffic from my usual place on the right side of the street, and I occasionally even rode on the sidewalk to escape fast moving cars on big, unfriendly roads.

Though I don't know any cops (and I know a lot of cops, obviously) who enforce traffic laws on bike riders, I do know that if something were to happen and I was injured in a crash, I would be considered at fault if I was breaking an ordinance meant to control cars. A more fluid system of traffic laws for bicycles would help protect riders in legal situations. As a city dedicated to becoming more bike friendly, our ordinances could stand some revision.

Overall impressions:
Overall, I felt very comfortable most of the time during my almost six hour ride. I can get to almost all the places I most like to hang out in a relatively short ride. Plus, it was enjoyable. The pace is slow enough to allow a rider to look around, checking out the houses and greeting the people he passes. But the speed is also high enough to extend reach outside of the neighborhood. Finally, my legs are on fire and, since I burned about a million calories, I'm having ice cream tonight without feeling badly about it.

Were it not for the fact that I'm attending a graduate school 25 miles away and that my children go to school in a neighboring city, I could envision selling a car and going about on bike or foot. Maybe in the future, this will be possible.

A Time to Blush

Today is the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing. Meanwhile, the situation in Boston is out of control.  So as many people that I care about are remembering the ways in which we were changed forever, another set of people I care about is seeing their own city changed forever. So this is a heavy day. And it should be. It's the kind of day when we are bombarded with stimuli that should make us want to turn away, and yet, with our twenty-first century addiction to the twenty-four hour news cycle and social media, with our movie-mania-desensitization, many of us are instead transfixed.

A couple days ago, a photo collage featuring gory pictures from the Boston Marathon finish line went viral. It was composed of pictures of bloody streets from varying distances and, most notably, a picture of a man with the bottom half if his leg missing, his femur exposed to the open air. My father, a now retired twenty-five year veteran of the Oklahoma City Police Department, and former Crime Scene Investigator, tried to remind others of the tastelessness of such pictures going public. He reminded us, in not o gentle terms, of the fact that such photos are disrespectful to the victims and their families and added, "I spent a career taking these kinds of photos, and I don't care to relive the experience on facebook." To my chagrin (I've reached an age where I feel responsible for protecting my parents, so I feel righteous anger about this) he actually received some flack for his hard line, including one passive aggressive questioning of his masculinity (of the type common on Facebook--that is, which may or may not have been directed specifically at him). Such a suggestion is a clear sign to me that many people just don't get it.

To my father, a police officer, and to my step-father, a firefighter, and finally to me, a second generation police officer myself, there is great honor, humility,  and a sense of gravitas in knowing that seeing these kinds of things is part of the sacrifice we make. Both of those men, the two most important men in my life, bear both the physical and emotional scars of April 19, 1995. In fact, I am often telling people that all first responder suffer from some level of PTSD; to what extent is only a matter of degree. But those of us with the introspection to be aware of it take a tremendous amount of pride in the fact that we run toward things others run from, and take care of things that others can not--and should not. We see things that humans are not supposed to see in order to shield others from it. And we take that responsibility seriously.

You see, humans aren't supposed to see horrible things happen to other humans. It's against the way we are wired. It does, despite our imagined toughness, effect us. Which is why, for decades, the media edited such horrible images. Consider the highly anesthetized newsreel footage from the Second World War:

To us, this footage may seem unrealistic, even sweetly quant. We may, God forbid, even see this as a sign of how much more "with it" we are in our generation, how much more realistic and world wise we are. But do we really think we were tougher than the Greatest Generation? This is a generation who lived through the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the most politically complex and technological war in human history. These videos aren't designed this way because this generation lacked toughness or wisdom, but because it possessed humanity and a basic sense of proper revulsion.

To this generation, one tried to hide that which should not be seen by others. It's not that people watching at the theater didn't know that what was happening "over there" was horrifically violent; the stars hanging in their neighbors windows would have stood as a constant reminder of this. It's that they knew that these were not things to be witnessed. For them, it was improper that the president should be seen in a wheel chair. Twenty years later, it was improper that a president's brain matter and skull should be seen in TV (The first time I saw the Zapruder film without blurring to hide the president's fatal injury was when my dad was teaching a forensics class. Not long after, the History Channel began showing the film unedited--a move I took as a sign that something important had happened--things had shifted.)

