DC Metro: A Record of Reinvigorating a City

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

Love (and Hate) That Metro

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

By Alex Marshall

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

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

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

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

Everyone’s a critic

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

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

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

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

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

Corrugated cocoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chutzpah at work

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

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

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

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

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

Quirks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not Paris

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

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

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

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

Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At the station

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

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

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

Without the subway

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

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

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

What’s ahead

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

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

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

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

Way out there

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making Elections Matter

During the six presidential races in my adult lifetime, I’ve lived in three states – Virginia, Massachusetts and New York – that collectively have 31 million people and 58 electoral votes.

But despite all this political muscle, I can’t recall ever seeing a campaign ad by Reagan, a local appearance by Carter or a policy spin by Dukakis. No, each presidential race has been like a distant battle, watched with interest but not something I was a part of.

Why is this the case, given the populous, wealthy states I have lived in? Because our nation has something called the Electoral College, an antiquated system designed in the 18th century for reasons immaterial to our goals now. During the last election, we heard the machinery of this system grind and spark for more than a month, before it crankily spat out a “winner.”

Just days ago, we saw this “winner” — George W. Bush — put his hand on a bible and take the oath of office even though he lost the national election by more than a half million votes. That’s a good reason to scrap the Electoral College and replace it with a direct election.

But it’s not the only reason. The other reason is that, even if the system produces a clear winner, it usually causes candidates of both parties to ignore most of the states in the country, and the concerns of their voters.

The Electoral College, in most states, awards the all-important electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. Consequently, if a state is solidly in one column or another, neither candidate pays it any mind.

Virginia has always been one of those states – voting solidly Republican for most presidential elections since World War II. Consequently, candidates largely ignore it, because they have little chance of changing the outcome, and thus winning additional votes.

During the presidential campaign last summer and fall, I lived in Massachusetts and New York. These states were solidly for Al Gore – so both Gore and Bush ignored them too. Which meant they ignored me!

I’m tired of this. I’m tired, I realized, of presidential candidates not caring whether or not I vote for them. My situation, and I expect my sentiments, are shared by millions if not most voters in the country.

In this last campaign, Bush and Gore directed their money, time and ads at voters in a half dozen or so “swing” states, including Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Most importantly, they altered their positions on the issues to affect the vote in these key states

Because Pennsylvania has a lot of hunters, Gore softened his position on gun control, even though most Americans favor it. Gore won Pennsylvania, so he probably made the right choice – for himself. But the country lost.

It seems unlikely that we will get rid of the Electoral College completely. Like our system of allocating senators, the Electoral College gives disproportionate power to less populated rural states. Wyoming, which has about the same population as Virginia Beach, has two senators and a congressman, and three electoral votes. These rural states are unlikely to support switching to a system that decreases their power.

But we can change the system for the better, even if we keep the Electoral College itself. We can change it in such a way that would decrease the chance of producing a president that has lost the popular vote, while prompting candidates to pay attention to more areas of the country.

This change would be for every state to copy Maine and Nebraska, which right now allocate their electoral votes by congressional district, rather than on a winner-take all basis. In Maine and Nebraska, a presidential candidate gets one vote for each congressional district he wins, and two electoral votes for winning the state as a whole.

If every state did this, it would turn presidential races into a race of congressional districts, rather than state against state. This would produce a more finely grained campaign. Bush and Gore would not have ignored California, New York and Virginia, as they did in the last campaign, because there are too many congressional districts where the race is relatively close. Under such a system, you would have seen a big state like California break up into a patch-quilt of votes for either Bush or Gore.

Indeed, given the diversity of different regions around the country, you might start seeing true national campaigns, rather than the pseudo ones we have now.

One possible objection is that such a revised system might make it even more likely to have tie votes, because you could have as many close elections as there are congressional districts and states: 485. But we can still improve the machinery of voting. And if counting the votes takes a bit longer, well, we saw no real harm come to the nation, even though the last election was not over for a month.

A merit of this type of electoral reform is that you do not have to amend the U.S. Constitution Each state has the power to alter its own system. The federal government could provide some sort of incentive, as it does with so many programs from highways to health care.

Virginia should act now. I bet residents would enjoy being a part of presidential campaigns, rather than distant spectators

In Praise of TV by Someone without One

The Powhatan Review, Norfolk, Va.
1998 issue
By Alex Marshall

Missing ‘Ally McBeal,’ ‘The Simpsons’ and HBO’s ‘RealSex,’ and how much one is missing, is the issue. Ten months ago my wife and I threw out our television, in a fit of highbrowism, and now we are without.

