How Urban Should Your City Be?

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

by Alex Marshall
The New York Observer
July – 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Columbia, Maryland

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METROPOLIS MAGAZINE.
BY ALEX MARSHALL
APRIL 7, 1997

Driving around Columbia reminds me of surfing the web. Everything is hidden, not visible except for an icon that says mall or village center, or hotel. But double-click one of these icons – that is, follow the small, waist-high sign that tastefully pokes up off the road – and a hidden reality opens up to you, be it a shopping mall, a housing subdivision, a park, or a school.

Like the web, one can pas quite a few pleasant hours in Columbia, navigating its maze of curvy, curvilinear streets, losing all sense of place and time. Each choice leads to a new set of choices. Destinations are down secondary roads, and in even there are concealed behind rows of trees and sculpted man-made hills.

Residents of Columbia, which sits on 14,000 acres midway between Baltimore and Washington a few miles off I-95, are generally proud of the sleek coat of shrubbery and rules that conceals their community’s vital parts.

Things are hard to find here, said a middle-age man in a T-shirt who stood in his driveway under a basketball goal, next to his teenage-daughter holding a boxed pizza. “There’s a restaurant I still can’t find. First day I was here, I was running of of gas, and I couldn’t find a gas station.”

I heard that story a lot.

Columbia is one of the largest and most ambitious of the several dozen new towns started in the 1960s. The idea was to capture the hordes then leaving the center city, and funnel them into some sort of planned community that would be better than the more laissez-faire sprawl that was bubbling outward. Beside Columbia, the list included nearby Reston in Virginia, Irvine, Ca., Clear Lake City in Houston, and others. Huge sums of private capital made developing an entire region possible, as well as weak local and state governments that ceded their land-use authority to private enterprise. Columbia was based in part on European new towns then being developed. But in Europe, government was the designer and developer. In America, the private developer persuaded municipal governments to turn over the reigns of authority for a chunk of real estate. In exchange, the private developer laid out the streets and parks. And then bet that the profits from selling homes and leasing stores and offices would make it worthwhile.

Columbia was started and developed by Jim Rouse. Still led by The Rouse Company, its design and ongoing development bears the mark of this man who was a player at every step in the ongoing evolution of the prevailing urban-suburban zeitgeist over the past half-century. Victor Gruen just beat him in building the first enclosed shopping mall in the 1950s, but Rouse came up with Faneuil Hall festival marketplace in the 70s, which was cloned all over the country. In the 60s, the new town concept was the cutting edge and Rouse was on it. He was determined to improve the design of suburbia, to build a better, more manageable kind of sprawl, where commerce, religion, schooling, shopping and all the components of 20th century life would take place in a more practical and harmonious fashion. Rouse, who died last year at age 81, was also determined to build a socially better place, where a mix of all races and even incomes would live and work together, avoiding or overcoming the derisive racial battles then ripping apart the nation.

To a large degree, Rouses vision, both socially and otherwise, was realized. As of this year, about 85,000 people, with about 20 percent African-American, live in eight villages grouped loosely around a regional enclosed shopping mall, which is the town center. The ninth and last village is set to begin construction, which when finished, should bring the total population up to the planned 100,000 people. From the hindsight of 30 years, it’s interesting to ask not only whether Rouse got to where he was going, but whether he was going in the right direction. Rouse and many others put a lot of freight on new towns, including that it would be a model for future development, spawn countless imitators and cure the ailing center cities.

Its also fascinating to compare the New Town movement to New Urbanism, the latest town planning movement. Although New Urban proponents would probably shriek in horror at the comparison, the goals and results of both movements are identical in many respects. Both are attempting to create new, self-sufficient places in open countryside, and both are ultimately harmful to the historic cities their developers said and say they love. Both conceptually link back to Ebenezer Howard of the 19th century and the belief in the merits of starting over. Like settlers making their way to the new world, or abandoning the Catholic Church for the Protestant Reformation, these believers in new places love the fresh canvas, and the idea that old problems can be cured by doing something somewhere else.

When Rouse conceived of Columbia in the early 1960s, he was determined, like the New Urbanists, that people would be able to live, work, play and do other stuff at Columbia without leaving its borders. In his mind, this made Columbia a city. He never called or considered it a suburb or suburbia, which he despised. This of course, leads into a discussion about what is a real city, but more about that later.

To pursue his dream Rouse, a millionaire mortgage banker and shopping center developer, walked out about halfway between Washington and Baltimore, and proceeded in 1963 to surreptitiously buy up much of Howard County. This was a start of a lengthy process where by Rouse, after revealing his purchase, eventually persuaded county commissioners to pass in 1965 something called New Town Zoning which established the legalistic framework for Columbia.

Because Rouse could only develop what he could buy, and some landowners refused to sell, Columbia is a rough assortment of land parcels, some contiguous and some not, a few miles west of I-95. Studded throughout the area known as Columbia are chunks of land, now mostly turned into subdivisions, which are not part of Columbia at all. As one woman pointed out, an easy way to tell when you are in Columbia proper is whether the telephone poles are above or below ground. In Columbia, of course, they are neatly stowed below ground. That Columbia is not a definable chunk of land shows the limitations of private development. If a government had laid out Columbia, it could have done so in a practical and neat fashion, much as the municipal government laid out Manhattan in the early 1800s.

Columbia was formed against the backdrop of the 1960s, and as President Lyndon Johnson struggled to get the Voting Rights act passed, and southern governors stood on the steps of schoolhouses and threw down gauntlets, Rouse and his partners wanted to give the country an alternate example of how the races could live and work together. It was an admirable, and daring, dream, given the fact that most real estate leaders overtly segregated their developments under the belief that it helped sales. This dream of racial harmony gives Columbias much of its historical shine.

Rouse’s basic design was to have 100,000 or so people live in nine villages and a town center, in this case a regional shopping mall. Mixed in would be parks, schools, interfaith centers, offices, industry, hotels and other accouterments, like the 17,000 seat, open-air, Merriweather Post Pavilion. The design was largely realized, an amazing thing, because usually the marketplace forces developers to alter their designs over time. Roughly a third of the land was dedicated to what in developers lingo is known as “open space,” which gives Columbia its ambiance of greenness and nature. As we know now, this is probably the most environmentally destructive way to build. It chews up more land, and the greenery left over isn’t suited to real wild life. Instead, it consumes fertilizers which find their way into the water sources. But at the time, it was seen as saving the land, or even improving on it.

The physical design of Columbia is mirrored in its organizational structure. At the top is the Columbia Association, a mammoth homeowners association with a $33 million budget. Like other homeowner associations, it takes care of the open space, runs the recreation centers and, through its village appendages, determines what paint colors are allowed on houses and other aesthetic guidelines. It is controlled by a ten-member council, each of which is elected by the villages and town center property owners. It is, in reality, a private government. To fund the Columbia Association and the village associations, residents pay an extra assessment based on property values. On a $200,000 house, this amounts to $750 a year.

The village system that is at the heart of Columbias physical and organization design has been successful in many respects. If Columbia did not help save the center city, it did construct a more practical and more hassle-free suburbia. True, people don’t walk as much as planned, and major mass transit never materialized, although there is a minimal bus service. You still drive to the supermarket. But the drive to the village shopping center is shorter and less confusing.

“I love Columbia, because I hardly ever have to leave the town,” said a school teacher I interviewed, who lived in a set of lower-priced condominiums. She spoke from the door of her home, which faced a tiny courtyard with three other front doors. These in turn, faced a larger courtyard, all of which was invisible from the street.

“Everything I need is right here. With the village centers, I can go over the Wilde Lakes to get fresh fish. Next door, I can get fresh produce. If I want to buy clothes or do more serious shipping, I can go to the mall. I used to live in Rockville, and it would spend all Saturday morning driving miles from this place to that to get my errands done.”

The design of these village centers vary, but usually their backs face the road and storefronts are relatively concealed. At the Wilde Lake Village center, for example, the entire complex faces inward, like a mini-version of the Pentagon. Even after driving into the parking lot, I could not see the supermarket and collection of small stores around a courtyard that form the nucleus of the center. This design has its charm, in that only people who live in the village know its there. But it also makes it very difficult for the centers to succeed financially. Although I was told it was one of the more successful centers, it was relatively dead. The courtyard was empty. The bagel shop was pretty busy at lunch, but the wine shop next door was devoid of customers. Its manager said they were barely holding on.

