The story of Apple evading taxes inspired me to write an op-ed that The New York Times published today. You can see it here. The point is to take back control of this corporate form that we created. Our child has run away from us. Let’s get it back.
The review by Edward Rothstein of the show in Washington DC about Thomas Jefferson and his slaves completed a loop for me. http://nyti.ms/w8wc5B Rothstein, a writer I would label a neo-conservative, wrote a courageous article whose conclusion I endorse. Living a wise and good life usually involves doing the best you can within an imperfect or even corrupt system. It does not usually involve being a revolutionary. Thomas Jefferson did the best he could within a corrupt system – slavery — and both he and his slaves arguably had better lives because of it. That’s the conclusion Edward Rothstein comes to in his review of the exhibit in Washington about Jefferson. Had Jefferson been a revolutionary or a true radical, he would left his plantation and become a hermit or something. (I know from reading that it probably wasn’t even legally possible for him to have freed his slaves, but he could have simply walked away from his nice life.) That probably would not have been a good thing, neither for him, nor his slaves, nor the rest of us. But he receives the condemnation of history for the devil’s bargains he made. Of course earlier in his life, in 1776, Jefferson did choose the radical path. He chose to take up arms against his government, and endorse the spillage of blood. Was that a hard decision? Was it even the right one? I sometimes wonder, given what I have read about the roots of the American revolution. Government under Great Britain was not a tyranny. For my own life, I’ll try to choose less the option of saying, “oh the system is corrupt.” Systems are always corrupt. The point is can you work within it, or work to change it. Occasionally the times may demand a complete rejection of something, but those times are rare. Alex
I was at a block party on Saturday, which, being in Brooklyn, had a band playing on a stoop that were pretty damn good. One of the band members, before playing Woodie Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” introduced the famous song by telling a story about Guthrie, who was the folk singer from the 1930s onward that inspired Bob Dylan and hundreds of other folkies. Anyway, the band member said that Guthrie had a sign posted when he played, or outside his door, that said something like, Anyone Who Reproduces In Of These Songs In Full Or On Part Is A Mighty Good Friend Of Mine! Boy, that attitude is in short supply. It’s clear that the copyright, patent and trademark systems of intellectual property have become perverse distortions of their original intent. Rather than inspire and reward innovation and creativity, these systems now almost certainly impede innovation and creativity. This is because the courts with some help from Congress have defined intellectual property so rigidly and expansively, that the typical process of creativity is short changed. One can’t invent a new song, a new device or a new piece of writing because every where one turns you are stepping on someone’s legally defined property rights. What’s helpful to learn is that this is not an entirely new situation. With patents, I was just reading in Richard White’s great new book, Railroaded, 19th century railroads benefited for the first few decades of a culture and practice of open sharing. Engineers and firemen would modify engines and fireboxes on the spot, and these inventions were swapped around and evolved. White compared it to the open source system among software developers now. Later though, this practiced faded out as companies began to patent their inventions more systematically, and this impeded progress in railroad development. Something similar, although in reverse order, occurred in the early 20th century when the Wright Brothers and the Glenn Curtiss were both struggling to develop commercially viable aircraft. The Wrights, who had been the first to fly a manned plane, sued Curtiss for patent infringement, and much of the normal process of innovation was stymied. Under the pressure of World War I, the federal government got the Wrights, Curtiss and other airplane manufacturers to form a “patent pool,” so inventions could be freely traded and innovation proceed more quickly. Would such an arrangement happen today. At the moment, despite some bright spots, the environment is way too restrictive. Documentary filmmakers now often edit reality to take out any logos or trademarks on someone’s T-shirt, for fear of being sued for illegal use of intellectual property. Mickey Mouse will be providing royalties to Disney when the last sun burns out, I wager. Much of the tech world competes to patent anything and everything. What we should remember about intellectual property is that it is a social good. It exists only because we as a society say it should. That being the case, we should remember, as a society, to continually ask whether these systems are living up to the reasons for their existence: improving society as a whole.
The Future of Transportation
Will the auto and airplane reign supreme?
By Alex Marshall
With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the political scientist Francis Fukiyama caused a sensation with an essay called “The End of History?” It postulated that, with the relative collapse of Communism, the struggle among rival political systems had ended with a permanent victory for liberal, democratic capitalism. All that was left to do was to refine it.
Is something similar happening with the way we get around? Have we reached “the End of History” with transportation? Will the current system of automobile and airplane travel reign supreme’for now and for centuries hence? Or will something new come along to remake our world, as it has in the past?
The context of such a question is this: Since about 1800, revolutionary changes in our transportation systems have created new types of cities, neighborhoods, and housing, while leaving old ones to wither away, or become antiques.
If history is any indication, we are due for another revolution soon. The car and the highway, and the airplane and airport, have been dominant for almost a century. By comparison, canals lasted about 50 years, streetcars about the same, and railroads about a century as dominant modes of travel.
Yet, some people say that the automobile and the highway are so imbedded in our landscape and lifestyles that nothing will ever challenge their dominance. In effect, they say we have reached the end of the historical road.
“It’s hard to imagine a fundamental change because the automobile system is so flexible,” says urban historian Robert Fishman, author of the 1989 history of suburbia, Bourgeois Utopias, and a professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “All I can imagine is a better balance with a revival of the train and transit connections that have been so shamefully neglected.”
But, if the past is any guide, we won’t see a new revolution until it is upon us. People, maybe even particularly experts, have difficulty envisioning a new transportation context from within the current one. Fishman, although himself skeptical of any coming big change, recalls the scholar who around 1900 predicted that the automobile would never go far because it couldn’t match the utility of the bicycle.