The question is time. It’s becoming clear to me, disturbingly so, that my time here on earth is limited. In what remains of that time, what do I want to do with it?

The problem with television is that it is always there. When we had a television, it would beckon to me from its perch on the third-floor of our townhouse, ‘Come watch awhile, why not, see what’s on?’ You’ve heard its voice, I’m sure. When I had a TV, the most dangerous time period was between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. Wandering the house, a bit wired, unsure of bed, my wife Andrea already asleep, I would find myself before the box, clicking from channel to channel, always saying, ‘I’m just going to be here for a few minutes to unwind.’ Two hours later, at say 2.30 a.m., I would stagger downstairs, my eyes burning and my brain with it, having digested God knows what. When I awoke the next morning, I would have a hangover as if I had stayed up drinking. Without a television, I am a changed man. Trim. Fit. Sounder of mind and body. I have cast the demon rum out of my house and am better for it. I think.

The problem is, I happen to like a lot of what’s on television. I approve of television in the specific. I’m not talking PBS. I’m talking ‘South Park,’ ‘The Larry Sanders Show’ and ‘Chris Rock.’ They are all cutting-edge stuff — funny, experimental and enlivening. Dramas like ‘NYPD Blue’ and ‘Homocide’ arguably have better writing, and are closer to the shifting shoreline and dangerous waves of emerging culture and society, than most movies, even independent, art house movies. ‘The Simpsons’ is better political satire than anything I have seen at the movies since ‘Bob Roberts.’ The ‘X-Files’ is a better work of science fiction than ‘Armageddon.’

But absent TV, I have time for other things. For one, I read more. In the last six months, I have read both The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1,500 pages), and The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (800 pages.) I may not have made it through either if I had something else to do after dinner. My life is richer for having read both books. I am starting to understand ‘Empire’ better, whether it be an attempted Nazi empire or the actual British ones; how our lives are determined by the political context in which we are born, and how in the past and still in the present, those political contexts are determined by the usually quite amoral struggles of groups of men and equipment to gain predominance over land and other people.

That’s a more important ‘get’ than the latest clever plot from the X-files.

But still, I ambivilate. To tell you the truth, I really don’t feel that much like reading at night, when I would otherwise be watching TV. I write for a living, and so I’ve usually spent much of the day staring at words, either my own or someone else’s. At night, I kind of feel like sitting back and being visually and aurally stimulated. I also dislike being cut off from the zeitgeist, to use a once trendy word, of popular culture and politics. I even miss the ads on television, being a big fan of the design and thought that goes into them.

The only time I really feel like reading at night is in bed, before I go to asleep. But I usually only last a few minutes, before sleep calls. When I read earlier in the evening, I feel vaguely anxious. But without a TV now, I soldier on more, at my perch on the couch, non-fiction book in hand.

Of course, it’s not as though my life is without visual stimulation. Absent a TV, I now walk the four blocks to the Naro movie theater at least once a week, and sometimes two or three. The Naro in July had the Warner Brothers Festival of Classic Movies. I managed to see 10 of the 33 shown. But movie watching is different than TV watching. With movies, you commit to it. You decide to leave the house, go to the theater, and see said film. Then you go home. One does not drift into watching a film in a theater. Then there is the technology. A friend convinced me that TV is harder on the head because it is beamed directly into your eyes. With a film, you watch reflected light. The movie projector isn’t aimed at you, like a TV. It’s aimed at a blank sheet on a wall, which one then views. It’s a less aggressive form of technology.

What bothers me is that it seems as I grow older, I have to increasingly plan my life. I read once that actors, as they grow older, have to do consciously what was once intuitive: a gesture, a portrayal of emotion, a reaction. I feel the same way about life. It seems that as I age, I have to plan things that once just happened. If I want to ‘hang around with friends,’ then I have to schedule ‘hanging around with friends time.’ It doesn’t just happen. I used to just pick up my guitar and play at odd moments, including learning new songs. Now, I contemplate scheduling a set period for the act. Reading was once something I just did. Now, I have a loose schedule: newspaper reading at breakfast; magazine reading at lunch; non-fiction before dinner and at night; fiction before bed.

I guess what I resent is having to be an adult. To have to be fully conscious and responsible for my own actions. I still want to be age 10, where life was a room I played in, without thought of where it came from.

Television fits into this, or doesn’t, because, despite my affection for the medium, I can’t quite work it into my schedule. If I start watching TV again at night, when will I read that new non-fiction book I wanted to get through? On the other hand, I dislike missing all those neat new shows on the tube. It seems unjust that I can’t do everything.