This is one of the most interesting trends at Columbia, the beginnings of its own version of urban decay and inner-city abandonment. The plight of the village centers have been made worse by a recent, and quite ironic development. The Rouse company, which Jim Rouse retired from in 1979, opened last year a huge collection of big box stores on land it owned on both sides of Route 175 leading into Columbia. A mammoth Target, a warehouse style supermarket and other stores are open, and more are being built. They were constructed over the protests of many residents, and it has predictably drained the village centers of much of their business. The Rouse company still owns the village centers, so it is hurting itself to a degree. The company has essentially done to itself what the shopping malls in the 50s and 60s did to innercity downtowns. As a consequence, Columbia is now struggling to rejuvenate its older village centers. One, Harpers Choice, is being renovated. In Oakland Mills, the supermarket is set to close, and plans have not been worked out yet on how to replace it.

That these small commercial centers are struggling is significant, because it shows how large a critical mass is needed now to make it commercially. It also shows how difficult a task New Urbanists have set for themselves by attempting to put small commercial centers within New Urban communities, most of which are far smaller than even one village in Columbia. The New Urban development of Kentlands in nearby Gaithersburg, Md., for example, will have 1,500 homes when completed. By comparison, each villages in Columbia has more than 3,000 homes, while Columbia as a whole will have about 33,000 homes when completed.

Accompanying the decline of some of the village centers, and causing it to a degree, has been an increase in crime and the fear of crime. Much of the subsidized housing was built near the village centers, so poorer residents without cars could walk to the store. But this has also increased crime, or at least the fear of it.

“Just from living here, you know you don’t go to a village center at midnight,” said one man in his twenties, from the doorway of his apartment, who also added that everyone in his apartment put clubs on their cars. “I don’t want to walk down to the village center of Harpers Choice, because of the areas you have to walk through between here and there.”

The increase in crime has some racial overtones, because the subsidized housing are usually located near the village centers, and much of the subsidized housing is African-American. Still, Columbia is a racial paradise compared to the rest of the country, and its residents have had better lives because of it.

Columbia is roughly 20-percent African-American, with a fair sprinkling of other minorities. Its also fairly diverse economically, including some subsidized housing, although the overall household income is high. This racial diversity seems to have been achieved through sheer force of will. Rouse said that Columbia was open to everyone, meant it, and pretty soon word got around.

“The grapevine,” was what brought him to Columbia, said Alan Blondell, a burly black man who says he has lived here since 1974, shortly after he graduated from college. Hair speckled with gray, he sits reading the New York Times sports section in a bagel place at Wilde Lakes village center.

Blondell, as with many whites I spoke with, said his children benefited from growing up here.

“I wanted my son to interact with people of various backgrounds. That’s happened. His best friend is someone who is Jewish and white. They still hang out, even though both are in college, because their roots go deep. It’s fascinating to pull out the photos of the birthday parties, and see the same kids, all different colors, over the years, growing up.”

This diversity of ethnicity is accompanied by a homogeneity in Columbias physical appearance. Your neighbor might have a different skin color than you, but not his house, or at least not one you can’t predict. Judging from a few days spent at Columbia its bedrock values are control and concealment. The placement of signs, the location of shopping centers, the paint colors of houses – are carefully controlled in order to keep back the louder expressions of present day civilization, be it the yellow Midas Muffler sign on the 20-foot-pole, or the neighbors who insist that avocado shutters on a lime-green facade is just fine. What you get in Columbia instead is a reality carefully colored beige.

“People either love or hate it here,” said a plump woman behind the real estate booth in the shopping mall. “Some people dont like the big brother thing, that you can’t paint your house chartreuse, stuff like that. These people live in Ellicot City, (a few miles down the road.) There you find strip development, all the things not allowed here. I love it here though. I drive around other places and think, ‘How could they allow that pink door on that white house?'”

Homes too, in Columbia, might be said to be icons, revealing nothing of their inner identity. A visitor on the street sees only a generic assembly of house-like components: lawn, shrubbery, driveway, shutters. Weird paint colors, bird baths on the lawn, and apparently even lavish shrubbery or gardens are prohibited. Practically the only accessory permitted to this minimalist fashion style are basketball goals, which stand out sharply as the only addition to the generic landscape. Although even these, have to be the approved style and form. Even religion has a generic feel to it at Columbia. When developing Columbia, Rouse set aside slots for Interfaith Centers, which would house several religions in one building. It was meant to be progressive, and perhaps it is. But the effect is to submerge even God underneath the code of suburbia. All one sees is a bland, square brick building with a utilitarian sign saying “Interfaith Center.” Barbara Kellner, who is kind of the informal historian at the Columbia Association, tells the story of going to a crafts fair recently and buying a contemporary metal sculpture. She decided to place in her front yard.

“You know, I like to think my taste is pretty good,” she said. “But I had to admit, there wasn’t anything conceptually different in my sculpture and a white plastic bird bath, which is not permitted.”

So did she rip out the sculpture?

“No, I’m going to wait until they tell me to,” said the woman who is employed by the association that enforces such rules. “I can still put it in my backyard if I want.”

Such codes are more possible legally through a private homeowners association. Nevertheless, municipalities are beginning to have similar, if less drastic, rules. In urban areas, the stated rationale is often historic preservation. In more suburban areas, the logic is preserving property values. In each case, this kind of fastidious attention to detail rules out the ebb and flow of neighborhoods over time that make them interesting. Levittown, for example, is such an interesting place now because the homeowners were allowed to morph their houses into other forms with relative impunity. In the older neighborhood I live in, part of its charm comes from the variety of housing types built over the last 100 years. Much of the variety is becoming prohibited now, under the historical zoning that now rules the neighborhood.

Columbia is hardly alone in relying on a homeowner association. Such organizations are becoming standard in new subdivisions being built. The increased reliance on them is disturbing. It represents a larger trend of Americans turning away from government and buying an organization that will do the job government was set up for. It’s comparable to the current health care crisis, really, where American society rejected attempts to have a government-managed health care system and instead opted to have for-profit insurance companies and HMOs deciding who gets what care when.

With homeowner associations, residents have chosen an entity with far more power over their lives than a conventional government. And in a way, that’s what they are paying for. They care less about restrictions on themselves than on the confidence that their neighbors will be restricted. But there’s an inherent dishonesty about Columbia and most of these privately controlled subdivisions. At Columbia, through the homeowners association, Columbia residents have apparently purchased their way out of the messy affairs of democratic governments, for the safer world of a private community. But as Evan McKenzie wrote in his book “Privatopia,” these homeowners associations ultimately rely on a public institution – the courts – to enforce the deed restrictions that creates them. And as McKenzie explains in detail, the legal validity of such deed restrictions is questionable from a historical perspective. In addition, should Columbia fall on hard times financially, it would ultimately fall back on the public body that created its underlining zoning and legal framework in 1965, Howard County.

So judging on its own terms, Columbia is a success. An interracial cast has bought its homes, the company has made a profit, its lawns are green, its office towers high. But how does Columbia rate as a design model, and how does it compare to that latest New Town movement, New Urbanism.

When it was conceived, Columbia consciously built on the theories of Ebenezer Howard, the garden-city prophet of the late 19th century, who advocated saving cities by moving out of them, and building new, cleaner, safer and more orderly communities in the country. This theory now is seen as flawed, because it is apparent that what destroyed American cities was the exodus from them. Policies were needed to keep people in cities, not encourage them to leave. But in the 1960s, encouraging a more orderly exodus into more egalitarian planned communities was seen as a good thing, said Robert Fishman, author of Bourgeois Utopias and professor of history at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey.

“The whole rhetoric of urbanism, throughout the 60s, carried on the idea that the cities were overcrowded, and that the solution was to get people out of the cities,” Fishman said. “No one really comprehended that cities were so vulnerable, and that decentralization would not return them to a proper density, but would create these vast wastelands right in their center.”

Fishman also noted how similar the New Town movement is to New Urbanism, despite the absence of front porches and neo-Georgetown-style row houses in Columbia.

“It’s uncanny how the rhetoric of New Urbanism resembles that of the New Town movement in the 1960s,” Fishman said. “You could publish what Rouse was saying in the 1960s, and substitute Andres Duany’s name, and it would sound the same.”

Which indeed is true. I dug up an old of Business Week from 1966 with an article on New Towns. Jim Rouse sounds like Andres Duany, from his view of architects to his view of suburbia. Said Rouse:

“Sprawl is inefficient, ugly. Worst of all it is inhuman. . . . .There has been too much emphasis on the role of the architect as an artist, not enough on his role as a social servant. . . The suburb is the most controlled environment you can have. A kid can’t do anything without a parent. How many kids in the massive sprawl around the big city can walk or bike to school, to a concert or music lesson, to a stream to fish, or to the movies?” (This last statement is particularly interesting, given the degree of control present at Columbia.)

