Coney Island: The Train is The Thing

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

by Alex Marshall
Metropolis Magazine
August/September issue, 2001

Today’s Quiz: What magnificent hall of marble, iron and glass, built about 1900, was torn down in the mid 1960s, robbing New York of one of the best examples of Beaux-arts architecture in the city if not the world?

No, not Penn Station. The Pavilion of Fun!!!!!! Of course! That magnificent hall inside Steeplechase Park on Coney Island that sheltered park goers on a rainy day. It was our Crystal Palace. And Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, tore it down in 1966 to build some condos that didn’t materialize.

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

“At Coney Island, where the abiding talent is for the exaggerated and the superlative, the changes have been so violent and complete as to obliterate, each time, the memory of what was there before,” said Edo McCullough, the nephew of George C. Tilyou, who founded Steeplechase and built the Pavilion of Fun. “On one shorefront lot at Coney, for example, there has been in succession an untidy tangle of bathhouses, a vast casino, an arena in which were fought three world’s championships heavyweight prizefights, the most beautiful outdoor amusement park in the world, a freak show, a parking lot, and ‘- today — New York City’s brand-new aquarium.”

McCullough wrote this in 1957, before his uncle’s park and the Pavilion of Fun were torn down, before most of the cereal-box ranks of Corbusier-inspired apartments had replaced the low-rise bungalows and duplexes, before its amusement park district had shrunk to a few blocks.

Now, Coney Island is changing again. The city of New York has built on the boardwalk and beach a cute little single-A ballpark for a cute single-A farm team of the mighty Mets, the Brooklyn Cyclones. Housing a mere 6,500 people, it allows ball fans to watch the sand, the ocean and a rising young star belt a fat one all at the same time. Even more significant, although less hyped, is the complete rebuilding of the Coney Island subway station, where four separate lines terminate, and which once routinely dumped out a million people into Coney Island’s downtown on a hot summer’s day. Costing $250 million ‘ six times the $40 million cost of the ballpark’ the new subway station, to be completed in 2005, will have an airy canopy of steel and glass over a new building, platforms and tracks. The city is also spending $30 million to spruce up the boardwalk, build public bathrooms, and other beach-front details; $30 million on youth athletic facilities, and $10 million on old-style urban housing and retail along Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney Island’s principal urban thoroughfare.

The ballpark and all this new infrastructure may revive Coney Island. But in what style will be the island’s newest incarnation? Coney Island, once a clear urban grid of streets fed by subways, is now a patchwork-quilt of auto-oriented development built around parking lots and highways ‘ like a recent Home Depot that went up –mixed with old-style urban streets built around subways lines. Will new development be oriented around the sidewalks and the subway station, or around the parking lot and the highways? No one knows. Despite about $350 million in city spending, there is no master plan as to where and in what form development should go.

Ken Fisher, a Brooklyn city councilman and candidate for borough president, said there was no master plan, but there were plans to set up a non-profit development corporation to direct investment. Fisher uses the Times Square analogy, as do many believers in Coney Island’s potential revival. At some point, like the old-porn saturated Times Square, the dilapidated Coney Island will reach the tipping point, and new investment will flood in, Fisher said.

‘Everyone cherishes Coney Island’s past,’ Fisher said. ‘But they also can’t wait for its future.’

THE PAST
The history of Coney Island, like the history of all places, is a history of transportation. This barren strip of beach, never really an island but ‘a clitoral appendage at the mouth of New York’s natural harbor’ in Rem Koolhaas’s vivid words in Delirious New York, was ignored for two and a half centuries. Then about 1850, steamships began visiting the island from Manhattan, which prompted the development of several luxury hotels. In the 1870s, railroad lines were extended there, and then the hordes began. By the early 1900s Coney Island had three huge amusement parks ‘ Steeplechase, Luna Park and Dreamland ‘ plus hundreds of other individual attractions, often illicit — that lined the streets. At one time, Coney Island had three horse tracks, plus numerous casinos. Coney Island was dubbed ‘Sodomy by the Sea.’ This period, from roughly 1870 to World War I, has obsessed novelists and other writers. It is the subject of Kevin Baker’s surrealistic 1999 novel, ‘Dreamland,’ named after the amusement park that burned down in 1911. You could go to Coney Island and visit China, Arabia, Africa and Hell. See a building catch fire. Ride mechanical horses around a full-size track. You could visit man-made mountains, lagoons and German villages. See human premature babies on display in an incubator. And oh yes, visit the moon, at Luna Park.

Between 1915 and 1919, the subway lines to Coney Island were completed. Soon, the traffic on an average summer Sunday went from 100,000 a day to 1 million. Ironically, the hordes had a morally cleansing effect on the island. Coney Island went from being ‘a city of sin,’ to being a family-oriented, safe resort. The casinos, whores and more extravagant displays of weirdness disappeared. It was a resort version of ‘eyes on the street.’ Sin could not survive under the gaze of such vast hordes. In the place of sin, you rode with your date on the Cyclone Roller coaster, built in 1927, or the Wonder Wheel, built in 1928. Both are still in business. A 1988 report by the Landmarks Preservation Commission smugly informs us that ‘most of these rides succeeded because they combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy.’

During the depression and World War II, with gasoline being rationed, Coney Island thrived. A nickel subway ride got you to the beach. But the post-war, frenzied embrace of new highways and new cars killed Coney Island.

Like Robert McNamara, Robert Moses seems to be ubiquitous in histories of the 1950s and 1960s, accumulating blame for every urban tragedy. You can throw in the death of Coney Island. It was Moses, the all powerful parks commissioner, who built Jones beach and Jones parkway, which siphoned off customers from Coney. In actual numbers, more people continued to visit Coney Island. But the people with money had cars, and they went to Jones Beach. ‘He put the kibosh on us,’ said Charles Tesoriero of Moses, former president of Coney Island Chamber of Commerce, in 1965 in ‘Another Time, Another World,’ an oral history taken down by Michael Paul Onorato, ‘No markers on the belt Parkway, no exit signs; it just by-passed us.’ Moses also got control of the beachfront, and encouraged bland parks to replace frenzied amusements. Koolhaas, in Delirious New York, said that for Moses, ‘Coney Island becomes ‘ again ‘ a testing ground for strategies intended ultimately for Manhattan.’

The combination of freeways, parks and projects almost urban renewed the old Coney Island out of existence. Luna Park, the second great amusement park, burned down in 1944. In 1946 on its site, the first high-rise housing project went up. Over the next three decades, into the early 1970s, vast ranks of tall towers, some of them housing projects, some of them middle class, were built on Coney Island. The city rips out many if not most of the traditional streets of low-rise apartments and homes.

Today, Coney Island has a fading resort strip, remnants of an old-style urban neighborhood, and ranks of high rise apartments, most of them low-income housing. It is this jumbled mix that the various improvements, if they prove to be that, will act upon.

THE BALLPARK
The sweaty fat man in the pink T-shirt and baseball cap walked into the construction trailer beside the Brooklyn Cyclone stadium, then on the verge of completion. ‘You got any merchandise?’ he asked, using the cognoscenti word for souvenirs. ‘I was hoping to get some merchandise before it all got sold out. You got pennants? Pins?’ Kevin O’Shea had come all the way from Staten Island, the other side of the city, just to buy souvenirs. He already had tickets. ‘It’s about time,’ O’Shea said about the new stadium. ‘I’ve been meaning to come over here.’ It is this kind of rabid fan intensity ‘ a remnant of the time when Brooklyn had the mighty Dodgers ‘ that has helped the new team sell out most of their season’s 247,000 seats for the season before a pitch had been thrown. Tickets cost a reasonable $6 to $10 a seat.

Even without the nostalgia for pro baseball in Brooklyn again, the appeal of the ballpark is easy to understand. It combines beach and baseball in a Zen-like, all-is-one experience. Sitting in the stands, you can see the blue ocean, white sand, the boardwalk filled with strolling people, the nearby amusement rides, and a baseball game, with just a few swivels of the head.

