by Alex Marshall - articles and essays

The Regional Articles:

A Scary Trip To The Suburbs - "The cinema we chose is one of the big new movie complexes in Hampton Roads. Its innovation is not only stadium seating on some screens, but to package what is basically an entire amusement park around its 13 auditoriums. You enter this big box behind a strip shopping center and find yourself ushered into a gymnasium-size hall. Its two floors hold not only long rows of elaborate video games, but bumper cars, laser tag, miniature golf, skeeball and more -- all amid waterfalls flowing over fake stone." Click on link for full article.

Biking Amid The Cars - "When I suggested accommodating bicycles more on local roads, Addis, who has become the leading supporter of the traffic-jammed, suburban status quo, could only think of Bejing or Bombay. Yellow and brown hordes on rusty bicycles jostling for space on dusty roads with chickens and stray dogs yapping at their heels. Who wants that? But a different image comes to my mind. I think of two of the wealthiest and most civilized cities on earth -- Amsterdam and Copenhagen. In my travels there, I remember beautiful women in elegant skirts, and men wearing fine linen suits, bicycling along to work or shopping." Click on link for full article.

Don't Let Kirn Library Fly Away - "Built as part of the urban renewal process that was then tearing apart the city, this sleek masterpiece of glass, steel and marble rose on its site on City Hall Avenue, now directly across from the MacArthur Mall. It was Norfolk's first real central library. In replaced the beautiful, but small Carnegie-funded library on Freemason Street, whose building still stands, but which unfortunately the city no longer owns." Click on link for full article.

Passing Out The Favors - "Now here's the kicker . Not only is this favored quarter getting most of the private investment, it's also getting most of the public investment. Here is where is going the lion's share of new roads, sewers, schools and libraries." Click on link for full article.

Whither Virginia Beach - "For most of its life, the city's biggest appeal has been what it is not: It was not Norfolk, with its declining schools, racial problems, high crime and sagging tax base. Not Portsmouth or Newport News. But the era of Virginia Beach exceptionalism is ending. It has roughly 440,000 people -- roughly equal to Norfolk and Chesapeake put together. There is no way something that big can be vastly different than the average. Virginia Beach used to be richer and whiter than the rest of the region. It is much less so now." Click on link for full article.

Central Carolina Choices - "The effort to excel continues. The city government is making a heroic try to ``reinvent'' itself, to become more responsive to neighborhoods and citizens. Whether or not a full city-county merger is approved, the consolidation of multiple Charlotte and Mecklenburg County services stands out as a beacon of common sense among America's quarrelsome metropolitan regions. Indeed, here's a region where it's at least possible to discuss the idea of merged regional government services. Think further: Wouldn't regional fire and emergency medical services make sense, too?" Click on link for full article.

Long Boats and Undergroud Vaults - An Essay About Harvard - "The Harvard Faculty club looks as you would expect. Its building is a conservative brick house. The rooms are furnished in dark wood with heavy carpeting and serious paintings on the wall. In the main drawing room, you can lounge on big leather sofas while a nearby fire crackles, helping yourself to one of the many newspapers and magazines placed there daily. The men's bathroom has a supply of colognes out for use." Click on link for full article.

New Urbanism versus an old neighborhood. "East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, is a neighborhood on death row, awaiting execution by bulldozer. Residents are being forced from their homes to make way for a brand-new village designed by Andres Duany. If this sounds like old-fashioned urban renewal, well, that's what it is. It employs the same logic: cities can be fixed by plowing down neighborhoods and replacing them with better buildings and wealthier folks. The presence of Duany adds a twist. As a partner of Miami-based Duany/PlaterZyberk Town Planners, he is an acknowledged leader of the New Urbanists, the selfstyled white hats of contemporary architecture who seek to reform America's wayward landscape. Their remedy is as much moral as it is aesthetic. They believe that traditional town planning - by which they mean a grid of streets lined with trees and front porches, studded with shops and parks - can heal the nation's fractured sense of community. In East Ocean View, however, the New Urbanists' championing of the ideal of community is being put to the test. In essence, Duany is now facing the same charges that smeared the Modernists he so disdains: Is it people he cares about - or buildings?" Click on link for full article.

Alex Marshall interviews Andres Duany Asks Alex: "You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, "We love your ideas, but we don't want our houses torn down." What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?" Click on link for full article.

What Makes A Neighborhood Viable? "The guts of Duany's defense are that it is okay to tear this neighborhood down because it is troubled and the people are poor and the buildings aren't pretty. I disagree with this philosophy. I won't say that a government can never level a neighborhood, but the area's existing homes would have to be in worse shape than those in East Ocean View, and the people who live in them treated more fairly.... Regarding the Norfolk City Council, Duany defends the urban renewal decision because the political decision was unanimous. The same urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s, which Duany joins in criticizing, was also approved by duly elected democratic governments. Does this mean it was right, or exempt from criticism? The fact is, the people in the condemned neighborhood had little political voice." Click on link for full article.

The Pavilion of Fun - "The Pavilion of Fun was just one of the many glories that Coney Island, that strip of land on the outer reaches of Brooklyn, has housed in its 150 years of fame. Like some citadel city that has been sacked and burned repeatedly, the sands of Coney Island hold the traces or at least the memories of castles, ancient empires that have rose and fell, rose and fell. I imagine some future archeologist digging in its soil in centuries hence, finding the remnants of the Elephant Hotel, or Lilliputia, the city of midgets." Click on link for full article.