Hovering over this discussion is a single word: sprawl. Our low-density, car-clogged environment is the product of our transportation system. Highways and airports produce low-density sprawl. Old transportation revolutions, such as streetcars and subways, made cities denser because housing and businesses flocked to these transportation points. If we do have another transportation revolution ‘ the personal jet pack, high speed trains, the humble bicycle ‘ it could make sprawl even worse. Or, it could reconstitute our cities around new transportation hubs.
The Past As Prologue
Six words summarize transportation over the last two centuries: canals, railroads, streetcars, bicycles, automobile, and airplanes. Each mode remade the economy and the landscape. Each was generally adopted only after government got behind it financially and legally.
The canal era started in earnest in 1817, when New York State had the gumption to sell $7 million in bonds to pay thousands of laborers to dig a 350-mile trench from Albany to Buffalo. The Erie Canal, when it went into service in 1825, opened up the entire Midwest to shipping and made New York the commercial hub of the New World. Other states and cities frantically dug their own canals in an unsuccessful effort to catch up.
Spurred in part by these efforts, other cities and states began investing in a new technology’railroads’that gradually replaced canals. The railroad created railroad cities, like Atlanta, and converted canal cities, like Chicago, into railroad cities. With the railroads came streetcars, first horse-drawn and then electric.
Because the first railroad tracks were often laid alongside the first canals, the canal cities tended to prosper even as the canals declined in importance. Economists call this phenomenon “path dependence,” (even as they debate its significance), and it still occurs. New York City, for example, is no longer dependent on the Erie Canal, but its because of the canal that that the rail lines, highways and airports were located in and around the city.
From about 1875 to 1925, railroads were at their peak. Urban palaces like New York’s Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania Station were built and opened, so that millions of passengers could shuttle across thousands of miles of tracks that stretched to every corner of the country. Few riders could have imagined that within their lifetimes, weeds would grow along thousands of miles of abandoned tracks.
Although the automobile dates to the 1890s, drivers were scarce until cities, towns, and states began paving roads’which took awhile. Many of the first roads were built, ironically, at the urging of bicyclists, who needed better roads to use their two-wheel contraptions. The League of American Wheelmen convinced the Department of Agriculture to create the Bureau of Public Roads. This small agency would grow into the Federal Transportation Department.
But better roads did not happen overnight. In 1922, 80 percent of U.S. roads were dirt and gravel. At first, railroad companies lent their political muscle to the “good roads” effort. After all, their leaders reasoned, better highways would get rail passengers to the stations more easily.
After World War I, the automobile and later the airplane, served by publicly funded roads and airports, began to supplant the passenger rail system and its intimate companion, the streetcar.
World War I helped convince government and business that investing in roads was worthwhile. During the war, massive railroad congestion brought on by the war effort forced some inter-city industrial transportation onto roads via trucks. Surprisingly (for the time,) it worked. Soon, states and the federal government began investing more in roads and airports, and less in train service.
As urban historian Eric Monkkonen noted in his 1988 book, America Becomes Urban, governments and taxpayers were the fundamental builders of this country’s transportation systems. New York state built the Erie Canal. Federal and state governments gave away a fifth of the nation’s total land area to the railroads. Congress, at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, financed the Interstate Highway System. Cities and states built airports. Even the New York City subways, although operated by private companies at first, were built with taxpayer dollars.
Each of these transportation innovations’canals, railroads, streetcars, cars, highways, and airplanes ‘ created new ways to live and work, and thus new types of neighborhoods and cities. The banks of Schenectady, New York are still lined with the ornate buildings created during the heyday of the Erie Canal. The streetcar era, which lasted from the late 19th century to World War II, led to thousands of streetcar suburbs, densely populated communities at the fringes of 19th century cities. And of course, the highway and air travel system created the current pattern of low-density sprawl that defines our built environment.
The Next Big Thing
If history is any indication, we are overdue for another change that will change how we travel, and thus change the form of our cities and towns.
“Nothing really revolutionary has occurred since the Wright brothers and the combustion engine, and that’s now about 100 years old,” says Elliot Sander, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. While some might say this is evidence of the longevity of car-use and air travel, it’s also evidence that we are overdue for a big change. After all, past transportation eras, such as canals to railroads, have lasted from about 50 to 100 years. Then, something new has come along, and created a new dominant transportation system.
What might the next big thing be? Among the possibilities is the nifty Segway, the “gyro-scooter” that enables someone standing on it to point and ride. Or it could be the Solotrek Helicopter Backpack. A user straps it on and rotating blades overhead carry him where he wants. So far only prototype versions exist. Another variation is the Airboard, which hovers four inches off the ground and costs a mere $15,000. Of all these, the Segway actually seems to have a chance to live up to some of its hype.
Maybe the revolution will come in the form of small airplanes. In his 2001 book, Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, James Fallows, who is himself a pilot, foresees a future where people use small planes like taxis or rental cars for short flights between the thousands of small airports that now are underused.
Rail is another, more likely, option. High-speed rail networks are common in Europe and Japan, and in theory they hold great promise in more densely populated areas of the United States.
The situation now, as is typical in the United States, is a scattershot mix of aggressive policies by some states mixed with erratic federal actions. Various states and coalitions of states are aggressively lobbying to create or preserve high-speed rail corridors, under the assumptions that being in the high-speed loop will be as important as being on the Interstate in the 1950s. North Carolina are creating a ‘sealed corridor’ for high-speed rail across the state; California and Florida have both received Federal grants toward high-speed rail initiatives; The Wisconsin-based, Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, which is a coalition of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin, is pushing for a high-speed network with Chicago as the hub. And of course in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is running what might be called its ‘almost-high-speed’ service, Acela Express. Meanwhile though, Congress perennially discusses killing or reorganizing Amtrak and has yet to really get behind any national rail policy, even while some members are quite passionate about it.