It seems clear to me that each of these planning movements, from New Towns to PUDs (Planned Unit Developments) to New Urbanism, are so alluring because they offer an easy way to solve our collective societal difficulties. They can be compared to fad diets. Each propose that we build our way out of our collective problems, from too much sprawl to inner-city decay to environmental destruction. Its the equivalent of eating your way to thinness. It doesn’t work. The only way to better center cities and protect the environment is to do the urban equivalent of exercising more and eating less. That means such things as growth control, a big gas tax, investment in mass transit, prohibitions on parking. So far, there is only one metropolitan area willing to diet: Portland, Oregon. With its urban growth boundary, transit system, prohibitions on store size and other rules and efforts, it’s achieving a meaner and leaner urban form, the equivalent of going to the gym three times a week and avoiding McDonalds.

It’s significant that New Urbanism relies just as heavily on these private associations to create their advertised world of small town life. As with Columbia, there is a rejection of the public sphere in favor of what is believed to be a more manageable and safer private one. With New Urbanism, it is especially hypocritical because the design movement is dedicated to improving public, political life. With their own creations, they reject public life in favor of the private sphere.

What’s also similar about New Urbanism and New Towns is how their development attracted the interest of big corporations. Although Disney has attracted a lot of attention for its New Urban community in Florida, Celebration, Columbia was backed financially by Connecticut Life, which put up $25 million. Gulf Oil backed Reston in Virginia, while General Electric, Goodyear and other corporations backed other New Towns around the country.

From this light, what was new about Columbia was not its design, but its financing. It provided the chance for one company to profit from an entire region of people. Virtually every act a person does at Columbia puts or has put profit into the Rouse corporation, from buying their home, to buying groceries, to shopping at the mall. In scope, it’s a breathtaking proposition. It’s doubtless what attracted Disney to build Celebration. Before, Disney would just capture a family’s money a few times a year, when they visited Disney World or saw a flick. Now, they would have the chance to profit off nearly every act of their lives.

But the amounts of capital needed to finance such towns are also breathtaking. The New Town era stopped around 1970 because the lag time between spending and profiting was too long, and the risks are too great. Disney has taken on Celebration, but it’s less than a third the size of Columbia.

As Columbia faces the challenges of growing up, including unplanned sprawl and urban decay, the wider metropolitan area it inhabits faces even bigger ones. The amalgamation of superhighways, luxury malls and well-manicured subdivisions that makes up the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area is in its totality a nightmarish experience. The beltway is jammed at almost any hour, and the secondary roads are not much better. The irony is that this is some of the richest sprawl in the country, built to the most demanding of specifications. The roads are wide, the setbacks huge, the landscaping and berms ample. All this richness, however, produces a sprawl which is probably worse than your average metropolis.

Columbia has helped produced this sprawl by having 100,000 people live out in the boonies, rather than within a tighter metropolitan orbit. This in turn, has helped to create the demand for the hyper-controlled environments that is Columbia. In a sense, the development of Columbia exists in a symbiotic relationship with the sprawl around it, creating its own demand. Every time someone drives home from work or goes out on a Saturday morning on a traffic jammed freeway, it produces the urge to return or escape back to a controlled environment, where everything is in place.

But although Columbia is not threatening, neither is it exciting. Back in the mid 1960s, Jane Jacobs, author of the seminal Death and Life of Great American Cities, was asked for her reaction to Columbia and the whole New Town movement. Her comment was pithy. It still seems accurate.

“They were really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life among others with no plans of their own.”

Ouch.

Surprisingly, some Columbia residents concur. Several people, although they praised Columbia, said they planned to move as soon as their kids were grown. One of those was Alan Blondell, the African-American executive.

“Now that my kids are of age, I don’t necessarily want to continue living here. I could see myself moving back to a big city, where there’s a real ethnic diversity and a lot of energy. Columbia does not have the kind of vibrancy from an ethnic viewpoint that a city does.”

Blondell said if the urban neighborhoods where he had grown up had offered a better place to raise a family in decades past, he might have never made the trek out to suburbia.

Said Blondell, “If the city had had good schools, and other stuff that Columbia offered, I might have stayed in the city.”

Building New Urbanism: Less Filling, But Not So Tasty

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This Article first appeared in Builder Magazine
NOV. 30, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

The old commercials for Lite beer by Miller which were once so popular gained their fame by having ex-jocks and other assorted celebrities stand at a bar, hold up a glass of amber-colored liquid, and repeat the slogan: “Tastes great, less filling.”

The advertising pitch worked for a while, but as any beer lover could tell you, all the “lite” beers were a pretty thin, tepid brew. The designer beers, which actually did taste great, but were also filling, shoved a lot of them out of the marketplace.

Most of New Urbanism, the new subdivision and home-building style that has been the rage in recent years, is a kind of lite-beer form of urbanism. Urbanism Lite. You take out most of the things that make urbanism urban — density, dependence on mass transit, less space for cars — and you leave some front porches, some reworked street systems, some different facades and a few alleys.

The attempt is to eliminate what people don’t like about small town or city living — less privacy and no place to park — and leave in what they do like about it, which are walking to a cafe, or buying a quart of milk without getting in a car.

But you can’t have one without the other. What you get is a slightly different looking subdivision lying off a main road on the edge of town, which functions pretty much like all the other subdivisions that surround it.

New Urbanism is a big tent philosophy and practice: that is, a lot goes on under that label. It is at various times: a theory or theories of urban design; a marketing campaign; a collection of people who love urban places; and a particular way of buildings suburbs that attempt to imitate older towns and city neighborhoods.

Some of the former has some value. But it is the latter that concerns me here. On a practical level, most of what is physically built under the label New Urban are these newer suburbs out on bare land. These are sometimes called TNDs for Traditional Neighborhood Developments. Are these new-fangled subdivisions a cure for, or part of the disease of, urban sprawl?

Let’s look on the big level of sprawl first, that of the metropolitan area. Atlanta is prime example of this. It spills across hundreds of square miles, with the result that many of its residents spend huge portions of their day stuck in a car. It’s not a very nice place to live. Excessive highway building, rather than making traffic better, has made it worse.

New Urbanism will not help much here. Building places like Kentlands outside Washington D.C., or the nearby Reston Town Center, will do nothing to shrink the size of a metropolitan area. They part of the problem. They are yet more subdivisions and shopping malls being built farther “out”, where they help reduce density and enlarge the metropolitan area.

Really limiting sprawl is pretty simple. It means building fewer big highways on the edge of town and investing a lot more in mass transit. It means growth boundaries. It means dramatically raising the price of gasoline so that the taxes cover the costs of both building roads, maintaining them and the associated costs, like policing and air pollution.

These are tough choices. For builders, any of the above would mean drastic changes in the ways of doing business. In Portland, Oregon, which is one of the few cities and states that have moved in this direction, builders find themselves doing more redevelopment work, from adding a room to an existing house, to “tear-downs” to be replaced with newer structures.

The growth boundary around Portland has had the quite unexpected effect of pushing out large corporate developers. There simply isn’t land available in the 1,000 acre chunks that they prefer. So instead, you see the rise of more locally-owned builders and developers, who will take 20 acres here, and 10 acres there to build some homes. Portland, which has a booming economy, produced a huge number of new housing units in recent years, but roughly a third of them was through redevelopment. The rest were generally not huge new subdivisions that you see outside Las Vegas or Houston.

The problem with the practice of New Urbanism, as opposed to some of its talk, is that it has generally shirked from confronting the tough choices that Portland and Oregon residents have faced to a degree. Instead, New Urbanists generally offer Americans a chance to “buy” their way out of the sprawl dilemma, in the form of cute new subdivisions and town centers.

Like a lot of marketing-driven products, this might work for a decade or so, until people catch on. Then it will go the way of Planned Unit Developments, New Towns, and all the other once new-models of suburban sprawl. And Americans will be left with actual problem unresolved and unfaced.

In general, New Urbanists are selling something they can’t deliver without charging a far higher price, and without making changes far more fundamental than redesigning a few homes. To understand why, it’s necessary to look more carefully at what we today call the suburbs and how they took form.

Cities are products of something. They represent the effect, principally, of transportation systems. The classic 19th and early 20th century neighborhoods that many people love, and which New Urbanism apes, were created by the extension of streetcar lines. Levittown was a product of a new car culture. The mega malls and grab bag of subdivisions that surround most cities are products of the limited access freeways, built at public expense. Developers and builders understand this far better than the general public.

But how about on a more individual level. Even if a neo-traditional neighborhood built on the edge of town won’t counteract metropolitan sprawl, will it deliver a better life for the people who live there?

The answer is no again.

Urbanism is a package deal. Once you weed out the stuff people don’t like about it — no place to park, smaller homes, closer neighbors — you also weed out the stuff they like about urbanism, like walkeable streets and nearby grocery stores.

The Achilles’ heel of New Urbanist developments has been their “downtowns,” the classic “main streets” meant to be at the heart of the developments. If they were built, and successful, it would be a significant improvement on suburban life. But the reasons these mini downtowns fail point to the structural flaws in the whole theory of TNDs.

