So Kevin Durant has signed with Golden State, and we're all heart broken about it. That's as it should be. The reason we play, follow, buy, and love sports is that we get to compress our emotions into something outside of ourselves but of relatively low significance. Sports, then, is like a compact dress rehearsal for real life. I am a sports fan. So I don't begrudge people their anger, heartbreak, feelings of betrayal about KD leaving to win himself a sure-thing ring. I'm not one of those people who will flame at angry fans, "why can't you understand it's just a business," or "if only you cared as much about education," and all those other things people say to make themselves feel superior to sportsball fans.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Durant Did Not Invent OKC
So Kevin Durant has signed with Golden State, and we're all heart broken about it. That's as it should be. The reason we play, follow, buy, and love sports is that we get to compress our emotions into something outside of ourselves but of relatively low significance. Sports, then, is like a compact dress rehearsal for real life. I am a sports fan. So I don't begrudge people their anger, heartbreak, feelings of betrayal about KD leaving to win himself a sure-thing ring. I'm not one of those people who will flame at angry fans, "why can't you understand it's just a business," or "if only you cared as much about education," and all those other things people say to make themselves feel superior to sportsball fans.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
Durant Did Not Invent OKC
So Kevin Durant has signed with Golden State, and we're all heart broken about it. That's as it should be. The reason we play, follow, buy, and love sports is that we get to compress our emotions into something outside of ourselves but of relatively low significance. Sports, then, is like a compact dress rehearsal for real life. I am a sports fan. So I don't begrudge people their anger, heartbreak, feelings of betrayal about KD leaving to win himself a sure-thing ring. I'm not one of those people who will flame at angry fans, "why can't you understand it's just a business," or "if only you cared as much about education," and all those other things people say to make themselves feel superior to sportsball fans.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
There is, however, one thing that is irritating me about the dialogue surrounding KD's departure: the suggestions like this one by ESPN writer Royce Young that "[Durant and Westbrook] helped grow a city together."
In Boston a couple weeks ago, an employee at a running store told me that he hopes Durant re-signs with the Thunder because, if he doesn't, the Thunder will be headed back to Seattle. It's not so surprising that a shoe salesman in Boston thinks that without Durant, a fly-over state with lousy weather can't hold on to an NBA team, but it is surprising how many similar (though not so ridiculous) statement are on social media today.
Of course, most of them are actually meant to defend KD. They express how much he did to build the city, represent the city, and so on. And I don't entirely disagree with all of them, but it's important that we remember one thing.
Neither Kevin Durant, nor the Oklahoma City Thunder built this city.
Certainly, the tax revenue created by the Thunder season, especially the deep playoff runs, have been important to our local economy. Certainly, the team and its success have brought (non-bombing related) outside attention to our city. The Thunder have added to the quality of life in this city, and have given the community a team rally around together. But let's be clear:
The Thunder are a result of our city's growth, not the cause of it. This is what the shoe salesman in Boston didn't understand. We brought the Thunder here bacsue we became a place where the team was not only viable, but could thrive.
Superstar players come and go. This may be first in OKC's young history as a big league town, but it won't be last. Kevin Durant was an employee a professional basketball team who lived here for 8 years. He was not a city father. Now he's an employee of a different organization somewhere else. The Thunder is not going to pick up and move back to Seattle because of it. Our districts will not go dark, Devon Tower will not collapse (at least not yet), the canal will not dry up, because Kevin Durant did not build our city. We did.
We built it by investing in infrastructure, and urban walkability. We built it by willingly taxing ourselves to build things that we wanted in our city and that, it turns out, people looking for a place to settle want too. We have a long way to go. We have to fix education here. We have to figure out how to control sprawl and make mass transit survive. We have to diversify our economy so we don't tailspin every time fossil fuel prices hit the skid. But we've come a long way, and we are committed to growing even more and even better, despite what happens on a basketball team.
We built the city. And we are sticking around.
Monday, December 7, 2015
Killing the Chronicle to..Save...Lives?
Tomorrow, a re-worked version of Oklahoma City's proposed ordinance against panhandling in medians will be considered by City Council. When Ward 6 Councilwoman Meg Salyer introduced the proposal in September, the ordinance was explicitly designed to rid city streets of the blight of panhandling, addressing it as a quality of life issue--not for the panhandlers, but rather for the people in their cars who don't wish to look at panhandlers.
After substantial public outcry, the proposal was tabled utimately until December 8. Since then, supporters of the proposal have shifted the focus away from panhandling per se and onto public safety, now claiming that the ordinance is needed to save the lives of people in the medians, who are at risk of being struck by motorists. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma City Homeless Alliance, which supports the popular Curbside Chronicle, a paper which employs the homeless, claims that the ordinance will kill the Chronicle, 90% of whose sales are made from public medians.
I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case. I'm not at all sure that the Chronicle will be destroyed of vendors are forced to move from the median to the curbside. I am, however, completely convinced that "safety" is not at all the true purpose of this ordinance. The city has been unable to show that people being hit by cars while in the median has been a considerable or consistent problem. One highly publicized case involved a firefighter being killed in Michigan while collecting money during the "Fill the Boot" campaign, but this turned out to be a premeditated homicide. Meanwhile, Phil Sipe, president of OKC's IAFF, the firefighter's union, said in the NewsOK linked above that the most serious injury he can recall in our own city during a Fill the Boot campaign has been a sprained ankle.
The fact is, there is no data to support claims that this ordinance is necessary for public safety. Instead, tying the issue to public safety is clearly a rhetorical move, made to make an anti-panhandling ordinance (which many critics consider an anti-poverty ordinance) more palatable. The need to address poverty and homelessness is very real. And the need to address panhandling is even understandable. I fully appreciate that many in the voting public are uncomfortable being constantly confronted with panhandlers, though I admittedly look down on these people for their squeamishness. But to claim that this ordinance is about safety, and not about getting rid of panhandlers is simply disingenuous.
I don't personally think that panhandling ordinances are useful. They do nothing to solve the real, root problems, or even to improve them. Rather, they simply sweep the problem under the rug and may even make it worse. While there is some research (and a great deal of overblown anecdotal evidence) to suggest that many panhandlers are not truly street-homeless, policies that may inhibit worthwhile projects like the Chronicle, the work of the Restoration Church, the Fire Department's "Fill the Boot" campaign, and the like are not at all helpful. To me it's clear that there's not actual public safety problem at issue here. The actual question is if we are willing to kill off the Chronicle in order to insure that commuters in our urban areas have a less ugly ride to work.