The Buck Rogers version of high-speed rail, a Magnetic Levitation train, has been around for a while, but working examples are still few. Demonstration versions exist in Germany, Japan and even Norfolk, Va. But the only real working version is in China. Shanghai has just finished a $30 billion Magnetic Levitation rail line between its airport and downtown. The train reaches 250 mph and travels the 19 miles between airport and downtown in eight minutes, compared to an hour by taxi. Theoretically, Maglev trains, which float above the tracks on magnets, could reach speeds up to 500 mph. Despite generally parsimonious funding, the Federal Railroad Administration is administering a national competition, the winner of which would get funds to build a working maglev line in the United States.
Whether it’s Maglev or a Segway, the challenge in predicting radical change is that by its very nature it tends to be unforeseen.
“We’re very bad at predicting those big discontinuities,” says Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting, a transportation consulting firm in New York. “It’s like the Internet. I remember in the early 1980s, I visited a friend at Stanford who had e-mail on the early ARPA network. I said, ‘That’s really cool.’ But I never thought about it as something I could do.” Schaller notes that for the last few years, mass transit use has increased faster than highway use. This hasn’t happened in a half-century.
In fact, most transportation planners are conservative in their predictions. “I would not be investing in jumbo helicopters, dirigibles, personal rapid transit systems, motorized scooters, powered roller skates, etc., although they sure would be fun,” says Elliot Sander of the Rudin Center.
Autophilia
To its defenders, the automobile is irreplaceable, no matter what the predictions. If we run out of oil, they say, we can switch to hydrogen fuel cells. If gas prices skyrocket, we can buy smaller cars. If global warming increases, we can reduce emissions. And if our roads become overwhelmingly congested, we will simply build more roads.
“I don’t think congestion will stop the automobile,” says Jose G’mez-Ib”ez, the Derek Bok professor of urban planning and a leading transportation planner at the Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School at Harvard University. “I think the solution to congestion is to spread out more. There’s no doubt that we will have more mass transit in the future, but as people get richer in places like China, are they going to want to drive, and be mobile, and maybe drive SUVs? The answer is ‘yes.'”
“The automobile will continue to be the dominant mode of getting around,” says Mark Kuliewicz, traffic engineer for the American Automobile Association in New York. “Cars may be powered by something other than gasoline, and hopefully soon, but they’ll still be there.”
End of the Road?
But auto travel is dependent on roads. And an increasing number of critics believe that the expanding universe of highways’what historian Kenneth Jackson has called “the Big Bang of decentralization that started in the 1920s’ — has about reached its limit.
Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York (where I am a senior fellow), argued in a speech last year at the World Economic Forum in New York that for political, financial, and practical reasons, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build more highways. More and more citizens accept the fact that we cannot build our way out of congestion and sprawl, he said.
Yaro pointed out that highway construction has drastically slowed in the tri-state New York metropolitan area. From 1951 to 1974, the region’s highway system added some 54 miles a year. In the last decade, it has added only four miles per year.
The message is clear, said Yaro in an interview. “I strongly believe that we’ve used up the capacity of our 20th century infrastructure systems, and we’re going to need a heroic and visionary (and expensive) set of new investments to create capacity for growth in the 21st century.’
A key investment would be “new or significantly upgraded intercity rail systems in the half-dozen metropolitan corridors where high-speed rail makes sense.” Yaro is essentially endorsing some version of the high-speed or improved rail networks being pushed in Congress and by coalitions of cities and states.
Smart Roads
Most experts foresee increasing use of high-tech or “smart” technology to wrest more capacity from overloaded roads. In its more elaborate forms, smart technology includes things like imbedding highways with magnets, which would pull cars or trucks along at 100 mph and stop them when needed.
It also includes cars that brake themselves; GPS positioning systems that allow drivers (or their cars) to sort their ways around traffic jams; and computer chips and scanners that allow governments to price highways and charge drivers for using them, with different rates for different times.
The latter, usually called Congestion Pricing, is the Holy Grail of transportation specialists. Although once considered politically impossible, the idea of paying for using roads may now be acceptable to a public searching for a way out of congestion’even it means ending one of the last arenas of egalitarianism, the highway.
Highway space “is a scarce resource, and if it is scarce, we have to manage it. In a market economy, this means pricing,” says Sigurd Grava, professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and author of the new book, Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Community.
“This will be the first time we will manage the use of the public right of way. In the past, anyone has been able to walk, ride a horse, or use a motor vehicle without restrictions except for traffic control. But this is changing,” says Grava.
By definition, congestion pricing would eliminate traffic jams on any highway or road in the country. But at what price? In recent years in a federal experiment on Interstate 15 in San Diego, drivers paid as much as $8 during peak periods for congestion-free traveling on an eight-mile stretch of highway. At less busy times, prices dropped to 50 cents.
In 2000, transportation planners with Portland’s Metro regional government modeled how congestion pricing would change the region if used on key highways. They found citizens would buy smaller cars, drive less, and live closer to where they work.
With evolving computer technology, drivers could be charged for using even a neighborhood street. This could work similar to Mayor Ken Livingstone’s successful attempt to charge drivers to enter center-city London. Automatic cameras photograph license plates and send drivers a bill. Instituted in March 2003, the plan has already reduced traffic in London by 20 percent and won over many of its initial opponents.
Managing traffic, whether through smarter internal guidance systems in the automobiles or some version of congestion pricing, has the potential to substantially add capacity and efficiency to our road network, say most experts. “We’ve doubled and tripled the number of planes in the skies in the last generation, even though very few new airports have been built,” notes one federal highway official who chose to remain anonymous. “We’ve done it through better air traffic control.” Reasoning by analogy, the official said the ground equivalent of air traffic control, such as automated guidance systems, better traffic information and more pervasive tolling, could wring substantially more capacity out of our current allotment of asphalt.
