It’s Dangerous To Cycle in The City — That’s Too Bad

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?

The ferocious competition for a smidgen of asphalt on Manhattan streets might be best appreciated behind the handlebars of a bicycle. As I whiz up 8th Avenue or crosstown on 13th street, I’m confronted by double-parked delivery trucks, jaywalking pedestrians and meandering delivery boys, their bicycles draped with carryout food. Beside me, sleek SUVs with oversized grills, boxy belching trucks, and speeding yellow cabs all attempt, as I do, to grab a portion of street space and get where they are going as quickly as possible.

There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.

Nevertheless, I enjoy my now almost daily adventure on the city streets. I’m aided by a stint I had two decades ago as a bicycle courier in downtown Washington, D.C., where I learned to mix it up in city traffic.

I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.

Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.

Yesterday, for example, I bicycled from my home at 15th and Eighth to a doctor’s appointment at 34th and Broadway, then down to RPA at Union Square. After work, I cycled to meet a friend at 10th and 2nd Avenue, and then back home to 15th and Eighth. On a bicycle, all these trips took minutes. Walking, taking a bus or the subway would have taken two to three times as long.

But despite the speed of cycling, few people do it in New York, probably because it’s dangerous and difficult. Could cycling as transportation, as opposed to recreation, ever become more commonplace within the city?

I think it could and should, but that doesn’t mean it would be easy or without sacrifice. It comes down to that precious commodity, street space. If more people were to cycle to work, school, the grocery store or the synagogue, the city would have to cede space to them, physically, culturally and legally.

New York is a very dense city. If ten percent of adult New Yorkers started cycling to work, that would mean something like a half a million bicycles on the street daily. If we ever approached Scandinavian levels of cycling, where up to 50 percent of people commute on bicycles, it boggles the mind to think what our streets would look like.

But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.

Right now, it’s clear that cyclists are interlopers in traffic. To change this, the city could construct more bike lanes, such as those that run along 6th Avenue and Hudson Street. But more importantly, we could change the way drivers see cyclists, and thus allow cyclists to integrate more into regular traffic. A public awareness campaign could tell automobile drivers that cyclists come first on city streets, and that serious legal penalties are applicable if this does not happen.

I am influenced by my experience of European cities. In Berlin, a large and contemporary city, I saw many men and women in business clothes cycling along major city streets. In Amsterdam one morning, I cycled downtown along with a horde of cycling morning commuters. At stoplights, rows of drivers waited patiently as the cyclists crossed first.

A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.

But even European cities face the question of where to put bicycles, once people are off them. If more people cycled in New York, where would we put those half a million bicycles? Sidewalks are already narrow and crowded. The solution, one transportation planner told me, is to park bicycles on streets, instead of on sidewalks. Take away a parking space, or two, on each city block, and put up bike racks in them. In the space that two cars use, you could put 20 bicycles, if not more.

Along with taking away parking spots from cars, the city could also re-design streets for cyclists rather than drivers. This may sound heretical, but one idea would be to make the major avenues in Manhattan two-directional again. Right now, a cyclist often has to travel a half mile out of his way to avoid traveling the wrong way down a one-way street. The Avenues in Manhattan used to be two-directional, but were made one-way in the 1950s to better accommodate automobile traffic.

Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.

The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.

As one bike mechanic told me casually, in the United States bike designers are overly influenced by the sports market. Similar to the SUVs that threaten to mow me down, my bicycle is designed for leaping rocky mountain paths in a grimy Tshirt, not cruising along 3rd Avenue in a coat and tie. I would like to buy a bicycle like those in Holland, which have completely enclosed chains and gear hubs, thus eliminating the possibility of staining a skirt, pants leg or hand.

There are of course many other things that could or should change to make cycling more attractive in the city. Noah Budnick, projects director for Transportation Alternatives, the major advocacy group for bicycling, said secure bike parking is an issue. I know my relationship with my bike changed once I decided to just leave it on the street full time, and expose it to both thieves and the weather. I use my bicycle much more when I don’t have to carry it down two flights of stairs.

The city is not inactive on the cycling front.

The city has an ambitious Master bike plan that includes a proposed network of bike lanes and greenways. It’s a detailed and thorough plan that addresses every aspect of cycling. The executive summary states the case for urban cycling well.

‘Despite its reputation for insufferable congestion, New York City is in many ways ideal for cycling, offering dense land use (ideal for short trips,) relatively flat topography, a spectacular and expansive waterfront, and an extensive, linear park system,’ reads the executive summary. See http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/dcp/html/bike/mp.ht ml.

Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.

Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.

So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.

–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.

How Many Cyclists Can and Should Fit on City Streets?

There’s no question that what I’m doing is dangerous. A careless taxi driver or a misplaced car door could kill or injure me in a heartbeat.

I’m also rewarded in more practical ways.

Quite simply, getting around by bicycle is the quickest and most practical way to get from here to there for most of my destinations in Manhattan.

But that doesn’t mean such a city would not be better. Cycling is cheap, non-polluting, and healthy, provided one doesn’t get killed.

A Dutch friend said drivers know that cyclists always come first. Integration works better than segregation.

Another benefit of making the avenues twodirectional again would more attractive bus service, because people would not have to walk over an avenue to reach a bus going their direction.

The city is not the only entity that could change how it does business. Bike manufacturers could start designing bikes for everyday transportation.

The city is not inactive on the cycling front.

Nevertheless, the plan stops short of endorsing more cyclists mixing with conventional traffic.

Instead, it focuses on creating the 900-mile citywide cycling network, progress on which has been relatively slow.

So could hordes of cyclists ever cruise down Fifth Avenue? Be careful what you wish for, but I think New York would be a better, more livable place if this were to occur.

–Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is a Senior Fellow at RPA.

Who Gets the Favors?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

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

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

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

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

Orfield calls it “The Favored Quarter.”

Now here’s the kicker . Not only is this favored quarter getting most of the private investment, it’s also getting most of the public investment. Here is where is going the lion’s share of new roads, sewers, schools and libraries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whither Virginia Beach?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
THURSDAY, JULY 1, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Virginia Beach. The promised land.

It glistens in the sun, a shimmering mecca of backyards, beaches, prosperity and space. A wide open terrain where schools are good and crime is low, a destination, a place to start a life or fulfill one.

It still has that reputation to many, even as the city enters its 37th year and faces trend lines that dispute much of what I just said.

But looking out over the city’s many square miles, that easy optimistic view still has the ring of truth. You see the old grid of streets and homes on the North End, basking in the ocean air and sun, with their gentle, Nantucket-like charm. You see the prosperous resort, hauling in the bucks even while it nicely segregates its often tacky guests and attractions. You see Bob Dylan boogieing at the amphitheater, and kids bowling and swimming at recreation centers that resemble public country clubs. You see Kempsville, a land easy to make fun of as epitomizing suburban vapidity, but fundamentally a place where Filipinos, African-Americans, whites, Jews and Gentiles can all make a life.

But focus the telescope on different places, and you see a different city and future. In this view, you see simple suburban ranch houses around Green Run, Lynnhaven, Hilltop, Bayside and Princess Anne Plaza, their paint fading, the vinyl siding getting moldy, the homeowners converting to renters, and the property values flat or in decline. You see more people leaving the city then moving into it. You see neighborhoods resembling those of Los Angeles, in that they are purely suburban, yet problem ridden and dangerous. You see places where the mother will not walk half-block to the 7-Eleven by herself after dark for fear of being robbed. You see areas where kids with little adult supervision roam across yards, parking lots and roads like marauding tribes. You see a city that is very much part of a region where incomes lag well behind the national average.

Where is Virginia Beach going? The city is on the cusp, at the point of either heading down hill or working out some new trajectory that will keep it, and perhaps the region, a nice place to live.

For most of its life, the city’s biggest appeal has been what it is not: It was not Norfolk, with its declining schools, racial problems, high crime and sagging tax base. Not Portsmouth or Newport News.

The era of Virginia Beach exceptionalism is ending. It has roughly 440,000 people — roughly equal to Norfolk and Chesapeake put together. About 40 percent of the population of the Southside. There is no way something that big can be vastly different than the average.

Virginia Beach used to be richer and whiter than the rest of the region. It is much less so now.

“It used to be different, from demographic to social to economic,” said one planner. “But because it has matured, it has become more like the regional whole.”

It is still the same old Virginia Beach in one respect: It is a gigantic bedroom community, something city leaders loathe to admit. Of the 213,000 Virginia Beach residents who work, almost 100,000 do so outside city borders, according to stats from the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission.

