Tomorrowland

Just back from Orlando, where I spoke at a conference on redevelopment and infill put on by the Orange County Government. They don't make walking easy there, but I hoofed it back from the convention center to the Hilton, along grassy shoulders of dual carriageways; sidewalks begin and end. We could see Sea World out our hotel window, and I insisted we walk there, across a giant parking lot. At the Magic Kingdom, I was struck by how urban the arrangement is. You park your car, get on a tram, and then take either the monorail or a ferry boat into the park itself. Once there, you walk around, and there aren't too many places to sit. Were it not for the sugar- and carb-laden food offerings every few feet, it's a place to burn off calories. The most efficient way to see Tomorrowland is by hopping on the Tomorrowland Transit Authority's Blue Line, an elevated subway. Walt Disney loved highways, but he knew the role of transit, and the virtues of compactness and density. Meanwhile, in Orlando, there's a recognition that they can't keep spreading outward, and instead must turn inward to vacant lots and parcels with great potential. Florida gave us Seaside and the South Beach Diet; maybe the Sunshine State will become a model for re-engineering our car-oriented environments as well.

Hybrid heaven

So we took delivery on the 2008 Highlander Hybrid, submitting to the classic, and so completely backwards, stick-up job whereby pople who actually care about the future of the planet pay out the nose, while the buyers of old-school cars and trucks at Boch Toyota get the deals. It's a big yacht of a vehicle, and we're learning the mores of driving a hybrid: the wonderful quiet, the gentle touch with the accelerator to stay on electric power as long as possible, the joy of being able to park and idle without feeling guilty (the better to let the DVD run a bit more). We needed to accomodate three boys and do mostly city driving, and of course the mileage is better in stop-and-go because the battery kicks in at low speeds, and actually recharges in braking. Any longer trips we take have the whole family in one vehicle so we're always trip-bundled. When you drive a hybrid, it's true, you view the rest of the road differently: all those folks doing exactly the opposite of what we need to do, continuing to practice the great American tradition of driving a single-occupant, gas-guzzling vehicle for long distances. In Boston, as well, there's a particularly interesting cultural clash. At traffic lights and stop signs, I never gun it anymore, because I have one eye on the "EV" display that indicates my locomotion is emissions-free. My fellow road warriors seldom seem to be in this frame of mind. The honking began the instant the light changed to green the other day, and at the next light, where of course I caught up to the offender -- in a big non-hybrid SUV with New Hampshire plates -- I asked, why were you honking at me? To which he replied, "You weren't moving." No, I just wasn't moving fast enough for you. And off he went, pedal to the metal, secure in his ignorance with his brethren in the land of subdivisions north on I-93, unaware that the oil we use and the stuff we spew into the atmosphere is the slightest concern.

Hybrid havoc

An expansion in the family required five distinct seats and storage, so we faced the dreaded middle-aged American dilemma -- minivan, SUV, crossover -- but with a but one mandatory requirement: our new, bigger car needed to be a hybrid. The auto industry, sluggish to respond to the demand from people like us (or equally likely, keeping supplies limited and prices high, knowing we'll pay), only offers a smattering as of 2008. We considered the Mercury Mariner, but they are hard to come by -- September at the earliest, we were told, and that was by a friend in the business. Aside from a Lexus, that left the Toyota Highlander Hybrid; Boch Toyota in Norwood said come on down for a test drive. "Great day to by a Highlander," said the welcoming sales director. "A hybrid Highlander," I clarified. Toyota is an interesting company in the context of the planetary emergency. The Prius has made history, but the showroom that day was full of huge cars and trucks -- the monster Sequoia SUV, the Tundra pick-up, a minivan here and there, some economy compacts, and no hybrids. We were told we got the last Highlander in stock. As such, Boch wouldn't take a dime off the $38,373 list price, despite the bubbly claim on the telephone that inventory needed to move before the end of the month. Why aren't there more choices? Does anyone seriously think we're all going to be driving gas-powered vehicles in 15 years? Toyota refuses to sell its hybrid minivan in the US (for sale in Japan only), though it would sell briskly in these parts and elsewhere around the nation. We don't need a huge SUV; we just need some extra seating. We would jump at the lightest vehicle possible with the most space and the best fuel economy. The Hybrid Center keeps tabs on how the car companies seem to be making this inevitable transition as difficult as possible. On the way out of the showroom, I asked if there was a recycling bin for the can of Diet Coke I had bought in Ernie's cafe. "Nah," said the cashier. "Just throw it in the trash." I squeezed past a hulking Tundra and headed for the door.