On The Ground
Whether the future brings simply better cars, or Star-Trek like transporters, cities and towns here and abroad will change as a result. As current transportation systems evolve, cities and towns are evolving with them.
In France, for example, the high-speed train network is producing new commuting patterns. For example, some people are living in Paris, yet commuting to jobs in Tours, a medium-sized city about 150 miles southwest from Paris. On the high-speed train, this journey takes 58 minutes. In New Jersey, suburban rail towns are reviving around improved transit connections to Manhattan. In Atlanta, the excessive highway building of the last few decades has produced both suburban sprawl, and, paradoxically, a revival of inner city neighborhoods as people flee congested freeways.
So what’s ahead for our communities? Yaro and several others see a future in which new transit lines make the suburbs more like the city. This future is not so imaginary. Around the New York region, classic commuter rail towns are reviving around substantial reinvestments in the rail system, like the new, $450 million rail transfer station in New Jersey’s Meadowlands.
Cities evolve in unexpected ways. The introduction of freeways decimated many downtowns in the 1950s, something unpredicted at the time. Houston’s downtown in 1960, for example, had become mostly surface parking lots. But today in Houston, tall parking garages have replaced much of the surface parking, and the downtown is substantially denser. Perhaps in the future, more office buildings will replace the parking garages, and people will take commuter rail service to work. In fact, the city is already building a light rail line downtown.
We could also go the other way. If auto use continues at the same level and personal jets take off as Fallows and some others predict, sprawl is likely to increase. New homes and businesses would spring up around small airports throughout the country.
An unstable mix of government subsidies, technological promise, and private profit will determine what comes next, and this will vary from place to place. Indicators like wealth will not always offer reliable clues as to what transportation systems particular societies will adopt.
Consider the humble bicycle. It’s used extensively in China, which has a very low per capita income, and in Scandinavia, which has a very high per capita income. In Copenhagen, more than a third of commuters use bicycles. The point is that wealth alone does not adequately predict transportation use. You might say that the Chinese use bicycles because they have to; the Danish because they want to.
What Planners Can Do
For the most part, U.S. urban planners work separately from transportation planners. The average state or city planning director tends to react to transportation decisions, rather than to make them. Planners have tended to focus on zoning and land-use regulation, which is often auxiliary to the real work being done by the transportation engineers.
In a better ordered world, land planners would have responsibility for transportation planning, (or supervise those who do it), and urban designers would be directly involved with state and federal highway planning.
We probably haven’t reached the end of history when it comes to transportation. But whatever the future, it would be a better one if we had a broader range of choices. As a country, we have tended to lurch from one extreme to another. In the 1890s, we had the most extensive rail system in the world’and one of the worst road systems. By the 1950s, we had abandoned our extensive streetcar system. Today, we lack a decent passenger rail system but have a great highway system. Like the fiber-optic cable industry and the Internet rage, transportation has proceeded in a boom-bust fashion.
When the next big thing does comes along, let’s not be too quick to abandon proven modes. The past teaches not only that change comes, but that the best societies offer a range of transportation choices, including using one’s own two feet.
END
–Published in Planning Magazine, May 2003
Resources
–Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition. www.midwesthsr.org
–High Speed Ground Transportation Association. www.hsgta.org.
–National Association of Railroad Passengers. www.narprail.org.
–American Highways Users Alliance. www.highways.org
–Transportation Alternatives. www.transalt.org
–Surface Transportation Policy Project. www.transact.org
By Alex Marshall
April 2001
Some school kid will shoot some other school kids again soon, and thus provide an adequate “hook” for this article. I was worried that it had been too long since the last schoolyard massacre – at least several weeks – for people to care about what I say on the subject. But I needn’t worry. Another will be along soon.
It’s difficult to identify causes or cures for the random violence that erupts in our schools, malls and office buildings. I would like to suggest some that are perhaps less intuitive than gun control or less violence on television, valid as these may be.
I would like to mention subjects such as national health care. Better leave policies when families have children. Higher minimum wages. Stronger protection for injured workers. More equal school funding. Publicly financed elections.
What, I can hear you saying, have these to do with kids killing kids in schoolyards? It’s not as if someone picked up a gun because OSHA didn’t protect workers from repetitive motion injuries?
Not directly, but there are fewer degrees of separation than one might think. For the last generation, we have steadfastly refused to do things that give us some responsibility for the well being of each other. We have refused, over and over, to be our brother’s keeper.
Measures like national health care or family leave are the true test of community. Are we willing to limit our own actions for a greater good? Are we willing to share a burden? Are we willing, in the case of health care, to limit our fees if we are doctors, our premiums if we are insurance salesmen, our access to specialized health care if we are rich?
We have been tempted. We almost passed national health care, but “we” decided, after hearing scary stories by various special interests, that we just weren’t ready. We did pass a very weak Family Leave act. We have passed a few, limited gun control measures. But by and large, we have not. Most recently, “we,” that is the new Bush administration, rejected worker safety measures that would have given us responsibility for people injured through typing or whacking chickens.
And how does this relate to a teenage kid killing people in California, to name a recent news item? Quite simply, our insistence on pursuing individualistic, competitive solutions to every problem is producing a society that is individualistic and competitive. It is producing a society that tells people, including kids, you’re all alone. It’s every man for himself. If you can’t make it, tough luck.
We are a very rich society, yet we still have more poor people, worse schools, longer working hours and less adequate health care than other first world country.