John Ingram, the lead architect on the stadium from Jack L. Gordon Architects in New York, said he did everything he could to bring the beach, the boardwalk and the resort ambiance into the stadium. While most arenas work to create a sense of enclosure, the Coney Island does the opposite. The bland, glass-fronted skyboxes were stacked in a pyramid behind home plate, rather than strung out along left and right fields, which would have obscured views. The bathrooms were placed at ground level to the sides, rather than near the outfield. The stadium has an entrance directly off the boardwalk. You can walk the hard-wood planks of the seaside boardwalk, turn, and walk directly to the stadium on a pathway made of identical wood, also laid diagonally, without changing elevation.

At night, the ballpark has a different dynamic. Rather than blend with the sun and sand, it merges with the lights of the amusement park nearby, and the general festive air of Coney Island at night. It does this principally though lighting. Surrounding the stadium are giant lollipop lights, each 120 feet high and topped with 30-foot circular neon lights. At night, these red, green and blue lights mesh with multi-colored lights put under the skyboxes, creating an enclosure of lights. When someone hits a home run, the lollipop lights spin in circles, mixing with the bright flashing lights from the amusement park a block away.

‘We were trying to get some of the colorful overlays of light and graphics that were associated with old Coney Island experience,’ Ingram said. But he said they rejected having an historical look to the ballpark. ‘This is Coney Island now. We are its future. We are the fresh new look on the block.’

The stadium’s 1,200-space parking lot, (it has another 900 spaces off site), are put to the side of the stadium, and are not visible from the stands. Although the minimizing of the parking visually is admirable, a larger question is why is the city spending money on parking, while also spending money to rebuild a subway station that sits a block from the park, and can handle a million people a day? No doubt the owner of the Brooklyn Cyclones want parking, but it may not be in the long-term interest of Coney Island. The old-new resort can develop more intensely as a subway oriented resort, rather than an automobile one.

THE SUBWAY
In 1997, Bilbao in Spain opened its new Guggenheim museum. Designed by Frank Gehry, its shiny, fluid, dramatic presence seemed to single-handedly revive this fading, Basque industrial city. Less noticed though, was that the $100 million museum was the capstone of a $1.2 billion urban redevelopment program, which included a new subway line, a refurbished train and streetcar system, a waterfront development plan, and a new airport. The shiny Guggenheim was simply the shiny bauble on top of a serious mound of infrastructure, which would do more in the long run to bring more jobs and residents to Bilbao.

In similar fashion, the Coney Island ballpark is the shiny bauble on top of some serious infrastructure work, which includes the $250 million subway station renovation, the construction of an urban row of shops and apartments called Mermaid Commons, and various beachfront improvements. While the ballpark got its picture in The New Yorker, the new subway facility is more important. Four separate lines ‘ The B, D, F, and N ‘ terminate at Coney Island, giving it immense capacity. Like Grand Central Station, the Coney Island stop was built with ramps instead of stairs, better to handle the vast crowds. As you stand in the station’s swelling mouth, where four ramps from four platforms from eight tracks exit, you can quickly visualize the crowds from past days. The ramps look like cattle chutes.

The new facility includes a new building, new tracks and platforms, new foundations for the elevated station, new signaling and a dramatic overhead canopy that will stretch across the open-air platforms. Despite the ambitious design, the project’s biggest challenge was figuring out a way to do the work and negotiating with the community about the work, said project officials. Originally, the job was going to take eight years, said Mike Kyriacou, design manager on the project with New York City Transit. But he and his staff figured out a way to do it in 42 months, although it means shutting some lines down for years at a time.

‘We had to go to the community, and say ‘We have to have you suffer for a while,’ Kyriacou said.

The present station is a wreck of crumbling concrete and rusted metal. It’s a sad testimony to the low priority given to maintenance in public infrastructure. ‘You go there, and you say, ‘Why the hell do we have such a thing?’ Kyriacou said. ‘The condition of the existing facility is so dilapidated. It’s looks like a place that no one has ever touched.’

The most visually striking component of the new station will be a gull-wing glass and steel canopy, equipped with solar photovoltaic grid to generate electricity. This will stretch across the four platforms, and because the eight tracks are elevated, should be visible from a considerable distance. Underneath the canopy will be new tracks, platforms, pilings and station. The solar system will produce the most electricity ‘ 150 kilowatts — on a hot summer day, precisely when air conditioners around the city are draining the centralized power system of Con Ed. Below the canopy and platforms will be a new, three-story, 34,000-square foot building that will replace the existing, crumbling one-story station. This station will include not only space for about 300 daily transit workers, but a new district 34 Police Station. The new station will manage to keep the mosaic fa’ade of the old station, which is landmarked. It will be removed, cleaned and rebuilt.

Andrew Berger, an architect at di Domenico + Partners in New York who designed the new three-story building, said he believed the new station would help renew Coney Island.

‘It’s all part of a bigger picture, which is that if you build it, they will come,’ Berger said. ”It’s a real opportunity to not only knit together an improved transit facility and police station, but hopefully leave a positive statement about future development opportunities out in Coney island.’

The renovation of the Coney Island’Stillwell Avenue stop should spur new development the same way a new highway creates more shopping malls and subdivisions. Of course, the $250 million renovation will not be creating more capacity. But appearances are important. Visitors and residents of Coney Island in a few years will enter a new, three-story building, lined with stores inside and out, then walk or roll up gently sloping ramps to wait for a train under a futuristic glass and steel canopy. Manhattan is infinitely more enticing, now that riding its subway is not about enduring graffiti, crime and crumbling stations.

In addition to the subway, there is about $70 million in other city-funded projects planned. They include the $10 million ‘Mermaid Commons’ of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Through a public-private partnership, the agency is building a series of infill buildings along 13 blocks of Mermaid Avenue, one of Coney Island’s principal urban streets. The project includes an entire block of three-story row houses, with retail below and apartments above, each selling for $274,000. The plan is to sell these to moderate income families, who will live on one floor, run a retail store, and rent out one apartment to another family.
ONWARD AND UPWARD
Standing on the Coney Island boardwalk at sunset, you see an amazing parade of people pass by: an Hasidic Jew in a black hat and long coat; some pudgy Latin children and their pudgy mother; a white haired man in a shirt and tie, speaking Russian to his grown son in blue jeans. Off to one side of the boardwalk in a park, a group of mostly Latins and blacks play handball.

Coney Island has always been a melting pot. The late novelist Joseph Heller, in his memoir Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, writes of the poor but thriving community of Jews, Italians and other ethnic groups of his youth in the 1920s. With a ballpark, a subway station, a renovated beach front — and most importantly, a rising economy in the New York region ‘ more people and money will come to Coney Island, and blend into the existing soup.

But many people are skeptical that better days are ever ahead. David Barstow of The New York Times, in a story June 9, 2000, spoke of how ‘the old-timers and tourists and politicians cling like rust to the distant fantasy that Coney Island will be what it once was, as if the great cultural and demographic tides that built and then laid waste to the place were merely boardwalk phantasms.’ He goes on to call the place, ‘a clich’ of seedy decay,’ and ‘charmless.’

But Barstow did not mention the plan to renovate the subway, apparently only aware of the new ballpark. Probably what threatens Coney Island now is getting too rich. If New York transit adds better express service to Manhattan, the island could be a half hour away from Wall Street. And as an amusement park, Coney Island is still not bad. Sitting in a rocking car on top of The Wonder Wheel, you can see the ball park and then, the elevated subway line that glides between the housing towers nearby. From this vantage point, the train looks like just another amusement park ride, perhaps one to try after the roller coaster. I suspect that more people will try that ride, in coming years, and come to Coney Island.

Alex Marshall, the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken, lives in New York City and is a frequent contributor to Metropolis Magazine.