After substantial public outcry, the proposal was tabled utimately until December 8. Since then, supporters of the proposal have shifted the focus away from panhandling per se and onto public safety, now claiming that the ordinance is needed to save the lives of people in the medians, who are at risk of being struck by motorists. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma City Homeless Alliance, which supports the popular Curbside Chronicle, a paper which employs the homeless, claims that the ordinance will kill the Chronicle, 90% of whose sales are made from public medians.
I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case. I'm not at all sure that the Chronicle will be destroyed of vendors are forced to move from the median to the curbside. I am, however, completely convinced that "safety" is not at all the true purpose of this ordinance. The city has been unable to show that people being hit by cars while in the median has been a considerable or consistent problem. One highly publicized case involved a firefighter being killed in Michigan while collecting money during the "Fill the Boot" campaign, but this turned out to be a premeditated homicide. Meanwhile, Phil Sipe, president of OKC's IAFF, the firefighter's union, said in the NewsOK linked above that the most serious injury he can recall in our own city during a Fill the Boot campaign has been a sprained ankle.
The fact is, there is no data to support claims that this ordinance is necessary for public safety. Instead, tying the issue to public safety is clearly a rhetorical move, made to make an anti-panhandling ordinance (which many critics consider an anti-poverty ordinance) more palatable. The need to address poverty and homelessness is very real. And the need to address panhandling is even understandable. I fully appreciate that many in the voting public are uncomfortable being constantly confronted with panhandlers, though I admittedly look down on these people for their squeamishness. But to claim that this ordinance is about safety, and not about getting rid of panhandlers is simply disingenuous.
I don't personally think that panhandling ordinances are useful. They do nothing to solve the real, root problems, or even to improve them. Rather, they simply sweep the problem under the rug and may even make it worse. While there is some research (and a great deal of overblown anecdotal evidence) to suggest that many panhandlers are not truly street-homeless, policies that may inhibit worthwhile projects like the Chronicle, the work of the Restoration Church, the Fire Department's "Fill the Boot" campaign, and the like are not at all helpful. To me it's clear that there's not actual public safety problem at issue here. The actual question is if we are willing to kill off the Chronicle in order to insure that commuters in our urban areas have a less ugly ride to work.
Sunday, September 13, 2015
Imploding Downtown. . .Again, or 'the Problem of Missing Teeth'
This morning, the former Hotel Black and the Motor Hotel next-door were imploded as the 400 block of West Sheridan continues to be cleared to make way for new development. This comes after the hotly debated destruction of the Union Bus Station at 427 W Sheridan in July, after Councilman Ed Shadid's efforts to save it through litigation failed.
I admit that I will have a hard time missing 427 West Sheridan. Generally, if I know a place by its specific street address, that's a bad sign. It means I've had plenty of negative contact with the place. So though I understand the general anger among otherwise like-minded folks over the demolition of the Union Bus Station, I have a hard time mustering the righteous indignation I was able to for Stage Center (a place I loved and whose address I do not know). I'm more bothered by the destruction of the old Hotel Black, whose glass encased penthouse (or whatever that was) was one of the defining features of our skyline for me when I was a kid. I also hated to see the destruction of the block of retail store fronts along the south side of Main Street. Though they were all empty, and perhaps no longer viable, I loved the porcelain tiled facades that so richly captured their period.
What worries me most, though, is whether or not anything worth having will actually replace these. It's bad enough that historic buildings with lovely facades are being destroyed. But I would at least feel a bit better if I had more faith that something worth building would actually replace them.
Perhaps my fears are unfounded. Before the block was cleared, plans were well underway to develop the 27 story 499 Sheridan project, which already has two major tenants. It's just that we in OKC have heard all this before.
In the 1970s, the Pei Plan called for huge swaths of downtown to be razed to make way for the future Myriad Gardens, the Galleria shopping center, and several other projects. Much of the demolition work, which is cheap compared to actually building new projects, was done so that by the end of the decade, vacant lots separated the financial district from Film Row (where not much was going on and which is only recently on the upswing).
Then, the oil bust of the early 1980s came. A detailed account of the boom/bust and its effects on Downtown development can be found in Steve Lackmeyer and Jack Money's book OKC: Second Time Around (Full Circle Books, OKC), essential reading for OKC enthusiasts. The short account is that many of the planned projects were abandoned. The botanical gardens and the Crystal Bridge were eventually completed, as was a portion of the Galleria which mostly sat empty until the Oklahoman moved into the building recently. Many of the lots that remained were eventually bought on the cheap and paved over into parking lots.
This created what planners have called "missing teeth" (see Jeff Speck Walkable City, 214-5). These gaps in the urban fabric of a city create a sort of false barrier. People don't want to walk across the open, unshaded and uninhabited space of a parking lot, so they simply don't. Thus, each part of downtown becomes an enclosed space, separated and disconnected from all the other enclosed spaces downtown. These empty spaces are part of what makes a downtown un-walkable, unenjoyable, and uninhabitable. (To see how these missing teeth have changed the look of several cities in the period of urban sprawl, see Shane Hampton's overhead slider project for OU-IQC, "60 Years of Urban Change.")
Of course, this is not a problem if the 499 project goes along as planned. But as the lot that's supposed to house the new OG&E headquarters sits fallow across the street (a project that was supposed to begin as early as May), and oil and natural gas prices plummet, I worry that we are simply going to go through the same cycle all over again. After all, this period of renewed fervor to reclaim downtown followed by a stagnating energy market seems eerily reminiscent of, well, the last time the exact same thing happened. What if these projects, like the projects of the 70s, are abandoned? Will the Motor Hotel, Hotel Black, and the Union Bus Station become parking lots?
I hated 427 W Sheridan, but not near as much as I would hate another parking lot in the middle of downtown. I will hopefully (probably?) look back and wonder why I was ever so worried about this. I'm probably afraid over nothing. I'm probably being reactionary. But I can't help it; I'm an Oklahoman, and I've seen it all before.
I admit that I will have a hard time missing 427 West Sheridan. Generally, if I know a place by its specific street address, that's a bad sign. It means I've had plenty of negative contact with the place. So though I understand the general anger among otherwise like-minded folks over the demolition of the Union Bus Station, I have a hard time mustering the righteous indignation I was able to for Stage Center (a place I loved and whose address I do not know). I'm more bothered by the destruction of the old Hotel Black, whose glass encased penthouse (or whatever that was) was one of the defining features of our skyline for me when I was a kid. I also hated to see the destruction of the block of retail store fronts along the south side of Main Street. Though they were all empty, and perhaps no longer viable, I loved the porcelain tiled facades that so richly captured their period.