The California kid who last month picked up a gun after being teased was a manifestation of this society where every man, woman and kid is on his own. I can almost hear that kid telling that to himself, as he grabbed his father’s gun.
We Americans like to think of ourselves as valuing family and community. But France and Germany have far greater protection for families, and far greater respect for the rights of a community. It’s telling that Europe has strong limits on how corporations can use information acquired over the Internet. We do not.
We tend to rely on markets to solve common problems, which means competition of individuals and companies. We reject cooperation. This runs like a theme through every major public policy issue. We deregulate utilities, airlines, TV cable companies, all in a belief that a frenzy of competition for money will somehow produce a greater good for everyone.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Adam Smith’s invisible hand sometimes pushes everyone down, instead of lifting them up. Or it sometimes pushes most of us down, and just a few of us up. “Market failure” is far more common than economists like to admit, as anyone who has paid a $1,000 for a short airline hop will know.
Gun control is, of course, one example of our refusal to cooperate, to give up individual liberties and choices for the sake of the common good. We are as addicted to guns as the worst alcoholic is to his whiskey. It is so tellingly clear that we need to control, manage, order, track and regulate guns and those who own them. Yet, we resist. Our government is our government, so we can’t blame the politicians without blaming ourselves. They do what we tell them to do, ultimately. And if they aren’t doing it, that means we aren’t telling them forcefully enough.
Written in 1995
by Alex Marshall
When the computerized letter sorter at the central post office in Washington, D.C., can’t read the handwriting on an envelope, it flips it into a slot where a live person can look at it.
A person in Greensboro, North Carolina. There, the worker sees an image of the letter on a small computer screen, reads the address, and types it into the computer. Back in Washington, a printer spits out a thin black bar code across the bottom of the envelope-which routes the letter to its destination.
The facility in Greensboro is one of the remote encoding centers that the Post Office is setting up around the country. In these facilities, rows of workers will help computers in other parts of the country route letters.
The mechanism is an example of trends that are restructuring the economy of cities and thus their physical face as well. New technology, principally computer related, is allowing companies to get rid of jobs, move jobs out of center cities and consolidate jobs in back-office suburbs.
Various prognosticators have speculated on this trend and the effect if will have on the economic and physical structure of center cities and metropolitan areas. One of the first to put some solid numbers and facts around the speculation is a new report by the federal office of Technology Assessment, entitled the The Technological Reshaping of Metropolitan America
The 232-page report says new computer technology is leading to further abandonment of downtowns and core cities, and new development on the fringes of metropolitan areas.
In other words, sprawl. “The new technology system is creating an ever more spatially dispersed and footloose economy, which in turn is causing metropolitan areas to be larger, more dispersed and less densely populated,” says the report.
We are in a post-industrial metropolis, the report posits, an era that begun in roughly 1970. Its no longer as simple as downtowns versus suburbs. Instead, old dichotomies between cities and suburbs give way to a more spatially diversified and complex ordering of economic space.
In this new order, some downtown business districts and center cities have thrived, even if most haven’t. In general though, outer suburbs have boomed in population while core cities have stagnated or declined. The Northeast as a region has lost a million manufacturing jobs between 1980 and 1990.
Most recent commentators have focused on the effects of very visible new technology – the personal computer, the modem and the fax machine – and what it will do to re-arrange how people live and work.
Architect Michael Pittas predicted in 1994 (June 1994 Metropolis), that in a decade or two telecommuting would turn center city office districts into “dinosaurs” and “may be the prelude to the extinction of the modern office building as we know it.”
Pittas has redesigned office buildings to allow companies to operate with only a fraction of the usual office space by having many workers telecommute. Because of this work, Pittas was speculating on the end result of a trend that allows the graphic designer in her mountain cabin in Idaho to modem her work to New York.
But even more significant trends on cities and working are being caused by less visible and less publicized technology that is shifting the way entire industries do business, according to Robert Atkinson, who directed the Office of Technology study.
Atkinson spoke not from an office but his home in Northern Virginia. The Office of Technology Assessment, for which Atkinson directed the study, no longer exists. The Republican Congress killed the OTA in a round of budget cuts in 1995. The Reshaping report came out after the office had been killed and Atkinson was speaking on his own time.
Computer technology not related to the personal computer can allow a company to consolidate far-flung offices into a few back offices set up in outer Indianapolis or even India. Many of these workers come from downtown locations, where practicalities forced companies to house relatively non-elite jobs. Because of computers, companies have eliminated many such jobs or moved them outside downtown.
Take the U.S. postal service, said Atkinson. It centralizes human letter readers in Greensboro because it is cheaper than having each central post office, usually located in or near downtown, have its own set of workers.
A variety of unlikely services are still kept downtown, Atkinson said, but this may change as technologies continue to evolve. Banks, for example, still locate check processing facilities near or in downtown, despite the fact that these are low-paid, relatively menial jobs taking up expensive real-estate. Such facilities still need to be near a large central post office, Atkinson said, because processed checks need to be mailed out as quickly as possible. This is both to comply with federal regulations, and more importantly, to gain as much interest or “float” in the few days when the check is between banks.
But new technology like debit cards and check imaging, which promises to replace physical checks with images that are then transmitted from supermarket to bank, mean the use of the paper check is dwindling fast.
These technological changes are not just affecting center cities. The economy of the country is becoming more monolithic. Smaller branch offices or services, like the neighborhood insurance office, that were once marbled through most towns are now being eliminated as computer technology makes them unnecessary.
Some banks now process loans over the phone. Claims adjusters call up policies on a computer and dont need to see policy holders as often in person. Because of this, companies are closing dozens of smaller offices.
The report notes that NYNEX, for example, the baby Bell phone service in New York, once had 133 customer service centers; now it has seven. Aetna now operates 22 underwriting centers nationwide instead of 55. Allstate is going from 28 policy processing centers to just three.