Moses Didn’t Understand Tranportation

Posted on March 14, 2007 by Alex Marshall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Puerto Rico builds a train in the sky

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Alex Marshall

ALEX MARSHALL
Metropolis Magazine
October 2001

The startling truth about San Juan, a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people in Puerto Rico, is that most of it looks like New Jersey. It is a landscape of ugly roadways lined with strip malls, American franchise restaurants, and glass office towers overlooking impenetrable limited-access highways. Sure, there is Old San Juan, the sixteenth-century fortified city with its tiny cobblestone streets. But that citadel of the picturesque, which sits on a point of land in the harbor, is a tiny speck in San Juan’s overall breadth. The bulk of the city was developed after World War II, when tax breaks and other incentive programs brought in industry. And in good postwar fashion, American and Puerto Rican engineers and urban planners heavily promoted the highway as the proper spine for development.

With the construction of the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), San Juan, Puerto Rico, hopes to find a mass transportation solution to its dependency on congested highways.

Two generations later, San Juan has reaped the result. Although its citizens earn substantially less than stateside Americans, they actually own more cars per capita. In fact, Puerto Rico has one of the highest car-ownership rates in the world. Traffic is horrible. Residents tell stories of once ten-minute drives that now take several hours. Buses exist, both public and private, but they are trapped in the same traffic jams as the private cars.

Enter the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), a 10.7-mile, $2 billion heavy-rail system scheduled for completion in 2003. Its planners are attempting something extremely difficult: altering a landscape produced by one type of transportation, the highway, by introducing a different type of transportation, an elevated train line. The risk in this type of urban surgery is that the patient will reject the alien transplant. Parts of the line travel through older streetcar suburbs, which have remnants of a traditional urban fabric. But the bulk of the project goes through postwar highway-oriented development, which is the most difficult to adapt to mass transit.

Elmo Ortiz, the urban design manager for the project, is well aware of the challenges it faces. Like most of the staff, Ortiz works in a blockish brick building located off a busy highway. “We have sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ortiz, whose face is ringed with a corona of white beard and hair. “The transformation of the geography of this place is incredible.”

Tren Urbano has a chance of working, Ortiz says, because it is intended to facilitate the development of a new type of city, not just to transport people: “We are trying to create a new urban form.” He and others envision the conversion of the rail corridor into destinations where people can live, shop, and work around the stations.

“We need to bring development back into the cities, instead of continuing with the sprawl that we have throughout the island,” says Javier Mirand’s, manager of architecture at Tren Urbano. “We need higher-density housing with minimum parking and good access to transit. This is the first time in sixty years that there will be a dependable transit system on the island.”

In this, Puerto Rico is not unlike so many other American cities trying to fight sprawl with new passenger rail systems: Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and even Las Vegas have adopted similar projects in recent years. The greater challenge is that Puerto Rico resembles other Latin American cities in its high levels of crime and general paranoid atmosphere of security. Even convenience stores often buzz in customers. Apartment towers have double-entry security at the parking lot and inside the building. Wrought-iron gates and bars, which at first might appear decorative, encase many suburban homes. Many once accessible public streets have been gated and locked, privatized by their community. “How do you create housing around stations where people want to live in a gated community?” Ortiz ponders out loud, grimacing at the challenge.

Mass transit is difficult in such high-crime, high-fear regions, because people don’t want to associate with strangers. A related problem is race: lower-class Puerto Ricans tend to be dark-skinned, and whiter upper-class citizens may shy from using mass transit if it requires them to encounter poorer commuters.

But as in other countries, Puerto Ricans are now talking about “smart growth,” environmental protection, and different living patterns. “There has been a big shift in environmental consciousness, and that is going to help us redevelop cities and control sprawl,” Mirand’s says.

A specter hanging over the project is the fate of another expensive elevated train line: in 1984 a $1 billion, 21-mile elevated Metrorail line opened in Miami. Isolated by sprawl, it has attracted few riders and is widely considered an enormous white elephant.

Maurice Ferre, mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985 and a native of Puerto Rico, predicts a better chance for the Tren Urbano because it goes through more work centers, such as the university and Rio Piedras. But San Juan will have to expand its system if it wants long-term success, he says: “Metrorail in Miami is a failure because it is an unfinished system. It’s like taking a table with four legs, and only building one leg and expecting it to stand. Structurally the two are similar, but I think the one in San Juan will be more successful.”

Aníbal Sepúlveda, professor of urban planning at the University of Puerto Rico and author of the book San Juan: An Illustrated History of Its Urban Development, is pessimistic about the project’s chances, even while he hopes for its success. “I have not seen enough effort to plan around the stations,” he says. “It will not come automatically. There is such a low density. At the same time, we are still building highways and making it easier for developers to build tract houses.”

Sepúlveda also questions the appropriateness of an elevated train line. “We chose the most expensive project for the city, but not necessarily the best one,” he says. “It’s too much money. We will not be able to build future lines with the same technology.”

Because it is a heavy-rail system, Tren Urbano can move immense numbers of people cheaply. But it will only be cost-effective if enough people actually use it. Officials project an initial ridership of 100,000 a day, which is predicted to rise to 115,000 by year 2010. At those levels, revenues from the fares would pay about half the operating costs, which is typical for mass transit.

Ironically, the key factor in the project’s favor is San Juan’s horrible and worsening traffic, which may motivate commuters to take the train. With a $2 billion investment, San Juan and Puerto Rico have placed an expensive bet on the table. They may win a city with choices other than highways and sprawl, or lose both money and hope that a sprawl-oriented city and its citizens can ever be changed.

How Urban Should Your City Be?

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Alex Marshall

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

by Alex Marshall
The New York Observer
July – 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

Posted on July 31, 2006 by admin

Getting There: Building Healthy Cities

[Excerpt From Chapter Nine]

Of all the public decisions that go into place-making, the most important is what type of transportation systems to use. They will determine the character of the city and much of its economy. Do we pave roads or lay down tracks? Do we fund buses or subsidize cars? Do we lay down bike paths or more highway lanes? Do we build airports or high-speed train lines?

What is transportation for? That’s the essential question Lewis Mumford asked forty years ago.

In the first place, it’s for building the economy of a city. A city’s external links to the outside world, its freeways, train lines, airports, ports, and others, will determine the potential of its industry and people. The big links a city has to the outside world determine its economic potential, something most people do not grasp. Thus, people should think hard about, and usually be ready to fund, the new airport, the new train lines, the new port, and even the new Interstate if it actually travels somewhere new, though this is not likely these days.

As these external links are established, attention can be paid to the internal transportation network. We should recognize that the internal transportation serves a different purpose than the external transportation systems of a city. The layout of a region’s internal transportation will determine how people get to work, how they shop, how they recreate, how they live. The standard choice today of lacing a metropolitan area with big freeways for purely internal travel means we will have a sprawling, formless environment. Simply getting rid of the freeways–forget mass transit–would establish a more neighborhood-centered economy and dynamic. But we don’t have to forget mass transit. Laying out train lines, streetcar tracks, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks–and forgoing freeways and big roads–will mean a more place-oriented form of living. Both the drawbacks and the benefits of such a style dwell in its more communal, group-oriented form of living. You will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult.

Transportation is not the only public decision. Policies on growth and development can help implement a transportation policy. Such policies are far less important than usually thought, however. The major transportation systems dictate the pattern and style of developments. Once those are established, ways will be found over and around zoning and land-use laws to build the type of development that fits with a big highway or train line.

But zoning and other land-use laws can be used to facilitate or support the type of development that goes along with a particular style of transportation. The best way to do this would be to move away from zoning and go back to actually designing cities. Governments would actually lay out street systems on paper, and then private or public developers could build them as needed. This would give a coherent structure to a metropolitan area. It would also mean better coordinating the relationship among states, metropolitan areas, and smaller localities.

Growth control laws and boundaries are a wonderful tool for shaping development. Conceptually they are great because they help the public and the planners focus on where they want growth to occur. But growth boundaries are misleading because they give rise to the perception that without them, houses and shopping centers would magically pop up like mushrooms after a good rain. They would not. In reality, development only occurs after the public has made a decision about where to lay out roads, train lines, sewers, and other public infrastructure. Growth boundaries are as much about inhibiting public development as private. They are lines that tell government, beyond this point, go no farther with your services. A better way to think about growth boundaries is that they are lines that demarcate to what point the public is going to extend its blessings, both in the form of transportation and in things like educating children, police services, and libraries.