What worries me most, though, is whether or not anything worth having will actually replace these. It's bad enough that historic buildings with lovely facades are being destroyed. But I would at least feel a bit better if I had more faith that something worth building would actually replace them.
Perhaps my fears are unfounded. Before the block was cleared, plans were well underway to develop the 27 story 499 Sheridan project, which already has two major tenants. It's just that we in OKC have heard all this before.
In the 1970s, the Pei Plan called for huge swaths of downtown to be razed to make way for the future Myriad Gardens, the Galleria shopping center, and several other projects. Much of the demolition work, which is cheap compared to actually building new projects, was done so that by the end of the decade, vacant lots separated the financial district from Film Row (where not much was going on and which is only recently on the upswing).
Then, the oil bust of the early 1980s came. A detailed account of the boom/bust and its effects on Downtown development can be found in Steve Lackmeyer and Jack Money's book OKC: Second Time Around (Full Circle Books, OKC), essential reading for OKC enthusiasts. The short account is that many of the planned projects were abandoned. The botanical gardens and the Crystal Bridge were eventually completed, as was a portion of the Galleria which mostly sat empty until the Oklahoman moved into the building recently. Many of the lots that remained were eventually bought on the cheap and paved over into parking lots.
This created what planners have called "missing teeth" (see Jeff Speck Walkable City, 214-5). These gaps in the urban fabric of a city create a sort of false barrier. People don't want to walk across the open, unshaded and uninhabited space of a parking lot, so they simply don't. Thus, each part of downtown becomes an enclosed space, separated and disconnected from all the other enclosed spaces downtown. These empty spaces are part of what makes a downtown un-walkable, unenjoyable, and uninhabitable. (To see how these missing teeth have changed the look of several cities in the period of urban sprawl, see Shane Hampton's overhead slider project for OU-IQC, "60 Years of Urban Change.")
Of course, this is not a problem if the 499 project goes along as planned. But as the lot that's supposed to house the new OG&E headquarters sits fallow across the street (a project that was supposed to begin as early as May), and oil and natural gas prices plummet, I worry that we are simply going to go through the same cycle all over again. After all, this period of renewed fervor to reclaim downtown followed by a stagnating energy market seems eerily reminiscent of, well, the last time the exact same thing happened. What if these projects, like the projects of the 70s, are abandoned? Will the Motor Hotel, Hotel Black, and the Union Bus Station become parking lots?
I hated 427 W Sheridan, but not near as much as I would hate another parking lot in the middle of downtown. I will hopefully (probably?) look back and wonder why I was ever so worried about this. I'm probably afraid over nothing. I'm probably being reactionary. But I can't help it; I'm an Oklahoman, and I've seen it all before.
Thursday, July 2, 2015
Plaza Mayor WILL Fail. . .Thank God
I spent the early part of my career on the south side, patrolling from Santa Fe to Portland and the river to SW Grand Blvd. SW 29th street is the main artery of the area and so I was up and down that street a dozen times a day. Though the traffic is at times horrendous, one of the things I loved about SW 29th street, then and now, is that so few of the signs are in English.
For me, the presence of districts where the signs are in languages other than English is a sign of a great city. They suggest a number of things that are important in a thriving urban area. First, they suggest international influence and diversity (albeit a limited type of diversity, since a possible drawback of these districts is that they may allow people to remain segregated in their own neighborhoods). They also suggest a strong sense of community and loyalty, anchored in a sense of place. This sense of place, of being grounded, promotes community involvement, responsibility, and ownership.
While certainly the international neighborhoods in Oklahoma city, notably the SW 29th Street corridor and the Asian District, cannot rival neighborhoods in other cities like the Chinatowns of LA, NYC, and San Francisco, or the North End in Boston, they are hidden gems in our city, deserving of attention and investment. One of my frustrations working on the south side was that it had so much potential but received so little investment. I've believed for several years that SW 29th Street, already a natural commercial district by virtue of its location within OKC's sizable Hispanic community, could become a thriving destination, a place where Hispanic business owners might enjoy the benefits of the kind of local chic, hipster vibe of places like Paseo and the Plaza District (though there's admittedly drawbacks to this, like gentrification. A subject for another time).
So, in 2013, it was with great irritation that I learned of plans to rebrand the old Crossroads Mall into Plaza Mayor in an attempt to lure Hispanic businesses into one place to "serve" the Hispanic community (and to save the dying mall). This plan horrified me for a number of reasons. First, it felt a bit gross that developers seemed to be trying to save a failing business model by passing it down to a minority community. Something just didn't feel right about, once again, bequeathing to minority communities our used-up, hand-me-down, middle-class commodities.
My greater fear, however, was that it would work--at least a little for a little while. My fear was that Plaza Mayor would pull Hispanic businesses and services away from SW 29th street, Commerce Avenue, and other Hispanic business districts that were embedded within the actual Hispanic community. Of course, developers tried to sell the idea that the Hispanic community in OKC was centered in the south side and so, Crossroads being on the the south side, this was a perfect place for such a development. We're putting businesses for the Hispanic community where the community lives. Sounds great, right? Of course, the fact is that this is only true if we're still thinking in terms of middle-class suburban car culture. This is because, in reality, no one lives near any mall. Just look at the overhead view:
This is why every time I drive past the empty Plaza Mayor parking lot, I'm encouraged by the hope that it will die sooner rather than later, before it is able to destroy the neighborhoods I grew to love early in my career. I'm also encouraged by today's report by the Oklahoman's Brianna Bailey that community leaders on the south side have begun working to secure public support for development on SW 29th street.
After all, many of the pieces are already in place to make SW 29th the kind of thriving urban neighborhood that might rival international districts in other cities. There are loyal, grounded residents in close proximity. There are a few well-established cornerstone restaurants like Taqueria de Los Desvelados (my favorite). On weekend nights, the street is teaming with taco trucks and people cruising in customized cars, giving the street healthy potential for a thriving street festival scene.
One of the things the area needs is some coordination--someone to connect with in-place neighborhood associations like the College Hill NA, a well-run, highly involved model of a neighborhood association. College Hill, hosts its own neighborhood movie nights, projecting movies onto screens in members' backyards, meets with police and fire officials for Neighborhood Night Out, gets together for ice cream and "Mexican Bingo," and so on. With support from and coordination with other NAs and business owners, these types of events could easily become district events rather than neighborhood ones.