Retail needs an enormous accessible customer base to succeed. Street-level retail in cities get this from enormous density and the therefore enormous quantity of people that walk by their front doors. Suburban retail get this by locating on a main highway where a high volume of traffic goes by their parking lots.

New Urban developments have generally tried to locate their mini-downtowns in the center of their low-density subdivisions. The result is that they have neither enough pedestrian, nor enough auto, traffic to make retail succeed. The “main streets” of virtually all New Urban developments have failed.

An exception is the Disney-produced Celebration in Florida. But it may be the exception that proves the rules. Disney had the enormous financial muscle to build the downtown first, before any homes were built or sold. It also had the marketing muscle to pull in tourists to its shops, even though the downtown lacks immediate access to a main highway. Tourists are making these shops succeed, not residents.

There are other tradeoffs and inadequacies that become apparent when you look at a neo-traditional development closely.

Peter Calthorpe, one the New Urbanists who is honest about the choices involved, has said the minimum density needed to make mass transit work is a gross density of ten units to an acre, with selective density even higher. Most TNDs hover around four units to an acre. The idea that these places can dovetail eventually with mass transit in some distant year is probably not the case, unless you acknowledge a tremendous amount of infill and expensive redevelopment. To really change how people live, you need mass transit in a development at the beginning, not the end.

The street system is another interesting thing to look at. Neo-traditionalists like to advertise that they have gotten away from the cull-de-sac, which has become the symbol of American bad taste, like tail-fins on that old Chevy. New Urbanists promise a more open and easy going grid.

But the “grids” these developments use are usually just as confusing and intimidating to outsiders as the standard pattern of cul-de-sacs and collector streets. These “grids” are usually a collection of loose skewed streets. They are less urban grids really, than descendents of the wavy street patterns used in 19th century cemeteries and later in early suburbs.

Finally, the treatment of the driveway and the garage in the standard New Urban house say a lot about its tradeoffs. The high priority of neo-traditional development is to get a clear, urban looking façade at the front of the house, usually reminiscent of Cape Cod or Georgetown. To get it, the driveway is put either on the side, or in the back off an alley. The same goes for the garage.

The result is that the residents lose their backyards, the classic spot of backyard barbecues and swing sets. So for the sake of the appearance of urbanism, residents sacrifice one of the prime pleasures of suburbanism.

Older towns, like heralded Charleston, Georgetown or Savannah, worked well with alleys and street facades because their residents didn’t have to worry about where to park the car. When these places were built, people walked everywhere, until they got on a train, a streetcar or a ship. Trying to replicate these building types in the context of a freeway and car-dependent environment is a false equation.

For the builder and developer, New Urbanism represents a dilemma of sorts. It can be profitable. Standard New Urban subdivisions offer smaller homes on less land at higher prices. This means higher profits, even though there is higher risk, because the development costs for streets are more, and the potential market is smaller.

But a developer would have to acknowledge that is not really selling what he is usually advertising: a cure to our sprawl-oriented life style. Instead, he is offering more a change of style than substance. And as with any style, there is the risk that people will tire of it and move on.

New Urban developments do offer some improvement on conventional suburbia. They sometimes offer “granny flats,” which give a mother-in-law or lower-waged worker a place to live. That’s a real improvement. I also favor experimenting, whether it be in the suburbs or the inner-city. But we should be honest about what we are selling.

Time will tell where the New Urban debate and practice goes. In the long run, it may lead to better, more real form of urbanism. It may cost more in its political choices, but it may be more satisfying, and most of all, may taste great.

Wine Warning!

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Why Not To Love It.

The Wine Guy
WINE COLUMN
MONDAY, MARCH 1, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

There are a lot of reasons not to get into wine. I’ll tell you a few.

One: It’s expensive, or easily can be. While a few good cheap wines still exist, it’s becoming more difficult to find quality for less than $10 a bottle. That can be a lot to spend if you drink wine daily.

And the more one learns about wine, the more one is inclined to spend. You begin the taste the difference between an okay and a great Pinot Noir, and you are lured upward along the price curve as your tongue pursues mre intoxicating flavors.

So great is the reality distortion field of wine, that when you really get into it, you find yourself nodding your head in agreement when an article refers to a $50 bottle of Bordeaux as “affordable.”

Two: It can be obscenely complicated. Only a full-time professional could know the thousands of makers and dozens of sub-regions that exist in one major wine region alone of France. And to be really good, one should have actually tasted a substantial portion of those wines.

With wine, you have layers of information and knowledge lying over one another that influence a bottle’s taste and role: grape variety, the region, vintage year, accompanying food, and what else you are drinking. All these different facets interact with each other, making the subject interesting but hideously complex to all but those who persevere.

Three: Wine is an orphan in our culture, a mistreated step child. On the one hand, Thomas Jefferson loved wine and drank it daily. On the other hand, the rest of us have mostly not grown up with a bottle of wine on the table, as in France, Spain or Italy. You won’t find it served at McDonald’s.

Fourth (but not least): It can be incredibly pretentious. When you combine arcane fields of knowledge and large sums of money you are sure to get people named Buffy standing around talking about the bucks they dropped on big-named bottles of Burgundy.

Okay, that’s it for the negatives. This set of difficulties — expense, complexity, pretense and the ambiguous relationship wine has with our culture — will form a backdrop against which I hope to show readers wine’s more appealing aspects. They are:

One: Nothing goes better with conventional western cuisine than wine, despite its tortured history here. Whether it’s Hamburger Helper, or filet mignon, a glass of red wine cuts through the grease, sets off the flavors, and aids digestion. Until Americans convert en masse to Thai or Mexican cuisine, one should learn enough about wine to enjoy the simple pleasures of drinking it with much of what one regularly eats.

Two: Those touted health effects of wine are not just hype. A glass or two of daily really does calm the blood and clear out the arteries. Peasants have said as much for years, and now science is backing them up.

Three: The complexities of wine become oddly comforting as one grows older. As I approach middle-age, it’s strangely reassuring that there is a field I can devote the rest of my life to and never master.

Four: I like that wine has no redeeming social value. It is a purely sensual pleasure, good because it is good, and bad only if one does not like the taste. Drinking a great glass of wine is like staring at a great painting, enjoyable only for itself. For someone who can be overly inclined to think about “the big questions” of society, history and politics, wine can be a comfort.

So that’s it. If you choose to go along for the ride, my mission is to find good and great bottles at reasonable prices, and to together find our way through the forest of dollar signs and hype. With that in mind, allow me to introduce:

Great Wine List of The Month: Meredith Nicolls, the new owner of Cafe Rosso in Ghent, has put together a marvelous short wine list and hit on a clever way to introduce it. He calls it “21 for $21 on 21st.”

Translated, that means that he is offering 21 bottles of wine, all for $21 each, at 21st Street in Ghent where Cafe Rosso is located. Putting all wine at the same price helps people try different wines and different types of wines, without fretting. It is a marvelous counterpoint to the list that subtly encourages one to trot up the price curve until you arrive at the $100 bottle of California Cabernet.

Nicholls, a first-class chef and former owner of “Meredith’s” at Willis Wayside in Virginia Beach, provides a sampling of some of the best wines from around the world. He has a Viognier from France, a Pinot Blanc from Alsace, a Barbera from Italy, and a Rioja from Spain. He avoids relying too heavily on California. It’s a list that both a novice and a connoisseur could love. He also offers five or six wines by the glass each night. All this with good food at good prices.

Nice job, Meredith!

Those Old Rules Can Come In Handy. Just ask James Bond.

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WINE COLUMN
First Published in PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
SEPT. 23, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

Knowing and paying attention to the old rules can come in handy. Just ask James Bond.

When the Russian agent managed to point a gun at Bond’s heart in the novel “From Russia With Love,” Bondmentally kicked himself for not realizing at dinner an hour earlier that the blond gentleman across from him was not who he appeared to be.

The gentleman’s English accent had been perfect. But, while chatting with Bond over a nice filet of sole, the beefy guy had ordered a glass of red wine. Bond had noticed this curious behavior, but only now, with his life in danger, did Bond realize that this had been the sign the proper English gentleman was actually a Russian agent.

Bond got out of his predicament, needless to say, and went on to give more lessons on food and social etiquette, which are always woven into every Ian Fleming novel.

But how about that advice about red wine and fish? Does it still hold true?

Absolutely. As a general rule, red wine and fish do not marry well. The tannins and stronger flavors in a red wine often set off a violent chemical reaction with a white fish that can be not only unappetizing but downright unpleasant.

I say this defiantly, in the face of a wave of words from various wine writers who have been proclaiming of late that red wine certainly does go with fish. These nouveau trendsetters say all rules are off, that God is dead, that all is permitted. They will find a way to marry a 20-year-old Bordeaux with a mess of catfish.