But growth boundaries are not possible usually without addressing the tangled political structures of our cities. Which leads us to our third rule of thumb.

The End of Place

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[Excerpt From Chapter Two]

The Nature of Place

Before the car, or more particularly before the highway, the essential challenge of cities was to keep everything from being in the same place. The city was centripetal. Like a black hole, the nature of a city or town was to suck everything to one point. People needed to be near the railroad, the port, the factory to get to their jobs, and factories needed to be near the people and transportation links. This was why reformers championed public parks. Called the lungs of the cities, they were spots of greenery in the tightly packed clumps of buildings and streets. And it took real community effort to put them there. Valuable and scarce land, which could have been converted into homes and businesses, had to be set aside by the public. The tendency of the pre-automobile city to suck people to specific points only intensified with the transportation advances of the nineteenth century, which drew people, machinery, businesses, and money toward the subway stop, the streetcar stop, the railroad terminal.

Just the opposite conditions prevail today. The city is centrifugal. The city is more akin to a giant salad spinner, spraying growth out over the countryside indiscriminately. Growth still clusters around transportation sources, except that it is now the freeway off-ramp rather than the subway stop or train station. But the growth circle of a streetcar is measured in blocks because people have to walk there. The growth circle of a freeway off-ramp in measured in miles, because people drive there, and need places to put their cars at each end.

Consequently, there is no particular advantage to being right near one’s workplace. In fact, there is considerable advantage to being as far away from work or other necessities as possible. The person who locates himself on the fringes gets the advantage of bigger lots and more peace and quiet, while still being able to “raid” the jobs and commerce of the metropolis as a whole. Thus the city expands ever outward, with each person and developer reaching the short-term gain of being the farthest out.

The drive to establish parks is anachronistic now, because we no longer live packed in a block with no green space nearby. Now, most of us live surrounded by green space, from our backyards to the berms and shrubbery that surround the shopping mall and local gas station. We are enveloped in greenery, because the low-density environment has plenty of spaces for trees, shrubs, and spare land that is left as forest or fields. Now, a park is just about providing recreation, not relief from crowding and congestion.

The essential dynamic of cities and places has changed. The fundamental challenge of cities today is to keep everything from being everywhere at once. The modern push to establish growth boundaries can be compared to the drive in the past to establish parks. Each movement is attempting to check a fundamental tendency of the form in favor of the public good. The public good now concerns containment, whereas before it was the reverse. Kenneth Jackson, a historian of the suburbs, said, “The effect of the auto on the city is analogous to what astronomers call the big bang theory of the universe.”2 In the past, cities sucked inward. With the car, they exploded outward.

This big bang has increased exponentially the rate cities consume land. Urban historian Robert Fishman noted, “The basic unit of the new city is not the street measured in blocks but the ‘growth corridor’ stretching 50 to 100 miles. Where the leading metropolis of the early 20th century–New York, London, or Berlin–covered perhaps 100 square miles, the new city routinely encompasses two to three thousand [square] miles.”3

A news article about contemporary Atlanta, a particularly acute case, gives a glimpse of the dynamic. “Over the past six years, Atlanta has gobbled up more land than any metro area, anywhere. Each year, the region’s suburban boundaries grow by 38 square miles.-.-.-. As a result, commuters-.-.-. pile up more car miles each day, per capita, than residents of any U.S. metropolis, including Los Angeles. They also breathe the worst air of any city in the Southeast.” The fastest-growing county, Gwinnett, has tripled in population in sixteen years to 460,000. “Seen from the air, Gwinnett looks like a vast sea of cul-de-sacs–an estimated 9,000 of which are spread across the county.” The growth of Atlanta, the writer correctly observes, was fueled by three Interstates built in the postwar era that converge on the region.4

Victor Gruen, father of the first enclosed shopping mall, in Minneapolis, precisely describes the centrifugal nature of suburban development in a long piece, which he apparently writes with some regret, about the children he has sired. In a chart entitled “The Vicious Circle,” he shows an arrow from “Sprawl” leading to “Increased Use of Automobiles” leading to “Decreased Use of Public Transportation” leading to “Separation of Urban Functions” leading to “Increased Road Surfaces” leading back to “Sprawl.”5

The End of Place saddens us, I believe. We have had thousands of years living with “walls” around us in the form of streets and buildings. It’s only in the last fifty that most of us have been able to leave them. Now, like a prisoner yearning for his old jail cell, we miss the places that once involuntarily confined us. Although we chafed at our old constraints, we find now that we might need them. The car and the highway have allowed us to leave our old confines, but they also have meant we could not go back.

Is the End of Place an unavoidable consequence of the car? To answer this, we need to understand why one method of transportation is chosen or can be chosen.

A Tale of Two Towns

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

Kissimmee versus Celebration and the New Urbanism
[Excerpt From Chapter One]

“When you’re building your own creation,
Nothing’s better than real than a real imitation.”
-Lyrics from the song “Frankenstein,” by Aimee Mann

On the edge of two lakes about twenty miles south of Orlando are two small southern Florida towns. Both have old-fashioned main streets, with stores, restaurants, and a movie theater that open onto their sidewalks. Both have old-fashioned homes with front porches set on streets which lead into their downtowns. Both have parks that wrap around their lakes, where you can stroll and take in a sunrise or the night air. They both lie off a road called U.S. 192, and are just a few miles from each other.

But one of these towns is struggling. Its homes are not selling for much, and its storefronts have trouble staying full. The other town is a wealthy place, with homes that cost up to $1 million. Its downtown has rich boutiques and pricey restaurants.

The struggling town is called Kissimmee. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew as a shipping port and then a railroad and cattle town. But people stopped using the big lakes for shipping, and railroads became less important as well, and the town suffered.

The successful town is called Celebration. It is a new place, founded in 1994. It is, in reality, not a town, but a subdivision, built by the Disney corporation in conscious imitation of towns like Kissimmee. It sits next to a freeway and an exit ramp. Its homes are being bought by the Orlando upper classes, and its stores are being filled with tourists. It is an example of a much-heralded design philosophy called New Urbanism.

In learning why one town is struggling, and the other prospering, we can learn what people value, compared to what they say they value. We can also learn about what makes towns, and subdivisions, tick. We also learn about the concept and practice of community, which Celebration’s owners say they are reviving. By looking at Kissimmee, we can learn about Celebration, because Kissimmee is the thing Celebration is pretending to be–a small, Florida main-street-style town. What does it say when the imitation of something is worth more than the thing itself?

Comparing Kissimmee to Celebration shows where Disney has chosen to imitate the design of a small town, and where it has not. In some aspects, like front porches, Disney has chosen to exactly copy Kissimmee. In other aspects, like the way the towns govern themselves, it has chosen not to. What we find is that Celebration is a contemporary automobile suburb pretending to be a nineteenth-century town. And that pretense, like most pretenses, has a price.

By looking at Kissimmee and Celebration, we can learn about the general thrust of the design philosophy the latter represents, New Urbanism. It is probably the most heralded design movement of the last half-century. It has been embraced as a way out of the problems of sprawl. Celebration closely resembles other New Urban developments, both in the structure of its streets and the structure of its management, although it does differ in some respects. By looking at Celebration, and the thing it is imitating, Kissimmee, we start to see just where this New Urban path, as it has generally been configured, leads.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Mrs. Mac’s versus Max’s

We can glimpse the distinctive characters of the respective “main streets” of Kissimmee and Celebration by looking at two eatery proprietors offering simple fare there. Kissimmee has a small restaurant on Main Street, called “Mrs. Mac’s,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. Celebration has a restaurant on Market Street, called “Max’s Cafe,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. One is a magical realist version of the other.

Mrs. Mac’s on Main Street in Kissimmee has Formica-topped tables that you might find in your kitchen, a nondescript floor, and a wooden checkout counter with a noncomputerized cash register. The menu is simple. Two grilled pork chops with three vegetables for $5.95. Steak for $6.95. Homemade chili for $1.50. At lunch, I watched a nonpicturesque group of people eat there: a fat woman struggling to control her three children, a businessman here and there. The food was austere but good.

