Who Gets the Favors?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

The Virginian-Pilot
Monday, July 19, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

New ways of looking how we grow and develop are rare. But I think I’ve found one. It’s the “favored quarter” theory.

Myron Orfield, a state representative from Minneapolis, talks about it in his book, Metropolitics, (Brookings 1998).

In every metropolitan area, Orfield says, there is usually one chunk of the region that is receiving the lion’s share of private investment. Here is where the expensive new homes are going, the new offices and the new shopping centers.

Orfield calls it “The Favored Quarter.”

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.

Does Hampton Roads have “a favored quarter?” I think so, although perhaps it’s more like a favored edge. On the Southside, it starts in Sandbridge around Pungo, goes up by the Municipal center, past Stumpy Lake into Chesapeake, and then on into Suffolk.

Here is where the fat McMansions are being built in spanking new subdivisions, here is where the state and city are spending millions of dollars widening two lane roads into four and six-lanes with medians and turn lanes. This is where the Chesapeake City Council is debating whether to extend sewer service — after just spending millions on the Oak Grove Connector.

It would be interesting to see just how many dollars The Edge is receiving in public dollars, compared to the rest of South Hampton Roads. How much public investment have places like Bayside and Norview seen in past decades?

Well, so what, you might ask? You naturally spend public money to try to catch up with all that private growth, right?

Actually, it’s just the opposite. Everything we spend on new roads, sewers and services promotes the very growth we are trying to “catch up” to. In actuality, we are subsidizing growth in one area, at the expense of all the rest of the region. It’s as if the favored quarter has managed to rig up the game at everyone else’s expense, Orfield says.

“These (favored) quarters are developing suburban areas that have mastered the art of skimming off the cream of metropolitan growth, while accepting as few metropolitan responsibilities as possible,” Orfield said in an article in Two Cities magazine.

In an interview from his home in Minneapolis, Orfield said that every metropolitan area has a favored quarter. The King of Prussia suburbs outside Philadelphia, for example, represents 20 percent of the households but is get 80 percent of the growth, he said.

It goes beyond just roads and sewers. Favored quarters, Orfield said, tend to keep out lower-income people with large-lot zoning and other measures. Only the richest gain entrance. With such policies, the favored quarters are able to actually decrease their social costs and while their tax bases increase.

Take a step back, and we can see that favoring one quarter over others is the wrong way to plan growth. It encourages metropolitan areas to develop “new rings” of growth, causing “old rings” to decline, Orfield says.

Others are focusing on the same dynamic. A study in Baltimore showed that the number of new schools built in the outer suburbs were equal to the number torn down in the inner city, a Sierra club official said at the Smart Growth meeting last week.

The alternative to a favored quarter is to spend your infrastructure dollars where people already live.

Private investment follows public investment. Build big roads in the middle of nowhere, and pretty soon you’ll have shopping malls and subdivisions. Build rail lines, bike paths, recreation centers and maintain what you already have, and pretty soon you’ll have renovated strip shopping centers and young couples adding additions onto old homes.

In this light, we can see why the proposed Southeastern Parkway between Chesapeake and Virginia Beach is such a bad idea. Right in the middle of the Edge, our “Favored Quarter,” we would plant a massive highway, thus greatly expanding the growth that already exists.

From this light, we can see why the light rail line between Virginia Beach and Norfolk is such a good thing. It spends our tax dollars where people already live, and so stabilizes and lifts up an area that might otherwise decay. Not to mention making the resort’s July 4 planning a lot easier.

Do we have a “favored quarter?” And how do we start passing the favors around more evenly?

The Savannah College of Art and Design

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

July 10, 1995
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Savannah is a city of symmetry. It has straight streets, square squares – columns of spreading oak trees. It’s a city where you feel like you are somewhere, all the time. In Columbia Square, one of the shaded parks surrounded by homes that punctuate the city’s grid of streets, a group of 40-something men and women were laying out platters of food on card tables set out under the oak trees. They had that neatness peculiar to some middle-age Southerners. The men wore knit or button-down shirts tucked into shorts. The women wore dresses or Bermuda shorts. Everyone’s hair was combed ad met cleanly at the ear. Despite the preciseness of their dress, they were friendly, open and cheery, in a way that reminded me of New Orleans, where people have learned that life’s priorities are food and friendship, not careers and money. They urged me to join their annual Lark in the Park, the equivalent of a block party. “You must take a plate of food, I just insist,” said one woman who had befriended me. The card tables were starting to groan with platters of sliced tomatoes, cheesy casseroles and an entire pork loin, roasted and now sliced and waiting in its own juices. I figured they would be a pretty good bunch to ask about the Savannah College of Art and Design, the institution with 2,500 students and 261 faculty and staff that had come to dominate this city of 150,000 in just 15 years. Take any compass point out of the square and you would hit one of the college’s facilities, usually housed in a renovated 19th century building. “I have a small bakery near here,” said Wayne Spear, a balding man with a mustache. He wore a Ralph Lauren shirt, and my eye drifted to the little polo player galloping across a pink cotton weave. “I use the students for part-time help. I have some rental property, and the students have made its value go up tremendously. On the side streets around here, little shops are opening because the students have given them a market. People go out at night, because they feel safer with students out and about. The college has been great for this city.” Town people might complain about SCAD’s students funny hair styles, strange clothing, or typical college-like, obnoxious behavior. They might complain that SCAD founders, Richard and Paula Rowan, are power hungry, paranoid or make too much money. They might mention some of the other gossipy controversies that SCAD has accumulated in its 15-year history. But most people mention the overwhelmingly positive role this college has had on this Southern city known mainly for its ground-breaking role in historical preservation. SCAD, they say, has completed what preservations might call the adoptive reuse of a town built centuries ago for a different time and different economy. The students have infused the town’s lovely squares and homes with life, people, energy and money. It has sparked a new wave of renovations in the city’s Victorian district, where many houses are still abandoned and crumbling. Most of all, it has turned century-old structures difficult to use for a home, store or office – like abandoned power stations, cotton warehouses or multi-story elementary schools – into economic engines of the town, filled with students, faculty and equipment. Since its first classes in 1979, the college had grown from a few dozen students to 2,500. It occupies more than 35 buildings now, sprinkled throughout a roughly one-mile square area in the heart of the town’s historic district. The school offers degrees in architecture, art history, computer art, fashion, fibers, furniture design,graphic design, historic preservation, illustration, interior design, metals and jewelry, painting, photography, sequential art and video. Master’s and bachelor’s degrees are offered in all majors except architecture, which has the traditional five-year bachelor’s degree. Most town people are probably indifferent or unaware of the school’s educational innovations. But with its emphasis on small classes and the biggest and best equipment, with its relatively cheap tuition and lack of tenure, and most of all its use of historic buildings as an economical way of creating building space, the college is setting a different example on how to form an educational institution. The schools phenomenal rate of growth has left growing pains. Some departments are better than others. Students complain about an administration so hell-bent on expansion that it overhypes the school’s already excellent facilities. Professors have left or been fired because of disagreements with the school’s management style. A strange assortments of controversies and ill-will surround its founders, Richard and Paula Rowan.

Ultimately, the college’s success will depend on how all these parts interact – the students, the town, and the administration. Those parts include, perhaps most importantly, Richard and Paula Rowan, whose ambition and determination and vision may make or break the school – and to some extent the town as well. At the moment though, the college is saving Savannah from the twin fates that seem to await historic places, either decay, or a kind of sterilized embalmment. The city’s system of “squares” traces back to a plan by James Edward Oglethorpe in 1733, an idealist who created the colony as a haven for English debtors and others of “modest means” who “felt the weight of oppression and discrimination.” The town’s more laissez-faire attitude toward different lifestyles, personal eccentricities and varying religious faiths traces back to Oglethorpe, residents say. Designed for defense as well as beauty, Oglethorpe’s system of homes, schools and churches surrounding a square park was followed for the next 100 years as the city expanded. From only four squares in Oglethorpe’s tenure, the city eventually reached its zenith of 24 squares – which began disappearing during urban renewal in the 1950s as city fathers began demolishing squares for freeways and parking lots. They were opposed by a group of residents who struggled and largely succeeded in saving the street plan and the old homes from the redevelopment fate of freeways, plazas and office buildings.

I envisioned the city now as quaint homes, neatly tended gardens and lots of tourists, all enshrouded in grey Spanish moss. Much to my surprise, I also found plenty of decaying buildings, vacant lots and non-descript stores. I greeted each odd thread in the urban fabric with relief. To me, it signalled that Savannah was still a real city, still evolving, still struggling. The college fits in with this by making the city a growing, changing place, rather than only a museum.