I leave where I came in. Undecided. I may go out next week, if Andrea will let me, and buy a big-screen TV and place it prominently again on the third floor. I would like to think that I could work out a plan to watch it more selectively, to limit the late-night forays. But I know that would take a plan and some discipline, both of which I often lack.

We’ll see. In the meantime, do you mind if I drop over your house tonight, say about 8:00 p.m.? ‘King of the Hill’ is coming on, and I just wanted to catch it this once. I promise not to stay long. Really.

When the big guns fail, here’s a secret weapon in the battle against warts

Published: Monday, August 9, 1993
Section: DAILY BREAK , page B1
Source: By Alex Marshall, Staff writer

THE STORY OF HOW I conquered and vanquished the strange, alien-like creatures that marched and multiplied across the soles of my feet for a decade may not be nice, it may not be pretty, but it needs telling, for those who face similar struggles need hope, examples that glory and victory comes to those who persist.

They – the warts that is – first appeared in the late 1970s. There were just two at first, right under the ball of each foot, so I felt them when I put my weight down.

I went to a dermatologist, the one who treated my teenage zits. He carefully froze them with liquid nitrogen and sent me on my way.

But the warts came back. Nitrogen worked on one or two warts on my thumb and hand, but foot warts were like Japanese guerrilla fighters, refusing to give up their positions even under the most withering fire.

So I did what I often do with long-term problems. I ignored them.

But they did not ignore me. While I finished college, lived in Europe for two years, taught high school, traipsed through Central America, became a writer, went to graduate school, got hired as a reporter and got married, my warts continued their slow march across my feet.

They were more persistent than Kempsville suburbs.

As the 1990s began, I found myself with, it’s hard to admit, more than 30 warts on the bottoms of my feet. Pea- to nickle-sized. I know, it’s disgusting. I fill with self-loathing just talking about it.

Still, I might have kept on ignoring them, but my wife was beginning to look at me funny. And they hurt when I walked.

So I declared total war. It was the only way I would get rid of them, I told myself. No pity. No quarter given. Lasers were the thing, I told myself. Move in the big artillery.

But the laser doctor, a dermatologist in a brick medical bunker on First Colonial Road, had bad news. I had so many warts that a laser would take off about half my foot along with the warts. I would be in bed several weeks afterward, maybe more. And it would be very painful.

So he recommended a different strategy. Weaken the bastards with liquid nitrogen and acid for a few months, then club them over the head with a laser.

Trouble was, my super-hardy warts didn’t weaken. They seemed to thrive under the acid and nitrogen as if I had been sending them to a health club. Eventually we moved up to acid so strong that the dermatologist handed it to me with shaking hands and elaborate instructions on how to avoid burning holes in my head or car.

But the warts didn’t flinch.

I was getting worried. What if these things crawled up my ankles to my throat? I was really having problems walking at this point. The treatments had made them larger and more painful.

My dermatologist, who was an open-minded kind of guy, had an idea. Let’s attack the beasts from the other end of your body, your head, he said. Biofeedback and hypnosis had been used with some success to train people’s bodies to reject warts and other skin problems.

But a guy at Eastern Virginia Medical School told me, after testing me with various gizmos, that biofeedback would probably take six months of daily sessions and cost thousands of dollars, most of which my insurance would not cover.

I didn’t like it but decided to try it. And curing warts through biofeedback and hypnosis would be a pretty good story. But that’s not what happened.

My wife visited a local chiropractor, Dr. Carl Nelson, bless his name and soul forever. She mentioned my wart problem, and he recalled a treatment he had heard about developed at the Mayo Clinic.

Here it is.

Soak your feet in hot water, he said, for 15 minutes a night for two weeks. Take 100,000 units of Vitamin A a day, only start this a few days before the hot water treatment and continue for just one week. During the treatment itself, take at least 1,000 units of Vitamin C a day. After each treatment, rub liquid vitamin E on the warts.

The theory was that warts were viruses. And as viruses, heat should kill them. The vitamins somehow boosted the process along. This was a ridiculous notion, and I had no faith in it. But I tried it.

Every night I soaked my feet in a plastic tub. I couldn’t stand the 118-120 degrees Nelson recommended, only about 112 degrees. I used the vitamins he recommended.

My crusty foot crustaceans didn’t change during the treatments, but a week or so afterward, I noticed all the warts had turned black. And then they slowly shrank, leaving my feet wart-free in a few weeks.

As they are right now, more than a year later.

All this leaves only one question.

Who put together the massive conspiracy of laser doctors and dermatologists to keep this simple, cheap treatment a secret?