This is a huge number. It’s even bigger in significance when you realize that these people are mostly traveling to the Naval Base, to downtown, to the shipyards in Portsmouth — jobs that drive the rest of economy. These jobs bring in money from outside that can be then spent on lawyers, doctors, newspapers, department stores, homes and all the other commercial and business activity. Without them, the rest of us are out of luck.

What this means is that Virginia Beach is still largely dependent on events outside its own borders. It’s only independent tax base is the resort, which is a good one, but not enough to support 400,000 people.

Virginia Beach’s future is deeply linked with the rest of the region. Even if the city attempts to “go it alone,” it will have deep implications for its neighbors.

As we approach 2000, I see Virginia Beach juggling a collection of political factions, any of which might manage to grab the wheel of the city and steer for awhile: Anti-tax folks. Pro-sprawlers. Light rail advocates. Regionalists. Go-it-aloners.

Here are a few possible futures for Virginia Beach, my hometown.

“REZONINGS FOR YOUR FRIENDS.”

Dean Block, the resident sage of city hall as well as the director of the city’s office of management and budget, once wrote a history of Virginia Beach that packaged its trajectory into four distinct epochs.

1968 to 1985 was probably the most interesting. This was the era where Virginia Beach grew by several hundred thousand people, often without rhyme or reason. The city’s leadership in that era, Block said, made a deal with voters. “The politicians promised to keep taxes artificially low, if in exchange they would be allowed rezone property for their friends,” Block said.

During this era, the city leaped across Rudee Inlet Bridge, across Holland Road and down to the edge of the municipal center. It left the city with a huge hangover — which voters sought to correct when they elected several anti-growth council members in 1986 that shifted the balance on council.

Starting with that council, the city started playing catch-up — and largely succeeded. Voters approved bond referendums to widen roads, build schools, libraries and recreation centers. The council tastefully renovated the resort strip. The council held the Green Line, and passed the agricultural reserve program, which helps preserve land for farming.

That era, Block said, ended about a few years ago. Now, the city is working out a new trajectory, a path to the future, a path of maturity. Several options exist for this future.

Although Block didn’t say it, one that looms is a return to “rezonings for your friends.” In the past few months, the city staff and council have backed a series of actions that signal the city, armed with Lake Gaston water, may resume fierce outward growth. The council approved the extension of Ferrell Parkway down to Sandbridge, despite environmental objections. City staff considered, and then backed off, from recommending removing the agricultural reserve program from “the transition era,” the land north of Indian River road that many developers are eyeing.

The city has recently elected two council members that are much more friendly to outward residential development, Margaret Eure and Don Weeks. Both recently attended a meeting of rural land owners and developers seeking to develop more property and depose Councilwoman Barbara Henley, whose priority has been protecting farmland.

This could be bad news for the city. More outward growth would eat up farm land, incur more infrastructure costs, make traffic worse by extending sprawl, and push housing values down within the rest of the city. Of course, it would also make a few developers and property owners a lot of money, so we know the vote will be close.

INWARD, NOT OUTWARD.

Contrasting to a return to outward growth is a coalition of sorts, an interesting combination of environmentalists and business leaders, that advocate growing inward. They are also generally the same ones talking about greater regionalism.

Under this path, the city commits money to the light rail system. It not only holds the Green Line, but works for regional growth control. It starts spending its infrastructure dollars where most of the people live, on new sidewalks, parks and other amenities, rather than on new roads and sewers out in Sandbridge and around the courthouse. It starts filling in some of the blank spaces that sit beside perfectly good highways already built. At last estimate, almost 10,000 acres of developed land sat above the city’s Green Line.

Michael Barrett, a city and regional business leader, said growing inward is why the light rail line is such a key question.

“Light rail makes the city look at itself and figure out who it wants to become,” Barrett said. In Barrett’s view, not much opportunity is left for development outward.

“Future development may mean redevelopment,” Barrett said. Light rail would help develop Pembroke, Lynnhaven and the resort into much richer, denser and higher tax-paying areas. He sees “nodes of development” that would pay more taxes and allow for different life styles at the beach.

Such a community, said Jan Eliassen, who recently stepped down from the Planning Commission, would fit with the city’s vision of a place where everyone could live.

“We don’t have as many different communities as the different communities need, from college graduates to empty nesters,” Eliassen said. “The kind of community we ought to design is a place where some of people can walk to work, some can walk to school, some can walk to shopping, and all of them can walk to reliable public transportation.”

The different communities plan would help balance the city’s largely monochromatic lifestyle choice. Some people love Virginia Beach but others hate it.

Andres Duany, the sharp-tongued New Urbanist architect, shocked Virginia Beach leaders a few years back when he called the city “a laboratory of failure for the East Coast.” When people told friends they were moving to Virginia Beach, the immediate response was “Oh, that’s too bad,” Duany said.

The city has never liked admitting this. But for many people, Virginia Beach is the last place on earth they would live. Developing some different types of communities would help change this.

LEAN AND MEAN

The most effective political force in the last half decade in Virginia Beach has been the anti-tax, anti-establishment folk that have pushed for less government, less services and of course, less taxes. This somewhat well organized group, led by former City Councilman Robert Dean and his Citizens Action Coalition, helped kill a bond initiative that would have supported better schools and libraries. They got the council to reverse themselves and kill a tiny new phone tax for a similar purpose.

They are a force to be reckoned with. Although the city’s taxes are some of the lowest in the region, and its services some of the best, they have evidently hit a nerve with their argument to the contrary.

Under their vision, Virginia Beach would become a bare bones, self-service city, where you check your own bags and bus your own tables. No more soccer stadiums, amphitheaters, recreation centers and the like. No more “entertainment.” In their view, Virginia Beach has been buying luxuries before it spent on the basics like schools. The city needs to get its priorities straight.

While there is some truth in this perspective, in my view they would cut flesh as well as fat. They also do not understand that economic success is based on government investment. Things like roads, schools, rail lines and maybe even things like recreation centers and amphitheaters. Dean, for example, voted against the agricultural reserve program, despite his credentials as a long-time environmentalist, because it involved a sales-tax increase.

When I asked Dean whether economic prosperity depended on government investment, he didn’t seem to understand the question.

“Under that scenario, we are breading a whole new type of society that expects government to take care of them from womb to tomb,” Dean said. “You have removed self reliance.”

How is building a road or a train line removing self-reliance?

If he were running the city, Dean said, his priority would be better schools. But he wouldn’t allow for new taxes to fund them. It’s true that more money won’t necessarily improve schools. But at some point, you have to grapple with the fact that public investment in a range of things is necessary to create a prosperous and balanced society.

Dean, for example, excoriated suburbanites who neglected their children in order to be able to afford two nice cars. People should consider living with just one car, he said, like they did back in the 1950s.

Well, would you support the type of public transportation that made living like that possible, I asked him, such as better bus service or the light rail line?

No.

“There is no reason that my gas tax should subsidize people to ride light rail,” Dean said, even though he freely acknowledged that car driving itself was massively subsidized already.

Dean also criticized the new companies the city had brought in, like Geico and Avis, as essentially being low-paying call centers. True enough. But beyond improving education — without new taxes — he had no plan for bringing in better companies. He did advocate eliminating the Economic Development department.

If Dean and his brethren get a majority, I see a not very pleasant future. I see a city that would become a place of haves and haves not, where the wealthy hole up in Bay Colony and Great Neck, send their kids to Norfolk Academy, and leave the increasing chaotic Baysides, Kempsvilles and Lynnhavens to fend for themselves.

EMBRACING THE WHOLE

Virginia Beach’s official vision is its “Community for a Lifetime” statement. It’s a bland, PR-ish statement, full of assertions no one could disagree with. Still, as these things go, it has its merits.

Everyone should be able to live in Virginia Beach, it basically says, for all their lives. It should be a place where one children’s can stick around and get good jobs, and where one’s parents can retire.

“That vision is one of an incredible place — a community where you would want to spend the rest of your life,” said Mayor Meyera Oberndorf in a recent speech. The vision, the mayor said, means making the city safe, prosperous and healthy.

Well, hard to disagree with that.

And “Visionary.” Which means thinking strategically about city growth and priorities, she said. Right on. It means accepting that quality of life costs money in taxes. Double Right on. It means acknowledging you can’t do everything at once.

Right on again.

The problem is, few city leaders, including Oberndorf, acknowledge the steps necessary to complete their vision.

If you want to be a Community for a Lifetime, you need to provide a way for a 70-year-old woman with declining eyesight to get around without a car. Or for a young family to live without two cars. But city leaders have been hostile to light rail, which might do this.

There’s another problem with the city’s vision, as told by the mayor. Oberndorf never mentions the word “Norfolk.”

Why should she, you might ask? Well, perhaps because Virginia Beach’s prosperity depends on it.