Max’s Cafe in Celebration is to cafes what Celebration is to small towns: a fantasy version of a small Southern cafe. Max’s has venetian blinds with thick louvers in the windows, booths inside with metallic piping, and a long soda fountain. It’s really quite beautiful, although it comes at a price.

A bowl of chili at Max’s costs $5.95, compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A piece of pie costs $4.95 compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A cheeseburger is $7.50 compared to $2.70 at Mrs. Mac’s. And we don’t even want to get into the entrees. But the differences between the two places go deeper than the prices and decor.

The proprietor of Mrs. Mac’s in Kissimmee opens or closes when she pleases. Like the other property owners or lessors in Kissimmee, she is not under the thumb of a common management. The property under Max’s, however, is owned by Disney. Every store in Celebration serves at Disney’s pleasure and was handpicked by it. Celebration’s management is that of a shopping mall, not a town. Disney can adjust “the mix” of the stores to optimize profits, or character, or anything it chooses.

So why do the respective characters, not to mention prices, of these two main streets differ so remarkably?

Kissimmee’s Main Street was once its center, because the town itself was once a business and transportation center. It was natural for people to shop as they went to work, or got off the train, or took a boat down the lake. When the region’s center shifted away from the town, its Main Street dried up.

Celebration’s Market Street is no more of a center than Kissimmee’s Main Street is now. But it does do a better job of fostering that illusion, for reasons I will come to.

The business district of Celebration is a curious animal. To some extent, Celebration has succeeded in overcoming what has been the Achilles heel of New Urbanism, which is establishing a commercial center within a residential subdivision. Retail is an area where fictions are exposed. Successful retail establishments have basic needs, like traffic or pedestrian counts, that cannot be dressed up or swept aside.

New Urbanists blame zoning for the segregated uses embodied in the mall, the subdivision, and the isolated schools no one can walk to. But this puts the cart before the horse. Zoning, like most regulation, usually only tidies up decisions the marketplace and the physical infrastructure dictated. Neighborhood business districts were created by the necessity to have services within walking distance of one’s home. Before the nineteenth century, this was because feet were basically the only transportation for most people. To buy something, you had to walk there.

The advent of the streetcar and other forms of mass transportation changed that dynamic only somewhat. In their effects, streetcars and subways were to cities what guns are to violence: they were force multipliers. They made it possible for even more people to live in one place, and congregated businesses around streetcar lines and subway stops. Once they got home from work, people still walked to shop, visit a friend, or have a drink. They had to.

The car and the highway changed that. While mass transit systems were magnets, gathering people and businesses around central points, cars and highways were antimagnets, spreading things out as much as possible. Businesses that relied on customers with cars needed parking lots, which ate away at the street-based retail around them. Eventually, stores moved to the suburbs, where their parking lots could be as big as their owners liked. Stores got bigger and bigger because people could drive to them. So far, the country has not seen an end to this centrifugal dynamic, where businesses get larger and larger, and more and more isolated and spread out.

New Urban communities attempt to change this by resurrecting the old form of retail which existed prior to the automobile, or which was left over in its first few decades. They try to do this, however, without actually resurrecting the old transportation systems that made the old business districts possible and necessary.

To survive, retail needs an astonishingly large potential customer base, much larger than might be intuitively thought. The huge, 200,000-square-foot warehouse-style stores, like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, can require a customer base of a half million households within a twenty-minute drive.3 But even a small restaurant or pharmacy requires high traffic volumes, whether it be by foot or car. Traffic volumes depend on transportation systems. Wal-Marts are located around key freeway interchanges because it allows them access to a regional population base. A small store can succeed in an urban neighborhood, but it requires a lot of people going by its front door, the same as such a store in a strip shopping center out on the highway. To produce those traffic volumes, an urban storefront seems to need at least 10,000 families within walking distance, which means a gross density of at least ten homes an acre. Ghent, the century-old neighborhood in Norfolk where I live, has a gross density of close to twenty homes to an acre. Some individual blocks in Ghent, with larger apartment buildings, have double and triple this density. And Ghent still has difficulty supporting a retail street. In general, the denser the distribution of stores, the denser the distribution of people. Manhattan can support retail in almost every block because it can pack 10,000 people into one block.

This point has always confused architects. Retail is not their strong point. Le Corbusier, the modernist giant of the twentieth century, imagined that shops could be put into his tall towers and persisted even after it was shown that their population was not nearly enough to support the shops.4 Duany conceives of small shops within his low-density, neotraditional subdivisions even though they also lack the necessary population and density.

Celebration, even at buildout, has a density of less than two per acre. The densest part of Celebration is the Garden District, which has about five homes to an acre. These are the special, lower-priced homes, starting at $150,000, and so are off to themselves so they won’t contaminate the more-common $400,000 and $1 million homes in the rest of the community. The Garden District homes, which are 1,350 to 2,200 square feet, are often only six feet apart.5 At five homes to an acre, the Garden District has a crammed-together feel to it. I wouldn’t want to live there. I bet turning into your driveway at night could be a real operation. Yet the density here is still nowhere near high enough to support a business district.

So how is Celebration able to support a downtown?

In a book about the making of the Macintosh computer, Insanely Great,6 Steven Levy described the “reality distortion field” that workers said Apple founder Steve Jobs was able to create around him by the sheer force of his personality. Disney is able to create a similar reality distortion field around Celebration. Through the force of its marketing muscle, it is able to reverse the normal laws of retailing that demand that retail be placed around principal transportation arteries, be they suburban highways or subway lines. In the suburbs, this means placing retail on a heavily traveled main artery and putting big parking lots there to scoop the traffic off of it.

With Celebration’s downtown, you have to drive a mile on a winding access road off U.S. 192. This should kill any attempt at retail. But Disney is able to surmount this with the sheer force of its name and presence. Tourists and sightseers are being pulled off U.S. 192 by the publicity generated by the press and advertising. Disney has heavily advertised Celebration on local television as a place to go shop. Celebration also has its own exit sign on Interstate 4. It’s already listed on the one-page, low-detail maps that you get from the rental car companies.

All this is enough to bring a steady stream of traffic into Celebration to both look at the homes and walk around this novel creature, a “downtown” inside a subdivision. The tourist traffic is a twofer, for the tourists both support the stores and look at the model homes. (This has obviously caused some tension in the neighborhood. Many homes have small signs on them that say they are occupied, not a model home.)

Celebration’s downtown will only succeed if it is able to be not a neighborhood business district, but a regional shopping center. That is working so far. Most of their customers, store owners tell me, are tourists and home lookers. But because of this, the stores in the downtown are nothing like one would choose for a neighborhood shopping street. There are a fancy dress store, and upscale souvenir shops. There are restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater, but all extremely upscale. The Goodings market, a luxury chain in Florida, is a gourmet store. The manager says it originally tried to have a full produce and meat section. But the stuff wouldn’t sell. So it scaled back the produce and eliminated the fresh meat. What you have left is a fancy store that is convenient if you forget the bottle of wine, but is not for everyday grocery shopping.

The point is that the residents of Celebration are still utterly dependent on U.S. 192, and always will be. They drive there to shop for groceries. They drive to the Wal-Mart to buy some lawn furniture. They drive to the mall to buy a computer, a lamp, or almost anything essential.

The Sex of Cities

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

[Excerpt From The Introduction]

Children are supposed to turn to their parents at some point and ask innocently, “Daddy [or Mommy], where do babies come from?” Faced with such a basic question, parents then decide how directly to answer it.

I doubt any child has turned to anyone and asked plaintively, “Daddy, where do places come from?” Or, “Daddy, where do cities come from?” But it is these questions that I hope people are asking, even if not consciously, and which I seek to answer in this book.

There’s been a lot of talk over the last half-century about our cities, towns, suburbs, and neighborhoods. Through most of it has run a thick current of dissatisfaction with the galloping forces of suburbanization that have characterized the postwar era. People may love their three-bedroom home on the cul-de-sac, but they hate traffic jams, destroyed countryside, pollution, and automobile dependence. But before we start labeling places as good or bad, or attempting to design new ones, we should understand them better. This means asking basic questions. Which are: What forces produce our streets, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions, and the shape they take? And can we control them? To proceed without understanding is to almost guarantee ill-conceived and unwanted results.