My laser guy, who I called with the news, was actually pretty interested in my treatments and not that surprised. He said the Vitamin A might have as much to do with it as the hot water. This vitamin had had some success in spurring the body to gather its defenses together and beat skin problems. Because my body essentially rejected the warts, I was now probably immune to them, something that doesn’t happen with lasers. So why hadn’t he mention it?

Well, he said, most people, believe it or not, get angry if they come for a simple laser cure and you tell them to take a hot bath. And Vitamin A, taken in large doses for too long, could be harmful.

The lesson of all this, besides the inefficacy of Western medicine, is that if you work at something long enough, you may win in the end. Even against warts.

David Gunn, Amtrak Prez, Speaks His Mind

David Gunn, the current president of Amtrak and the former head of New York City Transit, has had and will have great impact on transportation within the Tri-state region. In the 1980s, he dramatically improved the city’s then failing subway system. In 2002, he took on the similarly Augean task of improving the nation inter-city rail service, whose largest user is the New York region. In this excerpt from a 90-minute interview with RPA Senior Fellow Alex Marshall, Gunn draws parallels between what he considered Amtrak’s shambled state when he arrived, and what Gunn considers the currently misplaced priorities of the political leaders who set the mission — and the budget — for this region’s transit service. In general, he urges the Tri-state region to not shirk its job of maintaining excellent transit service, even while it pursues new services and projects. His sometimes sharp words are a bracing challenge to those who value high-quality transit, and must decide how to achieve it.

BEGIN
Alex Marshall: Here in New York City, you were known as the guy who, as president of New York City Transit, turned around the subway system by focusing on the nuts and bolts of the system. What are the nuts and bolts of Amtrak?

David Gunn: Well, you know actually Amtrak’s situation is very similar to the situation of the New York City Transit Authority, it’s just that the geographical spread is much greater. But in terms of the nuts and bolts, they are almost identical. Amtrak has suffered from years of deferred maintenance. The car fleet was allowed to deteriorate; heavy overhaul ceased years ago. Wrecked cars were just parked; they weren’t repaired. The locomotive fleet was in a little better shape, but a portion of our electric locomotives were ignored. The track structure, the parts we owned, was terribly neglected. The whole system was gradually becoming unreliable, and we were faced with the situation New York had in the 1970s and 80s, with slow corridors and the like. So we put together — we even used the same terminology — A-State-of-Good-Repair Capital Program, so you have overhauls and heavy maintenance being done on the car fleets and locomotives on a regular basis, and you start getting the track and the infrastructure back to a state of good repair.

A.M.: It’s surprising to me that there’s that much deferred maintenance in the Amtrak system, given the relatively heavy political attention put on Amtrak over the last decade.

Gunn: But the attention was all bullshit! It was political attention on this self-sufficiency notion and other wild ideas, which weren’t going to happen. Nobody was paying attention to basic maintenance. When I got here, they couldn’t even tell me how many ties they put in last year. I kept asking that question. “Well, what did we do last year? How many ties did we put in, how much rail?” And all they could give me were dollars figures.

This is what happens to institutions — and it happened in New York — when they get consumed with reorganizing, reforming and oversight. Instead of going in and fixing the basic problems, and actually taking the resources you do have, which may be inadequate, but putting them to work

The problem is that people don’t like to pay attention to the nuts and bolts, ’cause it’s not sexy. But you have to balance the two. And unfortunately — and I don’t know if it’s human nature or just the American Way — but everybody gets focused on the big sexy projects and ignore the basics. It’s like the Transit Authority right now, people think it’s fixed, right? So people start to think, now we can play games, now we can do Second Avenue, now we can do Eastside Access, now we can do the new Penn station at the Farley building. And they forget the nuts and bolts.

A few weeks ago, I rode a subway train in New York to get to an event. It took me one bloody hour to go from Penn Station to Borough Hall or Jay Street on the A train. The train I rode was an R-32, and the last time that train was heavy overhauled and painted inside was when I was there. Now it still ran pretty good which is a credit to the guys in the shops. But the fact of the matter is the subway is getting dirty. Even the new trains don’t look so hot. That system was spit-shined back in the nineties. And this is all because the attention is being focused on sexy stuff and not on the basics. I’m not criticizing the management of the Transit Authority. They have done a superb job of surviving in this environment. It’s the politics and the oversight that’s getting it fouled up.

A.M.: What about the Second Avenue subway or the new Moynihan Station. Do you think we should just ignore those?