THE SCHOOL: The floor of the furniture design studio tilts. In the 1880s, when this long narrow warehouse was built, it was designed so sweating laborers could more easily slide bales of cotton from where the freight trains would drop them off, across the 30-feet of weathered plank flooring, to where horse-drawn wagons would carry the bales to the harbor and waiting ships. Now, when a student needs a true level, they position their furniture on a shelf that juts out of one wall. The students work on long tables set up in a central room. Tiffany Arteaga, 21, a thin young woman, is leaning over a chunk of black walnut and filing its edges. It will be a shelf in a sinewy cabinet Arteaga is building. It’s a weird piece of furniture. The legs have gilded, bronze casts of horseshoe crab tails that stick out at intervals. It’s beautiful. I could easily see it in some high-priced gallery. Arteaga says it’s meant as an alter of sorts, a place to put powerful personal objects. She calls making such a cabinet the practice of Iconagraphy. Like all the students in this program I talk with, she loves the program.

“This place is excellent,” says Paul Buckman, 24 and a senior, who is working a few paces from Arteaga. He has dirty blond hair tied back, three gold earrings in his left ear and one in his right. A pack of Camel Lights pokes out of the pocket of his white T-shirt. Behind him, I see a wall covered with more than a hundred clamps of varying sizes on racks. “We have an incredible amount of space here for woodworking. We’ve got all the tools you need, a full machine room, plus a metal shop with metal lathes.”

The furniture design studio illustrates the college at its best. The students have all the things most schools are short in: space, equipment and time with skilled instructors. The only thing unusual about the furniture school, as compared to the rest of the college, is that you’re not surrounded by computers, although I saw one or two.

Savannah was always a port city and many of the industrial buildings SCAD is re-using relate back to when the city was a center of the cotton industry. As Roberta Brandes Gratz details in her excellent book, The Living City, Savannah’s industry, and the historic center city, declined in the 1920s with the devastation of the cotton crop by the boll weevil. The town re-industrialized in subsequent decades, but most of the money and growth went to the new suburbs that were ringing the city. The SCAD buildings give a nice portrait of the town’s economic as well as residential past. Hamilton Hall, for example, was the city’s first power station. Built in the 1890s, it now houses the school’s video department. Down in the basement, you can see the massive columns of stone and brick which once supported the steam turbines. The brick building, which overlooks the river, has a Romanesque-style facade that makes you wish contemporary city power buildings were similarly housed. One of the biggest clumps of SCAD buildings are the freight, office and repair sites left from an abandoned central train yard. It includes Kiah Hall, which looks like a Greek temple or the White House with its white columns, was originally offices for railroad executives. Another interesting set are the four former public schools SCAD inhabits. They vary from Henry Hall, a three-story red brick building with rich terra cotta and a majesterial front stairway, to Barnard Hall, with a Spanish-tile roof and a humbler, less showy presence.

These generally ornate buildings that provide the bulk of SCAD’s floor space provide a poetical counterweight to the stacks of MacIntoshes, digital photography equipment, laser printers and assorted high-tech toys that litter most rooms. The place clearly digs technology. It’s a nice balance, however, that an architecture student manipulating a three-dimensional design program does so in a 19th century room with soaring ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. Marlborough Packard, a professor in the historic preservation department who somehow appropriately wore a seer-sucker jacket and a green bow tie, told the story of a student who, frustrated by a computer repeatedly crashing on her, left the building and went out to cry in one of Oglethorpe’s squares. “It’s a good place to sit and cry,” said Packard. He compared this setting with what he calls “the neo-penal colony architecture” of “gates and grates” that dominates most new colleges built on raw tracts of land.

As might be expected, Packard is part of one of the more dynamic departments. With the college renovating several buildings each year, the students have their craft directly in front of their face. While a separate professional construction crew actually perform the bulk of the work, students also participate. They learn about the decisions involved in taking an abandoned shell into a working, 20th century building. When not inside abandoned buildings, students learn about real-estate, and now to start and manage a historic preservation program. The department is part of the School of Building Arts, which includes architecture and interior design. Students from these separate majors will often work collaboratively on a project. All of SCAD’s departments, not just historic preservation, are oriented to sending students out to find jobs. The video students train to work as production hands on TV commercials and sit-coms. The graphic design majors practice making magazine covers. “We do not have the attitude, ‘Oh, we are going to turn out 7,000 starving artists and we don’t care,’ ” said Judith Van Baron, the college’s vice-president of Academic Affairs. “Parents think of college as an investment. They want something solid, that emphasizes quality and careers. We are career oriented. We think that is important.”

Given the school’s overall contribution to the town – the school estimates its economic impact is estimated at $300 million annually – it is surprising how many critics the school has. Basically, some say the school has treated both its professors and the townspeople autocratically and disrespectfully, and that this has led to turmoil within the school and around it. Even the most positive student mentions fairly quickly the instability the school has experienced.

“The politics are terrible,” said Buckman, the T-shirted furniture design student, in a set of typical remarks. “I disagree with how they treat professors. We’ve had some seriously good professors leave because of disagreements, although we had really good ones come in to replace them. But it’s tough when you build up a relationship and people leave.”

SCAD does not have a tenure system. In this, it follows a trend around the country of colleges either eliminating tenure or tightening controls over it. This has enabled the school to pay relatively good salaries but has also contributed to criticism that the school treats is professors cavalierly. Van Baron calls tenure “a dinosaur system” that promotes academic privilege rather than good learning.

THE TOWN It’s a Friday night at Oglethorpe House, the school’s freshmen dormitory fashioned out of an 1960s-era Ramada Inn. Teenagers are wandering from room to room, talking, gossiping, giggling. The building is unusual for SCAD in that it has little historic value. “This is the fun dorm; I really like it,” said a young man wearing a white Grateful Dead T-shirt and a Scooby-Doo scraggle of a beard. He speaks from the open-air hallway that rooms front on. From the hallway, you can see into each room because the front wall of each bedroom doubles as both a window and a wall. Some students draw their curtains, and you can see the typical undergraduate pile of books, computers, stereo equipment and clothes. Trash is strewn everywhere in the halls. Savannah residents have a particularly direct interface with this scene because the main building is turned sideways to the street, with the open-air hallways and the glass-windowed dormitory rooms fronting on Oglethorpe Street. It resembles an ant colony under glass. Passersby can stare at an entire wall of student life. By college standards, this Friday night scene is not too unruly. I theorize that art students are less Animal-House like than most undergrads. Still, I wonder how much beer has spilled from these balconies, how loudly bass notes have thumped from stereos. I imagine vomiting amid the Spanish moss. SCAD has no campus in the traditional sense. It’s “quad” is the city of Savannah. This is wonderful. Colleges usually hold themselves aloof from the cities they inhabit. SCAD’s structure literally forces students and professors into interacting with regular citizens. It’s like taking a regular college set around a central plot of grass and turning it inside out. But the school’s use of a city as a campus has a number of ripples. It is, to some extent, the use of public space for private purposes. The college does not have to pay to maintain a traditional campus. As the school grows, I wonder how the relationship between town and gown will go. Many residents love the students because they put money in their pockets and make the streets safer at night. Initially, though, the college had sour relationships with the town. It was due partly to narrow-mindedness on townspeople’s part, but also to what appeared to be autocratic and paranoid behavior by SCAD. SCAD has sued several of its critics and professors who have left the school, alleging they attempted to defame the school and hurt its business. Using court documents, the Savannah News Press published a front-page story last year that told how SCAD had secretly photographed and surveilled possible critics of the school as they went about their lives. One former SCAD employee testified that he had been instructed to photograph people who attended bond or zoning hearings and voiced positions contrary to SCAD.