Babies come from sex. Where do places come from? What is the sex of place? What union of people and nature produces our cities, our suburbs, and the environment out of which we make our homes? If some concede the need for more widespread sex education, might I raise the call for more universal place education?

I believe we are mixed up about our cities, our neighborhoods, and the places where we live. We don’t understand how they work. We don’t understand what produces them. We don’t understand what starts them or stops them. We don’t know how to change them, even if we wanted to. That is what I hope to do in this book. To explain to myself and to the reader why human settlement occurs, what shapes it, and how it can be shaped. In this book, I discuss the nature of place and how the nature of places has changed. And how we can shape the nature of our places. I do not argue to redesign our cities in a specific way. I have preferences and make them known. But my purpose is to make clear the choices available and the price tag of each. How do we change our world? What levers do we grasp if we want to change how it is constructed?

Much of the book explicitly or implicitly addresses the dualism that has developed between the so-called urban and suburban environments, between the land of the parking lot and the land of the street. These two types of places are seen as representing different ideals, and being governed by different systems. I attempt to find the Rosetta stone that will make understandable the workings of both city and suburb. Although they indeed have stark differences in their everyday life, I contend if we widen the lens, we find both urban and suburban places are governed and created by the same laws of place. If we understand those laws, we come a long way in understanding how places and cities are created and how they function.

Guns Don’t Kill People; Cars Do. Or At Least Not As Many

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

On Foot Or On Wheels, Facing The Threat

Whether you walk, drive or bicycle on your daily rounds, are you more in danger of getting killed from a bumper of a car or a bullet from a gun? It depends on where you live, although the stats suggest that overall, the mean metal of a car is more dangerous than that from a gun, simply because speeding cars are so much more prevalent than speeding bullets.

The New York Daily News started out this somewhat morbid train of thought of mine with its news series this month examining pedestrians killed by vehicles. The series noted that from 2000 to 2002, 580 pedestrians were killed. The news campaign, entitled Save a Life, Change the Law, is an excellent example of advocacy journalism. It informs the reader of a fact — a lot of people on foot are killed by cars — and then forcefully presents a possible remedy, in this case, making it easier to charge drivers with criminal penalties if they kill a pedestrian. If more drivers were charged with criminal penalties for reckless behavior, drivers might think twice before speeding through an intersection.

The good news is that both the murder rate and the killing of pedestrians by vehicles have been steadily dropping over the last decade. In 1990, 365 pedestrians were killed and an amazing 2,606 people were murdered. In 2002, only 195 pedestrians were killed and only 575 people were murdered. If the murder rate keeps up its swift descent, walking across a dangerous intersection will be riskier than walking through a bad neighborhood.

Eric Monkkonen, an urban historian at the University of California at Los Angeles, studies both crime and urban planning. He is the author of Murder in New York City (UCLA press 2001), and America Becomes Urban, (UCLA 1988). Both are excellent. He said New York City’s murder rate has always gone up and down over the centuries, but was unusually high in the last generation.

“New York has always been safer than other American cities, so the crime rate could go even lower.” Monkkonen said from his office in California. “The question is how to get it there. I wouldn’t trust anyone who has a simple answer.” Moving back to pedestrian deaths, Transportation Alternatives, in several excellent recent reports available at its web site www.transalt.org, reported that the number of pedestrians has continued to drop in 2003, with only 102 pedestrians killed in the first nine months of the year. It appears we are heading for a record breaking year in safety. T.A. credits the transportation department with a series of traffic calming measures that have significantly made things safer for pedestrians.

But only if you are satisfied with not dying.

Transportation Alternatives also reports that in 2002, 15,000 pedestrians and 4000 cyclists were injured, about the same as in past years. Also in 2002, 16 cyclists were killed, a rate that has been pretty consistent for the past decade.

How do we fare if we move from the urban streets of New York City to the more suburban ones of New Jersey? Not so well, at least if we are walking or driving.

Drivers in the Garden State killed 184 pedestrians last year, an alarming 37 percent increase, it was reported recently. Pedestrian deaths in New Jersey had been dropping, and the increase is so large that it begs some specific explanation. New York has 8 million people; New Jersey has about 8.4 million.

Given the similar populations and the similar pedestrian death rates — 184 in New Jersey versus 198 in New York City — seems evidence that it’s more dangerous to walk in New Jersey, simply because so many more people walk regularly in New York City.

It’s not only more dangerous to walk, it’s more dangerous to drive. In 2001, New Jersey had 747 traffic fatalities, at least double the number of those in New York City.

This statistic matches with the work of William Lucy, a professor of urban planning at the University of Virginia, who made headlines consistently in the 1990s with his studies showing one was more at risk living in a traffic ridden suburb than a crime ridden inner city. Several of his studies showed that a prosperous Northern Virginian or Richmond suburb was less safe to live in than Washington DC or Richmond, which then vied for the highest murder rates in the land. The reason was surprising but obvious from the data.

Speeding cars killed a lot more people in the suburbs than they did in the inner city, where the cars tended to travel more slowly and accidents tended not to be fatal.

Here in the Tri State Region, it would be nice to have the best of all worlds. If we make it safe and most of all pleasant to walk and bicycle in the city or suburb, we will have safer and more pleasant communities all around.

–Alex Marshall, an Independent Journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA

DC Metro: A Record of Reinvigorating a City

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Alex Marshall

(Taken from the February 2004 issue of Planning Magazine.)

Love (and Hate) That Metro

It’s a mess say some commuters — it’s too expensive and the stations are too far apart. But they ride it all the same.

By Alex Marshall

While he sips an imported beer at Aroma, the elegant bar on Connecticut Avenue near the National Zoo, Jamison Adcock is happy to offer his opinions on “Metro,” the popular name for the D.C. region’s 103-mile transit system, whose pinwheel map is as familiar to residents as the tall spire of the Washington Monument or other local landmarks.

“It’s a horrible mess,” says Adcock, a 33-year-old software engineer. “It’s the lamest metro system I’ve ever seen.” Exhibiting the enthusiasm of someone finally getting a load off his mind, Adcock details Metro’s shortcomings: With its long arms stretching into Maryland and Virginia, and fewer stops within the city proper, “it’s basically built for commuters,” he says.

There’s more: The point-to-point ticketing system, which charges riders according to distance traveled, makes it “incredibly expensive compared to, say, Boston or Philadelphia.” The deep stations mean “you have some of the longest escalators in the free world.” And the open-air escalators lack canopies, making rainy days bad news for riders.

For all his bad-mouthing, it turns out that Adcock actually uses Metro. In fact, that’s how he got to this bar to meet his friends at 7 p.m. on a Friday night. “I can come down here and not worry about parking,” he admits. “And I can drink three or four beers and not worry about driving home.” This prompts Adcock at last to mention a positive about Metro: The management has extended its hours to 3 a.m. on weekends. “They finally did something right,” he says.

Everyone’s a critic

Such criticism from a regular rider illustrates an undeniable fact about Metro. Twenty-seven years after the first line opened in 1976, the system has worked its way into the very fiber of the city and region, transforming both in the process. It’s almost impossible to overstate Metro’s impact. It has revitalized downtown and the closer suburbs, led to population growth within the city proper, priced out less affluent newcomers from once-sleepy suburbs and once-dying urban neighborhoods, and changed the skyline in both suburb and city.

Few people are indifferent to Metro because few people are unaffected by it. Whereas the chief complaint about many transit systems is that they’re inefficient or too costly to taxpayers, the rap against Metro is that it does not go far enough, run long enough hours, or match some other rider expectation of tiptop service. Polls on expanding the system routinely reach support levels in the 70 percent range.

Even critics begin their remarks with praise. “The overall image of the system locally and nationally and worldwide is that it’s a spectacular system,” says Robert J. Smith, a Metro board member who was appointed by Maryland Gov. Robert Ehrlich. Smith has attacked the system’s budget as lavish and wants to see more money put into highways rather than transit. But he is also a regular patron. “I ride it every day,” he says.