Mr. Gunn: I’m not saying the 2nd Avenue subway is not important, Alex, it is. But what’s happening in New York is that the basic maintenance of the existing system is not being pursued. It’s under funded and they’re living off the capital that was put in years ago. . . If they keep going with what they’re doing, they’re going to have another crisis. It’s unbelievable actually. You’d think people would learn from history.

The same thing happened at Amtrak. Everybody got all wrapped around the axle with ideas that we’re going to leap into the 21st Century with TGVs [a reference to France’s high-speed trains, known by their initials “TGV” for “Train of Great Velocity”] and high-speed corridors all over the United States. Meanwhile, we weren’t putting in any new rails on existing lines. We weren’t overhauling cars. There was a total disconnect in terms of where this place was headed, between the nuts and bolts, and what the rail proponents focused on. To some extent, I’m being critical of the rail proponents, because they have this idea that the nuts and bolts will take care of themselves. And that is wrong.

A.M.: Are you saying we shouldn’t invest in the latest technology? What’s wrong with truly high-speed trains?

Gunn: It is not helpful, in my opinion, to engage in these flights of fancy where you’re going to build TGVs all over the United States. We do not have the technical capabilities for doing it, we don’t have the manufacturing to support it anymore, and you don’t have the people to run it.

A.M: What about France? They have a large and growing network of true high-speed trains, which go 200 mph.

Gunn: But they’ve been working on their train system since the war. For sixty years, they’ve been incrementally creeping up on speeds on electrification, on cantenary design, on locomotive design. In the United States, which was the leader at the end of World War II, you can’t even buy a coupler that is made in the United States. You can’t just take this super sophisticated technology from over there, and bring it here and make it work. Because, I mean, you have to have people who actually have a toolbox and can stand there and make it work. This is what the big thinkers — planners and other people — often don’t get. This is not a detail. It is a critical component of having a good operation.

A.M.: Where does Amtrak fit into the overall transportation policies of this country?

Gunn: There are areas where the cheapest solution to congestion is high-speed rail, or at least higher speed rail. I’m not talking about flights of fancy and the TGVs. I’m talking about you get a P-42, which is one of our diesel locomotives and can run 110 mph. You get the track fixed, you get the signal system fixed, and clear enough control points and passing sidings, so you can run reliably frequent service, like in the Northeast corridor. And this actually will save the government money. I mean, can you imagine building highways to carry the mobs of people that go over those rails in the Northeast Corridor?

I mean look at places like California — it’s becoming a nightmare. Try to go from L.A. to San Diego by highways certain times of the day it’s a bloody parking lot. We got the little old San Diego line, which is single track in a lot of places, and it’s handling over two million people a year. People on trains are zipping by people on the freeways. And yet some people in Congress act as if these are unimportant assets.

Obviously out in the boonies you’re not going to have passenger rail because there’s no volume. But when you get into congested areas like Chicago, St. Louis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Portland, Seattle, LA, San Diego, Sacramento, Oakland, San Jose, the highway physically can’t do it. It’s not even a case of money. There’s no place to put all the lanes you would need. Not to mention that to add lanes to most interstate highways in urban areas, you’re talking billions and billions of dollars, for just a few miles.

A.M.: Why is the Amtrak Acela Express so slow going to New Haven on the first half of the New York to Boston run?

Mr. Gunn: What’s happened on that line is that it used to be a four-track railroad from New Haven to New York City. Then a while back, the MTA made a terrible mistake. It ripped up one track North of Stamford, so it’s down to three tracks. I was there when they did it, and I said to them, “You will regret doing it.” But they did it anyway, and then what happened is they suddenly realized they had to replace the 1910 cantenary line. It is 1910, original stuff — the first mainline electrification in the World, and it’s still there. We got cantenary poles that are almost 100 years old on the Hellgate Bridge route. And so, what they did, then they had to take another track out of service. And then, the whole corridor is fragmented. It’s run by MetroNorth, owned by MetroNorth, but North of Stamford, it’s dominated by ConnDOT [the Connecticut Department of Transportation], so ConnDOT is dictating the speed and the pace with which they’re doing the wiring. You only got double track from Stamford to New Haven. It’s physically impossible some days to run the trains through there on time. Then you hit New Haven, and you go 130, 140, 150 miles an hour.

The tracks North of Providence are owned by the MBTA [Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority]. The whole thing is a symptom of the fact that you would never have had the fragmented ownership of the corridor if the Department of Transportation in Washington had known what it was doing.

A.M.: Any chance of the service on the Boston/New York line improving any time soon?

Mr. Gunn: I think if you talk to ConnDOT, they say it’s a 10 year project. The thing is, it’s a highway department.