Yankee thrift and warming

The next few years, climate change experts agree, are our last chance to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to have some impact on the planet fifty years from now. Putting a price on carbon, wind farms, new technology for cars, and concentrated land use are all important, but perhaps the most pressing need is in changing behavior now: using compact flourescents, turning off lights, eating local food, bundling trips, leaving the car parked and taking transit, and ride-sharing with such services as GoLoco. Yet it turns out there's one behavior I don't have to change, because it's been good for the planet all along: my habit of wearing clothes until they are threadbare, shoes far beyond their life expectancy (record: a pair of wingtips from Scotland, twenty years). And being loathe to throw out any article of children's clothing, because it can be re-used. I have been exposed to much criticism and psycho-analysis about this, but now I have the ultimate defense -- I'm saving on the energy needed to manufacture new things. I knew there was something visionary in the old New England Yankee credo: use it up and wear it out. The New York Times ran a piece in the Thursday Styles section on jackets insulated with recycled plastic bottles and tote bags patched together with rags. Recycling clothes from your own closet, the reporter concluded, may be the greenest statement of all.

Jane's turn

Earlier this year, New York was abuzz with a series of exhibitions put on by Columbia University, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Queens Museum: “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” with a subtitle noting the “transformation of New York,” in contrast to the “fall” of New York in the subtitle of Robert Caro’s epic biography The Power Broker. The series was a fresh look at the master builder, and suggested, implicitly and otherwise, that maybe Moses wasn’t as terrible as he was made out to be, particularly in Caro’s tome. Some of the dialogue that emerged centered on the question of whether the pendulum of community participation had swung too far, and the need for someone with Moses’ vision if not another Robert Moses, to push for big projects and critical infrastructure to keep New York an economic powerhouse and a good place for people to live. Now comes “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York,” a two-room multimedia exhibit at the Municipal Art Society -- 457 Madison Avenue, New York NY, opening Tuesday Sept. 28 and running through Jan. 5, 2008 (www.mas.org). The exhibit is sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the same folks who gave Jacobs a grant that enabled her to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities almost a half-century ago. There is no revisionism in this presentation, curated by George Washington University’s Christopher Klemek. The message is that Jacobs was vindicated in her recommendations for short blocks, diversity and density, and a mix of uses; tenacious in taking on the planning establishment and officialdom to show them the errors of their ways -- and, critically, that all New Yorkers should feel empowered to question plans and projects in pretty much the exact same way today. For each of the battles that Jacobs took on – blocking traffic in Washington Square Park, fighting urban renewal in the West Village, and beating back the Lower Manhattan Expressway (all of which I will chronicle in my upcoming book on the clash of Jacobs and Moses being published next year by Random House) -- the exhibit cites a battle happening right now in New York, over landfills, environmental justice and other assorted projects, and the neighborhood group that is engaged in the cause. The Municipal Art Society, currently looking for new leadership and a clarified role in the civic affairs of New York, clearly seeks to empower and educate, and laudably, reach new audiences. The fact is a great many people don’t know who Jane Jacobs was. A