The city’s established preservation leaders are mixed on the school’s track record. One of the school’s biggest supporters, Lee Adler, said most established preservation leaders initially hindered the school more than they helped it. Adler, now 72 and wearing a soft-summer suit and a red bow tie, led the drive in the 50s and 60s to save Savannah’s historic downtown, often against considerable odds. “Thirty years ago, town fathers would have traded six of these squares for two tall buildings,” Adler said with a laugh. “They wanted to be another Jacksonville.” He also led the drive to renovate Savannah’s Victorian District, a section of town adjacent to the oldest historic area developed with ornate 19th and early 20th century homes. Adler fought not only to save the homes but to keep the neighborhood’s heavily black population in place, at a rent they could afford. Adler has gained fame recently as the nemesis of the more or less protagonist of the recent bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt. The volume opens up Savannah like an oyster and in the city is simply referred to as “the book.” Adler is portrayed as the talented, but stuffy opponent of Jim Williams, the more colorful character who shoots his lover and struggles with a trial. The unstated debate in the book seemed to be whether Adler was a pompous know-it-all who hogged too much credit for saving historic Savannah, or whether his detractors were small-minded Southerners who didn’t like a Jew who put too much emphasis on saving homes for Negroes. “I always say that the college is the best thing that happened to the town in 20 years, and it’s only been here 15,” Adler said. “It brought back vitality to the inner city. My feeling is that the college has set a national example. I’ve been amazed at how far Richard has taken it. But the average upper-middle class resident who lived in a renovated 18th century townhouse didn’t see it that way at first, Adler said. Residents protested vociferously, Adler said, when SCAD first proposed renovating a beautiful red building with a turret on Pulaski Square and making it a girls dormitory. “You’d have thought it was the end of the world,” Adler said. “Now, of course, they see it’s been about the best thing that ever happened to them.”

Of course, it probably didn’t help matters that, according to the Savannah News-Press, SCAD photographed and surveilled the leader of the downtown neighborhood group opposing the dormitories in an attempt to prove a conspiracy against the school. “I think it is fair to say that in the early days there were a few bumpy times,” said Stephanie Churchill, president of the Historic Savannah Foundation. “It was partly because the college didn’t follow the rules when it was renovating buildings. But it’s normal that whenever there is any change in the status quo, you are going to wonder how it’s going to work out.” Despite the school’s at times bizarre behavior, which obviously increased resentment against the school, I suspected Adler was right about many of the neighborhood leaders who first opposed SCAD. The skeptical attitude Adler described captured a short-sightedness and narrow mindedness that I had noticed over the years in writing about neighborhoods and historic preservation. “We don’t want any skateboards, we don’t want any rollerblades,” Adler said, mimicking SCAD’s critics. “It’s like the Goddamn Republicans. Instead of Ofamily values,’ they talk about Oquality of life.’ Instead of embracing the college, it was, ‘We don’t want any tour buses, we don’t want this.’ It was nit-picking.” THE PRESIDENT Richard Rowan, the school’s founder and president, stood in the middle of the abandoned train repair depot, light streaming through the broken panes of cathedral sized windows, chortling with glee. “This is wonderful, just wonderful,” said Rowan, turning round and round, looking at the weathered brick walls, the concrete floor in laid with rusty railroad tracks, the soaring roof and the massive steel I-beams holding it up. “This is the most excellent space I’ve ever seen.” This would not be most people’s first remark. Overgrown with weeds and vines, the massive, 150,000 square feet of building had small trees growing out of one section, liberally kept watered through the smashed skylights. But Rowan sees that the brick walls are sound, as are the steel frames in the broken-out windows. The concrete floor in the central room, which is above a cavernous basement, once supported 13 locomotive engines. It isn’t going anywhere. The wooden roof may be in tatters, but the steel girders that support it are fine. So. Pour some concrete across the floor. Put glass in the windows. Put a metal roof on, while keeping the massive skylights. Wire it. Plumb it. Presto. You have SCAD’s new design center, filled with studios and classrooms. “It doesn’t take great vision to see green metal instead of rotting wood,” Rowan says. “To say, ‘pour some concrete across this floor.’ I don’t think you could build something like this now with this much structural integrity.” A million dollars will renovate it, Rowan says. Come back in a year. Normally, such an effort might cost $5 million, Rowan says, but SCAD has its own construction crew. Rowan says his final cost per square foot should be about $7 per square foot. On the average, Rowan says ready-to-use building space costs him $19 per square foot compared to an average of $140 per square foot at colleges across the country. The man who stands amid the abandoned train workshop is the same man who, 16 years ago, stood with his wife in an abandoned armory and ripped out walls with his bare hands. Even Rowan won’t admit to having the vision of seeing how far that would lead.

Richard and his wife Paula got the idea for starting the school when Richard was working in the late 70s for the Atlanta Board of Education. Both just in their 20s then, they admit to having little background in the arts other than appreciating them. But Richard was convinced that the future of higher education lay in specialized education. And the south lacked a major arts and design school. The decision to rehab so many of Savannah’s historic buildings was a decision prompted by both economics and aesthetics.

The Rowans embody the school’s strength and weaknesses. If they are to be credited with great vision, great perseverance, they also must take some responsibility for the aura of controversy and resentment that has settled around the school. A lot of people are mad at SCAD. The allegations, in brief, are these. The Rowans make too much money – combined salaries of $602,000 in 1992-93, one of the highest of any college or university in the country. The Rowans fire or sue anyone who criticizes the school. The Rowans spy on professors and critics. The Rowan over-hype their school, advertising buildings and projects that are still unfinished. The controversies came to a boiling point in 1992 and 93, when students and faculty protested, board members resigned and a flurry of lawsuits ensued. New York’s School of Visual Arts eventually opened a Savannah branch, hiring former SCAD faculty, and SCAD sued the competing school and assorted other folk. The cutline to the photo in the 1992 New York Times article by Peter Applebome neatly summarized the debate that many still have about SCAD: “The Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia is considered either a model of entrepreneurial education, the largest of its kind in the nation, or a college more concerned with money and power than education.” Applebome described the school’s lack of tenure, how professors were pressured to fund raise and recruit students, how the school’s administration was liberally seeded with Rowan family members, and various incidents, like the allegation that Richard Rowan had an outside accrediting team bugged. Applebome included the charge that the school’s board of trustees did not properly supervise the Rowans. Applebome quoted Pat Conroy, the novelist who resigned from the college’s board. Conroy said that he believed he never voted on a single thing in his two years on the board. He said he resigned “because I was afraid that if I stayed on it, I would end up up jail.”

There is too much smoke here not to be some fire. But still, when the charges and counter-charges are sifted, you come up with more style than substance. The priorities of the school seem to be, judging from my unmonitored wanderings around the school: the best equipment, close professor to student relationships, and moderately-priced tuition. From a student’s perspective, that’s a pretty good set of priorities. Most of the students I spoke with sounded like the one student quoted in the 1992 NYT article: “The facilities and the faculty are just great,” said a photography student. “It’s the administration that’s just a little screwed up.” Richard Rowan does not apologize for any of the school’s action or practices, except for a lack of diplomatic skills in the college’s early years. Many of the school’s critics, he said, were attempting to destroy the school and he expects to win big from the lawsuit that is still in court. People are free to say what they like, Rowan said, but the fruit of false speech “is usually a tort.”

The dark cloud of controversy that hung over the school two years ago has largely lifted. It won the prestigious 1994 National Trust Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Its expansion plans are going forward. The school is considering adding a department of performing arts, which would add a bright new dimension to the town and school. The school has already bought a darkened theater on the city’s old main street.

Townspeople are aware of the light and dark sides of the school’s character. Although they compliment the school for revitalizing downtown, they mention resentment contretemps such as the college surveiling professors and residents. They would like the school to be a good neighbor. As the school grows, both its officials and town leaders will have plenty of chances to build this relationship – or tear it down. As the college faces zoning and building permit hearings for its future renovations, towns people and school officials can either cooperate and communicate, or end up dueling before the City Council in the farcical confrontations that have become so common in contemporary America. Both sides have a lot to gain from the other. The college’s plan for starting a school of performing arts has enormous potential for revitalizing both the college and the town. The city has several dark or underused theaters, and having dancers and musicians filling the squares as well as painters and architects would be nice.

Still, as the school grows – Rowan hopes to double its size – it will test the adaptability of Oglethorpe’s famous squares. So, far they have proved remarkably elastic. The students and professors that fill them now, along with residents and business people, seem only to enhance them, make them more robust. As any New Yorker knows, a well-used park is easier to maintain than one that is vacant most of the day. It’s a compliment to Oglethorpe that this town designed for carriages and horses, when a shopping mall, an office tower or an elevator were as yet undreamt, has so easily absorbed cars, computers and a college.

Cities Back From The Edge

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

New Life For Downtown Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mintz

There are two ways to try to revive an old downtown, says Roberta Brandes Gratz. Only one of them works.

The first way is to spend a lot of money, taxpayer money, on stadiums, aquariums, science centers and mammoth public-private partnerships like enclosed shopping malls. (Sound familiar?)

The other way is to look carefully at what is already there, and to nurture its revitalization. Avoid big projects. Find ways to plant small businesses and new residents into old buildings and streets as if you were injecting favorable spores into a vat of cheese.

Guess which method Gratz likes best?