Don’t you believe them. In general, red wine goes badly with most types of seafood, unless the seafood is heavily masked by other flavors. I am a conservative in this, but I am also correct. There are some exceptions. But these are ones that prove the rule, not break it.

Salmon, an oily dominant fish, goes well with Pinot Noir, a Rioja or any lighter red wine. The oiliness and strength of the fish holds up against the red wine. I love ordering Salmon in restaurants, for I get to enjoy fish and my favorite color of wine, which is red.

Salmon is the only fish I have found that goes well regularly with red wine.

But a sauce or spice can change the flavor dynamics. Dump a red sauce on just about anything, and a red wine will go well with it. A spicy shrimp Creole or jambalaya has no problem holding up to a Cote du Rhone. But when the primary flavor you taste is tuna, sea bass, scallops or oysters, shun the temptation to be daring and go red. Be a traditionalist instead. Go white.

But what type of white? As a general rule, a Sauvignon Blanc, whether it is from California, Bordeaux or Sancerre, is a my favorite white wine with almost any type of seafood. The crispness frames the fish well, without covering up its delicate flavors. A Chardonnay, by contrast, can overpower fish with its oak and vanilla flavors.

But there are plenty of other white wines to choose from.

A good place to try for yourself is at the Dockside Inn Restaurant in Virginia Beach, in the shadow of the Lesner Bridge, next to Henry’s. The Dockside Inn, which is partnered with the Lynnhaven Seafood Marina, has one of the finest wine selections in the area. The wine department is more like a wine store. It is housed in a small store immediately adjacent to the large restaurant dining room. With most wines, you can go in, pick out your bottle on the extensive shelves, and order the same bottle off the wine list in the restaurant a few feet away.

And oh, what a selection. Just with whites, you can find an extensive collection of Rieslings, Gewurtraminer(sp), Sancerres, Viogners and many others.

The palate and pocketbook behind the wine is Angelique Kambouropoulos, who with her husband Costas, own and run the marina and the restaurant. The wine selection is Angelique’s department.

Angelique agrees with me that Sauvignon Blanc is often her reflexive choice with seafood, because of its crisp acidity. She is fond of those from New Zealand.

Although now she deals with wine professionally, her passion for wine began when she was selling real estate in Northern Virginia 15 years ago. She loved the way it made food taste better, she said. Eventually, she began planning the wine list for her husband’s restaurant.

“I love quality,” Angelique says, as she contemplates her row after row of well-bottled shelves. “I don’t care how long it takes to sell a great bottle. I want the best.”

She offers about 30 wines by the glass. It helps people learn about wine to be able to easily taste a variety of different wines, she said.

I forgot to ask her if she is a fan of James Bond. But on matters of the grape, she agreed with him. When it comes with flesh from the sea, white is usually right.

Sweet is Neat

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First Published in Port Folio Magazine
By Alex Marshall

Learning to sneer at White Zinfandel, or any wine that is sweeter than not, is one of the first steps in wine education.

‘I’d like something dry,’ you say proudly when the waiter asks. ‘I hate sweet wines.’

But as your palate develops, you learn that some sweet wines are fantastic, with subtleties and depth of taste. They can vary from the sweeter Rieslings and Gewurztraminers, to ports and muscats, to the creme de la creme of dessert wines, Sauternes and German ‘eisweins.’

The trick is balancing the sweetness with flavor and crispness. While a pinkish white Zinfandels can taste like Kool-Aid — sweet and not much else — a good sweet wine has a sharpness that sets off the sugar on your tongue.

Some sweeter wines, like a Rieslig, are usually drunk with meals. They are thin and often low in alcohol, so you can drink them in big gulps with a plate of sauerkraut and Bratwurst. I love them (the wines, that is.)

But the kings and queens of sweet wines are what we usually call dessert wines. They are thick, and often have a honey-suckle like flavor. In America, they are usually drunk with or after dessert. In France, they are common as aperitifs before dinner. Whichever, they are wonderful.

Most are ‘late-harvest’ wines to some degree, meaning the wine makers have allowed the grapes to hang on the vines and grow extra-sweet, even to the point of shriveling and rotting. The best — the most famous is from Sauterne within Bordeaux in France — are infected with Botrytis, ‘noble rot,’ a fungus that dries out the grapes even further. The result is juice super concentrated, and super sweet.

The less expensive dessert wines usually seal in sweetness by adding straight alcohol to stop the fermentation process before the yeast has eaten up all the sugar. This is also how Port is made. With a Sauterne, the juice is so sweet that the wine can ferment fully and still remain sweet.

Sauternes are wonderful. They can also cost $600 a bottle. I’d say $70 or $80 is typical. But other sweet wines are quite affordable, and quite good. Over the last few years, I’ve had fun trying out various ones. I’m excluding Port, which I consider a separate category. I’m referring to the usually white, late-harvest wines. They are nice after dinner, with a special dessert, or just a small glass late at night. You see them in half bottles usually, and costing between $8 and $15. While this may seem like a lot for a half-bottle, you don’t drink the wines in large quantities so they are a pretty good deal. A single half bottle will do for an average size dinner party.

One of my favorites is Muscat de Beaumes de Venise. It comes from the town of the same name inside the Cote Du Rhone region in France. It has a wonderful, honey-like flavor and golden color that is similar to a Sauterne but at a fraction of the price. Most I have tried have been very good.

Across the river from Sauterne in Bordeaux is the little town of Cadillac. Wines from this appelation are similar to a Sauterne, but at a tenth of the price. You can find quite a few half-bottles around town — Chateau Haut-Roquefort is one — and all I have tried have been very nice.

The last is a favorite of David Blackstock, former owner of Cracker’s on 21st Street. Drunk with the cheese by the same name, it’s an incredible experience, he says. But Blackstock also says there is nothing like a real Sauterne.

‘It has got a lot of character beside the sweetness,’ Blackstock said. ‘I push people to buy a real Sauterne if they can possibly afford it,’ but to avoid the cheaper ones.

California, never one not to try to do better what France did first, has a number of sweet wines. Robert Mondavi makes several interesting ones, which come in small bottles with cute labels.

The Virginia winery, Barboursville, makes a slightly fizzy sweet wine, Malvaxia from the Malvasia grapes. It comes in a tall elegant bottle that looks like a rolling pin.

Taste Unlimited has a broad selection of dessert wines in half bottles. Steve Stewart, the wine guy in there Ghent store, recommends the Framboise by Bonny Doon. Produced by the infamous Randall Grahm, it’s made from raspberries and is rich enough, says Stewart, ‘to pour over ice-cream.’

Sydney Meers, owner of the now-defunct Dumbwaiter in Norfolk, was known for the variety and style of dessert wines you could order at his granite-topped bar. Now working as a painter and a for-hire private chef, Meers said one of his favorite dessert wines is ‘Essencia,’ an Orange Muscat made by Andrew Quady in California. Quady also has a black muscat wine called ‘Elysium,’ and a low-alcohol Orange Muscat called Electra.

This last is interesting. They obtain a low-alcohol wine — just 4 percent — by stopping the fermentation process by chilling the wine, rather than adding alcohol.

Meers is also a fan of Beaulieu Vineyards’ ‘Muscat de Beaulieu,’ which is $6 to $8 for a half bottle. Meers says that he also finds some affordable and tasty Sauternes from time to time.

My own experience with affordable Sauternes has been mixed. B & G sells a full bottle of Sauterne for $20. It’s not bad — thin, but with good flavor. But I also remember trying one cheaper Sauterne that was ghastly.

But leaving aside Sauternes for now, I encourage any wine lover to move from dry to sweet once in a while, and try some of the numerous sweet wines available. The good ones will make you feel like a god, sitting on Mount Olympus, sipping your nectar.

Searching For The Heart Of Darkness

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BY ALEX MARSHALL
WINE COLUMN FOR PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
JAN. 11, 2001

The fluid in the glass was black and dark, as if someone had emptied out his fountain pen into a glass of water. I eyed it suspiciously, then swirled, sniffed and tasted.

It was wonderful. A rich assortment of tastes cascaded over my tongue, backed up by a healthy dose of tannins. It was like a variation of a good Bordeaux.

I smiled appreciatively at the waitress. I had never heard of the wine she steered me toward: Madiran. I was in a small, French restaurant in Manhattan, Chez Bernard on West Broadway. It had classic French food at reasonable prices — and a wine list worthy of a three-star restaurant in Paris. The waitress had steered me away from the $2,000 bottles of old Bordeauxs, and to this wine I had never heard of, Madiran, for $30.

Madiran, I would learn from her and others, was a small region near the French-Spanish border. The makers used the local “Tannat” grape mixed with more familiar grapes like Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. The Tannat grape, whose name derives from “tannins,” gave the wine its dark, inky blackness. The one I had enjoyed, a 1996 Chateau Bouscasse by Alan Brumont, was one of the best rated, it turned out.

