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.

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:

"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.

Street Ceiling: The Aesthetic of Overhead Cables

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

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

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

Electric busses in Cambridge, MA. Photo: Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

Overhead lines and row houses in San Francisco.

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

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

Photo: ACOG Blog

Alternative Other Cities: San Francisco's Mission District Murals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A panorama of OKC's "Legal Wall"

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

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

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

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

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

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.