You got it. The second way. She calls it “urban husbandry,” which gets at the organic, fertile nature of the process.

The first method Gratz contemptuously labels “Project Planning.” She says it results in awkward cities that are never weaned off the public teat and lack grass roots stability.

Gratz has been writing about cities for more than 30 years, starting with 15 years as a reporter in the 1960s and 1970s for The New York Post. She is the author of the groundbreaking book, The Living City, (Simon and Schuster 1989), which first detailed her theory of “thinking small in a big way.” Her new book elaborates on that thesis.

In its 350 or so pages, Gratz shows the excesses and failures of Project Planning, and the successes of Urban Husbandry. She says again and again, as if trying to teach a dense student through repetition, that there is no formula for urban revival and that cities fail when they start looking for one. Instead, cities need to look carefully at their individual strengths, weaknesses and personalities.

She spends time in her long-time home, New York, reviewing old acknowledged failures, like the Cross-Bronx Expressway, as well as newer ones like the aborted attempt to revive Times Square with mega skyscrapers. She has a chapter on “The SoHo syndrome,” detailing how the district in lower Manhattan revived itself not only without city help, but expressly against city plans for a 10-lane freeway through the area.

But the best part of the book is where Gratz spotlights cities that have received less attention. She visits Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, and shows how they revived an old movie theater. She spends a lot time in Mansfield, Ohio. She goes into most of the decision points on downtowns — courthouses, libraries and farmers markets — and shows how they can help or hurt a downtown. She does a very good job talking of the transportation decisions that either rebuild, or pull apart, an older city.

If there is a flaw in her book, it’s that she does not show as clearly how a downtown’s growth, or lack of it, fits into the overall growth of a region. Although Gratz has a chapter on “Undoing Sprawl,” she may not quite see how limiting new residential and business growth in the outer suburbs leads to an eventual re-emergence of the same in the center city.

She speaks of Hampton Roads several times. She says Virginia Beach is an example of a city damaged by traffic engineers, and quotes from a 1991 Virginian-Pilot story by “Alex Marshall, a perceptive urban issues reporter” about the difficulty in crossing Lynnhaven Parkway on foot. But she pays more attention to Norfolk.

Gratz has watched Norfolk’s strategy of rebuilding downtown through the Waterside festival marketplace, the Marriott Hotel and convention center, the Tides ballpark, Nauticus and most recently, the MacArthur Center shopping mall. It’s obvious that Norfolk falls into her category of a “project planner” city, with the big mall being a prime example.

“Too many [cities] are still going the anti-urban, anti-place route of the enclosed shopping mall,” Gratz says. “In Norfolk, Virginia, a SoHo-like district was showing signs of renewed life and slowly but naturally attracting new business and people. Instead of nurturing this revival, building on and adding to its momentum, the city followed the conventional Project Planning route of the enclosed mall.”

Actually, you can debate whether Norfolk has a SoHo-like district, and whether it was reviving. The old warehouses along the waterfront that might have become a SoHo were torn down long ago. And business revitalization along Granby Street was not going very far on its own. But Gratz is correct in that the city has pinned its hopes on the mall and other big projects, with what she says are bad results.

Is she right about Norfolk and its mall? Yes and no. Norfolk has a horrible track record of destroying old buildings and streets. It has not put enough energy into the small-scale rebuilding Gratz highlights. In a perfect world, Norfolk’s downtown would be rebuilt with smaller streets and stores that rely on a renewed, regional mass transit system.

But in our imperfect world, the giant MacArthur Center, even with its fortress-like design, is better than a blank, 20-acre parking lot. The mall, if successful, will provide downtown with a retail base and help the city as a whole. It would be nice, however, if city officials would do more to nurture the more authentic type of downtown Gratz and so many others love.

*Cities Back From The Edge: New Life For Downtown Roberta Brandes Gratz with Norman Mint Preservation Press. John Wiley & Sons. New York 1998

A Sweet Neighborhood In San Antonio: King William

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

BY ALEX MARSHALL
SEPT. 5, 1996
Metropolis Magazine.

The fat man in the Budweiser T-shirt and shorts gawking up at the Moorish inspired arches of the front porch of the palatial home was one sign of why life in this elegant neighborhood is not always easy. Despite his admiral interest in historical homes, the man and his companions were not the easiest sight on a Saturday morning if you had just climbed out of bed.

And keep in mind the Budweiser man was one of the good tourists, or at least uncontroversial ones. He was on foot, not in a belching tour bus.

King William is a sweet honey of a neighborhood, a tasty blend of elegant mansions, decrepit Victorians and more non-descript homes nestled down amid the scarred landscape of freeways and vacant lots on the edge of San Antonio’s downtown. A slum at one time, it was rediscovered in the late 60s and 70s. Since then, many of its palatial mansions have been renovated, and their residents live in harmony with the more middle-class denizens that reside in the smaller homes and apartments there.

The neighborhood, built largely between 1850 and 1890, was developed by successful German immigrants who swept into this part of Texas in the 19th century. The Germans were a strong influence in the part of the state. An old photo from the 19th century San Antonio shows a sign warning people to walk their horses across a bridge. It’s written in three languages – English, German and Spanish.

What’s nice about King William is that it’s still very diverse. A guy living an an apartment with a battered car, is down the street from the stockbroker in the mega-mansion. Plenty of homes still need renovating. As I talked with one woman in lovely restored mansion, I watched an old man across the street, wearing a white T-shirt, and sitting on the front porch of a house with peeling paint. He and the house looked equally old and near collapse. Despite its beauty, King William might be just another inner-city, gentrified neighborhood were it not for its position on the edge of San Antonio’s tourist machinery. Both a convention city and a historic tourist town, San Antonio receives some 10 million visitors a year who trot through The Alamo, wander the River Walk, and increasingly, make their way to King William to look at the houses.

This is a mixed blessing. It is one shared by many historic neighborhoods that are in cities like Charleston, Alexandria, and Savannah. The tourism helps keep the city as a whole healthy, and also justifies historic preservation in dollars and cents. But for people living in the neighborhood, it can be a hassle.

Tourism was not on the minds of those who homesteaded the neighborhood back in the late 1960s and early 70s. The godfather of this movement is Walter Mathis. When his home elsewhere in town was put in the bullseye of a freeway’s path, Mathis moved into King William in 1968, bought a crumbling mansion, and then – he says he wanted to assure himself of having good neighbors – bought 14 other homes.

“Everyone thought I was craze to do gown there, because the neighborhood was so terrible,” Mathis said. “People were parking cars in the front yards, and the big houses were all broken up.”

Mathis, an investment banker, says he had 16 men working 18 months to renovate his mansion. On most of the other homes, he had the foundations repaired, put on new tin roofs, and then sold them as is to young couples eager to renovate the homes themselves. Like many people who subsequently moved in, they then spent years or even a decade or more slowly renovating their homes, a la This Old House.

The tourism debate has developed over the last few years. It has centered on two items of tourism: bed and breakfasts, and tour buses.

Of the two, the tour buses are clearly obnoxious. In King William, the full-sized city buses glide through the neighborhood at a crawl in the middle of the street, forcing regular drivers behind them to wait or try to squeeze around them. According to residents, they often sit and idle their engines after they have disgorged their passengers for a stroll. Sometimes they stack up, two or three at once. My visit to the neighborhood was not during the high-tourist season, but I could tell they are obnoxious as hell.

“I’ve had times when right in front of my house, I’ve had two buses and one trolley parked, and I didn’t feel I could work in my bathing suit or shorts on a hot day, because people are staring at me,” said Karen Van Nort, who lives in a palatial residence on King William street, the main drag for tour buses. ”

The bed and breakfasts are the flip-side of the coin, arguably more of a blesssing than a curse. There are roughly a dozen, formal B&Bs in the neighborhood now. They have little opportunity for friction with their neighbors. Despite ample street-parking in the neighborhood, all B&Bs must provide off-street parking. Their overnight guests are seldom seen. Their ownly advertising are tiny wooden signs placed usually on the front porch. Most important, their presence has helped renovate a variety of homes that otherwise might sit crumbling. These 19th century homes are often difficult to work economically for a contemporary household. The Yellow Rose bed and breakfast where I stayed was a 10-room apartment complex before Jennifer and Eric Tice bought it a few years ago and renovated it into a five-room bed and breakfast.

The debate over B&Bs and tour buses was at a high simmer a few years ago, but appears to have quieted. A city committee has proposed, and the neighborhood has accepted, a new ordinance that limits the number of B&Bs to no more than 20 percent of the homes on any one block. The B&B operators are comfortable with this, as are the homeowners. At the moment, only one block is at this level. I couldn’t find anyone during my visit who complained about bed and breakfasts.