Such trends have huge implications for cities, greater than the ones causes by the growth of personal computers, Atkinson says. There are basically two trends at work.
One is the shift of jobs and people out of center cities and older suburbs, and trend that has taken place over the last 50 years but could accelerate with new technology.
The other is the winner-take-all economy, that is dividing individual companies and cities into winners and losers. Under this trend, some center cities will do well or even thrive, while others will fall even more steeply into disrepair and poverty.
The command cities in a world economy-like New York, London or Tokyo-may survive or even thrive in the new world. This matches analysis by other analysts who have noted that many of these world cities have actually halted or reversed their population losses, with similar trends in crime and per capita income. That’s because the elite bankers, stock brokers, and lawyers will probably still cluster in these big cities. And a city like New York can still be a very desirable and fashionable place to live if you have a lot of money.
According to the report, smaller, mid-sized cities must find “niches” in the global economy. Atkinson notes that Gary, Indiana, a declining core city, used low-interest development loans from HUD to win a postal service remote encoding facility similar to the one in Greensboro.
As technology leans against some inner cities, governments need to adjust rules that presently favor development in the suburbs, the report recommends. Environmental rules now often make it prohibitively expensive to develop old industrial sites in cities, while the mortgage interest deduction rules and standard development policies actually subsidize the construction of new subdivisions on raw land that lead to greater air and water pollution.
In addition, the report recommends that cities, with help from the federal government, initiate job-skill training programs for their residents.
“It’s not just that cities are going to lose jobs, Atkinson says, it’s that the economies of cities are restructuring to have more highly skilled functions that still require face to face contact. But inner cities don’t have a skilled worked force.”
Thats not quite true. Some cities do have highly skilled workers. Its hard to swing a stick in parts of Manhattan or Washington without hitting some overly-talented individual. But its also true that even New York, which is doing better than most cities, has huge percentages of under-skilled, under-educated residents who will have no chance at the good-paying, skilled jobs that still locate downtown.
To counter these trends, and help soften their blows, the report lists 18 policy options, ranging from increasing small business loans to businesses in urban core area, to requiring HUD to assess and quantify in what ways public policies subsidize sprawl.
No wonder the Republicans killed the agency. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do: assessing technology and offering solutions, including ones that relied on government.
Though the OTA initially enjoyed bipartisan support, Atkinson says it was eliminated because of the antipathy on the part of more ideological Republicans, particularly the new freshmen. He notes that the OTA lost points with some conservatives when it was asked to examine the Star Wars technology in the mid 1980s and concluded it would not work.
“It’s unclear whether they really wanted an agency that would provide them with independent critical analysis that wasn’t ideologically based, ” Atkinson says.
The central question raised by the OTA report is whether people will still live in central cities if they don’t have to. If technology allows both people and industries more freedom to choose where they live, will many choose to live in or near downtown?
The answer is clearly yes – if cities can compete with suburbs as pleasant places to live. National Public Radio recently ran a report about how people are moving back to center cities to get away from the congestion and chaos of the suburbs. The very trends the report speaks of are causing the suburbs and the hinterlands to not be the pastoral oasis that many have in mind when they buy a house in the suburbs.
If older cities can maintain their infrastructure, their neighborhoods and keep crime down, they can compete quite successfully with the land of K-marts and freeways as a pleasant place to live. It’s quite possible that the next century will see an even greater return to the city by the middle and upper classes. New York, Paris and many other major cities have halted their population decline in the last five to 10 years, several studies show.
So maybe that graphic designer, given the choice between a mountain cabin in Idaho and a loft in Soho, might just choose Soho.
How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?
The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.
There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.
Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.
I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.
Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.
Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.
But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?
I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.
New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.
But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.
Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.
I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.
A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.
But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.
Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.
Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.
The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.
As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.
There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.
The city is not inactive on the cycling front.
The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.
‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.
Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.
Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.
So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.
–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.
How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?
The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.
There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.
Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.
I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.
Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.
Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.
But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?
I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.
New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.
But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.
Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.
I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.
A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.
But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.
Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.
Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.
The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.
As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.
There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.
The city is not inactive on the cycling front.
The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.
‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.
Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.
Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.
So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.
–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.
What Was Lost: A lot.
What Was Gained: Not Much.
BY ALEX MARSHALL
Tuesday, August 10, 1999
The 1950s was about new stuff, not old stuff. The United States had spent two decades postponing consumption as it fought the Great Depression and then World War II. It was ready for new cars, houses, roads and ways of doing things. With a vengeance.
It was in this spirit that from 1949 into the early 1960s, Norfolk proceeded to tear down most of the buildings and streets built over the previous 275 years. A city founded in 1680 was left with little built before 1900. Cities around the country followed its example.
When the dust had ettled in the early 1960s, old East Main Street, lined with burlesque houses and bars, was gone. Gone was the original Commercial Place, where stevedores and merchants traded drinks in ancient taverns while they waited for ships to unload. Gone were the central city markets, where dozens of produce, dairy, meat and fish merchants sold their wares at small stands under mammoth roofs. Gone was the city’s old Union Station near the Elizabeth River, where travelers stepped off trains into the heart of the city. Gone was the entire neighborhood of Atlantic City. Gone was the city’s oldest core, a tight web of streets dating back to the city’s founding.
But the city didn’t just tear stuff down. In the place of the old, the city built: wide new roads, like St. Pauls Boulevard, Tidewater Drive, Virginia Beach Boulevard extension, Brambleton Avenue and the interstates; housing projects, including Roberts Park, Diggs Park, Young Park, Grandy Village, Bowling Park and others, which now ring downtown; new civic buildings, including a new City Hall, jail and courts complex, which would sit on a plaza nestled by freeway on-ramps; and vast windswept parking lots, where city officials would wait — and wait — for promised new investment to materialize.