But the area also needs and deserves some public investment. The area needs better sidewalks and well marked crosswalks to make 29th street more walkable and more suited to gathering. As it exists, SW 29th street is pretty uncomfortable if you're not in a car. The street, which has a reputation for being in a "bad side of town" could also use more highly visible but benign police presence, like one might see in Bricktown or at the Fair, in volumes high enough to make visitors feel safe but laissez faire enough to be part of the atmosphere. Finally, district signs, decorative lighting and other "placemaking" amenities visible in other neighborhoods would help to give the residents in the district a sense of pride and the affirmation that the city supports their efforts.
There is enough neighborhood loyalty, community interest, and embedded commercial presence on the south side that, with some reasonable public investment to support what's already being done there by private citizens and business owners, the SW 29th street corridor could become one of OKC's really cool places. Though, admittedly, Big Truck Tacos should worry about what would happen if hipsters were to find out about south side truck tacos. And perhaps the south side should also be a bit worried about hipster-creep.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Alternative Other Cities: Chicago-and its Suburbs
Being good urbanists and all, our family doesn't go to resorts or lakes for our family vacations. We go to cities where we don't rent a car, but rather use public transportation. We try to break free from the tourist areas and break out into neighborhoods where we can explore local haunts, talk to people live there who don't make money by catering to us, listen to the accents, and so on. We try to learn the individual character of cities.
This summer, when a large family trip to Germany was cancelled, we decided instead to visit Chicago, a city that my wife Charissa has never been to, and that I have only been to once when I was 14. We did plenty of touristy things, like taking in the museums and Navy Pier and the chrome bean in Millennium Park, but we also branched out to visit the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge in the near west side, a dive Pierogi restaurant underneath the "L" train, a rich-people neighborhood north of downtown where we found an early Frank Lloyd Wright (designed with Louis Sullivan), and a small chocolate shop in Old Town where one can buy a chocolate popsicle shaped like the Star of David or a chocolate Colt 1911. I even got us going the wrong direction on the green line and took a ride through the high rise projects in south Chicago.
On about the third day, we began to notice just how often we were hearing references to the "suburbs." Obviously, this isn't particularly uncommon in cities, but something was different about the way Chicagoans use the word--with a kind of tone of voice. The word was used as a kind of blanket to refer not to a place so much as a nebulous concept. In seven days, I never heard the actual name of a town, but rather only heard references to the generic "suburbs." One of the more telling uses of "suburbs" came from the semi-official language of television news, when an anchor discussed a large traffic accident on an inbound interstate, mentioning that "police, along with 'suburban' departments" were on scene. "Police" meant Chicago PD. Meanwhile, the "suburban" departments were not named. Even in the official discourse of the news, there seemed to be Chicago and everywhere else. Charissa even overheard a conversation in Wrigley field where a woman told a Chicagoan that she lived "in the suburb northwest of here," as if even a local would not have known where she was talking about if she had used the name of the town.
These are just a couple examples of this usage that we heard over and over. I have never been in a city that has such a self-conscious divide between city and suburb. I asked a architectural tour guide (one of those touristy things we did) about this, asking him why people seemed to have such disdain in their voices when they used the word "suburbs" here. He rolled his eyes and explained this a couple ways. First he said that people who live in the suburbs are "always telling people they live in Chicago, but they don't." This explanation is pretty common in big cities, even in Oklahoma City. The more telling explanation to me, which seemed an aside for him was this: "When I go out there, I get lost." A similar sentiment was echoed by my friend Michael, who we met for lunch while we were there. I forgot to ask him specifically about this issue (though I planned to) but at one point I complained about my own recent move to a suburban neighborhood and how I couldn't bike everywhere anymore. He mentioned that his wife's parents live in the "suburbs" near Chicago and that every time he "goes out there," he realizes that suburban life is not for him.
People in Chicago and people in its suburbs just don't seem to mix much. Chicago, an old city with lots of open land around it, may have the most meaningful divide between the city and the rail-road suburb of any city I've visited. In an old and compact city like Boston, you'd have to drive a long way before you're in a suburb that actually feels suburban. Many of Boston's suburbs still feel very urban, so the distinction between Boston and Belmont down't feel so extreme. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, the nation's second largest city but a relative late bloomer built after the advent of the automobile, is itself almost entirely suburban, so the difference between city and suburbs there is a technicality. In Chicago, on the other hand, the city itself is classically urban, while the suburbs are definitively suburban.
The distance between the two is not a simple matter of heavy inbound traffic, but of the two different lifestyles that have come to define urban living versus suburban living. Chicago, then, is an interesting laboratory in what makes these lifestyles different and, perhaps, incompatible. It would have been interesting to have explores the suburbs and heard from people "out there." But, alas, the suburban transit lines cost extra.
This summer, when a large family trip to Germany was cancelled, we decided instead to visit Chicago, a city that my wife Charissa has never been to, and that I have only been to once when I was 14. We did plenty of touristy things, like taking in the museums and Navy Pier and the chrome bean in Millennium Park, but we also branched out to visit the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge in the near west side, a dive Pierogi restaurant underneath the "L" train, a rich-people neighborhood north of downtown where we found an early Frank Lloyd Wright (designed with Louis Sullivan), and a small chocolate shop in Old Town where one can buy a chocolate popsicle shaped like the Star of David or a chocolate Colt 1911. I even got us going the wrong direction on the green line and took a ride through the high rise projects in south Chicago.
On about the third day, we began to notice just how often we were hearing references to the "suburbs." Obviously, this isn't particularly uncommon in cities, but something was different about the way Chicagoans use the word--with a kind of tone of voice. The word was used as a kind of blanket to refer not to a place so much as a nebulous concept. In seven days, I never heard the actual name of a town, but rather only heard references to the generic "suburbs." One of the more telling uses of "suburbs" came from the semi-official language of television news, when an anchor discussed a large traffic accident on an inbound interstate, mentioning that "police, along with 'suburban' departments" were on scene. "Police" meant Chicago PD. Meanwhile, the "suburban" departments were not named. Even in the official discourse of the news, there seemed to be Chicago and everywhere else. Charissa even overheard a conversation in Wrigley field where a woman told a Chicagoan that she lived "in the suburb northwest of here," as if even a local would not have known where she was talking about if she had used the name of the town.