My minister friend, Ryan, tells a story to his youth group to emphasize the extent to which our own desensitization has cost us some of our humanity. As he drove one day, he saw an accident at the side of the road. He looked to the driver's seat of one of the cars, where he saw an injured woman from whom, "blood was flowing out." Ryan though, wow, that's bad, and drove on. He made it a few blocks when he suddenly felt overwhelming shame. He had just seen a horribly injured woman, and the most he could think was, wow that's bad. It cost him nothing, barely even slowing down his commute.  He had felt no emotion. It hadn't bothered him that he had just witnessed the suffering of another human being. And that shamed him. It should cost us when another person suffers. It should bother us. He stopped the car and prayed, both for her, and for himself.

You see, we need to feel revolted. Because revulsion suggests that we understand the human cost of these violent tragedies. The people in these photographs are not actors, they are not objects for our own voyeuristic catharsis. They are not bloody puppets in an Artaudian play. They are human beings in incredible pain. They are someone's wife, husband, son, daughter, mother, father. They are people who will be dealing with these scars, both physical and emotional, forever--not just until the screen fades and the credits roll. 

So, when my father lectures about the insensitivity of posting these pictures, people would be wise to listen. He speaks from hard earned experience about the tolls this violence takes on a human being. My call to any of us who still can, on this day in which we remember what happened in 1995 and pray for what's happening in 2013, is to keep what my two dads have lost. Keep your ability to blush.

Building Quality Community in Downtown OKC

I spent today at the Placemaking Conference hosted by the Institute for Quality Communities at OU. The highlight of the day, for me, was the presentation by Jeff Speck, one of the keynote speakers for the conference and author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. Speck argues that improving downtown by improving walkability is the key to better communities. Toward the end of his presentation, he addresses the objections he sometimes gets from community members from poorer neighborhoods who ask why improvements should focus on downtown rather than on their neighborhoods. After all, they want improvements to the places where they actually live. Speck's answer to this is entirely reasonable.

Speck argues that, since any renewal plan can't improve every neighborhood, it is best to do one small area very well than to spread resources and make a large area mediocre. For this reason, it makes sense to focus first on downtown, since this is the one part of the city that belongs to everyone.

In Speck's vision of community space, this is certainly true. As a proponent of what is often called New Urbanism, Speck's vision of good public space is emphatically mixed use (I think I may be quoting Kunstler here), pedestrian friendly, and scaled to humans (rather than to automobiles). Its borders are permeable, it's buildings interesting, and its aesthetics welcoming. It is truly democratic space where members of all classes intermingle and watch one another.

In contrast to Speck's optimistic vision, however, Mike Davis, in the essay "Fortress Los Angeles" from his book City of Quartz, presents an alternate view of downtown as purposefully constructed space. In the picture Davis draws, downtown does not, in fact, belong to everyone.

Davis recounts the "urban renaissance" of Los Angeles in the late 1980s and early 1990s during which time the city underwent a serious makeover, mainly focused, it would seem, with making the educated middle class feel comfortable by insulating them from people they don't want to see. The most insidious of these "improvements" was the city's "experiments with community blockades." In a move that created de-fact ghettos (in the old meaning of the word), the city surrounded neighborhoods supposedly infested with drugs with concrete blockades in order to disrupt the flow of cocaine. But it also disrupted the flow of service industry workers into service industry jobs. It disrupted the flow of anyone living in the neighborhood to get out.

Though the blockades were being used in more suburban neighborhoods, moving downtown doesn't mean that the designs become less oppressive, just that the messages have to be a bit more subtle. There are without question, ways to make certain people feel uncomfortable in a place--to make sure they understand the signs that they are not welcome. Davis explains:

Ramparts and battlements, reflective glass and elevated pedways, are tropes in an architectural language warning off the underclass Other. Although architectural critics are usually blind to this militarized syntax, urban pariah groups--whether young black men, poor Latino immigrants, or elderly homeless females--read the signs immediately.