Impressed with this wine from an unfamiliar region with an unfamiliar grape, I called up some of my wine buddies to get their thoughts.

Phil, who imports wine for a living out in Portland, Oregon, was impressed. “You’ll see a Madiran on the lists of most restaurants in France,” he said. “But it’s not very common in the United States.”

Phil had two on his wholesale list, both made by Domaine Berthoumieu.

After Phil, I called up Jim Raper, my former boss at The Virginian-Pilot and a wine enthusiast par excellence. Raper, who is now in Lexington, Va., had lived near the Madiran region in France for a while. He noted that the Madiran is close to where Armagnac is produced, the competitor to Cognac. He remembered enjoying a bottle one afternoon.

“I was up in there, on the way to Biarritz, and stopped and bought a bottle in a grocery store,” Raper recalled. “It was a 1989. It was fantastic.”

Although still not well known, Madiran is slowly being discovered. Bonny Doon, the iconoclastic California wine company, has begun importing a Madiran. Owner Randal Grahm has called it “Heart of Darkness”, in honor of its color, and slapped on a wild smear of a label designed by Ralph Steadman.

Country Vintner of Richmond is distributing it in Hampton Roads.

“They are big, inky, very different wines, made from old vines,” said Pat Dudding of Country Vintner. “They are awesome, because they have such intensity.”

So I had fun both drinking and investigating the origins of my “Madiran.” But speaking more generally, Madiran is an example of the type of lesser-known but excellent wines you should keep an eye out for. Once found, you get the benefit of a good wine at reasonable prices — and the pleasure of telling your friends about it.

What other nice wines are out there?

David Hollander, with National Distributing Company in Norfolk, said he likes the California wines from the Monterey and Lake County districts, which he said produce great wines but are less famous than nearby Napa or Sonoma.

“You aren’t paying for the expensive land,” Hollander said.

Peter Coe of Taste Unlimited said bottles of Rhone wine from the Costieres de Nimes appellation are flying off the shelves. They retail for $9.95 a bottle.

The trick is to trust your taste buds. Many now expensive wines were not so a decade or two ago. I know people who used to buy Ribero del Dueros, the well-known Spanish wine that ranges from $20 to $50 a bottle, when the were $6 a bottle.

They are kicking themselves now for not buying several cases.

In Paris, The Wine Bar Is The Place To Drink Some Wine

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FOR: PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE
BY ALEX MARSHALL

PARIS — It was with some trepidation that I first walked in off the sidewalk into the small establishment on the narrow Rue Daguerre near Montparnasse with the words “Bar A Vin” written across its front glass window. It was 11 p.m. on a Wednesday night, a strange hour. In Paris, it was neither late, nor early. An uncertain hour.

I had been headed home to my nearby hotel bed, having eaten a full dinner down the street and decided I needed a good nigh’s sleep. But I couldn’t resist the pull of this small restaurant. Inside, I could see people huddled around the small bar, talking and laughing while they swirled liquid in glass goblets.

I was about to enter what I would discover was one of the better examples of an institution that still exists in Paris, the wine bar. Ranging from fancy to casual, it’s a place where you can order a variety of carefully-chosen wines by the glass, and talk with both staff and customers about their various merits or lack of them. The environs can range from fancy crystal and tablecloths, to dirt floors. They are a great place to sample a lot of wines, and gain a familiarity with different regions and grape varieties.

My wine bar had bare wooden tables and no formalities. In fact, the “Bar a Vin” seemed a step back in time. The customers, mostly in their 30s and 40s, were dressed without any fashion in particular. It had a tile floor, a pewter metal bar, and an old coat rack in the corner. A soft yellow light spread across the whole restaurant, giving everyone a soft glow.

But it also had the air of a thoroughly neighborhood place. Everyone knew each other, or so it seemed. When I entered, everyone turned and looked at me, a tall, obviously foreign, stranger. They weren’t smiling.

The waitress behind the bar, who was pretty in a kind of timeless Gallic way, with a thin face and aquiline nose, came over and said shortly in French, “What do you want.” I had hardly had time to even glance at the blackboard where the names of ten red and ten white wines were scrawled.

“Give me a minute,” I stammered. She shrugged and walked away. When she came back, I ordered a glass of “Chinon” quickly, thrown off by her bluntness.

Chinon is the region in the Loire Valley named after the city of the same name there. Made with Cabernet Franc, the wine can be like a Bordeaux in its better years, that is austere and flavorful. But this one tasted mostly just austere.

As I sipped the wine, I looked around the restaurant. This was a place for people serious about wine. The half-dozen men and women grouped at the pewter bar were having fun, laughing talking and of course smoking. But they were taking their wine seriously. At each swallow, they would sniff deeply of the glass, tilting it to the side so as to favor one nostril. This seems to help odors penetrate one’s head more deeply. Once the liquid was in their mouths, they would aerate it by sucking air through it, which makes a gargling noise.

After Chinon, I tried something called Vin D’Ardeche. This was a small named region inside the Cote Du Rhone. The wine was marvelous, really special. It had a huge, intense jammy taste, with little tannins. It was similar to an Amarone from Italy, with its raisiny full taste.

I was starting to make inroads with this crowd. The guy behind the counter, who was the manager, recognized I wasn’t a complete slob. He poured me some “Saumur,” the red wine from the Loire valley, and I won points when I noted that it was made with 100 percent Cabernet Franc grape.

The manager seemed classically French. Years of drinking wine had not given him the bulbous nose and layers of flesh sometime typical of wine lovers; instead, it had cured and condensed him. He was lean, with dark hair and a taught face showing a 11 p.m. shadow.

Beside me, an older man, dressed more formally dressed in a tweed sport coat, was talking intensely with the bartender. He turned out to be the owner of the Saumur vineyard that had produced the wine I had just tried. He started talking very animatedly to me about his theories of wines and vineyards.

The Loire Valley has traditionally been considered too cold to produce wines as good as Bordeaux and Burgundy. But global warming, he said, would change this.

Then he started criticizing American wines, particularly those from California. They were, he said, like a woman who used too much perfume. They deliver the “attaque spectaculaire” that unexperienced wine drinkers liked, but which was similar to a woman who wore too much perfume. The odor you were appreciating was more of a created effect, rather than the natural odor, like the natural scent of a beautiful woman.

I was grateful to this Frenchman for conforming to national stereotypes. Not five minutes into a conversation about wine, and he was comparing them to women. Great! I considered running further with this metaphor. Could California wines be considered like their women? Too “easy”? Did French wines require more finesse in their approach, as did their women? I had better stop such thoughts.

I was feeling better. From the tall, awkward, foreign stranger who they looked at suspiciously, I was now the tall awkward foreign stranger who they looked at with some amusement.

The wines the restaurant served said a lot about wine drinking in France. The establishment served almost nothing known to your average American wine drinker. I had noticed this trend in other restaurants and brassieres I had visited. The famous wines were too expensive for daily drinking.

I wrote down the red wines the “Bar a Vin” was serving that night: St. Joseph, Alsace Pinot Noir, Patrimonio, Chinon, Bandol, Cote du Rhone, Cairanne, Vin D’Ardeche, Anjou Village. These were regions, not grape varieties, as is the tradition in France.

I asked the bartender why he didn’t include more well-known regions. “Because Burgundy and Bordeaux are too easy,” he said. “You open a book and there they are.”

In Paris, Hubris and Humility. Both Have Their Merits

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When it comes to urban design, the French have a unique ability to use heavy-handed state authority to produce systems that are technologically and aesthetically advanced. When successful, their state-trained engineers and civil servants produce stunning urban systems, like the TGV high-speed train network, that combine high technology, artistic elegance and coordinated efficiency. This can be seen not only in the TGV system, which has helped keep Paris a center of Europe and thus economically vital, but also in the country’s state-run nuclear power system, and its phone and electrical systems. Even the arching brick tunnels of the city’s 19th century sewer system are elegant.

When unsuccessful, however, the French way can produce grotesque white elephants that seem to emerge unchanged from the heads of their designers, and then lay flat upon the earth, unloved and unlovable. The modern La Defense office district outside the central city illustrates this possibility, an immense complex devoid of urban energy.

A recent visit to Paris confirmed all of this, again. As New York moves forward with the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site, as well as the continual renewal of the city itself, both examples are good to keep in mind.

The new Meteor subway line and the surrounding development districts show French urban design at its best. This number 14 line runs from the heart of old Paris on the Right Bank to the new Bercy office district, then under the Seine to the “Bibliotheque Nationale Francois Mitterrand,” the new national library built on the Left Bank. The French have not only designed a great subway line but have used it as an instrument of urban development.