television producer, for example, told organizers that the exhibit and related panels and walking tours all sounded very interesting, but wanted to know if Ms. Jacobs would be leading any tours or speaking herself (she died last April). Thus, the first room of the exhibit is an introduction to Jacobs and primarily the principles of urbanism she espoused. In a nice touch, guests can look through a Lucite panel to a stretch of Madison Avenue outside, and consider the mix and massing of buildings, or the pulse of people on the sidewalks. (When I was there I was fixated by the artistry of a worker scoring some freshly laid cement on the sidewalk along 51st Street, and had to tear myself away – but it was all in keeping with Jacobs’ admonition to observe and look closely at the urban environment). The second room dwells more on taking on the establishment, and includes a wonderful section of nasty letters about Jacobs from two men, Moses and Lewis Mumford. The fight against the plan to raze 14 blocks in the West Village circa 1961 gets thoughtful treatment; this is the area of Klemek’s greatest expertise. Jacobs, during this time, developed a no-compromise approach and dabbled in trying to do housing development herself, with the West Village Houses, the 5-story red-brick alternatives to the towers in the park that Jacobs and the community managed to build near the Hudson River. The fight against the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which Moses wanted to build to connect the Holland Tunnel to East River crossings, is made vivid by a digital composition photograph showing a graffiti-strewn elevated highway structure – it looks like the Bruckner – plunked down in the middle of trendy Broome Street in SoHo. On the way out, visitors see a photograph of Jacobs in jail with Susan Sontag after being arrested in an anti-Vietnam War protest, and the quote from Jacobs on she resented how much time she had to spend fighting government plans when she says she would have been happier writing books. The exhibit, which relies heavily on the contents of the Jane Jacobs papers at the Burns Library at Boston College, suffers somewhat from imprecision; the wrong date is given for her arrival in Greenwich Village, and the idea of putting a sunken roadway through Washington Square Park is misattributed to Moses (the man behind the submersion was Manhattan borough president Hulan Jack, whom Moses pilloried for daring to suggest an alternative to his surface-level park-piercing). The photo caption in a magazine showing Jacobs with various planning and design luminaries at the University of Pennsylvania in 1958 misidentifies the legendary urban and environmental scholar Ian McHarg as “Ian McHard,” and the mistake is repeated in the exhibit copy. There are also a few typos that suggest a sense of being rushed. Do we need another Moses? Did he do good things? This tribute to Jane Jacobs was seen by some as a kind of retort to the Moses exhibits, almost as if it was audacious to suggest that Jacobs’ primary foil might be redeemed. No, actually, she was right and he was mostly wrong; she had an intuitive sense of what makes a successful city and Moses and the planners of the day didn’t; she had the gumption to challenge authority, and all New Yorkers should engage in the future of their city with her energy and verve – those are some of the messages inherent at the Municipal Art Society. How can big plans and big projects and infrastructure co-exist with community participation? Has NIMBYism led to paralysis that threatens to turn the city into a museum? How can affordability stay marbled into the urban neighborhoods that Jacobs knew the wealthy, in droves, would begin to value? Those are some of the trickier questions raised in the juxtaposition of Jacobs and Moses that are not so fully addressed. The exhibit will be accompanied by a series of panels and guided walking tours, the first of which was today through the Greenwich Village neighborhood Jacobs called home.