Disenfranchised groups have learned, often through bitter experience, the vocabularies of built space. They've learned to looks around and know that they are not wanted. For the homeless man, "No Trespassing" signs, blocked walkways, public park closing hours, and benches designed to make it impossible to sleep on them all work to tell him that he is not wanted.

Impractical "armrests" on OKC park benches make it impossible for homeless people to sleep.

If you are middle class and white, you may well find the huge police presence in Bricktown comforting. If you're young and not white, you likely find it a bit disconcerting.

There's great incentive for a city to make sure that the middle class will feel comfortable. After all, we have to pay for these improvements, and we pay for these improvements with the revenue that they generate. So, if a city allows the economics of building communities to take precedence over the human needs of all those living in the community, it becomes easy cater to those whose money is financing the improvements. The problem with the superblocks in LA, Detroit, and Atlanta that Davis mentions was primarily that they were designed to insulate the people they were designed for. A person working in one of these can easily leave home, seal herself in her car for the drive to work, park in a garage that is connected directly to the office building, and never cross paths with someone outside of her own socioeconomic milieu.

Such an arrangement is decidedly un-democratic. In such a model, downtown does not belong to everyone, but only to those whose comfort is profitable.

So, it's important for those of us who concern ourselves with social justice, and economic and racial diversity to remain closely involved and aware of public discussions of community building. If we see downtown as our most democratic public space (and I think Speck is right to), we must work to make sure that everyone is, in fact, invited.

Universal Trashcan Theory: an Argument for Littering

This is an argument for littering. Hear me out. It's a bit satirical, obviously, but it's also valuable enough to consider at face value.

When I was a college student, I got my first teaching job as children's music director at a suburban OKC church. On Saturdays, I would ride around with the youth minister, meeting with kids who ride the bus and their parents to find out which kids would be on the bus in the morning (part of the idea was that coming to visit them would make the commit to coming). We had an active bus ministry, picking kids up and dropping kids off all over the metro area, so our Saturdays visiting kids and parents were long days.  My minister friend would stop for a candy bar and a soda and eat a snack on the road. When he finished, he would crack his window, toss his empty wrappers out and say, "universal trashcan theory." This was a kind of inside joke that, for my friend, never got old. He said that, according to his Universal Trashcan Theory, there would actually be less of a trash problem if, instead of piling all of our trash in one place, we would just spread it around--if everyplace was our trashcan. Of course, it was really just a tongue-in-cheek way for a church youth minister to justify littering. I always found the joke, and the littering, immature and, even as a then young conservative, I found it to be insidiously bad stewardship of the planet.

But as I've thought about it lately, I've decided that he might be on to something. Obviously, it doesn't make us less covered in garbage of we spread it out (as my friend's theory suggested). Rather, it does the opposite. What it would do, and what maybe we need, is make us more aware of our garbage.

When I open up and eat my individually wrapped apple sauce cup and throw it away, I don't have to think about it again. It becomes part of the nebulous pile in my kitchen waste bin until I take it out. Then, once a week, a paid city worker shows up at my house, often before I'm even awake, and takes it away for me. From there, it goes to a well secured site on the outskirts of the city in areas where most of us never go, and they do things with our trash that we don't quite understand (which mostly involves the low tech process of covering it with dirt and high tech processes that keep the decomposing garbage from flowing into ground water).

Through this process of taking our trash and hiding it from us, we are insulated from our own impact on our environment. We can eat mandarin oranges out of a plastic cup with a plastic fork, drink water out of a plastic bottle,  eat a sandwich out of a plastic baggie, eat tuna from a can packaged in a box with a plastic spoon and foil mayonnaise wrapper. Then I can forget that all this packaging even exists. A one cent per dollar sales tax takes care of this for me. I don't have to be confronted with my own growing pile of garbage, because I don't have to live with it.

If, on the other hand, we stop putting our trash in a blue container where it magically disappears, we instead throw it out the window into the neighborhood in which we live, we suddenly must live with the choice we make between a tupperware box and an individual apple sauce cup. As the Starbucks cups start to pile up on the corner, I'll be forced to decide whether or not I ought to just sit down and drink from a porcelain cup. (do they even offer those anymore?)