These are just a couple examples of this usage that we heard over and over. I have never been in a city that has such a self-conscious divide between city and suburb. I asked a architectural tour guide (one of those touristy things we did) about this, asking him why people seemed to have such disdain in their voices when they used the word "suburbs" here. He rolled his eyes and explained this a couple ways. First he said that people who live in the suburbs are "always telling people they live in Chicago, but they don't." This explanation is pretty common in big cities, even in Oklahoma City. The more telling explanation to me, which seemed an aside for him was this: "When I go out there, I get lost." A similar sentiment was echoed by my friend Michael, who we met for lunch while we were there. I forgot to ask him specifically about this issue (though I planned to) but at one point I complained about my own recent move to a suburban neighborhood and how I couldn't bike everywhere anymore. He mentioned that his wife's parents live in the "suburbs" near Chicago and that every time he "goes out there," he realizes that suburban life is not for him.
People in Chicago and people in its suburbs just don't seem to mix much. Chicago, an old city with lots of open land around it, may have the most meaningful divide between the city and the rail-road suburb of any city I've visited. In an old and compact city like Boston, you'd have to drive a long way before you're in a suburb that actually feels suburban. Many of Boston's suburbs still feel very urban, so the distinction between Boston and Belmont down't feel so extreme. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, the nation's second largest city but a relative late bloomer built after the advent of the automobile, is itself almost entirely suburban, so the difference between city and suburbs there is a technicality. In Chicago, on the other hand, the city itself is classically urban, while the suburbs are definitively suburban.
The distance between the two is not a simple matter of heavy inbound traffic, but of the two different lifestyles that have come to define urban living versus suburban living. Chicago, then, is an interesting laboratory in what makes these lifestyles different and, perhaps, incompatible. It would have been interesting to have explores the suburbs and heard from people "out there." But, alas, the suburban transit lines cost extra.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Marathon Therapy--For Me, for the City
I am not the only person who runs as a form of therapy. In fact, it's a common enough motivation that it inspires t-shirts. I was always a runner as a kid, but I slowed down a lot after the police academy because, well, the police academy will make you sick to death of running. I would run two or three miles on a treadmill as a warm-up to weight training and because doctors say you should have 20-30 minutes of cardio a day (or has that gone up now?) but that was about it for ten years. Then, in October, we put our house on the market and I turned into a basket case. I wasn't sleeping, I had ridiculous anxiety, I was not eating well. I'm a bit high-strung anyway, and the stress of buying and selling houses, packing, and moving sent me over the edge, despite the fact that the whole process went remarkably smoothly. I was actually to the point where I thought it might be time to seek professional help. Instead, I went running. And I kept running.
As my distances began to get longer and my times faster, I began to think I might like to train for the half-marathon. After all, the twentieth anniversary of the Murrah Bombing would be coming, so the Memorial Marathon seemed like a natural fit for my first timed distance run. So I began to take it seriously. Until two months ago, I wasn't sure I'd make it. I kept getting sick over the winter with stuff my kids were bringing home, so my training was falling off. But when it warmed up and I got up to eleven miles, I signed up. A couple months later, the Half Marathon medal hangs in my closet, the 13.1 sticker is on my rear windshield, and like many newly initiated distance runners, I'm hooked.
The Memorial Marathon was especially meaningful for me because the Memorial Half is a running tour of the neighborhoods where I've spent most of my career. I love these old neighborhoods: the tall buildings and shadowy streets of downtown, the stately approach toward the capital building, the handsome old houses of Mesta Park, Heritage Hills, and Crown Heights. Throughout the run, I got the sense that I was doing something I would never forget in places I love to remember. The whole run was very touching and meaningful for me.
I would be remiss to neglect the stated purpose of the Marathon itself: a fund raiser to support the OKC National Memorial, and an event explicitly dedicated to the memory of those lost in the Murrah Bombing. I have been reluctant to write about the events of April 19, 1995 for a number of reasons. For one thing, I am suspicious of the common "where were you when you found out," kinds of conversations. I understand the importance of public memory and take seriously the realness of public grief, but I also fear the temptation of making the event about myself, when so many, some that I know well, were effected much more personally than I. For another thing, with months of buildup by local media outlets, I fear exploitation of the event and its victims. I don't want to be simply adding to the noise, noise that a great many people, including some that I love very much, are trying as hard as they can to avoid. For some people, the notion that "We Will Never Forget" is not a well-meaning promise, but a horrifying curse.
Nevertheless, the event was a large part of my motivation to run. In 1995, my father was a crime scene detective on the Oklahoma City Police Department, and my step-father, who I lived with, was an Oklahoma City Firefighter. Both of them are strong, courageous, and empathic men, and both were caught up in the Hell of that month. My step-father spent nearly a month digging through the rubble of the bombed out building, and my father spent that same time assigned to the Medical Examiner's Office processing the bodies of the victims. Unsurprisingly, the event had a singular impact on them and on our family in ways that are, frankly, no one's business.
My dad's were and are exceptional men. They both went into their respective professions for all the right reasons. They are brave and caring, and what they experienced in that month hurt them, probably more deeply that I actually understand (they both hold their cards pretty close). I have always felt a debt to them for spending a month in a place they would not allow me to even go see. For this reason, I saw the run as a way to honor them. When training was tough, when my body was breaking down, or I felt sick, I pushed on by telling myself, "they spent a month in Hell; I can spend a few hours running." It's an empty ovation, I'm sure. A run that many people do for fun cannot really repay for the sacrifices made by any of those who were forced to sacrifice in 1995 and in the years since, but it's all I can really do: to endure in order to honor their endurance.
Beyond this, (and I didn't really think about this until during the run) it became a way to reclaim the month and the sight. April is no longer the month, and NW 5th and Harvey is no longer the place that tried to destroy my fathers and my family. It's the time and place where I accomplished something really difficult and important. In a way that is admittedly imperfect and which may or may not be lasting, at least in my own psyche, I've taken back my family. At the very least, I've reclaimed the month of April.
This notion occurred to me as a ran up Lincoln Blvd, with the field of flags in front of the capital on one side, and hand-written posters with the names of victims on the other. The Marathon itself hangs signs on light posts with the names on all 168 victims along the course, but far more touching are the hand-written signs that people along the course hold. Friends and family of victims participate as spectators, make home-made signs, hand out medals at the finish line, serve as board members, and run the race. In fact, the whole city is involved in the race. Spectators line the entire 26 mile course, stand in front of their houses handing out food and drinks to runners, and cheer for people they don't know. Neighborhood associations decorate their neighborhoods and line the streets in ridiculous costumes. Two local T.V. stations preempt programming to carry the race on live television. This communal effort speaks to the meaning of the Memorial Marathon for this city. The city was injured, horrified, and changed forever in April of 1995. But through the Marathon, we've taken back that time and place. We've reclaimed it for ourselves and for our community. Downtown in April is no longer a place of defeat, fear, and injury. Instead, it's a place of celebration, strength, endurance, and triumph.