What is located in Norfolk? A huge port, with both commercial and military activities. Without it, this whole region would evaporate.

If you depend on something for your life’s blood, shouldn’t you mention it when you are figuring out a vision for your city? Shouldn’t you figure out how to keep it healthy? If you can’t stand to say the word “Norfolk,” at least say the word “port.”

No dice. Virginia Beach is basically embarrassed that it still largely dependent on economic activity outside the city, and doesn’t want to admit it.

Not a good policy.

The mayor’s speech, and the official policy it represents, shows the tension between the city’s desire to be its own master, and the realities of its interconnectedness with everyone else. A coalition has emerged that argue the city should embrace regionalism, but they run up against the city’s long history of seeing little gain from working with anyone else.

If this changed, Virginia Beach might actually to work not only for the health of the port, but to improve the fortunes of Norfolk’s downtown. With a great downtown, a company would be more likely to move to a corporate office park in Virginia Beach.

Look at Portland. All the great new high-tech companies are not moving to the center city. They are moving to the suburban communities out on the fringes, like Beaverton and Hillsboro. But these places have a symbiotic relationship with the Portland downtown.

The great Portland center city makes the area very attractive to workers, which attracts great companies. The companies might locate ON THE LIGHT RAIL LINE in the suburbs, where they can build a low-rise campus-style office park, but their employees enjoy traveling downtown and might even live there.

But here, no dice. Both sides see the other a threat. If we were really smart, we would start rewriting tax laws so taxes from companies would be spread more equitably.

What would the future look like if Virginia Beach realized it had more to gain from regionalism than to fear from it?

Virginia Beach might take the lead in regional growth management because it recognizes that as a mature city, it has an interest in restraining outward sprawl, and pushing development inward. Virginia Beach would help establish a regional vision, where the various regional parts play clear roles. Downtown with its role as regional center, with sports stadium and urban living and cultural resources; the outer suburbs with opportunities for green-lawn living and amenities like soccer stadiums and amphitheaters; the resort, which with light rail would have a symbiotic relationship with downtown; the rural areas, that can provide good vegetables and open vistas to the suburban and urban dwellers.

With almost half the population of the Southside, it’s clear that if Virginia Beach has a lot of weight to throw around.

“I’ve never understood why Virginia Beach wasn’t the leading proponent for regionalism,” said Eliassen. “They would be in the driver’s seat, because they got the votes. I don’t understand what they are afraid of. They are the political gorilla of the region, but they act like the cowardly lion.”

Eliassen is willing to think about what most people won’t even mention: merging the three cities on one side of the water — Chesapeake, Virginia Beach and Norfolk — into one city.

“They are one city in reality, and they ought to be one city politically,” Eliassen said.

GOING IT ALONE

Since its birth, Virginia Beach has insisted that it is a “real city,” not just a bedroom community thank you. It has resented the lack of respect it has gotten from both the region and the rest of the world. When big-name New York Times writer R.W. “Johnny” Apple visited the area recently, he respectfully used the “Hampton Roads” moniker but, in describing the region’s charms, said scarcely a word about Virginia Beach other than a brief mention of its Contemporary Arts Center.

Virginia Beach does not like this. In this scenario, the regionalists fail and Virginia Beach strives to be an independent, self-sufficient city. It drops out of the light rail system. It goes its own way on recycling, jails, schools, social services, housing. At each of these intersections, it goes it alone. It only cooperates on the one thing it needs to keep life going as usual in Virginia Beach: more roads.

This is not such a great vision, either for Virginia Beach or the region. The city of VB will do okay at first, but gradually, the structural inadequacies will start to mount up. Deprived of Virginia Beach’s resources, the region will start to do more poorly, which will eventually pull down Virginia Beach as well. The region will not have a united front on economic development, or a coherent regional strategy on growth, the environment or transportation. Virginia Beach may get its share of the wealthy, but will not get the higher income jobs that lead to a more prosperous city.

The anti-tax folks are big go-it-aloners. Dean talked of cooperating with neighboring cities to get bulk discounts on “computers or textbooks,” but not much cooperation in larger ways.

WHICH WAY?

Some of these paths are mutually exclusive. Some are not.

The present City Council is steering a course between the shoals of the pro-growth councils of the early 1980s, and the no-tax constituents of the present. All this could change. The anti-tax folk, sometimes allied with the powerful Republican party, are banging at the door. Developers and home-builders are pushing to return to rural-area growth.

The future depends on who makes it to the ballot box.

We will see.

Urban Renewal in Norfolk

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

What Was Lost: A lot.
What Was Gained: Not Much.

BY ALEX MARSHALL
Tuesday, August 10, 1999

The 1950s was about new stuff, not old stuff. The United States had spent two decades postponing consumption as it fought the Great Depression and then World War II. It was ready for new cars, houses, roads and ways of doing things. With a vengeance.

It was in this spirit that from 1949 into the early 1960s, Norfolk proceeded to tear down most of the buildings and streets built over the previous 275 years. A city founded in 1680 was left with little built before 1900. Cities around the country followed its example.

When the dust had ettled in the early 1960s, old East Main Street, lined with burlesque houses and bars, was gone. Gone was the original Commercial Place, where stevedores and merchants traded drinks in ancient taverns while they waited for ships to unload. Gone were the central city markets, where dozens of produce, dairy, meat and fish merchants sold their wares at small stands under mammoth roofs. Gone was the city’s old Union Station near the Elizabeth River, where travelers stepped off trains into the heart of the city. Gone was the entire neighborhood of Atlantic City. Gone was the city’s oldest core, a tight web of streets dating back to the city’s founding.

But the city didn’t just tear stuff down. In the place of the old, the city built: wide new roads, like St. Pauls Boulevard, Tidewater Drive, Virginia Beach Boulevard extension, Brambleton Avenue and the interstates; housing projects, including Roberts Park, Diggs Park, Young Park, Grandy Village, Bowling Park and others, which now ring downtown; new civic buildings, including a new City Hall, jail and courts complex, which would sit on a plaza nestled by freeway on-ramps; and vast windswept parking lots, where city officials would wait — and wait — for promised new investment to materialize.

How did the city afford all this? With lots and lots of nearly free federal money. Norfolk was first to take advantage of the 1949 Federal Housing Act, which paid 80 percent of urban renewal and gave cities new legal powers to take private property. The country had just finished winning a world war, and was ready to attempt and pay for drastic changes, even if a few eggs were broken to make this particular omelet.

Norfolk’s fervor in urban renewal traces back to its concept of “slums” and the city’s passion to get rid of them.

Even before World War II, city leaders looked out from the old City Hall and saw crumbling buildings with poor residents with few options. Many structures were wooden, and lacked indoor plumbing. A 1936 survey by the WPA showed that of 954 dwellings in on area between Monticello and Church Street (now St. Pauls Boulevard), 900 of them lacked flush toilets. About a third of the homes were in need of “major repair.”

Other buildings were more solid, made of brick and stone. But these were used for things city fathers weren’t proud of, like bar and burlesque shows. Of course, there were also family restaurants, hotels, tailors and offices, but these old-style establishments were not seen as anything special worth saving when a brand new city, one of highways, shopping malls and civic buildings, could be created.

Discussion of creating a housing authority was active in the 1930s. Finally in 1940, the City Council overcame its longtime resistance and created the Norfolk Housing Authority, after the Navy swung behind the effort. Lawrence M. Cox, who would lead the authority for almost three decades, would become its first executive director. This organization, later renamed the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, would lead the way, and still does, in the city’s effort to reinvent itself.

But before the city could do much, World War II intervened. Downtown would deteriorate even further as thousands of sailors and civilian workers flooded its streets and swamped its housing. City leaders greatly disliked the reputation the city earned as one giant honky-tonk.

After the war, Norfolk was the first city in the country to have an urban renewal plan approved under the new Federal Housing Act. The city received $25 million in 1949 to build 3000 units of public housing. In 1951, the city proceeded to clear 127 acres of land between Monticello and Church Street, now St. Paul’s Boulevard. In 1953, another major slum clearance project was announced.

As the decade proceeded, city leaders fell in love with the bulldozer. In projects beginning in 1949, 1951,1953, 1957, 1958, 1961 the City Council, through its creation the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, ripped out dozens of streets, knocked down hundreds of buildings and evicted thousands of families from their homes. At the same time, it built new highways, new civic buildings, and new public housing.

Under then Mayor Duckworth, the city would announce a clearance project or an expansion of a current one almost every year. In 1957, the City Council approved the destruction of Atlantic City, a relatively stable neighborhood, that used to exist around the midtown tunnel entrance and underneath the medical complex. In the same year, the city would commence clearance of the central core of the city, which would lead to the construction of a new City Hall, courts complex and jail. These renewal efforts would also create the famous blank “17 acres,” which would stay empty for 35 years before the MacArthur Center was built.