A.M.: What do you think about some of the big projects proposed for the New York region, like the proposed second tunnel under the Hudson River.

Mr. Gunn: As long as it’s part of a logical whole, I’m in favor of it. I mean, you need that stuff. Rail access from the South is at capacity. Right now, any increase in rail access is out of the question to New York City, because the tunnels are at capacity during rush hour. So you have to start thinking about this stuff. But you got to take care of the nuts and bolts as well.

And the problem is that every time you start talking about the bigger stuff, everybody assumes that you’ve taken care of nuts and bolts. It can’t be an either/or, which is generally what’s happening.

A.M.: You seem to be criticizing having a vision.

Gunn: I think that having a long-term vision on this stuff is actually vital. But if it isn’t rooted in solid incremental improvements in terms of the nuts and bolts of the management, and the skills you need to pull it off, you’ll never get there. Instead you’ll get a lesser vision, or a nightmare. The point that I’m trying to make here is that you need to know where you’re trying to get to, but you have to have the baby steps identified to start you on the road to get there. And so often, all you get when you’re dealing with planners, is the vision thing.

Romance Novel – To A Man – Reads Like Female Porn

Published: Thursday, March 3, 1994
Section: DAILY BREAK – page B1 Source
BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER

My JOURNEY into romance novels began with an article in one of my favorite magazines, Whole Earth Review, the San Francisco quarterly that regularly runs against the mainstream current.In that issue, budding romance novel writer Augusta Wynde defended the chunky paperbacks featuring pectorially well-endowed young men like Fabio on their raised inset covers. These books sell in phenomenal numbers, she pointed out, yet are virtually ignored by the mainstream press and literary world, more so than other types of genre fiction such as mysteries, detective or science fiction.

“Reading bad detective novels is considered mildly eccentric; reading romance novels is evidence of irreversible vapidity,” Wynde said. “The New York Times Book Review regularly reviews mysteries, and occasionally reviews science fiction, but never reviews romance; the very idea seems almost embarrassing in its silliness.”

It is sexism, Wynde said, adding that women read romance novels, and the male literary world dismisses the books because of that. Playing around with guns, Wynde said, is more respectable than playing around with good-looking young men who might rip your bodice. Romance novels, Wynde said, get their power by using “heightened emotional intensity, not action.” So putting down romance is putting down emotions.

This seemed like a good argument to me. Maybe the romance novel really was misunderstood. Plus, I’ve always been interested in the contours of the female psyche. So I plucked off the grocery store rack “Sweet Liar” by Jude Deveraux, an author whom Wynde recommended.

“Her characters are entertaining and sympathetic,” Wynde said of Deveraux.. “She has a knack for wonderful fantasies. She’s immensely popular, and she deserves it. Her prose is uncluttered.

The royal-blue cover showed a jeweled broche and said, “The Dazzling New York Times Bestseller.” A note about Deveraux inside the back cover said more than 20 million copies of her books were in print.

The plot was this: A woman in her late 20s, Samantha, reluctantly travels to New York to search for her lost grandmother. In New York, circumstances force her to live in the same townhouse as a friend of her dead father’s, 30-year-old Michael. (In “Sweet Liar,” circumstances always force Samantha to do something.)

Samantha and Michael end up playing detectives and searching for the lost grandmother. The heart of the novel though, was Michael’s tortuously slow conquest of Samantha. For no apparent reason, Samantha was intensely hostile toward Michael, and he had to slowly break down her will, chapter by chapter.

Not a bad plot. But there was a strange hot-house air about the novel, especially in the descriptions of Samantha and Michael. It was as if I’d entered a room I wasn’t meant to be in. It reminded me of something.

Then it came to me. The novel reminded me of reading explicit sexual writing aimed at men, like the Forum section of Penthouse magazine, where readers detailed their supposed sexual exploits.

Romance novels, it hit me, were female pornography. As with male pornography, it was for women a generally private world, where unbelievable things were free to happen purely as a backdrop for something else. In Sweet Liar, Michael kissed Samantha in the street before they were introduced to each other. It was like in Penthouse when the airline stewardess offers herself to a passenger after a minute’s conversation. They also both objectified the opposite sex to an extreme.

Wynde’s thoughts that romance novels were really emotional dramas didn’t hold up to me, at least not with this book. Samantha and Michael seldom developed or interacted on a true emotional level. The romantic interplay was mechan-istic.