“They are my neighbors like anyone else,” said Karen Van Tort, after complaining bitterly of the tour buses. “They take care of their homes. I dont see any big advertising. I see it as more of a positive. I certainly don’t see it as a problem.”

The tour buses are another story. Although some limits have already been set – they are not supposed to cruise before 11 a.m. or after 6 p.m., they still bother some people. The problem is more difficult in that they generally only bother one street – King William – where most of the mega-mansions are clustered.

What many there want is to create a parking lot on the edge of the neighborhood, where the buses could park and then its occupants disembark and walk on foot through the neighborhood. Failing that, they want limits on the size of the buses, and the number that can go through at any onetime. A committee is studying the issue now. It’s using as its model, among others, the ordinances in place in Charleston which not only set limits on buses but on horse drawn carriages.

That tourism is both a problem and a blessing there can be no doubt. Last year, (November 1995), the Historic Anapolis Foundation held a seminar entitled “Living with Success: Managing Residential Life and Tourism in Historic Communities. Among its participants were San Antonio, Newport, Charleston, Santa Fe and Savannah. The report’s conclusions were common-sensical – there must be a balance between tourism and the indigenous life of the neighborhood – but no less true because of this.

What comes across when looking at tourism is that there is often a tension between long-term and short-term gain. If King William is overrun with tour buses, or San Antonio’s River Walk is overrun with chain restaurants, they will both lose some of the charm that makes them successful. But in the short run, the profits from such ventures – should we say predatory ventures? – are tempting.

But neighborhoods also have to guard against being too picky. Urban neighborhoods are meant to have a variety of uses, from a small coffeeshop, to a dentist’s office, to a bed and breakfast. As long as size and scale is managed, uses should not be worried about. Even in King William, most people had nothing to complain about, when I asked of how tourism affected them.

The original homesteader Mathis takes a fairly sanguine attitude toward the tourism fuss, even though a view of his home with the two carved lions out front is one of the prime targets for tour buses.

“Personally, the tour buses don’t bother me because I work all day and I don’t see them,” Mathis said. “Most of the bed and breakfasts are well-run businesses and are very attractive.”

Parking Over People in Brooklyn

Posted on April 27, 2007 by Alex Marshall

With a distinguished history and at least two and a half million people, Brooklyn likes to proclaim itself “a real city,” one that would be the nation’s second largest – well actually the fourth largest – if only it hadn’t merged with New York City in 1898.

How ironic and sad then, that the borough where I live often comports itself like a distant suburb of shopping malls and subdivisions, seeking to keep newcomers out while in contrast accommodating new automobiles as much as possible. While there are many ways the borough does this, in the interest of brevity this article will focus on only one of these: parking. I focus on Brooklyn here because its policies and situation are particularly poignant, but the argument applies to all boroughs and many parts of Manhattan.

Here’s the problem: New York City in its zoning codes essentially requires all new buildings, whether residential or commercial, to provide parking spaces for their denizens. The City basically has a sliding scale of parking requirements, with more parking required the less dense the zoning area is. Only in the Manhattan core is this requirement completely lifted. This policy has the most impact in places like Jackson Heights in Queens, or Crown Heights in Brooklyn, places that are at a crossroads and set to become either more urban or suburban in character as new development increases.

The parking requirement follows the theory that new buildings generate new demand for parking, and so the businesses should provide that parking. While this theory is flawed even in the suburbs, it’s particularly so in a dense urban city equipped with mass transit and good sidewalks.

What apparently most people don’t realize is that the more parking you provide, the more cars there will be on the street. Period. Parking breeds automobiles. By requiring the construction of parking, the city is essentially ordering that automobile use be subsidized. And by promoting parking construction, the city is helping break up the urban fabric and making its mass transit system, on which billions of public money is spent annually, less workable.

The city should scrap its parking requirements. An even better, more pro-active, policy would be to put a cap on the number of spaces a developer can provide. Essentially, this would impose a parking maximum on new construction, rather than a parking minimum, which is what we have now.

As a way of taming streets, controlling parking has a lot to be said for it. As Josh Brustein of Streetsblog.com pointed out recently in a three-part series on parking there, New York City does not need state authority to control parking. That’s not the case with more publicized efforts, worthy though they may be, like congestion pricing. New York City could substantially reduce traffic and make streets more pedestrian-friendly by implementing market-rate parking on the streets and implementing caps on the amount of new parking that can be constructed. As an additional agenda item, it could copy Copenhagen and start a policy of actively reducing the total number of parking spaces a few percentage points each year.

Absent policies such as these, we are likely to see a rise in hostility toward new residents. This is unfortunate. Although I am personally critical of many aspects of the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, I was dismayed to read a recent op-ed by the novelist Jennifer Egan in The New York Times who, despite some excellent points, often sounded like the quintessentially suburban citizen as she criticized the project on the grounds that it would bring a rise in population to the borough, and thus more problems with traffic and parking. She apparently failed to see that if the state and city insisted that the project not provide parking, much of these problems would be eliminated.

The Atlantic Yards project is set to provide about 4,000 parking spaces, or the equivalent of a 40-story parking garage as big around as the World Trade Center. This includes a controversial “temporary” surface parking lot for about 1000 cars that would be in place for a decade or more. Since these spaces will be used multiple times, that means many thousands of additional cars on the streets of Brooklyn, and an urban fabric that has been torn rather than mended.

But with good policies and good urban design, the influx of new people into Brooklyn and other boroughs can improve, not degrade the overall quality of life. Unlike automobile-based suburbs, urban cities generally work better with more people in them. More people means more money for more public services, from mass transit to better sidewalks. While our streets are at capacity for cars, they have plenty of room for more pedestrians and cyclists. Our mass transit system, given decent funding, also can easily be stretched to accommodate newcomers, especially in the boroughs. Imagine if instead of requiring developers to build parking, we required them to fund the mass transit system that their residents would use?

The city needs to reevaluate its policies toward parking. Through this tool alone, the city could make the streets more livable and in the process make newcomers more welcome.

Cold City of Fargo Now Cool

Posted on April 27, 2007 by Alex Marshall

Coolness, as every high schooler knows, is one of those things that’s hard to define but easy to spot among one’s peers.

With cities, being cool depends in part on being economically robust and vibrant, but also on other qualities, such as having a vibrant art scene, good restaurants and interesting local music.

For various reasons, these days almost any city can become a cool city, converting itself from has been to hipness in a relative blink of the eye. It has something to do with the Internet economy, which has a hop, skip and a jump quality about it, alighting in strange places for hard to predict reasons.

I was in Fargo, ND recently, giving a talk on What is Design to the architectural department of North Dakota State University, and it seems to me that this small city is one of those places that has suddenly become “cool.”

Fargo, as most people know, is known to outsiders principally for giving title to the movie by the Coen brothers about murder and Scandinavian accents and very cold weather. Fargo, to the extent that it stood for anything in that movie, stood for cold and dreary white people sitting in bars with not much to do.

I found some of that in Fargo, which to me was a nice break from New York. But I also found little restaurants, a very chic “boutique-style” hotel, and smart people doing interesting work. Most of this came through the eyes of architecture students and professors, who impressed me with the solidness and creativity. Fargo, I could see, could be a pretty good place to live, even though it does get to be 20 below zero in the Winter. (Which global warming has eased, the locals tell me: it used to be 30 below zero.)

Why has this city on the plains ascended the ladder of coolness? Some luck, some planning. Located at the intersection of freight and river lines, the city has always been a hub of manufacturing and industry, some of which is still there. The city was founded around the railroad lines in the late 19th century.

Some of the city’s coolness rests on a local boy making good, a certain Douglas Burgum who was the owner of Great Plains Software – until Microsoft purchased it for $1.1 billion in 2001. Now a top executive at the Redmond company, Burgam is still located in Fargo – and he and his ex-wife Karen Burgum has put money into a number of interesting projects. Just to name two, his wife started the boutique Hotel Donaldson, where I stayed very comfortable, while Mr. Burgum gave the architecture school the money to renovate the old warehouse that is its new downtown center. www.ndsu.nodak.edu/arch/

Of course, it’s not all Burgum money that’s making Fargo. And I’m just giving you my quick impressions after a quick speaking trip. Still, when I’ve gone to cities that are experiencing a comeback, it’s sobering how often I get the impression that private money plays a major part in their resurgence. That’s the case in Chattanooga, where a lot of old Coca-Cola, New York Times and other money has played a part in the city’s betterment. www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.phpIn this country, with government less active than in Western Europe, it’s often left up to private people – rich ones – to carry out what is in effect urban policy and design.