By the mid 1960s, most of downtown, with the exception of Freemason, Granby Street and part of Main Street, had been cleared.

With almost a half century’s perspective, what can be said about the city’s vast urban renewal effort?

Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear the city went too far, too fast. City leaders had envisioned a new city of freeways and plenty of parking that would compete with the suburbs. Instead, the destruction of the older networks of streets and buildings would accelerate the migration of retail activity to the suburbs. The passion to build big highways and freeways made mass transit less workable and made downtown, in comparison to the easy-parking suburbs, less viable.

While initial projects in the early 1950s had focused on crumbling wooden shacks beyond repair, later efforts of that decade would tear down scores of pre Civil War buildings of brick and stone, many dating back to the 1800s. These could have formed a base for tourism and downtown residential living.

Frederick Herman, an architect who served on the city’s design review board during this period, said the city tore down numerous treasures. In retrospect, Herman said, it’s clear the city’s wholesale clearance was the wrong approach.

“Norfolk probably had as many 18th century and early 19th century buildings as Georgetown,” Herman said in an interview in 1996. “And they were basically intact until the early 50s. Some were rundown, but a lot of them could have been rehabilitated.”

True, the city would gain a rebuilt Main Street lined with tax-paying office skyscrapers. But under a different plan, these might have emerged elsewhere while keeping the waterfront intact.

The city also lost less tangible things, like its historical memory. Norfolk not only tore down buildings, but erased ancient streets, dating back to the city’s founding. No longer could someone walk downtown, and remember at a glance where they or their forefathers came from.

But the 1950s were a different time. Norfolk’s old downtown homes, like those that still exist in Freemason, had been abandoned by the upper classes for two generations. The prosperous set had long moved out to fashionable Ghent, Park Place, Colonial Place and other new streetcar suburbs. Historical preservation was a tiny idea. Few people imagined a time when a young lawyer or business person would pay dearly for the privilege of living in a crumbling 18th century house with bad plumbing.

And Norfolk was certainly not alone in its love of destruction. Almost every city in the country pursued urban renewal. Like Norfolk, these cities often erased buildings and streets of great historical and economic value. It’s was a sign of the times that New York, New Orleans and Alexandria considered Greenwich Village, the French Quarter and Alexandria’s Old Town as candidates for urban renewal.

Savannah, whose historic district now attracts six million visitors a year, began tearing it down under urban renewal in the 1950s. This city of Spanish moss hanging over graceful squares has since been made famous in movies like Forrest Gump and books like Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil. But in the 1950s, like in Norfolk, its leaders envisioned a new city of skyscrapers and freeways. Only a backlash by prominent citizens saved most of the city’s unique structure of homes around squares, although some were lost.

It’s tempting to think what Norfolk and other cities would look like if the federal government had given money to renovate old buildings and improve mass transit, as well as for tearing buildings down and building new highways. What if Norfolk had improved its trolley system, and given grants for landlords to repair and renovate their properties?

But that was not to be.

Only after downtown urban renewal was over, would the city began trying to recreate new things in the style of what it had torn down. The new townhouses on Boush Street being built now, for example, mimic the urban homes that once lined Freemason and other streets downtown.

Historically, urban renewal remains a brief, although consequential, period in the history of American cities. By the mid 1960s, urban planners would start to turn against it. Jane Jacobs would startle planners by praising the traditional city street. Scholars would label urban renewal “Negro removal,” because of the thousands of poor, usually black families removed from their homes. In Norfolk in the 1960s, attorney and later judge Joe Jordan denounced urban renewal as racist. In the 1990s, Milwaukee is following the lead of some other cities in trying to tear down some of the highways built during the urban renewal era and rebuild a city of streets, mass transit and walking.

Norfolk was and is unusual in that it started urban renewal early, and has continued it long after it has lost fashion nationally. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city tore down and rebuilt virtually all of Ghent east of Colonial Avenue, moving thousands of black families from their homes. In the present day, the city is clearing a section of East Ocean View, and in the process evicting roughly a thousand families, in an attempt to build a new, more prosperous neighborhood.

For better and for worse, Norfolk continues to believe in the power of the bulldozer.

Typing For Non-Conformists

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand.

BY ALEX MARSHALL

I’m writing this essay in a different language. It’s called Dvorak.

The words in my mindnd on the screen are coming out the same as always. But my fingers on the keyboard, the tool I use to translate mental words to written ones, are moving differently than they have over the last 20 years. My fingers are speaking Dvorak.

Perhaps it was an impending middle-age crisis, but at age 39, after a decade as a journalist and two decades typing everything from college papers to months-long newspaper projects, I wanted to see if I could do something as fundamental as shift my system of typing.

So I switched. “Dvorak” (pronounced duh-VOR-ak), to the uninitiated, is the more efficient keyboard layout designed by efficiency expert August Dvorak in the 1930s. With Dvorak, the letters are laid out to correspond, roughly, with their frequency of use: All five vowels, for example, repose under the left hand. Five common consonants rest under the right hand. Your fingers stay put more and cover less ground.

As I write this, my fingers are staying mostly on the middle row of the keyboard — the home row. In Dvorak, 70 percent of one’s typing usually happens there. This compares to just 30 percent on Qwerty, as the standard keyboard layout is dubbed.

It wasn’t just a whim that prompted my switch. Although I liked the idea of typing more quickly and easily, I also thought it might ease my RSI (repetitive stress injury). Like roughly half the adult population, it seems, I am bothered by wrist and hand pain brought on by too much typing. I thought Dvorak might help.

Dvorak is also one of those visionary systems I have a weakness for — one of those big “if onlys,” like Esperanto, the invented language that its proponents hoped the world would adopt as a universal tongue. Or the Wankel rotary engine. Or the Macintosh computer. Or the flat tax. All these systems hold out the appeal that “if only” the world switched over, everything would work better. They’re frankly utopian visions: Someday, we will all use Dvorak on Macintosh computers as we write in Esperanto to our congressmen about the new flat tax.

But this particular revolution may indeed be coming. In the typewriter era, switching to Dvorak was virtually impossible: No one made typewriters with Dvorak keyboards — and even if they had done so, you would have had to lug around your own machine to every job or place you wanted to type.

But with computers, all you have to do is change a file in the operating system and presto — you have a new keyboard. Boosted by these possibilities, thousands of people around the country are switching to Dvorak. Dvorak has also inspired a dozen or so Web sites that promulgate its virtues.

The biggest boost for Dvorak came when Microsoft began pre-installing it in Windows. In most versions, you simply open the Keyboard file inside the Control Panel and then switch to Dvorak using the Properties file inside the Language selection category. (Depending on the computer, you may then be prompted to insert the installation disk to complete the switch.)

For this milestone on the road to universal Dvorak typing, we can thank two Dvorak fanatics, Linda Lewis and Randy Cassingham. Lewis is the founder and president of Keytime, a typing school and products seller in Seattle; Cassingham is author of “The Dvorak Book” and the online column This Is True.

A few years ago, Lewis and Cassingham journeyed across the water from Seattle to Redmond to meet with Microsoft executives and argue the case for Dvorak. It worked — the 800-pound gorilla of operating systems began including Dvorak in Windows soon afterward. It was a huge victory for the Dvorak contingent. Before that, Cassingham said, to use Dvorak, you had to type in MS-DOS, because Windows would not recognize a software conversion to Dvorak.

My own dear Macintosh, I’m sorry to say, does not pre-install a Dvorak file. But switching is still pretty simple. You can buy a Dvorak file from Keytime or download one free from several sites, like this. Then, you just drop it in your system folder, and Dvorak becomes one of the languages you can switch the keyboard to, like Dutch or Finnish.

Just how many people use Dvorak? Hard to say, but far more people than ever have in the past. Cassingham said offices are studded with people who have switched to Dvorak on their own. Among the high-profile converts to Dvorak use is Nathan Myhrvold, chief technology officer for Microsoft.

Cassingham has been typing in Dvorak for about 15 years. At first, he relied on software conversion programs he wrote himself. “I’m a writer, and as a writer, output is money,” Cassingham says. “I used to type on Qwerty, and my hands would be aching after a long article. My hands never ache now, even though I write a lot more. I used to type 55 words a minute. Now I type over 100.”

But the Dvorak revolution has implications beyond helping freelancers make more money. Along with the standard Dvorak layout, August Dvorak also invented a one-handed layout for both the right and left hands. Microsoft now also includes these in Windows as a benefit for disabled users.