Still, coping with success has its own challenges. With the original system now almost complete, the region is faced with deciding whether to embark on a new era of Metro expansion, to put that money into more roads, or to do neither.

Even without expansion, just keeping up with the capital and maintenance costs associated with a steadily growing ridership is a daunting task. It’s a challenge few predicted Metro would have when the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA), the subway’s builder and administrator, was created in 1967.

Corrugated cocoon

If you blindfold a group of Metro riders and lead them into one of the original stations, even after years away, it’s likely to take only seconds before they recognize where they are. The cocoon of corrugated barrel vaulting is absolutely distinctive.

Familiar to every user as well are the round lights at the platform edge, which flash as a train approaches, and the rechargeable paper tickets, which are inserted into the turnstiles. The cars themselves are distinctive. Wider than subway cars in older systems, many still feature the orange seat cushions and carpets that give the trains a vaguely disco feeling, reminiscent of the era in which the system opened. Construction began in 1969, and the first line began operation in 1976, coinciding with the nation’s bicentennial celebration.

Politically, Metro traces back to the Joint Transportation Commission, created by Congress in 1954 to study the problems of getting around in the Washington area. Conceptually, you could say the system harks back to the tiny subway created in 1906 between the U.S. Capitol and the Senate Office Building. A Washington Post headline at the time asked, “Why Not A Real Subway System for Washington?”

Although construction of the system beneath a roughly two-centuries-old city was a tough engineering job, the political hurdles were even higher. Constructing and operating the system required bringing together the District of Columbia and the states of Maryland and Virginia, entities that historically have been in conflict. Throw in the local governments, and the cooperation problems multiply.

The reason these hurdles were cleared is twofold: the leadership of many individuals and the promise of federal dollars. As with the interstate highway system that began in the 1950s, the lure of the federal money got competing states and localities to sit down and talk.

Ultimately, the federal government paid $6.4 billion and local governments $3 billion of the system’s $9.4 billion cost, according to Metro officials. In present-day dollars, $9.4 billion works out to about $22 billion. Although a big number, in context it can seem cheap. For example, New York City’s planned Second Avenue subway line, which will run just 10 miles up the East Side of Manhattan, currently bears a price tag of $16 billion.

Chutzpah at work

The chutzpah of early leaders like Reps. Carlton Sickles (D-Md.), Basil Whitener (D-N.C.), and Joel Broyhill (R-Va.), who managed to build political support for Metro and fund it, can be appreciated clearly in retrospect. The federal government and its partners were proposing a comprehensive heavy rail system at a time when transit use was dropping all over the country and highway construction was seen as the more obvious government investment.

“I tried to understand why Washington built a subway, when every other American city was building highways,” says Zachary Schrag, an historian at Columbia University, who wrote his dissertation on the city’s subway system. “The answer is to see Metro as the embodiment of Great Society liberalism. It was about using the power of the federal government to take American wealth and put it into grand public projects, not designed to serve the poor or the rich, but to serve everyone. Only if we understand it in those terms do we get a sense of what it’s worth.”

And if at times Metro’s station design, by Chicago architect Harry Weese, seems overly grand, it’s because it was meant to be. “Metro was not designed to be the cheapest solution to the problem; it was designed to be the best solution,” says Schrag.”It was designed to do public works right.”

Whatever the expense, the founders’ vision of the system’s overall design was quite sound. The path of the lines and the placement of the stations generally follows the original plan. The system’s five lines — red, orange, blue, yellow, and green — have arms stretching into the surrounding regions and states. The original 100-mile system was completed in 2001. A few heavy construction projects remain. WMATA is at work at the first infill station, New York Avenue, on the Red Line, and is extending the blue line by two stations; the line will terminate at the multi-million-dollar Largo Town Center.

The rail component works with a surface system of buses. Although Metro is what people call the subway, WMATA is also in charge of bus service for the city and much of the region. MetroBus runs almost 1,500 buses, which make about 500,000 trips daily, less than MetroRail’s 650,000 trips. Metro is seamlessly integrated with the city’s main airport, Reagan National Airport, one of the few systems in the country to be so. Tourists use Metro regularly and return home asking why their communities don’t have a transit system like it.

Quirks

The system has its quirks. No eating is allowed on the trains or platforms, a rule the transit police enforce with regular $10 tickets. It is also relatively expensive. A journey of more than a few stations quickly adds up to $3 or more, particularly at rush hour. Metro’s fare box pays about 70 percent of MetroRail’s operating costs, one of the highest percentages in the country.

Adcock, the critic at the bar, is essentially correct in his gripes about the system’s limitations. MetroRail is a hybrid of a traditional subway, which serves people within the city, and a commuter line, which brings people into the city from outlying areas. Even within the city, stations are relatively far apart, as is the custom with commuter rail lines. Some stations within the District are more than a mile apart.

Having fewer stations made Metro less expensive to construct and ensures that trips downtown are faster for commuters. But it makes the train harder to use for everyday travel because you have to walk further to and from the station. By comparison in Manhattan, most stations are five to seven blocks apart. Metro is remedying this some. The New York Avenue station, now under construction, adds a stop between Union Station and the Rhode Island Avenue station, which are 1.7 miles apart on the Red Line.

Another limitation is that the Metro lines have only two tracks. That means a breakdown in one place can back up other trains many stations distant. Unexpected delays are frequent. During a Friday afternoon rush hour recently, passengers waited fruitlessly for a Red Line train to arrive at Metro Center. At one point, the crowd grew so large that it overflowed into the wide hallway that led to the platform. A breakdown had delayed the trains.

“I’m still at Metro Center at 5:30; I’m not going to make the train at Union Station,” said one chagrined rider into her cell phone. “You’re going to have to reschedule my meeting.”

Metro planners look wistfully at New York’s subway, whose lines generally have four tracks, with both express and local service. Despite the advantages of more tracks, it is actually quite rare globally, probably because it increases construction costs enormously. With Metro, there is some talk of adding an express track to the Orange line to limit backups and improve service.

Whatever its shortcomings, many residents regard Metro fondly, probably more than is common with something as utilitarian as a subway. “I think it’s terrific,” said regular rider Joan Wise as she briskly made her way to her morning train at the Cleveland Park station. “It’s half an hour from inside my house to inside my office, and someone else is in charge. I’ve just been to Barcelona and Madrid, and Metro is better.”

It’s not Paris

When people do criticize Metro, they often compare it unfavorably to subways of older, larger cities like New York and Paris, whose systems were founded a century ago and which carry about 10 times the traffic of Washington’s. After all, the Paris subway carries 4.5 million riders daily and its new line, the Meteor, serves more people than Washington’s entire system. What’s amazing is that people are comparing these systems at all. In a sense, it shows how successful Metro is, and its users ambition for it.

About the only other recently built subway that is as vital to a region as Metro is to Washington is Mexico City’s. Its first line opened in 1969, the same year that construction began on Washington’s Metro. Mexico City’s system has 175 stations and 125 miles of track, versus Washington’s 83 stations and just over 100 miles of track, and carries 4.2 million riders a day versus Washington’s 675,000.

Although obviously eclipsed by Paris and Mexico, the D.C. MetroRail system is, by some criteria, the second largest in the U.S., after New York’s. Such inter-city comparisons are difficult, because separating out what is a commuter railroad and what is a subway is difficult.

Yet, whatever Metro’s rank, few foresaw that the Washington rail line would be in the upper tier nationally. Many critics predicted that it would be at best “an expensive toy,” used mostly by tourists, says James Hughes, director of planning and operations for Metro.

Transformation

Unlike the hypothetical blindfolded visitor who would recognize a Metro station or train at a glance once the blindfold was removed, a Washington-area resident who had been away since the 1970s would probably not recognize downtown Arlington, Virginia; Chevy Chase, Maryland; or even downtown D.C. In these places and others, Metro has transformed quiet suburban streets into hybrid urban centers, and once-decaying urban streets into thriving ones.