Moses Didn’t Understand Tranportation

Posted on March 14, 2007 by Alex Marshall

The retrospective on Robert Moses here in New York City has inspired a wealth of re-evaluations of the big man who did so much to alter, build and destroy New York City and its environs. I felt compelled to add my two cents, after seeing the marvelous exihibts at the Museum of the City of New York, where you can see the huge models from Moses’ day that showed how he would have, for example, tore a freeway through midtown Manhattan. Here’s what I wrote, after seeing the exhibit:

If a picture is worth a thousand words, than a model might be worth a million. This is the thought that came to me as I stared in fascination and horror at Robert Moses’ planned freeway across Manhattan on display at the Museum of the City of New York.

The elevated freeway would have gone from the Lincoln Tunnel across to the Midtown Tunnel and cut just beside the Empire State Building. Robert Olmsted, former planning director for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, who happened to be at my elbow, told me that the original plan was for a tunnel. Accommodating it is why the Sixth Avenue line dips going uptown out of Herald Square for no apparent reason, Olmsted said. But Moses got a four-lane tunnel converted into a six-lane above ground freeway – on the drawing board. Neither was ever built.

The model on view is part of the big exhibit on the big builder that is taking place this and coming months at MCNY, the Queens Museum of Art and Columbia University Wallach Art Gallery. Hilary Ballon is the curator and has edited a fascinating accompanying book on Moses with historian Kenneth Jackson of Columbia University.

The core of the exhibition at MCNY is many of Moses’ actual transportation models. They range from coffee-table to room sized. For decades gathering dust in a room under a bridge, the models were rescued from decay or destruction by Laura Rosen, the archivist for MTA Bridges and Tunnels.

The exhibition as a whole is pitched as a reevaluation of Moses, which is certainly welcome. If the exhibition had a motto, it might be “He wasn’t all bad.” Which, of course, he wasn’t. Along with plowing down neighborhoods for freeways and soulless high rises, he also built some elegantly designed bridges and parkways, and hundreds of recreation centers and parks, including Riverside Park on the Upper West Side.

But the models on view at MCNY should serve to remind us that Moses’ transportation and related visions of housing and work were not just poorly or cruelly executed. They were fundamentally flawed, even on their own terms. If Moses had had his way, Manhattan would be crisscrossed with freeways and studded with new parking lots and garages. Which not only would have destroyed many people’s homes and businesses, it would have made the city less prosperous, and ultimately put less money in both private and public pocketbooks.

It all comes down to capacity. Like many people of his generation, I’m convinced, Moses essentially didn’t understand the different capabilities of different modes of transportation, despite his learning and education. A freeway at top capacity can move only a few thousand vehicles per hour, and all those vehicles have to be put somewhere once they arrive where they’re going. That means many lanes of freeways and many parking lots and garages chewing up prime real estate.

By comparison, a subway or commuter train can move tens of thousands of people per hour, and they all arrive without the need to store a vehicle. This essential fact is why Manhattan can have dozens of skyscrapers, which not incidentally produce millions in salaries, profits and taxes, crammed right next to each other without any parking lots.

Moses’ vision of New York, if he had completed it, would have essentially downsized large parts of the city. At the MCNY exhibit, there’s one artist’s conception of what Soho would look like after the highway was cut through it. It essentially looked like Dallas or Houston – a broad boulevard lined with Edge City style office buildings. And whether you love or hate Dallas, it’s a far less productive city than New York, when calculated on a per square foot basis.

This is what happened to much of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, which are still recovering from the damage Moses did. The boroughs are not only less hospitable because of the worst of Moses’ freeways; they are also less productive.

Moses thought he was modernizing Manhattan and the boroughs by adjusting them to accommodate the car and the highway. It’s true that on a conceptual level, he was acting similarly to those of the 19th century, who had put in train lines into New York and other cities, adjusting them to that then new mode of transportation.

But what Moses apparently didn’t see is that the car and the highway operate by different rules than modes of transportation past. Despite its behemoth-like size, a highway is actually a low-capacity mode of transportation, particularly when compared to trains.

Moses can’t be forgiven his intellectual errors by the observation that “everyone was doing it.” For one thing, everyone wasn’t. Lewis Mumford, who in the 1950s was a prominent and respected critic, laid out in painstaking fashion just exactly why plowing freeways into cities would not improve overall transportation, even while destroying so much of what was worthwhile in urban centers.

Secondly, Moses was not just part of the pack; he led the pack. Before World War II, the general plan was to put freeways beside major cities, not through them. Moses helped convince the federal government otherwise.

This capacity question still is with us today. It is the governing factor on how much New York City and the region can grow. It is the promise of the three major transit projects on the stage today: East Side Access, which would enable Long Islanders to reach Grand Central Terminal; Second Avenue Subway, which would deliver a long promised second subway line along the East Side with the potential to extend it to the Bronx and Brooklyn; and ARC, which would be another tunnel under the Hudson River from New Jersey.

The region’s transit system is above or at capacity on most of its key lines. These new lines will add new capacity, and thus create the potential for new growth. Adding them would increase the city’s amazing ability to handle more people comfortably.

I attended a briefing on the Olympics in early 2000 by the urban planner Alex Garvin. He talked about how the 2012 Olympics, if it were held in New York, would need to handle an estimated 500,000 visitors a day. That had crippled sprawling cities like Atlanta and the system of buses and satellite parking lots it set up to handle its Olympics. Oddly enough, Garvin said, New York, with its 8 million people, could swallow an additional half million without a hiccup. Its huge transit system could handle them without any problem, particularly given them most of them would be traveling at off-peak hours.

It was a fascinating display of the logic of New York. Where is the best place to put a lot of people? Where there already are a lot of people. That’s why if we do it right, the city can expand from 8 million to 9 million people over the next 25 years, which many predict, without sacrificing comfort or livability.

So as we evaluate Moses, we should remember that it wasn’t just his means that were unsound; many of his ends were too.

[first published in the newsletter Spotlight on the Region of the Regional Plan Association in New York City. Available at www.rpa.org]

What Makes A Neighborhood Viable?

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Alex Marshall

a roundtable debate – Alex Marshall and Andres Duany
Metropolis
May, 1995

Our article in May about the redevelopment of East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia (“When the New Urbanism Meets an Old Neighborhood”), has sparked discussion – verbal, written, and electronic – about similarities writer Alex Marshall sees between urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater – Zyberk’s plans for the Norfolk neighborhood. At the heart of the debate is a facet of New Urbanism that is disturbing to some critics and could impede the movement in the future: The majority of projects suggest an unwillingness to accommodate existing building stock into its new neighborhoods. New Urbanists call their movement the “architecture of community” – a questionable label when architects appear willing to remove existing communities to build new ones. But for now, the issue is whether this part of East Ocean View is viable enough to save.

ANDRES DUANY: In his article about our redevelopment project, Alex Marshall makes a false analogy between the neighborhoods destroyed by urban renewal in the 1950s and the site in Norfolk. Those martyred neighborhoods described by Jane Jacobs [in The Death and Life of Great American Cities] were poor but in possession of highgrade urban qualities supporting a fine tissue of society, including many homeowners. They were, as we say now, viable.

The 100 acres of East Ocean View were half-abandoned. Indeed, the area’s development had become undesirable so quickly that a good portion of the land had remained unbuilt. Most of the existing housing consists of decrepit Section 8 subsidized rental apartments, of a most degrading type, built in the 1970s by developers with nothing but exploitation in mind. The whole affair contributes to a very high incidence of crime. Their removal in Norfolk is akin to the justified demolitions of Pruitt-Igoe [the award winning St. Louis housing project often cited as a failure of Modern architecture] and other such products that were the object of Jane Jacobs’ attack, not of her defense.The people who lose their rental apartments will be assisted into housing by the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, which may well be the best-managed public housing in the country. They are certainly not being turned out into oblivion in the manner of the 1960s.

Apart from the apartments, the most controversy was caused by the 18 houses with middle-class resident/owners that are slated to go. Why these? Of the 18, three were on the beachfront, isolating the beach from the rest of the neighborhood. To make the beachfront public by eliminating these houses, the inland houses (the owners of only three of them wished to remain) were caught in the net of equal fairness (or unfairness). Designating these three otherwise acceptable homes for removal permitted the removal of those three that privatized the beach. The development of the neighborhood is designed in such a way that the three homeowners, retired couples who may want to remain for the rest of their lives, won’t be affected until the later phases of development, perhaps a decade away.