Switching to Dvorak is more an effort of will than of skill. When I switched a year ago, I gave myself one week for the task, during a break I had in researching a book. For those seven days, I dedicated one hour each morning to practicing Dvorak. I used a book and software package called “Skillbuilder” that’s available from Keytime.

It was a scary time. There was that moment midweek when I found myself between shores, unable to type Qwerty, but still not having mastered Dvorak. My fingers felt awkward and clumsy. But at the end of seven days, I had learned Dvorak enough to do my work — to walk, if not run, where I wanted to go.

And a year later? I count the switch a success, if a mixed one. My typing speed is only slightly faster than it was before. (I was shocked to learn, when I tested myself before I switched, that I was typing 90 words per minute in Qwerty — I guess daily journalism is good for something.) I now type about 100 words a minute in Dvorak. Cassingham says I will gradually increase in speed and flexibility over the years to come.

Dvorak is integrated into most of my environment. It’s installed on my Macintosh desktop and laptop. It even comes pre-installed on my AlphaSmart, the $250 word processor I use on the road. If I desired, I could buy premade Dvorak keyboards from several vendors. As it is, I’ve attached clear plastic letters, which I bought from Keytime, to show the Dvorak layout without hiding Qwerty.

My RSI is still there, but it has diminished. Under Qwerty, my hands resembled deranged spiders as they flew over the keyboard, making awkward stretches to this or that letter. Now, they are more like workers in a good union, as they hoe away at the main row.

First printed in www.SALON.com | Oct. 12, 1998

Alex Marshall is a freelance writer. His first book, “How Cities Work,” has now been published by University of Texas Press. It was written in Dvorak.

The Savannah College of Art and Design

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

July 10, 1995
METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Resort City Of Virginia Beach Now More Welcoming

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1993
by Alex Marshall

When was the last time a city offered you a seat? If your town is like most towns, not recently. The public bench, once a common piece of furniture in a city’s living room, has declined in number and significance along with the public spaces it once graced.

In the resort town of Virginia Beach, it is making a comeback after a long absence. As part of an overall renovation, the city has planted teak benches at regular intervals along the 40-block strip.

A minor thing, you might say, but 25-years ago, the city ripped them all out to discourage hippies, then making their appearance, from lounging around the town’s sidewalks and beachfront. For the same reason, the city also regularly arrested people for loitering.

“If you had 10 long-hairs standing together for any reason, people got alarmed,” remembers Police Captain Jim Brazier, who used to herd people along outside the Carol Lee Donut Shop on 22nd Street, a main hippie hang out. “They were big on that then. You had to keep moving.”

The old benches, although nothing special, had a certain charm. They were blocks of concrete, with painted planks running between them, and advertisements for things like “Mary Jane Bread” along their backs. They sat along Atlantic Avenue, the resort’s main drag, and the boardwalk by the beach, just as the new ones do. The new benches are part of a $50 million renovation that emphasizes the resort as a public space. People are encouraged to walk, to stroll, to loiter. It’s an amazingly daring action for an at-times such a tacky town. Sidewalks have been widened, telephone lines put underground, and small public squares with street art like giant beach balls created from formerly dead-end side streets. Now, like flowers responding to the right kind of dirt, sidewalk cafes are popping up.

One wishes the city been more daring in the design. The benches’s neo, faux Victorian curves, for example, match those of the neo, faux Victorian street lamps. They remind you of the ones in parts of New York that suggest the city is some kind of quaint museum.

But cut Virginia Beach some slack. The city planted the benches over the objections of politically-powerful hotel, souvenir shop, and restaurant owners. They feared benches might distract visitors from their central task of playing putt-putt golf, and buying seashells and $6 breakfasts. Already, the city has thinned the number of benches in a few blocks, after merchants complained that teenagers were grouping up around them. Still, there is hope. Fort Lauderdale, another beach town, recently renovated its resort along similar lines as Virginia Beach. Sidewalks were spruced up and a new brick walkway put along the beach front. It’s a turn away from the city’s encouragement of private, locked-gated condominium towers. Such actions increase the chance that, next time you stroll, a city might be hospitable enough to offer you a place to sit down.

New Suffolk Courthouse: Will it Revive Downtown?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

By Alex Marshall
For The Virginian-Pilot

SUFFOLK — This handsome new courthouse of brick and stone that sits on Main Street is one answer to the question: how do we revive this city’s downtown?

Is it the right answer? This city’s center, with two-hundred years of history, was once a bustling place. Now, like Norfolk’s Granby Street and Portsmouth’s High Street, it has declined. All of these city’s main streets are shadows of their former selves, even though there are signs of life on all of them in the form of new businesses amid the vacant storefronts.

Built at a cost of $14 million, the new courthouse works with a new omprehensive plan meant to bring back downtown and manage growth in the suburbs. The courthouse adds 150 or so new bodies to Main Street, while a downtown plan is talking of doing things like carving in new streets, and turning an old high school into a civic center.

Will it work? To make a good prediction, we need to understand where the growth that fuels Suffolk’s booming suburbs comes from, and how it fits into the growth of the region. For it is finally only by understanding the region’s growth, and working with it, that Suffolk can hope to reshape its downtown into the vital, active community it once was.

Suffolk has lessons everyone can learn from. Its struggle to revive downtown is Norfolk’s and Portsmouth’s, while it’s struggle to manage growth is Virginia Beach’s and Chesapeake’s. In understanding how both are interrelated, the region can better understand how to shape itself.

THE CITY’S PLAN What does a courthouse have to do with downtown’s health? The idea is that the 150 to 175 workers in the courthouse will shop on Main Street, and buy lunch there, as will the defendants, lawyers, plaintiffs, reporters and everyone else that makes their way to a courthouse, whether by choice or command. At the same time, new sidewalks, new street lamps and benches make Main Street a more inviting place to be.

Does this work? Sure it does, and you can already see downtown changing. Several new stores have opened on Main Street, including a bookstore, a restaurant, a newsstand and a cappuccino bar.

The city has also followed this up with changes of which the other cities might take heed. Over the initial squeamishness of VDOT, it restored parallel parking on Main Street. This converts a semi-highway back into a public street. VDOT’s only requirement was that they continue to allow southbound traffic after 4.30 p.m. during rush hour, to which the city agreed.

This is something that other cities can look at. Many have still not realized that there is a conflict between moving cars quickly and creating an environment where storefronts can prosper. In most streets downtown, the priority should be on the latter.

Norfolk in particular could do a lot more in this direction. It’s downtown is littered with unnecessary left-turn lanes and other devises that take up parking lanes. On Main, Plume and City Hall avenues, the city could substantially expand on-street parking without seriously damaging traffic flow. It should be a top priority for the widened Church Street. This would give on-street businesses more parking spaces, and would alert passerby’s that these streets really are meant for shopping and strolling.

What else would Suffolk do? The downtown plan calls for carving in some new streets so that dead-end streets will now go through, and the street grid will be more complete. Because of railroad lines and topography, Suffolk has a fractured street system. It’s to the credit of the downtown plan, developed by UDA of Pittsburgh and its leader Ray Gindroz, that it focuses on this often-overlooked aspect of a center city’s health. By cutting through some new streets, and connecting unconnected ones, the city could bring new life to otherwise becalmed areas.

In addition, the downtown plans for turning the city’s old high school into a civic center, and renovating the old train station. Both of these are good ideas, but they will not provide a foundation for a revitalized downtown. Other means are necessary for that.

Rather than convert the high school, a wonderful old building, into a civic center, why not convert it back into a school? Suffolk schools are straining to find space for their students. Norfolk has shown with both Maury High School and Granby High School, now under renovation, that old schools can be rehabilitated and fully meet city and state codes, including the Americans with Disability Acts. Other localities around the country have made great strides in this regard. Maryland in particular has led the way in this regard. It makes no sense for Suffolk to build new schools out in the country, when a fine one in the city sits vacant.

How does the new Courthouse’s design rate? It’s an imposing building, as a courthouse should be, with sharp corners and trim that echoes older, more formal civic buildings. Its most admirable feature is that its designers had the guts to build it directly on the sidewalk, in line with the other buildings on Main Street. This completes the walls that form the living room of downtown. If the building had been set back, even by a few feet, the vibrancy and intimate feel of downtown would have been diminished. With luck, it could become a building that is still cherished and loved 100 years from now. That’s the kind of buildings we need more of.

But a new courthouse, new sidewalks, lights and benches, and even new streets and a civic center can only do so much. For downtown to fully revive, the growth patterns of the entire region have to be understood, and then the city’s policies changed so that some of this growth goes into Suffolk’s downtown and center city neighborhoods.