How did the city afford all this? With lots and lots of nearly free federal money. Norfolk was first to take advantage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which paid 80 percent of urban renewal and gave cities new legal powers to take private property. The country had just finished winning a world war, and was ready to attempt and pay for drastic changes, even if a few eggs were broken to make this particular omelet.
Norfolk’s fervor in urban renewal traces back to its concept of “slums” and the city’s passion to get rid of them.
Even before World War II, city leaders looked out from the old City Hall and saw crumbling buildings with poor residents with few options. Many structures were wooden, and lacked indoor plumbing. A 1936 survey by the WPA showed that of 954 dwellings in on area between Monticello and Church Street (now St. Pauls Boulevard), 900 of them lacked flush toilets. About a third of the homes were in need of “major repair.”
Other buildings were more solid, made of brick and stone. But these were used for things city fathers weren’t proud of, like bar and burlesque shows. Of course, there were also family restaurants, hotels, tailors and offices, but these old-style establishments were not seen as anything special worth saving when a brand new city, one of highways, shopping malls and civic buildings, could be created.
Discussion of creating a housing authority was active in the 1930s. Finally in 1940, the City Council overcame its longtime resistance and created the Norfolk Housing Authority, after the Navy swung behind the effort. Lawrence M. Cox, who would lead the authority for almost three decades, would become its first executive director. This organization, later renamed the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, would lead the way, and still does, in the city’s effort to reinvent itself.
But before the city could do much, World War II intervened. Downtown would deteriorate even further as thousands of sailors and civilian workers flooded its streets and swamped its housing. City leaders greatly disliked the reputation the city earned as one giant honky-tonk.
After the war, Norfolk was the first city in the country to have an urban renewal plan approved under the new Federal Housing Act. The city received $25 million in 1949 to build 3000 units of public housing. In 1951, the city proceeded to clear 127 acres of land between Monticello and Church Street, now St. Paul’s Boulevard. In 1953, another major slum clearance project was announced.
As the decade proceeded, city leaders fell in love with the bulldozer. In projects beginning in 1949, 1951,1953, 1957, 1958, 1961 the City Council, through its creation the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, ripped out dozens of streets, knocked down hundreds of buildings and evicted thousands of families from their homes. At the same time, it built new highways, new civic buildings, and new public housing.
Under then Mayor Duckworth, the city would announce a clearance project or an expansion of a current one almost every year. In 1957, the City Council approved the destruction of Atlantic City, a relatively stable neighborhood, that used to exist around the midtown tunnel entrance and underneath the medical complex. In the same year, the city would commence clearance of the central core of the city, which would lead to the construction of a new City Hall, courts complex and jail. These renewal efforts would also create the famous blank “17 acres,” which would stay empty for 35 years before the MacArthur Center was built.
By the mid 1960s, most of downtown, with the exception of Freemason, Granby Street and part of Main Street, had been cleared.
With almost a half century’s perspective, what can be said about the city’s vast urban renewal effort?
Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the city went too far, too fast. City leaders had envisioned a new city of freeways and plenty of parking that would compete with the suburbs. Instead, the destruction of the older networks of streets and buildings would accelerate the migration of retail activity to the suburbs. The passion to build big highways and freeways made mass transit less workable and made downtown, in comparison to the easy-parking suburbs, less viable.
While initial projects in the early 1950s had focused on crumbling wooden shacks beyond repair, later efforts of that decade would tear down scores of pre Civil War buildings of brick and stone, many dating back to the 1800s. These could have formed a base for tourism and downtown residential living.
Frederick Herman, an architect who served on the city’s design review board during this period, said the city tore down numerous treasures. In retrospect, Herman said, it’s clear the city’s wholesale clearance was the wrong approach.
“Norfolk probably had as many 18th century and early 19th century buildings as Georgetown,” Herman said in an interview in 1996. “And they were basically intact until the early 50s. Some were rundown, but a lot of them could have been rehabilitated.”
True, the city would gain a rebuilt Main Street lined with tax-paying office skyscrapers. But under a different plan, these might have emerged elsewhere while keeping the waterfront intact.
The city also lost less tangible things, like its historical memory. Norfolk not only tore down buildings, but erased ancient streets, dating back to the city’s founding. No longer could someone walk downtown, and remember at a glance where they or their forefathers came from.
But the 1950s were a different time. Norfolk’s old downtown homes, like those that still exist in Freemason, had been abandoned by the upper classes for two generations. The prosperous set had long moved out to fashionable Ghent, Park Place, Colonial Place and other new streetcar suburbs. Historical preservation was a tiny idea. Few people imagined a time when a young lawyer or business person would pay dearly for the privilege of living in a crumbling 18th century house with bad plumbing.
And Norfolk was certainly not alone in its love of destruction. Almost every city in the country pursued urban renewal. Like Norfolk, these cities often erased buildings and streets of great historical and economic value. It’s was a sign of the times that New York, New Orleans and Alexandria considered Greenwich Village, the French Quarter and Alexandria’s Old Town as candidates for urban renewal.
Savannah, whose historic district now attracts six million visitors a year, began tearing it down under urban renewal in the 1950s. This city of Spanish moss hanging over graceful squares has since been made famous in movies like Forrest Gump and books like Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil. But in the 1950s, like in Norfolk, its leaders envisioned a new city of skyscrapers and freeways. Only a backlash by prominent citizens saved most of the city’s unique structure of homes around squares, although some were lost.