The feverish portrayal of courtship also revealed something about women, or at least about some women. In Sweet Liar, Samantha was a spoiled, brattish child. She treated Michael atrociously, often kicking, slapping and elbowing him. Michael not only put up with her, he showered her with gifts like designer clothes. (Samantha, though, didn’t figure out that Michael was spending thousands of dollars on her. She lived in this protective fog of ignorance, although she wasn’t meant to be a stupid woman.) Michael had his own faults. He would often manhandle her, preventing her from leaving rooms or shoving her along.

Lovers of romance novels, it seems, have, in their fantasies, a taste for passivity and a hint of violence.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with reading romance novels. A fantasy is a fantasy. But it’s interesting that descriptions of courtship may occupy the same place in the female psyche as descriptions of love-making do to men.

I don’t know how Sweet Liar turned out. The story pulled me about halfway through but then I stopped. I couldn’t stomach any more.

Mergers Or No Mergers, It’s Time To Re-Regulate The Airlines

I write this from the terminal of the Boston International Airport. I am about to board a small prop plane to Harrisburg, Pa, the state capitol. Given the plane’s small size, and my largish one, the ride will be uncomfortable. Not only will my 6’7′ frame be crammed into a tiny seat, but the propellers will sound like an electric shaver next to my ear for an hour and a half. Winds will bat the plane around as heavy seas do a rowboat.

For the privilege of this unpleasant ride, I am paying US Airways $851. Luckily for me, the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are reimbursing me, because their state legislature is flying me to Harrisburg to give my views on highways and suburban sprawl.

It has been more than 20 years since President Jimmy Carter and Alfred Kahn, chairman of the now defunct Civil Aeronautics Board, began deregulating the airlines. It is time to face facts about this experiment: It has failed. Every single aspect predicted by the advocates of deregulation has gone the opposite way. Competition, the theory went, would increase the number of airlines, increase the number of direct flights, make ticketing easier, and bring simpler, and lower fares.

At first, the theory seemed true. In the early 1980s, low-cost carriers like People Express offered short- to long-distance flights for pocket change. But in the ruthless consolidation that followed, these carriers were driven out of business. Now, a handful of oligarchic airlines reign over the skies like despots. Many smaller markets, like Harrisburg, have seen their air service, something vital to their economic health, ruthlessly extorted by one or two airlines. Flying has become unpleasant, uncomfortable, unpredictable and expensive. Passengers have no guarantee what they will pay, or under what conditions they will have to pay it.

The recent proposed merger between US Airways and United Airlines would do nothing to address these problems. It would probably make them worse. As it happens, these two airlines are already the only ones flying to Harrisburg from Boston. Their already vicious level of competition — I could have flown United and paid $856 — has not exactly produced affordable service. The problem with the airline industry is not mergers or no mergers, but the relative freedom airlines have now to engage in predatory capitalism with their customers.

A few weeks ago, I watched that classic movie from the early 1970s, The French Connection with Gene Hackman. At one point, the local New York villain suddenly decides to fly from New York to Washington to meet the mysterious Frenchman. The film shows the bad guy walk up to the Eastern counter at the airport, and say, ‘One ticket to Washington, please.’ The clerk says, ‘That will be $40, please.’

And that’s it.

Can you imagine something so simple nowadays? Forty dollars to fly from New York to Washington, at the last minute. Even with inflation, that’s pretty good. And consider what the villain did not do. He did not call seven, 14 or 21 days in advance to get this price. He didn’t have to stay over on a Saturday night. He wasn’t required to pay $75 if he changed his return date, or buy a whole new ticket at full-fare if he changed his departure date. He bought the ticket from ‘Eastern,’ one of many defunct airlines. That flight now to Washington from New York would cost $311. And that’s a bargain, considered what is being charged to smaller cities like Harrisburg.

Airlines executives frequently state that average ticket prices have declined in the last 20 years. But, as Robert Kuttner showed in his book Everything For Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets, prices declined even faster during the era of regulation. And average prices don’t take into consideration the economic costs of unnecessarily extending stays through a weekend to get a lower fare, or not being able to easily change one’s schedule. Nor do average prices consider that fares have increased enormously in some markets.

There is a way out of this mess: Reregulate the airlines. Reestablish the Civil Aeronautics Board, or some newer equivalent, which would set routes and fares. We would once again have a reasonable, stable system of air travel. Although Sen. John McCain and others have introduced passenger ‘Bill of Rights,’ few have contemplated complete re-regulation. They should.

People often forget that private airlines depend on a system of publicly financed, publicly-maintained airports. In giving these over to airlines to use as they will, it’s as if we had given over our public highways to a handful of taxicab fleets, who were allowed to charge whatever they wanted, and on whom we were completely dependent.