As my distances began to get longer and my times faster, I began to think I might like to train for the half-marathon. After all, the twentieth anniversary of the Murrah Bombing would be coming, so the Memorial Marathon seemed like a natural fit for my first timed distance run. So I began to take it seriously. Until two months ago, I wasn't sure I'd make it. I kept getting sick over the winter with stuff my kids were bringing home, so my training was falling off. But when it warmed up and I got up to eleven miles, I signed up. A couple months later, the Half Marathon medal hangs in my closet, the 13.1 sticker is on my rear windshield, and like many newly initiated distance runners, I'm hooked.
The Memorial Marathon was especially meaningful for me because the Memorial Half is a running tour of the neighborhoods where I've spent most of my career. I love these old neighborhoods: the tall buildings and shadowy streets of downtown, the stately approach toward the capital building, the handsome old houses of Mesta Park, Heritage Hills, and Crown Heights. Throughout the run, I got the sense that I was doing something I would never forget in places I love to remember. The whole run was very touching and meaningful for me.
I would be remiss to neglect the stated purpose of the Marathon itself: a fund raiser to support the OKC National Memorial, and an event explicitly dedicated to the memory of those lost in the Murrah Bombing. I have been reluctant to write about the events of April 19, 1995 for a number of reasons. For one thing, I am suspicious of the common "where were you when you found out," kinds of conversations. I understand the importance of public memory and take seriously the realness of public grief, but I also fear the temptation of making the event about myself, when so many, some that I know well, were effected much more personally than I. For another thing, with months of buildup by local media outlets, I fear exploitation of the event and its victims. I don't want to be simply adding to the noise, noise that a great many people, including some that I love very much, are trying as hard as they can to avoid. For some people, the notion that "We Will Never Forget" is not a well-meaning promise, but a horrifying curse.
Nevertheless, the event was a large part of my motivation to run. In 1995, my father was a crime scene detective on the Oklahoma City Police Department, and my step-father, who I lived with, was an Oklahoma City Firefighter. Both of them are strong, courageous, and empathic men, and both were caught up in the Hell of that month. My step-father spent nearly a month digging through the rubble of the bombed out building, and my father spent that same time assigned to the Medical Examiner's Office processing the bodies of the victims. Unsurprisingly, the event had a singular impact on them and on our family in ways that are, frankly, no one's business.
My dad's were and are exceptional men. They both went into their respective professions for all the right reasons. They are brave and caring, and what they experienced in that month hurt them, probably more deeply that I actually understand (they both hold their cards pretty close). I have always felt a debt to them for spending a month in a place they would not allow me to even go see. For this reason, I saw the run as a way to honor them. When training was tough, when my body was breaking down, or I felt sick, I pushed on by telling myself, "they spent a month in Hell; I can spend a few hours running." It's an empty ovation, I'm sure. A run that many people do for fun cannot really repay for the sacrifices made by any of those who were forced to sacrifice in 1995 and in the years since, but it's all I can really do: to endure in order to honor their endurance.
Beyond this, (and I didn't really think about this until during the run) it became a way to reclaim the month and the sight. April is no longer the month, and NW 5th and Harvey is no longer the place that tried to destroy my fathers and my family. It's the time and place where I accomplished something really difficult and important. In a way that is admittedly imperfect and which may or may not be lasting, at least in my own psyche, I've taken back my family. At the very least, I've reclaimed the month of April.
This notion occurred to me as a ran up Lincoln Blvd, with the field of flags in front of the capital on one side, and hand-written posters with the names of victims on the other. The Marathon itself hangs signs on light posts with the names on all 168 victims along the course, but far more touching are the hand-written signs that people along the course hold. Friends and family of victims participate as spectators, make home-made signs, hand out medals at the finish line, serve as board members, and run the race. In fact, the whole city is involved in the race. Spectators line the entire 26 mile course, stand in front of their houses handing out food and drinks to runners, and cheer for people they don't know. Neighborhood associations decorate their neighborhoods and line the streets in ridiculous costumes. Two local T.V. stations preempt programming to carry the race on live television. This communal effort speaks to the meaning of the Memorial Marathon for this city. The city was injured, horrified, and changed forever in April of 1995. But through the Marathon, we've taken back that time and place. We've reclaimed it for ourselves and for our community. Downtown in April is no longer a place of defeat, fear, and injury. Instead, it's a place of celebration, strength, endurance, and triumph.
Monday, January 12, 2015
Silent City
As an admitted OKC homer (that phrase is part of my Twitter profile description), I am proud of our city. I brag about how far it's come, how sneaky-cool it is, how it's headed in the right direction, and so on. But I'm also careful to remember that we have a long way to go, both in policy and in the culture of our city. I'm careful to accept our "city on the rise" rhetoric because I think that nothing will hinder our progress like buying too much into our own hype. There is a danger that we may become unreflective. It is in this spirit that I write this sort of "State of the Urban City."
Recently, we hosted a Korean student who needed a place to stay in the week before the dorms opened. This was his first time in the U.S. so being good hosts, we were eager to show him around as much as we could. Park, our guest, is from Seoul, South Korea, one of the great mega-cities of the world. It's home to ten million people and center of a metropolis of twenty-five million. But it's also in the midst of a transitional period between traditional Asian culture and a more westernized one. Korean young people increasingly emulate American culture. For this reason, among others I'm sure, Park was very eager to learn and we were very eager to teach. As usual, I ended up learning more than I taught.
On Park's first full day here, we took him downtown in the late afternoon. It was the tail end of a chilly workday with the Thunder on the road. It was in the last few days of December. People were ice skating at the Myriad Gardens and snow sledding at the ballpark. A family was taking family photos in the Devon Tower atrium, hispanic students rode through Bricktown on Spokies bikes and people stood in a sizable line inside Starbucks. All in all, not a bad day. By Oklahoma City standards.