SUFFOLK AND THE REGION Suffolk now is a satellite city of Hampton Roads. Although it has some industry, most notably Planters Peanuts, Suffolk is not self-sufficient in jobs and industry but depends on the more industrial cities of Newport News, Portsmouth and Norfolk to give its residents jobs. Or perhaps another way to say it is that job creators in these cities give Suffolk new residents.

We can see this trend in the data on employment and residential growth in Suffolk and the region. From 1980 to 1993, Suffolk actually lost jobs on a net basis, according to city planning statistics. But it’s total population actually grew steadily over this time period.

Where should the new residents go? In answering that question, Suffolk decides the fate of its downtown. If Suffolk puts all the new residents in new suburban housing miles outside downtown, then downtown will remain a tired place. If on, the otherhand, Suffolk limits development opportunities in the suburbs, forcing both residents and developers to look to the inner-city, then its downtown neighborhoods and eventually businesses should re-emerge as well. New houses would be built on vacant lots, new businesses on parking lots and old houses fixed up.

To reinvigorate downtown, Suffolk needs to start pushing some of its housing demand back to the center. It can do this not only by limiting rezonings in farm land, but by also ignoring calls for new roads or improved roads outside town. Every new road built or expanded leads to more suburban housing outside town.

All this points to the inter-connectedness of the region. If the Navy cuts personnel drastically from Norfolk, for example, you can bet that new housing starts in Suffolk will decline as well. It also points the need for regional growth planning and management. It makes no sense for new jobs in Virginia Beach or Norfolk to boost housing starts in Suffolk and Chesapeake, with no city having complete say over where the jobs go or where the houses go.

POLICY STEPS If Suffolk wants to accompany its new courthouse with more complete steps to revive downtown, it can consider some of the following steps. Some of these actions the city has already considered.

*Sharply limit suburban development on the fringes of the developed area, particularly in the high growth areas in the Northeast and Northwest. The city has taken some steps to do this in the new Comprehensive Plan, which calls for stopping development in the South, and limiting it in the North.

But it needs to do more. Taming development in the rural south is a paper lion, because there isn’t much growth pressure there anyway. Why? Because it’s too far away from the jobs in Norfolk and Portsmouth. The North is booming because that’s where the easy commutes are. That’s also where Suffolk has to act if it wants to retain some form for its city.

A consultant’s report, used to prepare the Comprehensive Plan, recognized this dynamic. The report said bluntly that new residential and commercial development, whose nature and location compete with downtown, will continue to sap its strength.

Steve Herbert, the assistant city manager for development, agreed that the city’s downtown health was dependent on curtailing development elsewhere. Herbert said ultimately the city might have to look at some form of downzoning, in order to scale back some of the 24,000 houses that have already been zoned.

These are some of the hard questions the councils has to deal with, Herbert said. Downzoning is a possibility, but it’s a very difficult issue. We’ll probably have to have other ways to deal with it.

Although Virginia courts have traditionally frowned on downzoning, they have not prohibited it entirely. Rather, they have insisted that it be applied uniformly and in accordance with broad public goals. That might fit in Suffolk.

Suffolk could also consider clustering development around existing village centers in Chuckatuck, Whaleyville and Driver. That way, these village centers could be improved, the rural areas kept rural, and the historical character of these places respected.

*Kill the Southwest bypass. This planned VDOT project, if built, will trap downtown between two major highways, and will encourage new suburban growth off its exits.

The amazing thing is that some people still see a bypass as a way to improve a downtown. It’s like cutting off an artery to improve circulation. One need only to look at downtown Emporia, dead since the route 58 bypass was completed around it, to see what happens to towns with bypasses. You can find hundreds of towns in North Carolina and Virginia that have been improved out of existence with bypasses. You will often find signs saying Business Route, which will take you to a downtown devoid of businesses.

Along with killing the Southwest bypass, Suffolk should examine trimming back some of the other road improvements planned in and around Suffolk. Building big highways is the quickest way to facilitate suburban growth. Suffolk should examine every road and ask whether it needs it, and for what purpose.

Herbert acknowledged that the city was risking its downtown’s health with the proposed bypass. Herbert said that people need to understand that traffic and congestion are part of a downtown’s health.

When people complain about a lack of parking and too much traffic, I tell them that there are people in downtown Portsmouth who would die for that kind of problem, said Herbert, who left Portsmouth City Hall last year.

*Make it easy to develop in the center city. Downtown and the surrounding neighborhoods are full of vacant lots that could hold new homes and businesses. Clear away the red tape for these, and consider low-interest loans for home renovations. Make it easy to develop in town, harder to develop in the country. The century-old homes that scatter downtown, many of them quite affordable, are a precious resource that should be used more fully.

If Suffolk can manage to restrain growth its countryside, it might manage to have the best of both worlds: a stable suburban community, and a healthy downtown with businesses, residents — and a fine new courthouse.

JON: THIS IS A SIDEBAR. THE COURTHOUSE MAKES HISTORY The site of the new courthouse used to be the home of Suffolk’s City Hall and City Market. Inaa putting a new courthouse there, the city is returning to its roots.

For close to a century, the twin turreted City Hall and City Market served as the site for not only the town officials and police force, but for vendors selling live chickens and fresh produce, as well as dances, theater concerts and high school graduations, said Sue Woodward, a member of the Suffolk-Nansemond County Historical Society. (JON: THERE ARE PICTURES OF THIS IN THE PICTORIAL HISTORY OF SUFFOLK THAT PERHAPS WE SHOULD RUN.)

Like Norfolk’s old city market, which actually also had turrets, the Suffolk city market was the center of town in numerous ways. But in the early 1960s, the city, like Norfolk, sold its building and allowed it to be torn down. In retrospect, it was a horribly short-sighted decision. Both cities lost huge pieces of their history as well as buildings that could have been home for other uses.

At the same time Suffolk was tearing down its courthouse, it was also developing a new courthouse complex outside the center of downtown. In this it was also following Norfolk’s lead. It had moved its City Hall and Courts out of what is now the MacArthur Memorial, its old city market known as the Armory, and other buildings, and into the City Hall complex. In retrospect, these decisions were also mistakes. Moving the courts and municipal offices onto plazas outside downtown helped to isolate downtown and take away its customer base.

The magnitude of what Suffolk is doing can be seen by imagining if Norfolk decided to close its courts building on the windswept municipal plaza and move it back to City Hall avenue, where it used to be.

The decision to put the courts back in a more prominent position on Main Street fits with the role the courts have historically played — as centers of a town, both physically and symbolically. Courts can be thought of as anchors and rudders of society, and because of this, it fits that they should be placed in the center of town.

Before the car led to the fragmentation of cities, it was natural to build a courthouse at the center of town where everyone could travel easily to it. Bankruptcy laws still call for delinquent property to be auctioned off on the steps of the courthouse, probably because legislators could not imagine a more public place for a sale to occur. This accounts for the now comical sight of, in Virginia Beach, property being auctioned off on a courthouse that sits on the edge of woods and farms, miles away from the developed city’s bulk.

Greater Norfolk: Why Not?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

By Alex Marshall
For Port Folio Magazine

Now I’ve just cut my own throat, Mayor Paul Fraim said sheepishly.

The Norfolk leader’s fearful verdict was a good example of the dangers and contradictions associated with endorsing what might be the biggest bugaboo of local political thought: regional government.

Whatever you choose to call it, Hampton Roads, Greater Norfolk, Norfolk-Virginia Beach, what would happen if we actually had an elected regional government? Is that something we could work toward, and if so how?

When I first raised the idea with Fraim, he was firm. Nothing doing, he said. The people weren’t behind it, and “the surest way to kill an idea was to wrap it into a plan for regional government.” No way.

Having said this, he then proceeded to talk about how how the very structure of government in Tidewater hurt us, how if the area was going to compete effectively and operate efficiently, it had to act as one city, deciding where it was going in a coherent fashion.

“We have a truly regional economy, a regional work force, but inside of that region, we have real winners and losers depending on where certain tax producers are located, and where the lines are drawn,” Fraim said.

History has rendered an unfavorable verdict on the state’s policies that keep cities small, divided and humble.

“You have to ask yourself, where are the great cities in Virginia? What public policy has combined to keep cities small and regions fractured? Why wasn’t Norfolk a Baltimore? It should have been. Why wasn’t Richmond one of the great cites of the South?”

If we don’t manage to act as a region to shape important policies, we inevitably are less able to grow coherently, both physically and economically, Fraim said.

“How do you form a strategic agenda for a region that is broken down into 16 different localities? Where are we going, and who is going to take us there. You not only have a number of local governments, but they are completely independent.”