The Meteor trains are completely automated and operate without drivers, probably one reason the line has the lowest operating costs in the system. The individual cars of a train are linked by rubber gaskets, like the long accordion-style buses in New York. The entire train is open to walk through, which distributes riders more efficiently and provides a feeling of openness. The train whooshes into stations behind a glass wall that protects those on the platform from the open pit of the tracks. Once in the station, the doors and the glass wall magically open in unison to allow riders to enter or exit. The stations are architecturally ambitious. The Gare de Lyon station includes a jungle-like garden that blooms behind glass directly behind the platform. I was impressed by all of this, although not as much as I was three years ago, when I rode the Meteor shortly after it opened. Since then, the New York subway has been improved with new trains and ongoing station renovations, and so the contrast between the systems this time was not as great. Still, the new Meteor line, and the Paris metro system as a whole, has an elegance and verve that New York doesn’t match.

Alan Cayre, supervisor of the Meteor line at the French transportation authority RATP, said his agency gives architects more authority than is typical, and that his office keeps aesthetics in mind from the beginning. Even the pylons on the elevated portion of a new light rail line, he noted, were designed by architects.

The Meteor has two goals, Cayre said: “To ease congestion on the number one line, [the city’s oldest line which runs directly through central Paris], and to be an instrument of development for the new Bercy district and around the Biblioteque Nationale.” I interviewed Cayre in his elegant office in the Bercy district overlooking the Seine river, with the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame visible in the distance, as well as the new glass-fronted offices beside the Austerlitz train station directly across the river. Like many French officials, Cayre spoke little English and I stretched my uneven French around the subject of urban design.

Cayre’s offices, with their blond wood walls, and the building itself, which is the new home of the RATP, are themselves examples of the French inclination toward bold urban design. I complimented Cayre on his wristwatch, which had a gray face on which simple black strokes marked the hours.

“Oh this,” he said. “This is no big thing. It was done by one of the designer of the Meteor line, someone who has unfortunately passed away.”

Clearly, Cayre cared about design. I felt like I could draw a line from his watch to the sleek hallways of the building, to the high-tech glass walls of the Meteor line which his office supervised and constructed. It was hard not to compare Cayre’s offices with some of those of the New York City Transit I had seen, which were standard, uninspired office cubicles.

The French have poured billions of dollars into the districts connected by the new transit line, in addition to what was spent on the Meteor itself. It is their effort to jump-start development in the areas that their planners believe are ideally suited for Paris’ future growth.
Contemplating these development districts, I wondered how New York would change if it conducted urban design in the French manner.

Consider Long Island City in Queens. For decades, the state and city have talked about developing this district that lies directly across the East River from Midtown Manhattan. But apart from some modest design improvements, the authorities have done little more than rezone property, which in itself took years. Under the French model, the state and the city would have already poured billions into designing and implementing a master plan.

Of course all this costs tax money. In fact, the French could only build the new Meteor line because there is a payroll tax that funds transportation, as well as national financial support for the regional entity that runs the metro system.

The pitfalls of French urban design can be seen in the rapidly aging La Defense office complex on the outskirts of Paris. Completed in the late 1980s under Mitterrand, the complex is a stunning example of architectural purity and efficient urban design. The complex’s imaginative hollow-cored, rectangular office tower, the Grande Arche, lines up with the axis of the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs Elysees. Every aspect of the French transportation system, from highways to subway to bus to intercity rail, connects underground beneath this complex.

Above ground, ambitiously-conceived office towers sprout from a wide plaza, as well as new residential towers. Its development was a 40-year story, and its roots are in the Le Corbusier inspired ideal of towers on a park or plaza. As a watercolor drawing, or a model in Styrofoam, the complex is breathtaking, its ambition laudable.

But in person, this complex is stunningly dead.

“I come here only to work,” said Claude, a welldressed man I talked with as he walked across the plaza. “To get together with friends, I go to Central Paris. This is only to work.” Ant-like people make their way across vast plazas. Below ground, people listlessly shop at a central shopping mall. “Feels like Albany,” to paraphrase a remark about the initial WTC site designs, could not be more accurate. Where is the “energized crowding” that defines great urbanism?

Traditionally, this has taken the form of great restaurants, stores and cafes along sidewalks on traditional streets. I have no problem with abandoning these old forms, as long as some successful new forms can be found to take their place. Are there any?

With about 20 million square feet of office space, 140,000 workers and 33,000 residents, the La Defense district is larger in size than the former World Trade Center complex, but in the same ball park. The French claim it is the largest office district in Europe.

It’s difficult not to see La Defense as a giant warning sign to the designers sketching visions for the WTC site. If built, would any of the designs presented at the Winter Garden in December produce “energized crowding?” It is hard to keep this in mind as one reacts viscerally to the imaginative forms seen in the scale models now on display. I instinctively loved Daniel Libeskind’s proposal. But what would it feel like to walk across his plaza built below grade as part of a memorial complex? Would it not swallow up any single person or even groups of people? The Corbusier ideal of towers in the park has supposedly been discredited, but most designs for the WTC site have their roots there. The one exception, the Peterson/Littenberg plan that reinstalls the old streets on the site, may be condemned as “traditional.” But does any other plan address the site on the finer-grained level necessary to produce vital urban space, as well as a great skyline? The old World Trade Center, despite having some merit as a pair of skyscrapers, lacked energy as an urban space. We appear to be on our way to building a new one that may be equally antithetical to vibrant city life.
Given the financial resources being made available to the WTC redevelopment, New York should be able to emulate French urban design at its best, rather than its worst. I see a great new transportation hub, architecturally ambitious, that links to vital new urban spaces featuring the best of contemporary architecture. Can anyone get us there?

–Alex Marshall, Senior Editor, Regional Plan Association
First Published Jan. 6, 2003 in Spotlight on the Region, RPA newsletter.

A New City Rises From Berlin’s No-Man’s Land

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By Alex Marshall and Sally Young
Globe Correspondents
11/5/2000

BERLIN – The guard tower and wooden sign over the street warning ”You Are Now Leaving The American Sector!” were still there, as was the narrow bridge over a ravine, where prisoners, dissidents, and spies were exchanged. But beyond these carefully preserved memorials to another time and era, it was difficult to distinguish the famous Checkpoint Charlie from any other intersection in this bustling city. Now, what was once a bleak no-man’s land has been recarved into streets and blocks. And on these streets, new buildings have risen up, many of them designed by the best, or at least the most famous, architects on the planet. Within a two-block radius of Checkpoint Charlie, Aldo Rossi, Philip Johnson, Rem Koolhaas, and Peter Eisenman have all tried their hand. Widen that circle further, and you encounter buildings by Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Rafael Moneo, and Richard Rogers. We had traveled to the new Berlin to see this new city being remade, the choices its leaders faced, the ones they made correctly, the ones that might be regretted in future years. We were the Loeb Fellowship, all 13 of us, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

For a week we examined this city from the inside out, often with personal tours by top planners and architects. We saw a new city coming out of the ground, spurred on by the torrents of money, both public and private, rushing in to fill the blank spaces now that the dikes of communism and the Cold War have been broken and breached. For a traveler, Berlin is a great place to spend a weekend or a week, particularly if you like contemporary architecture. But it’s also a great place to eat spicy German sausage from street vendors, drink great beer, shop for high fashion, and people watch.

What’s more, with the dollar at an all-time high, it’s surprisingly affordable. Eating at a nice restaurant, staying in a hotel, is much less expensive than in Boston or New York. How to get across the reality of the New Berlin? It’s as if 50 blocks of mid-town Manhattan had been forcibly cleared, and left vacant for 50 years. Then one day, development rushed back in. Signs still remain of this city’s remarkably violent past. Walk in almost any older section of the city, past the domed Reichstag or on the elegant Friedrichstrasse, for example, and you’ll see pockmarks, dents, and chips, left over from the bullets and shrapnel that shattered this city.

They are evidence of when a mustachioed-man in this city started, and then lost, a war that consumed more lives than any other in history. It left this city destroyed, and divided. It is finally reuniting, physically, culturally, politically, and socially. Even so, divisions remain. A local architect told us that few West Berliners would go to a restaurant in East Berlin, and vice versa. West Germans, raised under a capitalist democracy, say East Germans are lazy. East Germans, raised under communism and now suffering high unemployment, say they are treated like second-class citizens. But these divisions should blur as this city takes on its new role not only as the political capital of a united Germany, but as one of the commercial and cultural capitals of the European Union.

A wonderful place to begin a tour is a gentle cruise down the river that bisects the city. You can take in the highlights of the city in just an hour or two. Do it on the first day you arrive, while you are still jet-lagged. It’s a nice, undemanding activity. There are several boat companies and itineraries. A good one leaves from the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Cultures), conveniently located in the city’s central park, the Tiergarten, on John Foster Dulles Alle 10. The Number 100 bus stops there. This Number 100 bus, a double-decker, is another easy way to see the city. A regular city bus, it winds through the Tiergarten, around the Brandenburg Gate, and down to Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Alexanderplatz, a stark modernist plaza reminiscent of Boston’s City Hall plaza, once had banners draped from its surrounding tall apartment towers proclaiming the triumph of socialism. Now, neon signs for Sony and other multinationals adorn them.