It’s tempting to think what Norfolk and other cities would look like if the federal government had given money to renovate old buildings and improve mass transit, as well as for tearing buildings down and building new highways. What if Norfolk had improved its trolley system, and given grants for landlords to repair and renovate their properties?
But that was not to be.
Only after downtown urban renewal was over, would the city began trying to recreate new things in the style of what it had torn down. The new townhouses on Boush Street being built now, for example, mimic the urban homes that once lined Freemason and other streets downtown.
Historically, urban renewal remains a brief, although consequential, period in the history of American cities. By the mid 1960s, urban planners would start to turn against it. Jane Jacobs would startle planners by praising the traditional city street. Scholars would label urban renewal “Negro removal,” because of the thousands of poor, usually black families removed from their homes. In Norfolk in the 1960s, attorney and later judge Joe Jordan denounced urban renewal as racist. In the 1990s, Milwaukee is following the lead of some other cities in trying to tear down some of the highways built during the urban renewal era and rebuild a city of streets, mass transit and walking.
Norfolk was and is unusual in that it started urban renewal early, and has continued it long after it has lost fashion nationally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city tore down and rebuilt virtually all of Ghent east of Colonial Avenue, moving thousands of black families from their homes. In the present day, the city is clearing a section of East Ocean View, and in the process evicting roughly a thousand families, in an attempt to build a new, more prosperous neighborhood.
For better and for worse, Norfolk continues to believe in the power of the bulldozer.
Monday, August 16, 1999
COLUMN FOR: The Virginian-Pilot
BY ALEX MARSHALL
At the end of the movie Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman pleads with Humphrey Bogart to stay with him, and to let her husband, the courageous underground leader Victor Lazlow, fly off by himself.
As the prop plane beats it propellers against the air, Bogart, playing tough guy “Rick,” looks down at her and says, no way.
“You’ll regret it,” he tells her in his sandpaper-and-velvet growl. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”
That’s how I feel about tearing down Kirn library in Norfolk. That if we do it, we’ll regret it, and soon, and for the rest of our lives. (Imagine Bogart saying these words, in that accent that I now realize sounds vaguely like President John Kennedy mixed with Marlon Brando.)
Huh, you might ask? “I didn’t even know they were thinking about tearing down Kirn.”
Well “they” are. A study committee has recommended building a new central library elsewhere downtown. Even more important, city council members are eying Kirn as a potential spot for a new upscale hotel. Under this plan, the city would sell off the property, perhaps using the funds for a new library.
Sure, any such events may be far off. But I’m talking about it now, because I know how things work in Norfolk. By the time the process gets around to public hearings and comment periods, plans will set and difficult to change. If “we” want to keep Kirn, we need to start talking about it now.
Beauty is a funny thing. It reflects, I think more and more, the relationship one has with an object, as much as the object’s inherent characteristics in space and on the ground.
Kirn was built in 1960-1962, financed in part by a grant from the Kirn family. Built as part of the urban renewal process that was then tearing apart the city, this sleek masterpiece of glass, steel and marble rose on its site on City Hall Avenue, now directly across from the MacArthur Mall. It was Norfolk’s first real central library. In replaced the beautiful, but small Carnegie-funded library on Freemason Street, whose building still stands, but which unfortunately the city no longer owns. The architectural firm of Lublin McGaughy designed Kirn; contractor Paul Tishman built it.
Forty years later, Kirn has lost the aura of modernity, speed and style with which, like a hot new sports car parked on a corner, it used to greet passerbys. Its three stories and a mezzanine now seem small and short against the bulk of the MacArthur Center, and height of the main street towers. Kirn is now often unnoticed, always under-used.
But look twice at Kirn. Look three times. Notice the way the tall marble planks stretch up its sides. Notice the abundance of steel and glass. Notice how proudly it sits on its corner, directly addressing the street.
For an even better viewpoint, stand inside Kirn on the mezzanine level. Notice how you can see right into the street because Kirn’s “walls” are actually entire sheets of glass. Notice the luxurious floating marble stairs that lead you gently to the mezzanine. Notice how the building is literally stuffed with the black-streaked marble, around you at every turn.
And then I think it will hit you. Kirn is beautiful. An example of 1960s modernism at its best, all steel and glass, an open building, revealing its structure and interior to the world like someone with nothing to hide.
Historic preservation, I’m realizing, is not just about nostalgia. It’s about recognizing that different eras have different strengths. We could not replicate a Kirn library today, because building trades have changed, technology has moved on, and the eyes of present-day designers are different. Because of this, it makes sense to keep the best of every era, because we are keeping something that can’t be replicated, a language that, if erased, will no longer be spoken.
I love libraries. And it shames me that Norfolk has so long neglected theirs. When I was a boy growing up in Virginia Beach, visiting Kirn was something special. That’s no longer true.
But there is nothing wrong with Kirn that a strong wind of fresh cash couldn’t fix. A wind that swept old books off shelves, that expanded the public parts of the library into neglected corners and floors, a wind that made every corner glisten with love, attention and staffing.
Sure, a great central library might eventually need more room. But with the demolition of the old Board of Trade building, Kirn possesses an entire city block. This is as much room as San Francisco’s new downtown library. When time to expand, an addition can be built on the land now used for a few parking spaces. In fact, I hear there are dormant plans around for just that. Kirn could even go upward, building additional stories on top of the ones that exist
What Norfolk doesn’t need is another new mega structure, flanked by a giant parking box, isolated from the rest of the city. It needs buildings like Kirn, that fit into the streetscape, and that are intimately part of the fabric of downtown life, and the city’s history.
Don’t write an unhappy ending to this movie. Think once, twice, three times, before doing something that we may someday regret, “and soon,” and for the rest of our lives. Let’s stand by Kirn, as it has so nobly stood by us.
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.