Fixing it first

When I worked briefly in state government, one of the proudest accomplishments was what we didn't do. Under Governor Mitt Romney's "Fix it First" policy, what we didn't do was build new highways and interchanges and new bridges and the like -- not a single new lane mile in Massachusetts over four years. (The unfortunate reconfiguration of the Sagamore rotary, the gateway to Cape Cod, was the closest the administration got to this very common indulgence). Instead, Romney, a Republican now running for president, had a different priority: making sure that existing infrastructure was in a state of good repair. By definition that meant stuff that was in and around existing cities. Ed Rendell and Jennifer Granholm, governors of Pennsylvania and Michigan respectively, had similar policies. It is one of the most solid tenets of smart growth -- the makeovers make cities and older suburbs more liveable and functional, while sprawl-enabling highway construction is limited. In Massachusetts, when the engineers looked around and checked out what needed fixing up, the list was sobering. If the Longfellow Bridge connecting Boston and Cambridge over the Charles River doesn't get a $60 million restoration, it could crumble in stages like an unstable sand castle. One engineer said his official assessment was that the Storrow Drive tunnel absolutely will fail within five years, but his unofficial view was that it could cave in any day now. Even with an affirmative policy to fix it first, scores of bridges are deficient. All of this is relevant, of course, after the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis. We don't know what happened -- the span was deemed deficient but passed inspection; cracking from fatigue is suspected. Maintenance is never a sexy thing for politicans, but one report suggests that $9 billion a year is needed to address aging infrastructure, over four times more than what is being spent now. Money is still getting poured into new highways out into the cornfields. Maybe the tragedy will make that kind of highway and bridge construction a bit more shameful (see the bridge to nowhere, courtesy of Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens from Alaska). The Minneapolis bridge collapse came after a weekend spent in Amagansett on Long Island, which featured power outages and brownouts the days we were there. The Gucci storefront went dark and the pinot grigio warmed. It all gives one a creepy sense of being on borrowed time.
p.s. I have been trying to post more regularly but have been deterred in recent weeks because Google, new owner of Blogger, gave me no way to sign in. I'm a Google fan generally, but not when this champion of freedom of information freezes me out of my own blog.

Should I stay or should I go?

I had the honor of moderating a terrific panel the other evening on the subject of Boston City Hall: should the 1969 Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles structure be abandoned to the wrecking ball, as the mayor has proposed? Don't do it, said three out of the five assembled, namely Joan Goody of Goody, Clancy; David Fixler, principal at Einhorn Yaffee Prescott, who has done a number of spruce-ups and rehabs of modernist buildings; and Nathan Glazer, author of the recent book, From a Cause to a Style: Modernist Architecture's Encounter with the American City (Princeton University Press, 2007). Glazer was mostly convinced that contemporary architecture wouldn't give us a City Hall any better; Goody and particularly Fixler made the case that the building was neglected from the start -- light fixtures never replaced, finishes left undone, etc. The structure could be retrofitted, colorized and accessorized, and its barren plaza given edges and life. (A good first step would be to stop using the plaza as a parking lot and storage/staging area. The next step is to tear up the bricks and restore Hanover Street from Congress to Cambridge). While Mayor Thomas M. Menino has proposed a super-green new City Hall on the South Boston Waterfront, Fixler and Goody pointed out that demolishing the old City Hall, with all its stored energy, would take half a century to recoup. George Thrush, chair of the hard-charging architecture school at Northeastern University, dismissed that argument, and pressed for a re-envisioning of the entire Government Center/urban renewal area. Tamara Roy of ADD Inc. urged the same. I was interested in this subject for a number of reasons. One, I worked in the building from 1997-2000 in the Boston Globe's City Hall bureau; I covered the story the first time Menino proposed jettisoning City Hall, or turning it into a big handball court, as he remarked at the time. In addition, in my work on a new book on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, I wondered what Jacobs would have thought. The West End was slum clearance at its worst, but Jacobs didn't have a knee-jerk reaction to all modernism -- she liked the Seagrams building in New York -- and somehow I think she would have considered working with the building rather than tearing it down and starting over. One universal point of agreement on the panel, put on by CommonBoston with support from the Boston Society of Architects: putting a new Boston City Hall on the South Boston Waterfront is a bad idea. Two things point towards keeping the much-maligned City Hall, coming up on her 40th birthday (Goody's helpful guide to reading the building: its base a reflection of historic red-brick buildings surrounding it to about the 5th floor; City Council and mayor's office, where democracy happens, prominently in the middle; supporting bureaucracy above). One, the city might not be able to get top dollar after all, for a massive redevelopment of the site (and which must include relocating the federal JFK building, the ultimate NIMBY because of security concerns). Second, sources tell me that city officials are reluctantly acknowledging that the proposal to build a new City Hall on the harbor's edge beyond D Street on the South Boston Waterfront is all but dead. If it was 50 years from now, I would say dead in the water.