I'm not a tree-hugging hippie. But I've become increasingly aware that every time I cook dinner, I'm amazed at how much packaging I throw away. Every box I open contains three bags. And I throw all these away. Every time I go to Dunkin' Donuts (which, is like, a lot), I throw away a Styrofoam cup that will decompose sometime after kingdom-come. A college friend of my wife's from Finland used to talk about how amazed she was that everything here comes in disposable packages. In Finland, she explained, people would find this incredibly wasteful. We are addicted to disposable packaging. Of course, just because something is disposable doesn't mean that when I throw it away it's actually disposed of. It's just being moved to somewhere where I don't have to see it anymore.

So, instead, let's force ourselves to see it. Instead of moving it to some man-made no man's land, let's drop it in our own neighborhood. Because, and this is my revised Universal Trashcan Theory, if my neighborhood becomes my trashcan, maybe I'll think more carefully about what I throw away.

Memorabilia Mobile

If you've ever seen this truck tooling around town, it has no doubt caught your eye. I've seen it several times, and I've wondered who drives such a thing and why. It's like a rolling episode of hoarders, except that it's somehow got a method--and (this is my favorite part) it's all baseball stuff. There's equipment, signs, stickers, action figures, and even a Jar Jar Binks in a Cardinal's jersey.

Today, as I was driving down the section of Western near Bishop McGuiness, I saw the truck parked in front of one of the antique stores that line this section of Western. Intrigued (and needing something to write about) I cruised the block two or three times until I saw a man walking out of the store and toward the truck. Knowing this must be the owner, I turned back around. By the time I got my car parked, he was no longer in sight.

So, I knocked on the door to the camper, taking a chance that this guy might be a little off-center, and may not like being bothered. But the man who answered the door was not at all bothered, or even surprised, that some stranger would come knocking. He invited me in, and, still not sure what to think, I accepted his invitation.

As it turns out, Bill Patterson is not a nut job at all. He's a heat and air man who coached baseball for three decades before semi-retiring to his own heat and air business. His truck, which is a rolling expression of his love for the game he used to coach, doubles as a work truck and vacation home.

When work is busy (as it is now, with the cold weather knocking everyone's heat out), the camper is filled with the tools and equipment he needs to service HVAC systems. In fact, this is what he was doing at the antique shop.

During the summer, on the other hand, the Norman resident takes the tools out, puts the mattress back in, and travels around with his three dogs visiting ballparks and sleeping in the camper. He has traveled to every major league ballpark in the US and in Canada, and has even attended a game in Mexico City, all in this rig.

As he goes, he picks up memorabilia to add to his forty year collection.

He began this odd way of collecting when he kept an old work truck when he was coaching. He began collecting baseball related stickers, "the kind of stuff you see at Love's Country Store and places like that." Then, one day, a friend and he came across a baseball themed metal sign. He bought it, and his friend objected, asking "what are you going to do with that?" "I'm going to screw it to my truck," he said. And thus began his rolling collection.

The truck attracts attention everywhere Bill goes. People pull up next to him on the interstate to snap photos and, he says, "I just wave." He's even been chased down by Tulsa World reporter John Clanton, who followed him for miles to interview him. An avid Cardinals fan, he met his son, who is a soldier at Ft. Bragg, in St. Louis when they were in the World Series two seasons ago. They couldn't get tickets, so they parked the truck and enjoyed the atmosphere, tailgating style. They left the truck for a few minutes and returned to find it surrounded by people taking photos and even a TV crew from the St. Louis Fox affiliate, who ultimately did a two and a half minute story on him and his truck. He said he's got the internet address for the story written down somewhere, but, he says,"it's a shame, because I've never touched a computer."

Patterson notes that though he's been so many places, and during the World Series he parked his truck in crime ridden east St Louis, no one has ever stolen anything from the truck. People just love it.

Perhaps my favorite moment in the conversation was when, having told him that I too was a baseball fan, he gave the secret midwinter greeting among baseball fans frustrated with cold weather: "Pitchers and catchers in two weeks."

William Patterson lets me keep him from his job long enough to photograph him with his truck.