Granted, the decision for demolition was made before we were even interviewed for the project. But had we not approved, we would have walked away, as Marshall reported we did in Houston. There was an important condition to be respected: The City Council of Norfolk had voted unanimously for the complete demolition of the site. This was a very protracted, thoroughly public, and very contested process, through which the elected representatives of the people made a difficult decision. I understand this to be the workings of democracy and something to be intrinsically respected. I am surprised that Marshall does not report this.

Apart from the prerogatives of democracy, the stated intention of the Norfolk City Council is one that we support as a general strategy for urban cores: to decant the monocultures of poverty. This small area is responsible for the majority of the crime in East Ocean View, giving the entire bay – front of Norfolk its bad name and causing the middle class to shun it for the suburbs.

Poverty itself does not cause crime, the concentration of poverty causes crime (source: Reuben Greenberg, the brilliant police chief of Charleston, South Carolina). Our task was to design a properly balanced neighborhood which leaves the population with a mixture of the poor,the middle class, and even the wealthy. This is, in fact, the ideal of the New Urbanism, and not the demolition of fine old neighborhoods. Marshall did report accurately my politically incorrect statement to the effect that the inner cities do not need more affordable housing as much as they need housing for the middle class. . To live, our bankrupt cities need tax paying citizens. That’s a fact.

ALEX MARSHALL: 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.

Duany also makes serious errors that undercut his arguments and suggest how little he has paid attention to the neighborhood he is replacing. Here are the most obvious:

None of the homes in this area are Section 8 housing. All the homes, both apartments and single-family houses, were privately built. This part of East Ocean View has no public housing of any kind. The brick apartment buildings Duany is apparently referring to are standard suburban-style apartments built in the 1970s. Being brick, they are probably better than many such apartment complexes that litter the suburbs.

None of the families have been relocated to public housing. At last count, 75 families have been evicted from the neighborhood. The only guarantee the housing authority made was to place residents (who so desired) at the top of the waiting list for public housing – something that complies with federal law governing public housing. The fact is, East Ocean View has no public housing, so it is unlikely present residents would choose to become public housing tenants. By design, the city is using private banks rather than federal money to finance the project, which exempts the city from having to guarantee relocation assistance. Duany says residents “are certainly not being turned out into oblivion.” In fact, this is exactly what is happening to them.

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.

Duany asserts his plan will make the beach more public. In fact, an essential component of the city’s plans is reaping the profits from a series of new half-million dollar houses that will front directly on the beach.

Duany ends by saying he seeks only to “design a properly balanced neighborhood and to leaven the population witha mixture of the poor, the middle class,and even the wealthy.” His apparent capacity at self-deception amazes me. The new neighborhood will not have any poor people in it. The most the city has ever talked about is having homes in the price range of a high-school teacher – firmly middle-class.

Duany’s talk about diversity obscures the anti-urban nature of the project and his design. The new neighborhood, if built as planned, will be less dense and less diverse. By some estimates, up to 1,800 homes were in the East Ocean View neighborhood at the time the clearance project was launched. Duany would reduce the density to a third of that – 400 to 600. This area has blocks full of single family homes and apartments that are quite viable. It also has blank spots and abandoned housing, which would be perfect for redevelopment through a process that does not involve driving people out of their homes. The only reason to tear down the entire neighborhood is because of a cynical belief that no middle or upper-income person would be willing to move into a house next to that of a working-class person.

What if the city had taken the estimated $35 to $40 million the project will cost and subsidized the building of middle-class houses on those vacant lots Duany mentioned? Then the city would have had a chance of creating a genuinely diverse neighborhood, better off than the present one, but one not founded on force and exclusion. I am not against gentrification. Like Duany, I favor restoring a healthier tax base to center-cities. But there is a difference between gentrification – which I think of as a poor neighborhood gradually being infused with wealthier residents – and the clearance of people from their houses so wealthier people can be put there with the help of taxpayers’ money.

Norfolk is doing just what it wanted: tearing down a poor neighborhood and driving its people elsewhere – across city lines, some officials hope. When preparing the project, city officials used a feasibility study that estimates Norfolk would save millions of dollars in police and social costs because up to a third of the project’s displaced residents would leave town. In this noble endeavor, Duany is helping.

I don’t mean to say that Duany or his staff are without talent. His new plan has its beauty. Its planned road system carefully weaves around existing trees and carves out small parks. The mixture of town houses and grand homes with the now – standard front porches will be more interesting than the usual suburban subdivision. But Duany’s new neighborhood will have no history and reveal its lack of roots in its false, cheery appearance. It’s hard to resist concluding that Duany, the New Urbanist, is tearing down a real urban neighborhood to build a fake one.

How Urban Should Your City Be?

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Alex Marshall

What “urban” does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or trash.

by Alex Marshall
The New York Observer
July – 2001

As the Mayor’s race begins to heat up, perhaps it’s a good time to prompt some discussion about not only crime, schools and jobs, but something both more conceptual and more concrete, such as what kind of city we want to be.

The words “urban” and “suburban” are irritatingly vague, and used as both pejorative and praise. To some, “urban” is still a code word for minorities and crime. To others, it means sophistication and a willingness to embrace rather than avoid, public rather than private, a street-based life. “Suburban” can mean narrow, isolating and sexless, or it can mean families, space and nature.

Some New Yorkers feel that the lines during the Rudy Giuliani years have been blurred: that the city is becoming too suburban (no sex shops, no noise, no nightclubs, no crime), and that the funkier streets of the 70’s, 80’s and early 90’s — when the city was a rougher but arguably more interesting place — are making way for blocks that more closely resemble Garden City, Long Island (where Rudy grew up). It might be good to clarify the terminology, because it’s not always clear what people mean, or if they know themselves.

New Yorkers aren’t the only ones confused, however. Last month, 1,000 “New Urbanists” visited the city for their annual convention. New Urbanism is a movement, probably the leading popular-design philosophy in the country dedicated to making places more citylike. But those who call themselves “New Urbanists” are also not sure what that means.

New Urbanists have produced mostly fake urban places, like Disney’s Celebration in Florida. These places are essentially suburban subdivisions, built in cornfields and dressed up like small towns. Yet some New Urbanists, mostly on the West Coast, have helped accomplish more urban goals, such as building train lines and stopping highways.

Steven Bodzin, the spokesman for the Congress for New Urbanism, said the group chose New York for its convention this year because it was alien territory. The Northeast has few of those cutesy New Urban subdivisions, and the New York architectural establishment derides New Urbanists for liking the traditional architecture of columns, cornices and front porches.

“In the New York architectural world, there is a deep suspicion of New Urbanism,” Mr. Bodzin said. “Our single biggest source of criticism comes out of New York. So we decided to come here.”

Jonathan Rose, member of the prominent Rose development family and a developer himself, was the New York host for the convention. An avuncular man with a bushy beard, Mr. Rose said that New Urbanists can learn from New York, and vice versa.

“What New Urbanism has is a rap,” he said. “It has been extremely good at communicating its vision.”

The group’s travel schedule illustrated either its diversity or its confusion. The conventioneers toured the subway system and Greenwich Village, but also the placid, quasi-suburban Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills Gardens, with its privately owned streets. At the conference itself, held at the Altman building and the adjacent Metropolitan Pavilion on West 18th Street, the group tried to work out its own definitions.

Key indicators popped up. For example, congestion — something New Yorkers struggle with — may be a sign of success rather than failure.

“We’re in New York because it’s a congested city,” G.B. Arrington, a transportation planner from Portland, Ore., told a small group. “Congestion is a sign of vitality. Maybe if your streets aren’t congested, you’re doing something wrong.”

And how about infrastructure? The average person, I suspect, does not realize how directly a city’s infrastructure determines its character. Build more subway lines and you get more city. Build more highways and parking garages, and you get more traffic and quasi-suburban settings.

Jaquelin Robertson, the elder-statesman architect from Cooper & Robertson, did a masterful job taking listeners through the city’s key infrastructure decisions, from the Erie Canal of the 1800’s to Robert Moses in the 1920’s and 30’s, stringing parkways across the region as “a kind of infrastructure emperor.”

“If the Roman Empire was about roads, bridges, aqueducts, Roman laws and Roman legions, then my adopted New York, the Empire City, was about parkways, bridges, aqueducts, New York real estate, Penn Station, Yankee Stadium,” Mr. Robertson said.