At Alexanderplatz, you can take an elevator to the top of the ornate radio tower, the Berliner Fernsehturnc, visible throughout the city. It gives you a 360-degree view of Berlin and its environs. After you take in the view, buy the brochure, Berlin: A Panoraminc View, at the Ferneshturm gift shop. It is a great guide to what to see when you are back on the ground.

In general when traveling throughout the city, be sure to use the great public transport system. It is a four-part system: the S-Bahn (Bahn means train) or aboveground trains are great for sightseeing, the U-Bahn or underground trains, the yellow local trams that are only in the former East Berlin, and the buses. You can buy passes good for a day, several days, or a week. The system is extensive.

Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for The New York Times, recently observed that the nation’s largest city lacks much ambitious contemporary architecture. The same holds true for every American city, including Boston. It’s hard to realize how true this is, until one sees the shapes, colors, and materials used in Berlin. And they are used not just for fancy museums, as is the case here, but for offices, apartments, embassies, public buildings, and department stores. Pretty much any place is a good place to start. Directly across from our hotel, the Savoy, for example, was the Ludwig-Erhard-Haus, the home of the Berlin Stock Exchange. This dramatic building, designed by British architect Nicholas Grimshaw, has floors that are not erected, but suspended from two giant steel arches. But there are some architectural must-sees, including the areas around Checkpoint Charlie, the Brandenburg Gate, and Potzdamer Platz. All three are places of enormous new construction. The Brandenburg Gate is the giant ceremonial arch, similar to Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris. During the Cold War, it stood naked, stripped of its urban context. With the reunification, the city has reconstructed the elegant Pariser Platz that fronts on the Gate. Being rebuilt on and around this classic public square are the American Embassy, the Hotel Adlon, the Academy of Arts and other buildings. To accommodate the American Embassy’s security concerns, the city had to alter its setback rules.

Frank Gehry, currently the country’s, and perhaps the world’s, most famous architect, designed the DG Bank on the square. From the outside, it meets the city’s design guidelines that new buildings have stone facades, rows of exterior windows, and height and massing similar to the historic buildings that once occupied the square. But inside, Gehry has stuffed the building with an amoeba-like auditorium, that is vaguely like a fish, covered with steel and glass. It is a definitively weird structure. It’s as if a glass and chrome tumor erupted in the middle of a bank’s grand lobby. A beautiful tumor.

The Potzdamer Platz, until destroyed in World War II, was a Parisian-style meeting of six major boulevards in a star-shaped intersection. After the war, it stood vacant for 45 years, a monument to cold-war tensions. Today, it is being built anew. Mostly finished now are the huge agglomerations built by Sony and DaimlerChrysler. Architecturally, these complexes are stunning. The Sony complex by Chicago-based architect Helmut Jahn features a double glass wall building that merges into a huge plaza under a high-tech canopy. The Daimler complex includes a brick-clad skyscraper, a shopping mall, the Daimler headquarters, apartments, general offices, an IMAX cinema, a Broadway-style theater, a hotel and other functions. In all, the Daimler complex, whose master plan was by Renzo Piano, takes up 19 blocks, with buildings by Piano, Rafael Moneo, and Sir Richard Rogers. The diversity of the materials and shapes is stunning. But the overall feel is corporate, bland and controlled.

The two corporations own and maintain many of the ostensibly public streets and spaces. At the Sony Center’s central plaza, we asked our guide what would happen if one of us passed out political leaflets for, say, a local city council race. We would carry you out, came the quick reply from a security guard at the guide’s elbow. This somewhat Orwellian interchange indicated the degree of control exercised over these public spaces. One public architect associated with the projects called them a high level of failure.

As part of the Potsdamer Platz reconstruction, the state is building a new regional railway station at the Platz, all underground, where three types of rail service, basically local, regional, and national and international, will meet on three levels. Its gleaming structures, which we saw under construction, were a testimony to German planning and design.

For any architecture lover in Berlin, an indispensable guide book is ”Berlin: Open City, The City as an Exhibit,” available in English and German in most bookstores and news kiosks. Its skinny, blue covers are stuffed with information, including maps and architectural details on every major building.

Of course, one can look at architecture while strolling, shopping, and eating, all of which can be done aplenty in Berlin. You can check out the fancy shops on the grand boulevard Friedrichstrasse, the gardens and fancy shops around Savignyplatz in West Berlin, or the Soho-like charm, galleries, and fancy shops of Hackescher Market.

Savignyplatz is a small park through which pass many of the central streets of West Berlin’s downtown. Some of the fanciest shops in the city are here. Eating is good too. The Paris Bar (on Kanstrasse between Fasanenstrasse and Uhlandstrasse) is a famous Berlin institution that has been in existence for about 40 years. The owner is a serious art collector and the place is filled with art, much of it from the regular patrons. This is a good place for people watching.

Be sure to check out Depot at Bleibtreustrasse 48 for cosmopolitan European home and garden furnishings. Mechtild Stange, the proprietor, has a well-trained eye for good design, and the prices are affordable. Also check out Art and Industry, at Bleibtreustrasse 40, which specializes in furnishings, jewelry, and pottery from the ’50s.

Another favored haunt is Literaturcafe on Fasanenstrasse just off Kurfurstendam next door to the Kathe Kollwitz Museum. The spacious garden is a perfect spot to spend an afternoon reading or sketching. There is a good bookstore below the cafe, and there are frequent book and poetry readings in the cafe.

Under communism, the Friedrichstrasse in East Berlin was a shadow of its former self as the premier shopping street of the city. Now, rundown buildings are being renovated and new ones built. The new ones include an almost block-long Galeries Lafayette, the French Department store. This grand center is worth seeing as much for its architecture as its superior shopping. It features a hollow-glass core, shaped like two ice-cream cones placed mouth to mouth, around which one can stand and peer into the building’s multiple floors.

Hachescher Markt, just over the river from the Friedrichstrasse, has more old stone buildings that have yet to be renovated. This district of narrow streets and crumbling buildings has a Soho-like flavor, with its mixture of galleries, shops, and restaurants.

A bit further out is the Kathe Kollwitz Platz in Prenzlauerberg, a classic European square with mixed low-rise residential buildings, restaurants and bistros with outdoor cafes, galleries, and antique shops. Fewer tourists have discovered this area, so you can feel smug about having done so. This is an in place for students, and is on the S-Bahn.

Although strolling is nice, pedaling is great too. Bicycling is a wonderful way to see Berlin, and the inhabitants do it a lot. You can rent bikes behind the Zoogarten Station at the entrance to the Tiergarten and bike around this lovely central park with a stop at the biergarten at the Neuer See (Lichtensteinalle).

Eating is perhaps the purest expression of German culture, and one of the most intimidating to outsiders. At lunch one day, we watched as one of the more adventuresome of our group was served an enormous pink football of what appeared to be pure fat. But she sliced into it, peeled back the inch-thick layer of fat – and revealed a glistening center of moist roast pork. Ahhh, German food at its best. Course, meaty, and intimidating. This dish was called Schinken-Eisben. It was the butt of a pig, shrouded in its own fat, and cooked with sauerkraut and potatoes. It was being eaten at the Wirthaus Moorlake (Moorlakeweg 1, tel. 805-58-09), a lovely old timber-framed lodge overlooking a peaceful lagoon. It is a few miles outside Berlin, in a major public park well off the tourist track, but actually accessible by bus.

If you aren’t ready for Schinken-Eisben, eat some wurst at the glorified hotdog stands that abound on the street. The vendors serve their sausages not on a roll, but cut up with toothpicks on a paper plate, with just a smidgen of bread on the side.

If one is not into German food, though, you can do as Germans do, and eat Italian, Asian, or French food. There is plenty of it. Germany is more like America, in this regard, in that many natives disdain their own cuisine and reach for those of other countries.

What else can be said about this lovely city? That it’s still inventing itself. In another decade, the giant cranes that fill much of the skyline will be gone. The residents will settle into using their new train lines, parks, and buildings. And the world will see in what fashion this city resumes its place as one of Europe’s great capital cities.

Alex Marshall is a freelance journalist and author of ”How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and The Roads Not Taken.” Sally Young is the coordinator of Harvard’s Loeb Fellowship at the Graduate School of Design. This story ran on page M1 of the Boston Globe on 11/5/2000. Copyright 2000

The above is a story that ran on the front of the Travel Section in today’s (Sunday) Boston Globe. My friend Sally and I wrote it, based around our trip there last May.