Having thus argued himself into a corner, Fraim found himself saying, “As unpleasant as it seems, consolidation might be the easiest route.” Having just heard himself endorse the very idea he said he could not 15 minutes previously, Fraim then muttered despairingly about “cutting my own throat” and pleaded that his picture not be put on the cover.

Regional government is both the Promised Land and the Vietnam of local politics. Lots and lots of people say the idea make sense. But they also agree it will never happen and avoid the subject like a land-war in Asia.

But if the idea makes sense, why not consider it? The Berlin Wall was toppled. We put a man on the moon. Ended welfare as we know it. Why not start talking about some of elected regional government.

This could take several forms. We could keep the old governments but create a new regional one that took care of some duties, like land-use and transportation. Or we could merge the existing ones, or some of them. The point is to end up a mayor and council that run the region and whom the people elect.

With this in mind, we went around and asked a variety of leaders, mostly elected, to touch this third rail of local politics. Would they support regional government in theory? If so why, and if not, why not?

BIGGER IS BETTER The strongest argument for an elected regional government was that the region needed to act more as one in investment decisions and making strategic choices: where to build roads or rail lines; how to build good universities; setting coherent regional growth policies and economic game plans.

A lot of the region’s leaders supported working toward a kind of government where these decisions could be made and the leaders held accountable.

“That’s why we don’t have a major league franchise, that’s why we don’t have the road connections to the outside world, that’s why we don’t have consensus on light rail,” Norfolk Councilman Randy Wright said. “Until we resolve our minor differerencs, we can’t see the big picture. In theory, I would support” some sort of elected regional government.

Big companies like Ford or IBM have a board of directors that sets overall policy, even as different divisions of the company work on separate projects, noted Chesapeake Councilman Gene Waters. What Hampton Roads might need is an elected board of directors that can set policy on things like road networks, or regional growth policy, Waters said.

“There is no one governing body that makes those decisions,” Waters said. “We have like 102 city councilmen in Hampton Roads, and it’s very difficult to get those to come up with a decision.”

But if it makes sense, it also was a steep slope to climb, even supporters agreed.

“I think it’s the only way, but before that happens, we’ll have to have a lot of funerals,” Norfolk councilman Herbert Collins said. “Everyone likes their own fiefdoms. We would have more clout, more to offer, we could combine some things, and cut down the duplication. But I can’t see a way to get there from here.”

“Personally, I think it’s got to come,” Portsmouth Mayor James Holley said. “It may not be in my time. But we will never experience the growth and development until we are all in lock step and acting in concert.”

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL The argument that opponents of regional government grabbed most quickly was that, no matter how it we structured, any regional governance would put government another step away from the people, and make it both bigger and more remote.

“If I’m invited to speak at a Kiwanis club now, I can do that,” said Newport News Mayor Joe Frank. “If I were mayor of Hampton Roads, I couldn’t, because there are too many Kiwanis clubs. Most people don’t think that bigger government is better government.”

Mayor Meyera Oberndorf got in a good jab when she hinted that regional government might just make it easier for the Powers That Be to run things their way — without consulting with the people. I heard echoes of Henry Howell: There’s more that goes around in the dark beside Santa Claus.

“To the people who want everything to be run in the fashion that they think is appropriate, it would probably be tidier and easier for them to run things with a regional government,” Oberndorf said.

“Local government is close to the people it serves. Once it gets further and further away, there is this feeling of isolation.”

But you couldn’t you also make a good counter argument: That a regional government would in some ways bring government closer to the people. Right now, a lot of important things are handled by a series of unelected regional bodies: The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, Tidewater Regional Transit, PENTRAN, SIPSA — the list and acronyms go on.

Right now, if I’m angry at traffic on I-244, or don’t like my bus service, it’s very difficult to find an elected leader I can vote for or against that will in any way influence those things. Bodies like TRT or The Planning District Commission tend to be governed by councils made of representatives from more than a dozen different municipalities. My one or two representatives from my city have a minute voice in the total scheme of things.

With a regional government, these bodies would presumably report to a mayor and his or her council. A regional mayor could campaign on something like ending the HOV lanes. And if he or she didn’t make it happen, we could vote him or her out.

BIGGER IS MORE EFFICIENT If Small is Beautiful, it might also be more expensive, says another line of argument in support of regional government. It costs money to have a dozen municipal repair shops, for example. Del. Bob Purkey of Virginia Beach argues that moving toward a regional government would fit the Republican philosophy of less government and more efficient government. “Each city has their own inventory of very expensive road maintenance equipment,” Purkey said. “Think of the efficiencies that could happen in sharing it, these huge pieces of equipment that must be housed and maintained.”

Purkey enters what is traditionally thought of as dangerous ground politically when he speaks of eliminating the elected constitutional offices, like sheriff, clerk of court, treasurer and commissioner of revenue, Purkey said. Just forcing the merger of treasurer and commissioner of revenue might save $10 million a year, Purkey said, enough for one more new elementary school annually.

While citizens might not jump at the thought of regional governance, they will jump at you when asked for tax increases, Purkey said. Eventually, this reluctance to raise taxes will force government to start merging services.

“I’m suggesting that we are just scratching the surface on a number of cooperative” ventures that could be done, Purkey said. “You have a lot of regional fiefdoms. It really comes down to turf protection.”

Chesapeake Councilman Waters had similar thoughts. Setting a regional growth plan not only builds a more coherent region physically, Waters said, but it would save money. Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk have had to build schools while Norfolk and Portsmouth close them down.

“You have old ones rotting away, and new ones being built,” Waters said.

Having many different cities all planning development separately doesn’t work well either, Waters said. For example, you have Virginia Beach planning commercial growth around the proposed Southeastern Expressway corridor while Chesapeake, less active in the policy, plans for residential growth.

Fraim and others buy this argument, but say efficiencies in government are really just a nice extra to the more important goal of gaining more coherent direction, identity and policy as a region.

“Where are we going, and who is going to take us there?” Fraim said. “That’s more important than economies of scale. You can save money with one police chief, but there are a lot of bigger issues that regionalism means.”

Mayor Dana Dickens of Suffolk sounded a similar note. Although as one of the smaller cities, Suffolk would be a smaller voice in a larger whole, Dickens had no qualms considering some sort of regional governance. He told the old tale about the father who instructed his sons on the merits of working together by having them try to break a bunch of sticks lashed together into one bundle. Together, the sticks could not be broken; separately, they broke easily.

“The point of the story is what I feel about the region,” Dickens said. “The more together we are, the stronger we are. If that takes us to a regional government, so be it.”

Dickens had the most concrete example of actual regional action: His city and Portsmouth are close to announcing agreement on joint construction of a library. Although it would be placed in Churchland in Portsmouth, it would also be used heavily by residents in adjacent Suffolk neighborhoods, and so Suffolk may help fund it.

CITIES VERSUS SUBURBS Look at everyone’s comments and you see some trends. Those favoring regional government said the area would be more able to meet the big challenges that determine a region’s fate. Other backers said it would be more efficient. Those opposing said it would add another layer of government and remove government from the people.

But the way the supporters and opponents lined up showed another argument going on underneath the surface, one more about money. In general, supporters of regional governments tended to come from the inner cities. Firm opponents were usually suburban.

Why is this?

Well, whatever else it would do, a regional government would almost certainly share the wealth. Right now, the suburbs get a disproportionate share of the region’s money. Their residents get most of the salaries on the jobs located in the inner cities.

In the short run, that looks like a pretty good deal for the suburbs, so why change? Even though Chesapeake and Virginia Beach have more growth problems, they also have more shopping malls, dentists and other taxpayers that help balance the books.

You can see this imbalance when you compare Virginia Beach and Norfolk. If Virginia Beach raises its real-estate tax one cent, it raises an additional $2 million. But if Norfolk raises its real-estate tax one cent, it raises a little less than $700,000. Virginia Beach has a population less than twice that of Norfolk. But it has a tax base three times as large. That explains why tax rates tend to be higher in the inner cities.

In the long run, this imbalance in wealth hurts the whole region, including Virginia Beach, say many experts. David Rusk has proved pretty conclusively in several books that areas as a whole do better when they spread the common problems and costs over a wider area. Regions that have “inelastic” boundaries and remain divided suffer.

But like a rich woman not wanting to admit that she was having second thoughts about her potential groom’s wallet, that topic went generally unmentioned.

With the exception of Councilman Louis Jones from Virginia Beach. Under my prodding, he had no qualms saying he felt no responsibility for the fate of the inner cities.

“It should not be the responsibility of the suburbs to carry the tax burdens of the inner city,” Jones said. “The inner city needs to handle its affairs in a way that they can handle their own tax burdens.”

