Street Ceiling: The Aesthetic of Overhead Cables

I'll open this post with this disclaimer: this is the second post in a row that I've written in response to articles by the Gazette's Ben Felder. I don't intend to let this become a Felder response blog, but he refuses to stop writing about things I care about, so I'll indulge this once more.

This week, it's the modern streetcar project, one of the two MAPS 3 projects I actually want. As the project begins to move into the more specific design phase, the city and streetcar subcommittee must now begin exploring and deciding between wired vs. wireless systems. A wireless system would be more expensive and may push back the completion date (which would add even more expense), but some business owners don't want overhead wires, presumedly because they find them unattractive. So the city must balance both economic and aesthetic concerns. Here, I will make my argument for a wired system which will rest, perhaps surprisingly, on the second concern rather than the first.

Perhaps I'm a but eccentric, but I happen to like the aesthetic of overhead wires. Maybe it's just that I associate streetcars and other wired rail systems with my favorite cities. In particular, I think of Boston's Back Bay, where the famous Green Line comes above ground to serve Northeastern University, the Boston MFA, and Fenway Park. North of Boston, in Cambridge, the busses have moved to hybrid electric motors and are served by overhead lines.  These are my family's old stomping grounds, where I spent many vacations visiting family. Lights rail systems and overhead lines are part of the fabric of a place that holds cherished memories for me.

Electric busses in Cambridge, MA. Photo: Wikipedia

So maybe my love of overhead lines is simple nostalgia. But I think there is a more academic explanation as well, one that I think people without my own summer vacation experiences can appreciate. Urbanist author James Howard Kuntsler explains the importance of good urban design in creating "outdoor rooms" to provide a sense of enclosure. For Kunstler, the appropriate height of buildings, the presence of mature street trees, and controlling the width of streets (to be in proper scale with the height of the buildings) are all important in creating this sense of a large outdoor room.

There are obvious physical reasons for this type of design. Good urban design provides shade and ready protection from the elements, not to mentions passing cars and the fear of street crime. But there are also important psychological qualities to good urban design. A well enclosed (but still porous) streetscape provides a sense of security in the same way that a familiar room or building might.

For Kuntsler, buildings built to the sidewalk, street trees, and narrow streets provide this sense of enclosure, of outdoor rooms, by surrounding a pedestrian with walls with the trees acting as a vaulted ceiling. For me, the overhead cables of a streetcar line provide another kind of ceiling, one less cathedral-like to be sure, but a comforting one nonetheless.

Perhaps this is part of why the spaces where I have the clearest memories of overhead cables are quieter urban neighborhoods like Boston's back bay, Cambridge MA, Midtown Memphis, and sections of San Francisco.

Overhead lines and row houses in San Francisco.

If the tall spaces of a downtown financial district are a city's cathedrals, these surrounding urban neighborhoods with their shorter rooflines and overhead cables are the city's living rooms, the cozy spaces where enculturated locals live.

These neighborhoods, because they have the feeling of a comfortable family room (as opposed to the towering intimidation of a business district full of skyscrapers, or the desert-like wide expanses of a suburban arterial street) provide a kind of stickiness. There is a reason transit stops attract urban housing and small business. Certainly, easy access to mass transit is part of it, but it is also the case that these places are usually the most pleasant to hang out in. I imagine how pleasant it would be to sit in front of Coffee Slingers, protected from traffic by the street parking, and comfortably enclosed by the walls of brick buildings built to the curb curbline and the ceiling of streetcar lines. It's easy to stick to a place like this. So bring on the cables. I, for one, look forward to having this OKC back:

Photo: ACOG Blog

Compulsive Progress and the Death of Stage Center

I remember passing by Stage Center when I was a kid and thinking that it was an industrial building with its suspended condenser units and grain elevator looking staircases.  When I got old enough to know what the building actually was, this knowledge made me feel like a real OKC insider. As I grew up, I began to think of the building as the centerpiece of the Arts Festival (the one time of year I was really around the building back then). I understood that the design of the building was meant to be artistic long before I knew that in fact all architecture was. I thought of Stage Center as a building that was also a sculpture--as art that housed art.

When Carpenter Square moved out of Stage Center after flooding a couple of years ago, I desperately hoped they would move back in. Even after the theatre moved into its new building, I held out hope that it would eventually return "home." I naively thought that some benefactor would eventually bankroll a project to renovate the building and move Carpenter Square back in. This hope faded as Stage Center began to deteriorate. The water features were drained, transient camps grew up in the center of the building only to be torn down by the city then rebuilt again, the walkways were boarded up, then boarded up again with taller boards.

Now the building is set to be demolished to make way for a new skyscraper. When the Stage Center comes down, it will be the newest victim of Oklahoma City's compulsive habit of tearing down its own history to make way for Progress. 

Any long time resident of OKC will be familiar with this habit. As David Pettyjohn told Ben Felder for in the Gazette, "there is this perception that preservation impedes progress."

In 2010, I wrote a short graduate paper (actually designed to be a sample paper for a freshman assignment) in which I performed a rhetorical analysis of this MAPS 3 advertisement:

I argued that the ad operates by exploiting what I called OKC's "fear of devolution," or a fear that any slowing of forward "momentum" amounted to going backward. In fact, the MAPS 3 ad above actually makes this claim when it shows us a dreary 1994 photo of California Ave as the narrator says that, "we can go back to the way things were, or we can build our city and create jobs without raising taxes" as if a failure to pass MAPS 3 would have meant draining the canal, replacing it with a pock marked street and vacant warehouses, and once again buying lawn mowers for the North Canadian.

When I was researching for that 2010 project, I was surprised to find that this rhetorical move has been a hallmark of political ads in OKC for many years. As far back as the "Yes 'Em All" ad campaign for a bond issue in 1968, ads in OKC have relied on this fear of devolution. The "Yes 'Em All" sold us on four lane roads (and the bond issue to build them) by claiming that "we're at a crossroads. We can stop, or we can go forward."

It's incredible how often this message reappears in OKC's discourse of growth. Since I wrote that paper, I've continued to see it in some form with surprising regularity. Even the fundraising ads for the still incomplete American Indian Cultural Center rely on this thread. 

There's an odd pathology in this discourse, one that has been present since at least 1968, and which has had extraordinary impact on the infrastructure and urban planning of Oklahoma City since the [failed] urban renewal projects of the 1970s.

Interestingly, despite the expensive and crippling failure of 1970s style urban renewal, both policy makers and voters in Oklahoma City continue to insist that the only route to progress (whatever that means) is through the continual construction of new things. It's as if we are so convinced that we, as I have often heard of our state, "have no history" that we believe our only option is to be the next up-and-coming city. If we can't attract people with our rich history, the way a city like Boston might, we'll have to attract them with our sparkling newness. In this pursuit, we have consistently denied our own very interesting and decidedly rich, albeit compact, history and subsequently torn it down.

We are, then, stuck in this odd recursive process: we fear that we have no "history" to rely on, so we must build new things to attract people. In building new things, we tear down all our old things. In tearing down our old things, we prevent anything from becoming storied. Because we have nothing storied, we fear that we have no history. Da Capo al infinitum.

Bizarre old Stage Center is the latest victim of this process which, by all signs, will likely continue. And so goodbye Stage Center. May you find architectural heaven and there be with the Biltmore Hotel,   the Criterion Theater, the Hales Building, and so many others.