On the other hand, other than these few pockets of activity, not much else was going on. The Winter Shoppes had all closed but the temporary structures were still there. Ironically, these added to the feeling that nothing was going on. After all, what says "there's nothing here" better than structures where there is supposed to be something that is no longer there. Also, though it was the end of the workday, no one hung around to walk downtown or visit pubs to unwind from the day. Nobody was walking to nearby apartments or transit stops. Instead, and despite the huge growth of the downtown housing market, most people still got into their cars and drove back to their homes in the suburbs.
We walked all over downtown. We crossed streets with ease, went into the underground when we wanted to warm up (it was also empty), bought shirts at the Thunder Shop, stood in line for $4 coffee at Starbucks, took pictures from the top of the Bricktown parking garage and in the atrium of Devon Tower. As we were walking back to the car, Park said something in his broken English that brought into perspective just how far we've come (15 years ago, I would not have brought him downtown) but also how far we have to go. It was this:
A few days later, on New Year's Day, we took him to Qual Springs Mall. It was a totally different scene. It turns out, New Year's Day is a big shopping day (who knew). The stores and hallways were packed with people, the music was lively, people ate in the food court, and waited in line for movies at AMC. At one store, long tables of women's shoes were on sale, and the crowds had gathered to rifle through them, bumping into each other, spilling boxes onto the floor, arguing with each other and so on. We ran into people we knew at least three times, snacked, and window shopped. In other words, all the stuff that should happen on the street in healthy urban neighborhoods.
The message here, at least to me, is that with all our improvements, the centers of our lives are still out in the outskirts, where we park in huge parking lots and walk in the climate controlled, high-overhead, false urbanity of the shopping mall. One may argue that it was the cold weather than kept people from downtown, and it's not fair that I'm using a December day to critique our city. But urbanists love to point out that the number of months outdoor cafes are open in Stockholm is twelve, and the liveliest time of year in many cold German cities is Christmas, whose outdoor holiday markets are famously competitive. This may indeed be a factor here in OKC, but pedestrian cities with long winters know how to do winter.
The lesson here is that Oklahoma City is still, in large part, an event city. Downtown is lively in the hours before a Thunder home game. Midtown and SOSA is flooded on an H&8th night. However, we don't yet have a city that is organically vibrant, un-planned cool, naturally urban. We may be "on the rise," but we haven't yet risen.
Recently, we hosted a Korean student who needed a place to stay in the week before the dorms opened. This was his first time in the U.S. so being good hosts, we were eager to show him around as much as we could. Park, our guest, is from Seoul, South Korea, one of the great mega-cities of the world. It's home to ten million people and center of a metropolis of twenty-five million. But it's also in the midst of a transitional period between traditional Asian culture and a more westernized one. Korean young people increasingly emulate American culture. For this reason, among others I'm sure, Park was very eager to learn and we were very eager to teach. As usual, I ended up learning more than I taught.
On Park's first full day here, we took him downtown in the late afternoon. It was the tail end of a chilly workday with the Thunder on the road. It was in the last few days of December. People were ice skating at the Myriad Gardens and snow sledding at the ballpark. A family was taking family photos in the Devon Tower atrium, hispanic students rode through Bricktown on Spokies bikes and people stood in a sizable line inside Starbucks. All in all, not a bad day. By Oklahoma City standards.
On the other hand, other than these few pockets of activity, not much else was going on. The Winter Shoppes had all closed but the temporary structures were still there. Ironically, these added to the feeling that nothing was going on. After all, what says "there's nothing here" better than structures where there is supposed to be something that is no longer there. Also, though it was the end of the workday, no one hung around to walk downtown or visit pubs to unwind from the day. Nobody was walking to nearby apartments or transit stops. Instead, and despite the huge growth of the downtown housing market, most people still got into their cars and drove back to their homes in the suburbs.
We walked all over downtown. We crossed streets with ease, went into the underground when we wanted to warm up (it was also empty), bought shirts at the Thunder Shop, stood in line for $4 coffee at Starbucks, took pictures from the top of the Bricktown parking garage and in the atrium of Devon Tower. As we were walking back to the car, Park said something in his broken English that brought into perspective just how far we've come (15 years ago, I would not have brought him downtown) but also how far we have to go. It was this:
"This city is very silence."I remember that, in college, international students from Albania who I worked a catering job with had been very disappointed in our picturesque but small college town in north-central Arkansas. They said that they had been expecting New York City. They thought all American cities would be like films of New York. I don't know whether or not Park had similar ideas when coming here, or if, more likely, he was simply comparing our city to his own. But his statement felt like a critique, or at least a counterpoint to our own rhetoric that we have come into our own as a big city. Certainly, silence is not what I want for or from our downtown.
A few days later, on New Year's Day, we took him to Qual Springs Mall. It was a totally different scene. It turns out, New Year's Day is a big shopping day (who knew). The stores and hallways were packed with people, the music was lively, people ate in the food court, and waited in line for movies at AMC. At one store, long tables of women's shoes were on sale, and the crowds had gathered to rifle through them, bumping into each other, spilling boxes onto the floor, arguing with each other and so on. We ran into people we knew at least three times, snacked, and window shopped. In other words, all the stuff that should happen on the street in healthy urban neighborhoods.
The message here, at least to me, is that with all our improvements, the centers of our lives are still out in the outskirts, where we park in huge parking lots and walk in the climate controlled, high-overhead, false urbanity of the shopping mall. One may argue that it was the cold weather than kept people from downtown, and it's not fair that I'm using a December day to critique our city. But urbanists love to point out that the number of months outdoor cafes are open in Stockholm is twelve, and the liveliest time of year in many cold German cities is Christmas, whose outdoor holiday markets are famously competitive. This may indeed be a factor here in OKC, but pedestrian cities with long winters know how to do winter.
The lesson here is that Oklahoma City is still, in large part, an event city. Downtown is lively in the hours before a Thunder home game. Midtown and SOSA is flooded on an H&8th night. However, we don't yet have a city that is organically vibrant, un-planned cool, naturally urban. We may be "on the rise," but we haven't yet risen.
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Territorial Homes for Regular People
When OKC residents think of historic houses, we think of the beautiful old mansions of Heritage Hills, or the only-slightly more modest homes in neighboring Mesta Park. We think of the Overholser Mansion, built in 1903 and regarded as Oklahoma's first mansion.
But this is a working-class town, built first as a railroad depot, then as an industrial and commercial center to support the people brought to the Territory by the Land-Run, and finally as an oil town with dozens of wells actually inside city limits (and, for that matter, on the grounds of our capitol building).