As a journalist who has written a book about cities, I have my own views about what constitutes urban — and what I’d like New York to become. To my mind, urban means building the Second Avenue subway line and making fewer accommodations for S.U.V.’s and more for social activities, such as drinking at street fairs or dancing all night. What urban does not mean, to me, is tolerating crime, incivility or trash. I would like a safe, diverse, dynamic and clean city with more trains and fewer cars, with funkier streets and more stoops instead of porches.

Maybe one of the Mayoral candidates will offer his own answer to the question: How urban do you want New York City to be?

The Golden Flame Flickers Most Brightly In Cities

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Alex Marshall

REVIEW OF CITIES AND CIVILIZATION
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

BOOK FACTS: Cities in Civilization, by Sir Peter Hall. Pantheon Books, New York, 1998. (Pantheon is a division of Random House). First published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London. 1,169 pages.

Thanks to Peter Hall, I know a lot more about theater, music and the formation of democracy. I know a lot more about shipbuilding, computers, car-making, movie-making and the birth of rock and roll. I know a lot more about electronics, painting, cotton-spinning and the printing press.

I also know a lot more about cities, although at first I wasn’t sure. Was studying the fusion of blues and country music in Memphis in the 1930s studying cities? But Hall has changed my definitions.

He has written a curious book, which, by the way, just happens to be a masterpiece. It is a huge tome of a book, a doorstop, weighing in at four pounds on my bathroom scales, a mere 1,200 pages, including footnotes. It is Hall’s life work, the probable conclusion to a long and distinguished career of writing more than 25 books, most of them about cities. Sir Peter Hall, already knighted for his contribution to his native England, took 15 years to think it up, research, and write it.

I say it is curious because Hall has written what is basically a history of creativity, using cities as a connective theme. Rather than talk about finely-built churches or elegant streets, the usual stuff of city study, Hall talks of what cities produce — their art, culture, technology, science and industry. Only in the last of the volume’s four books, does Hall talk about sewers, streets, water lines, and growth patterns, which I think of as the basics of city study.

Hall’s thesis is that most innovation in art, science, philosophy and everything else comes out of urban centers in short, dramatic bursts, usually just lasting a generation or two. These intense flowerings produce most human forward momentum.

Why did democracy, humanistic philosophy and the dramatic arts explode out of Athens in 400 B.C.? Why did painters and sculptors rediscover the naturalism of ancient Greece in Florence in 1400? Why did dozens of men, including William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, suddenly write hundreds of great plays in a short 40 year epoch in London around 1600? Why did the best and most innovative work in computers come out of the Silicon Valley in our present era?

Why indeed?

Hall takes these short epochs — New York at the turn of the century, Detroit at the birth of the car, the creation of socialist Stockholm in 1950, in all 21 city epochs — and lays them out for the reader. He asks the question, Where, and why there? and then seeks answers thoroughly. And I do mean thoroughly.

In asking why impressionism, post-impressionism and cubism all came out of Paris between 1870 and 1910, Hall tells a concise history of art, delving into the backgrounds of not just Picasso, but dozens of other painters, tracing how they arrived at Paris to begin revolutionizing what it means to put color and lines on canvas.

With shipbuilding in Glasgow, Hall tells us a history of the steam engine, a geology lesson on the importance of coal deposits near the city, and a discourse on the shift from wooden to iron shipbuilding.

With the rock and roll in Memphis, Hall tells how the fusion of negro blues and white country music produced Elvis Presley, which of course includes discussing the differences between African polytonalities and the diatonic European scale.

Whatever you are reading about, Hall takes you deep, deep inside. Did you know that the great Japanese electronic firm, NEC — Nippon Electric Corporation — was founded by Western Electric, the American company, in 1899? I learned this reading about the rise of electronic industry outside Tokyo at the turn of the century.

The book is a masterpiece not only because of the astonishing range and depth of Hall’s writing, but because he begins to answer his question Where, and why there? He begins to outline the murky shape of what defines the conditions of creativity.

At first glance, Cities in Civilization seems like a companion and answer to Lewis Mumford’s great master works of the 1938 and 1961, The Culture of Cities and The City in History. But while all three books are huge, and both authors trace cities through time, Mumford’s story is much more rooted in the physical world. He makes you see the design of cities, their architecture, and even when spinning heady theories about social order, he traces them back to things like density, streets and regional growth patterns.

Hall, on the other hand, sometimes ignores the physical world completely. In writing about the Silicon Valley, Hall expends hardly a word about the Santa Clara valley’s disjointed, sprawling, automobile-oriented form. Instead, he tells how William Shockley moving from Boston to Palo Alto in 1954 and founded the modern electronics industry.

Rather than rhyming with Mumford, Cities in Civilization compares better to a smaller, but similar book, Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts into Air (Simon & Schuster 1982). Like Hall, Berman is fascinated with why creative people emerge from particular places and time. Like Hall, he comes up with some similar explanations.

Both Berman and Hall concludes that creativity often depends on a kind of dissonance between observer and observed, an interplay between the status of outsider and insider. Berman says great literature often comes out of developing countries, like Argentina in this century or Russia in the last, because their intelligentsia gained a magnified perspective on the human condition by being aware of a vast world of ideas, but living in a poverty-ridden, earth-bound place.

Hall says creative people are often in a place, but not completely of it. Hall documents the incredible achievements of the Jewish bourgeoise elite in Vienna around 1900, who were almost, but not completely, integrated into the local culture. In ancient Athens, Hall informed me that a peculiar group labeled metics produced much of the art and philosophy. Metics were a kind of resident alien, not slaves, yet not fully citizens. Both Hippocrates and Herodotus, the founders of medicine and the study of history, were metics.

In addition to being the work of outsiders, Hall sketches other common conditions about where great things are likely to happen, which I loosely sum up here.

One, paradoxically, is disorder. Creative places tend to be swirling, often violent places, where social order is present but changing rapidly. The masters in renaissance Florence, for example, worked in a context of violent family feuds, political divisions, continual warfare and bloodshed.

Second: Great places at great times become so by being magnets for creative people of a particular bent. Paris sucked in potentially great painters from all over Europe, trained them, and then spat them out to the world as masters. The Silicon Valley today does the same with computer people. New York City, of course, has functioned like this for most of its existence in a wide variety of endeavors.

Third: The state usually fertilizes the soil of innovation, whether it be in shipbuilding or painting. The unaided Free Market is largely an illusion. French kings sponsored the great salons of art which first made Paris the capital of art in Europe, and which then provided a backboard for the impressionist to rebel against. Federal defense money underpinned the initial university and industrial computer work in the Silicon Valley.

Fourth: The group is as important as the individual. Even a Shakespeare or a Picasso does not act alone, but comes out of a big bunch of people working on the same challenges in the same time and place. Even a genius needs the shoulders of others to stand on.

Fifth: Money matters. Most creative periods either produced or were funded by great increases in the wealth. More money not only funds luxuries like art, but tends to produce the violent social change that fuels new perspectives.

Still, despite the rules, you can never predict just where great things are going to happen. Great creative epochs are like love affairs, which erupt suddenly, gather great speed and energy, and then quickly burn out. Which leads to another conclusion of Hall’s: great epochs are not sustainable. The necessary dissonance between a stable social or economic order, and a creative group of outsiders who challenge it, cannot last.

Hall’s thesis is fascinating. I could think of only one example to contradict it, but it’s a big one: The American revolution and U.S. Constitution. Founding a new nation in 1776 based on democracy, without queens or kings, that separated church from state and guaranteed personal liberty, was obviously a very big deal. Where did it come from?

Many of the most important thinkers and actors behind the American experiment came from Virginia, then an agrarian, plantation-centered land with virtually no cities at all. Because of the economics of plantations, the planters shipped their tobacco and cotton directly to England from their own wharves and had no need of cities, which are usually based around transportation. Because of this, larger urban centers never emerged in the state. Other than tiny Williamsburg, Virginia had no cities at all.

How then, was this agrarian state able to produce George Mason, who authored the doctrine of religious freedom and the separation of church and state? How did it produce Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and many of the other intellectual underpinnings of the country? How did a a culture of enlightenment emerge from an agrarian, slave-based system of wealth and society?

How indeed. We’ll leave that question hanging.

Who should read this book? Its 1,169 pages are both alluring and intimidating. Rather than tackle it whole, I would advise most people to read the most appealing chapters first. If painting is your passion, read about Paris. If its the blues, read about Memphis. That way, you might gradually get suckered in to reading about shipbuilding in Glasgow, Swedish social thought in Stockholm, and event

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

I'm an independent journalist in New York City. My articles, books and talks are on this site.

Category Archives: Urbanism

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