GETTING THERE Okay, some leaders are willing to at least entertain the idea of regional governance. Is there any way to get there from here?

Here’s a fantasy scenario: Next year, a bill comes before the General Assembly in Richmond. It merges the governments of Hampton Roads into one entity, or creates a new entity that keeps the old governments but delegates some regional responsibilities to a new one. The House and the Senate pass it. The governor signs it. It’s done.

It might be that simple. Legally, we are creations of the state. Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport News and all the other cities exist only because Richmond says they do. Although the actions of the General Assembly are set by the constitution, it’s actually not required for the local governments to endorse the idea of a regional government. If Richmond wanted to thrust a regional government upon us, it probably could.

In Toronto a few years ago, the provincial government merged Toronto with several surrounding suburban localities. Toronto didn’t want to do it. The suburbs didn’t want to do it. But the province, whose conservative leader had campaigned on greater efficiencies in government, said We Don’t Care What You Think, and did it anyway.

For better and for worse, local governments in the United States tend to be more independent and less linked in a clear hierarchy of decision-making and policy to a state or national government.

Del. Tom Moss of Norfolk, and Speaker of The House, said the idea of a regional government has been discussed since he began in politics around 1960. There was even a commission that studied it. But he said politics make it all but impossible.

“If you had one city council, who would be on it?” Moss said. “Would they be elected at large? Who would be the chief of police? The logistics are overwhelming.”

As for sweeping action by the General Assembly, it might require a change in the constitution first, and even if not, would not happen for political reasons, Moss said. The state would not act against the wishes of the localities.

“To say you are going to have one central government is almost impossible politically,” Moss said.

Sen. Ken Stolle of Virginia Beach said there wasn’t much chance of Richmond ever imposing regional government on Hampton Roads.

“Everyone would have to agree that is where they were going,” Stolle said. The General Assembly would not impose a government on the localities.

By the same token, the state also is not hostile to the idea, Stolle said.

“I have heard the argument that the state does not want to give the localities the ability to act like a region because it threatens their authority. I couldn’t disagree more. If Norfolk and Virginia Beach got together and agreed to cooperate in some way, I would probably support it.”

Fraim of Norfolk said he could see a future where two or three governments “with common interests” might decide to consolidate. If this works well, others might clamor to join up. He thought this scenario more likely than the entire region agreeing on a plan for a regional government.

This was an intriguing idea. Imagine if Virginia Beach and Norfolk decided to merge. Think of the powerhouse of a city that would be created. Chesapeake might soon clamor to join up, and then others as well.

Around the country, most defacto regional governments happen either through annexation or by the conversion of county governments into effective city governments.

States with very liberal annexation laws, like North Carolina or Texas, end up with very large cities that swallow large amounts of land area. Houston is technically the fourth largest city because its liberal annexation laws, even though it is the 10th largest metropolitan area.

Of course, Virginia has neither liberal annexation laws, and its counties are legally separate from its cities. The latter doesn’t affect Hampton Roads much because its counties converted themselves into “cities” some time ago.

In the here and now, the best hope for regional governance is for the individual cities to keep cooperating on specific missions and services, said Jimmy Eason, president of The Hampton Roads Partnership and former mayor of Hampton.

Eason shied away like a skittish horse at the mention of actual regional government.

“The idea of consolidated government would be so negative to the majority of people,” said Eason. “There is such an inherent suspicion of big government. And there is a real fear of losing identity.”

What the partnership, which is actually working to address these issues, proposes is that the separate cities work together more on areas of common interests: this could even end up sharing services, like libraries or police. The cities already cooperate on a great number of things, Eason said. The failure of cooperation on things like light rail or the Southeastern Expressway overshadow some very real achievements.

If the merger of Pentran and TRT comes off, Eason said, this will be a real achievement. If consolidation of cities does come, it would only be after already having got most of the way there in smaller steps, he said. Eason’s scenario holds out the hope that we could perhaps get there from here. Say we consolidate libraries. Then maybe police. Then we cooperate on setting growth plans. Maybe eventually, it might not be so hard to actually form a coherent regional government, or for two cities to merge their governments.

Let’s never say never. Change really is possible. The future is unpredictable and exciting. Whether we call it Greater Norfolk or Hampton Roads, it’s pretty clear that we rise and fall together.

Don’t Let Kirn Library Fly Away

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

Monday, August 16, 1999
COLUMN FOR: The Virginian-Pilot
BY ALEX MARSHALL

At the end of the movie Casablanca, Ingrid Bergman pleads with Humphrey Bogart to stay with him, and to let her husband, the courageous underground leader Victor Lazlow, fly off by himself.

As the prop plane beats it propellers against the air, Bogart, playing tough guy “Rick,” looks down at her and says, no way.

“You’ll regret it,” he tells her in his sandpaper-and-velvet growl. “Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

That’s how I feel about tearing down Kirn library in Norfolk. That if we do it, we’ll regret it, and soon, and for the rest of our lives. (Imagine Bogart saying these words, in that accent that I now realize sounds vaguely like President John Kennedy mixed with Marlon Brando.)

Huh, you might ask? “I didn’t even know they were thinking about tearing down Kirn.”

Well “they” are. A study committee has recommended building a new central library elsewhere downtown. Even more important, city council members are eying Kirn as a potential spot for a new upscale hotel. Under this plan, the city would sell off the property, perhaps using the funds for a new library.

Sure, any such events may be far off. But I’m talking about it now, because I know how things work in Norfolk. By the time the process gets around to public hearings and comment periods, plans will set and difficult to change. If “we” want to keep Kirn, we need to start talking about it now.

Beauty is a funny thing. It reflects, I think more and more, the relationship one has with an object, as much as the object’s inherent characteristics in space and on the ground.

Kirn was built in 1960-1962, financed in part by a grant from the Kirn family. Built as part of the urban renewal process that was then tearing apart the city, this sleek masterpiece of glass, steel and marble rose on its site on City Hall Avenue, now directly across from the MacArthur Mall. It was Norfolk’s first real central library. In replaced the beautiful, but small Carnegie-funded library on Freemason Street, whose building still stands, but which unfortunately the city no longer owns. The architectural firm of Lublin McGaughy designed Kirn; contractor Paul Tishman built it.

Forty years later, Kirn has lost the aura of modernity, speed and style with which, like a hot new sports car parked on a corner, it used to greet passerbys. Its three stories and a mezzanine now seem small and short against the bulk of the MacArthur Center, and height of the main street towers. Kirn is now often unnoticed, always under-used.

But look twice at Kirn. Look three times. Notice the way the tall marble planks stretch up its sides. Notice the abundance of steel and glass. Notice how proudly it sits on its corner, directly addressing the street.

For an even better viewpoint, stand inside Kirn on the mezzanine level. Notice how you can see right into the street because Kirn’s “walls” are actually entire sheets of glass. Notice the luxurious floating marble stairs that lead you gently to the mezzanine. Notice how the building is literally stuffed with the black-streaked marble, around you at every turn.

And then I think it will hit you. Kirn is beautiful. An example of 1960s modernism at its best, all steel and glass, an open building, revealing its structure and interior to the world like someone with nothing to hide.

Historic preservation, I’m realizing, is not just about nostalgia. It’s about recognizing that different eras have different strengths. We could not replicate a Kirn library today, because building trades have changed, technology has moved on, and the eyes of present-day designers are different. Because of this, it makes sense to keep the best of every era, because we are keeping something that can’t be replicated, a language that, if erased, will no longer be spoken.

I love libraries. And it shames me that Norfolk has so long neglected theirs. When I was a boy growing up in Virginia Beach, visiting Kirn was something special. That’s no longer true.

But there is nothing wrong with Kirn that a strong wind of fresh cash couldn’t fix. A wind that swept old books off shelves, that expanded the public parts of the library into neglected corners and floors, a wind that made every corner glisten with love, attention and staffing.

Sure, a great central library might eventually need more room. But with the demolition of the old Board of Trade building, Kirn possesses an entire city block. This is as much room as San Francisco’s new downtown library. When time to expand, an addition can be built on the land now used for a few parking spaces. In fact, I hear there are dormant plans around for just that. Kirn could even go upward, building additional stories on top of the ones that exist

What Norfolk doesn’t need is another new mega structure, flanked by a giant parking box, isolated from the rest of the city. It needs buildings like Kirn, that fit into the streetscape, and that are intimately part of the fabric of downtown life, and the city’s history.

Don’t write an unhappy ending to this movie. Think once, twice, three times, before doing something that we may someday regret, “and soon,” and for the rest of our lives. Let’s stand by Kirn, as it has so nobly stood by us.

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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