Friendship Heights along Wisconsin Avenue, which straddles the border between D.C. and Montgomery County, Maryland, is one of these new centers. A generation ago, a long-time resident remembers, a convenience store provided just about the only local shopping. Now, office buildings, department stores, and towering apartment buildings huddle around the subway station. The Mazza Galerie, an enclosed shopping mall linked to the station, includes a Neiman Marcus, Saks, and other exclusive stores.

In many ways, this area is a cross between urban and suburban. The department stores are accessible both from Wisconsin Avenue and from the surface parking lot behind the mall. Thus, the mall sucks customers from two main sources, the rail users and other pedestrians who tend to walk in from the avenue and the suburban drivers who enter from the rear. Office buildings have similar arrangements.

Tom, a blue-jeaned 38-year-old, has come on a Sunday afternoon to visit the Borders bookstore across the street from the mall on Wisconsin Avenue. “I’m going to get some coffee, do some reading,” he says as he emerges from one of the Metro’s typically long escalators. “I own a car, but it doesn’t make sense to use it much, not with the traffic and when you have the Metro,” he says.

At the Ballston Metro stop in Arlington, Virginia, 25-story residential towers and new stores and restaurants face the streets, but the streets are wide, suburban-style boulevards with sweeping curves and gigantic intersections. Crossing one of these intersections, with their multiple turn lanes, is a dangerous activity, despite the brick crosswalks and flashing walk signs.

Overall, though, there is little question that the five Metro stops in Arlington are a model of integration. In part, that’s because Arlington County planners had a hand in siting the Metro line and stations, and then encouraged and designed for development around the stops. The result is a series of dense, tax-paying business districts. Most Metro stations in Arlington have no parking at all. Passengers crowd trains throughout the day and evening, rather than simply at rush hours.

In contrast, elected officials, developers, and civic leaders in neighboring Fairfax County, Virginia, were unable to agree on plans for development around the Orange line. As a result, the stations are surrounded by parking lots and except during rush hours trains run half-empty. This pattern is difficult to reverse now because commuters would protest if their parking were removed and development encouraged.

At the station

In the District, station-area renovation and revitalization has been picking up since the mid-1990s, when the economy revived and the city left behind a series of political scandals and began lowering its crime rate. As much construction as anywhere is taking place near the WMATA headquarters at Fifth and F streets near the Judiciary Square Metro station.

“When I came here seven years ago, there were a whole lot of parking lots around here,” says planning director James Hughes from his office on Metro’s seventh floor. Now he can point to new construction all around, including the MCI sports center.

At 14th and U streets, a largely African-American neighborhood that 20 years ago was written off 20 years ago as hopelessly blighted, hip design stores and trendy Somali restaurants attract upscale shoppers. New apartment buildings are going up, such as the one almost directly across from the Lincoln Theater, which was meticulously restored a decade ago.

Without the subway

It’s quite probable that none of this would have happened without the subway. Certainly in part because of Metro, the District’s population increased in the last census for the first time in decades. The federal government has expanded within the city, rather than outside of it. Without a subway, the gargantuan new Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center on Pennsylvania Avenue could never have been constructed downtown, say Metro officials. The 3.1-million-square-foot complex houses government agencies and private businesses related to trade.

“If we didn’t have Metro, it would have been built in Gaithersburg or somewhere even further out,” says deputy Metro director Wayne Thompson.

Without question, Metro and the federal government depend on one another, which is one reason regional leaders feel justified in asking for heavy federal support for Metro. Forty-seven percent of federal workers and contractors use the trains and buses to get to work, say Metro officials. When Hurricane Isabel swept through Washington in 2003, the federal government had to shut down when Metro announced it was canceling all service.

What’s ahead

Drive out from the city, past Friendship Heights and the other close-in suburbs until you reach the eight-lane I-495 beltway and the sprawling land of edge city office parks and some of the worst traffic on earth. The Texas Transportation Institute regularly rates the Washington region as one of the top three traffic nightmares in the U.S. Despite Metro’s high ridership, this is the daily reality for most of the region’s residents.

All this awful traffic, centered around the D.C. beltway, paradoxically helps and hurts future prospects for the hub-and-spoke Metro system. The traffic is one reason Metro use is so high. It also creates a market for the small, expensive apartments around Metro stops.

The traffic even creates some political support for Metro. Many drivers believe that it keeps congestion in check, even though transit experts will quickly disabuse them of such a notion. Mass transit does not necessarily improve traffic flow, they say, because the density that transit promotes ultimately means less room for cars.

But the suburban-style growth so common in Maryland and Virginia also impedes Metro’s prospects for future growth. It is very difficult to integrate existing suburban areas such as Tysons Corner into a mass transit system.

Way out there

This uneasy balance between freeways and Metro, suburban and urban-style growth, sets the context for the next generation of growth in the D.C. region. The lines of the debate and political divisions are already becoming clear, and at least in recent years have not been favoring transit.

In Virginia, the tiny Herndon town council made headlines in December when it refused to create a special tax district to fund a portion of the proposed $3.5 billion Metro extension to Dulles Airport.

In Maryland, Republican Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr., an advocate of increased highway spending, has replaced Democrat Parris Glendening, an outspoken mass transit proponent. Ehrlich and his transportation secretary, Robert Flanagan, are backing a $1.7 billion “intercounty connector.” The new road would be a link in an outer, outer beltway, running across the top of the region and connecting I-270 in Rockville in Montgomery County with I-95 near Laurel in Prince George’s County.

The rub is that the connector would run along roughly the same path as a proposed new Metro line — the Bi-County Transitway. The debate over the two nicely frames the region’s priorities and choices about growth: Invest in the transitway, and the region will probably get denser,transit-oriented development closer to the city. Invest in the intercounty connector, and the region will have more suburban, highway-oriented growth farther out.

The transitway, which would be about 20 miles closer in than the connector, would connect four lines in Maryland with an outer loop. It would run from Bethesda to New Carrollton, with stops along the way in Prince George’s County. The firmest proposal is for a light rail line rather than heavy rail. However, Gov. Ehrlich has also asked for a study of bus rapid transit.

If the new line is built, Washington will become one of the very few U.S. cities with true peripheral transit lines. Although convenient, these suburb-to-suburb lines tend to be more costly because they lack the heavy traffic that goes in and out of a core city. New York City has only one such line, the G line between Brooklyn and Queens. Despite its utility, it is constantly in danger of cutbacks in service by cost-cutting administrators.

Whatever the decision about the new line, Metro administrators and planners will have their hands full just keeping pace with growth on the existing system. Many trains are already overcrowded and if capacity is not expanded, officials say, customers will eventually have to be turned away.

The easiest solution is to simply add cars. The Metro stations were built to accommodate eight-car trains, but trains now are either six or four cars. This ability to increase capacity by 25 percent or more is fortuitous and shows the foresight of Metro planners. But adding cars is not cheap. At $2 million each, adding 120 cars would take about $250 million. In addition, money would be needed to upgrade electrical equipment to move the longer, heavier trains.

In coming years, Metro also needs to overhaul the system’s more than 550 escalators, some of them over 200 feet long. MetroBus needs to upgrade its fleet more regularly. The total price tag for long-term capital maintenance is more than $12 billion between now and 2025.

The three jurisdictions involved — Virginia, Maryland, and D.C. — are attempting to come up with the money. Although they have pledged billions on their own, they are looking to the federal government to supply about a third of the $12 billion total.

Obviously, given the region’s and the nation’s budget woes, Metro faces uncertainties. But it’s impossible to imagine a future for the Washington region without it. Hordes of commuters, tourists, and shoppers will continue to board its multicolored trains daily. The only question is at what rate Metro will continue to transform life in the nation’s capital.

Alex Marshall is a journalist in New York and the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken (2001; University of Texas Press). He is a member of citistates.com, an association of speakers on urban affairs.

Images: Top — The system’s deep stations mean long escalator rides. Bottom — In the heart of the city: the Gallery Place-Chinatown station. its three levels provide access to the red, Green and Yellow lines. Photos by WMATA.

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

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

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