For most of us, the lifestyles of these working-class people is a bit of a mystery--not one many of us have even thought about. In fact, someone informed me the other day that the first settlers to OKC after the Land Run lived in "mud huts," by which he seemed to mean the sod houses of the homesteaders. A student of Oklahoma history, however, will know that people were building permanent wood and brick structures remarkably quickly, as this photo supposedly taken four days after the land run shows. After all, we were a rail yard, which means that we had easy access to the pre-cut wood that defined the National Folk Style home.
Most of these first houses, built very quickly, were intermingled with the businesses and industries along the railroad tracks, and are of course gone, long since replaced by skyscrapers and warehouses. But just southwest of downtown, a few very early, modest homes remain.
The largest concentration of these early homes is not in Heritage Hills, but in the neglected little neighborhood between the old I-40 and the river, and between Shields and Wheeler Park. The oldest I found on my own hunt through this neighborhood was this one on SW 5th street, built in 1901:
But when researching for this post, Kate Singleton's "Intensive Level Survey of Downtown," led me to this house on a different street which was built in 1900. This may well be the oldest extant home in Oklahoma City (if there's one older, I hope someone will let me know).
The intrepid OKC-phile who is not afraid to wonder into the 600-700 blocks of SW 5th through about SW 8th will find dozens of houses built between 1905 and 1910 (plus a few built as late at the 30's and 40's). These are the homes that saw Oklahoma Territory become the State of Oklahoma.
These houses aren't particularly dignified. Most of them are hopelessly run down, and none of them appear on the National Register of Historic places. According to Singleton's survey, few, if any of them would even be eligible. They are working-class homes and have been added on to or altered often, usually as cheaply as possible by residents who had neither the resources to nor the interest in preserving the historical value of these houses.
In fact, most people in general would not be particularly interested in preserving these houses. Tiny, wood-sided houses just don't feel very historic to us. Even Paul Revere's home in Boston became a tenement and a series of shops before a descendant of Revere bought it to save it from being demolished. Houses like these may be historical, but they are not valuable.
In fact, these houses survived this long probably through an accident of twentieth-century urban planning. Cheap houses were built in this area initially because, early in the city's history, the land along the river was prone to flooding. This meant that land value here was low, so small, affordable, working-class houses were built here. They remained here likely because of Old Interstate-40. Wedged between the Crosstown Bridge and the river, this area became no-man's land, at least for the kind of people who are able to tear down old things to build new ones. Nestled safely between the formidable (and ugly) boundaries of I-40 and the North Canadian, the city's periodic attempts at urban renewal always skipped over these blocks. Thus, the fact that this land had no value meant that it was left alone. Had these historic homes been worth anything, they would be gone.
Now, however, I-40 has moved, and has been set below grade with a handsome pedestrian bridge traversing it. Money is being spent on the Core to Shore projects and we're about to put in a really nice downtown park right next door to this neighborhood.
This means that the land where these old homes sit is about to become very valuable. Several houses have already been demolished to make way for the park, and once it is done, developers will rush to acquire the land that borders the park in order to build luxury apartments and condos. These modest nuggets of territorial history will be gone--gone the way of the real Deep Deuce. So go see these houses now while you still can. But take your safety precautions.
But this is a working-class town, built first as a railroad depot, then as an industrial and commercial center to support the people brought to the Territory by the Land-Run, and finally as an oil town with dozens of wells actually inside city limits (and, for that matter, on the grounds of our capitol building).
For most of us, the lifestyles of these working-class people is a bit of a mystery--not one many of us have even thought about. In fact, someone informed me the other day that the first settlers to OKC after the Land Run lived in "mud huts," by which he seemed to mean the sod houses of the homesteaders. A student of Oklahoma history, however, will know that people were building permanent wood and brick structures remarkably quickly, as this photo supposedly taken four days after the land run shows. After all, we were a rail yard, which means that we had easy access to the pre-cut wood that defined the National Folk Style home.
Most of these first houses, built very quickly, were intermingled with the businesses and industries along the railroad tracks, and are of course gone, long since replaced by skyscrapers and warehouses. But just southwest of downtown, a few very early, modest homes remain.
The largest concentration of these early homes is not in Heritage Hills, but in the neglected little neighborhood between the old I-40 and the river, and between Shields and Wheeler Park. The oldest I found on my own hunt through this neighborhood was this one on SW 5th street, built in 1901:
But when researching for this post, Kate Singleton's "Intensive Level Survey of Downtown," led me to this house on a different street which was built in 1900. This may well be the oldest extant home in Oklahoma City (if there's one older, I hope someone will let me know).
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| Photo: Oklahoma County Assessor |
These houses aren't particularly dignified. Most of them are hopelessly run down, and none of them appear on the National Register of Historic places. According to Singleton's survey, few, if any of them would even be eligible. They are working-class homes and have been added on to or altered often, usually as cheaply as possible by residents who had neither the resources to nor the interest in preserving the historical value of these houses.
In fact, most people in general would not be particularly interested in preserving these houses. Tiny, wood-sided houses just don't feel very historic to us. Even Paul Revere's home in Boston became a tenement and a series of shops before a descendant of Revere bought it to save it from being demolished. Houses like these may be historical, but they are not valuable.
In fact, these houses survived this long probably through an accident of twentieth-century urban planning. Cheap houses were built in this area initially because, early in the city's history, the land along the river was prone to flooding. This meant that land value here was low, so small, affordable, working-class houses were built here. They remained here likely because of Old Interstate-40. Wedged between the Crosstown Bridge and the river, this area became no-man's land, at least for the kind of people who are able to tear down old things to build new ones. Nestled safely between the formidable (and ugly) boundaries of I-40 and the North Canadian, the city's periodic attempts at urban renewal always skipped over these blocks. Thus, the fact that this land had no value meant that it was left alone. Had these historic homes been worth anything, they would be gone.
Now, however, I-40 has moved, and has been set below grade with a handsome pedestrian bridge traversing it. Money is being spent on the Core to Shore projects and we're about to put in a really nice downtown park right next door to this neighborhood.
This means that the land where these old homes sit is about to become very valuable. Several houses have already been demolished to make way for the park, and once it is done, developers will rush to acquire the land that borders the park in order to build luxury apartments and condos. These modest nuggets of territorial history will be gone--gone the way of the real Deep Deuce. So go see these houses now while you still can. But take your safety precautions.
Wednesday, July 9, 2014
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.
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.
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:
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 |
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Compulsive Progress and the Death of Stage Center
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.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
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.
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.
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.
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.
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| 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.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
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.
Friday, May 17, 2013
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.
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.
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