Americans have fallen in love with the idea that competition makes everything cheaper and better. This is not always true. With air travel, it’s time we returned to the days, like in those old movies, when the nation’s air travel system served its passengers, rather than only the profits of a dwindling number of airlines.

Alex Marshall, an independent journalist, is the author of How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl and the Roads Not Taken. He writes frequently on transportation.

The Demolition Man

by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

When The New Urbanism Meets An Old Neighborhood

by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
May, 1995

East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, is a neighborhood on death row, awaiting execution by bulldozer. Residents are being forced from their homes to make way for a brand-new village designed by Andres Duany. If this sounds like old-fashioned urban renewal, well, that’s what it is. It employs the same logic: cities can be fixed by plowing down neighborhoods and replacing them with better buildings and wealthier folks.

The presence of Duany adds a twist. As a partner of Miami-based Duany/PlaterZyberk Town Planners, he is an acknowledged leader of the New Urbanists, the self styled white hats of contemporary architecture who seek to reform America’s wayward landscape. Their remedy is as much moral as it is aesthetic. They believe that traditional town planning – by which they mean a grid of streets lined with trees and front porches, studded with shops and parks – can heal the nation’s fractured sense of community. In East Ocean View, however, the New Urbanists’ championing of the ideal of community is being put to the test. In essence, Duany is now facing the same charges that smeared the Modernists he so disdains: Is it people he cares about – or buildings?

The drama is being played out in a city of a quarter million, the center of a metropolitan sprawl inhabited by 1.4 million. Over the last few decades, Norfolk has lost a third of its population, while the suburbs have boomed, tripling in size. Although the city has a huge commercial harbor, it’s still basically a Navy town, relying on the massive Norfolk Naval Base and related installations to pump dollars and jobs into the economy. For almost half a century, Norfolk has been looking for ways to stem the tide of white flight and bring the middle class back to the city. Since the early 1950s, huge chunks of the city have been bulldozed; many lots remain empty, awaiting private-sector investment that has never materialized. At the moment, the city is leveraged to the hilt in a variety of downtown renewal schemes, including a suburban-style mall supported with $100 million in loans and free infrastructure.

In East Ocean View, bungalows, duplexes, and brick apartment buildings sit on a grid of streets on a peninsula sandwiched by the Chesapeake Bay and one of its estuaries. For decades, people have speculated that it could be a prime piece of real estate. In late 1993, not without controversy, the Norfolk city council approved a plan concocted by the housing authority to purchase 100 acres. The bulldozers have already bit into a few of the roughly 350 buildings that make up more than 1,500 homes. The city hopes that a new neighborhood, aimed at the middle and upper classes, will both rid the city of social problems and help its tax base. It’s undeniable that the present neighborhood has its troubles. Prostitutes loiter at certain intersections; young men in bulky jackets handle a brisk drug trade with passing motorists. But as residents will tell you, it’s one of the few places in the Norfolk metropolitan area where a working-class family can afford an apartment within a block or two of the beach. It’s also one of the more integrated neighborhoods, about two-thirds white, a third black, mixed pretty evenly. The homes range from neatly tended to boarded-Lip and abandoned.

The locals include people like Barbara Caffee, who with her husband has owned a house there for 30 years and raised a family. Her small home includes a basement they added themselves, plus an addition where her mother lives. Caffee, who is president of the neighborhood’s civic league, says flatly that they won’t leave. “I would understand eminent domain if they were going to put in schools or roads,” she says. “But to take down our house to build a home for someone else? I don’t understand that.”

The Caffees are among the few home owners there. Most residents rent, including Claudette Durclen, a 27-year-old nurse’s assistant who shares an apartment with her eight-year-old daughter. Durden says her biggest concern about leaving is her daughter. “She has friends across the street, friends out back, and friends across the road,” the young mother says, pointing from her balcony. “It would be hard having to start all over.”

Duany’s design for East Ocean View sharply reduces the total population of the neighborhood, a paradoxical path for neotraditionalists, who usually extol the advantages and efficiency of high density. Instead of 1,500 homes, Duany’s village has between 400 and 600, ranging in price from $70,000 to $500,000 or more – beyond the reach of 95 percent of the current residents. The new streets and buildings are meticulously laid out and designed. In classic neotraditional styles, the proposed town houses and fancy homes sit close to the street, side by side. About the only things the plan retains from the existing neighborhood are the trees; they’re needed to lend the new development some character and to provide a windbreak against ocean breezes.

Since the city is not using federal money, it is not required to assist residents in relocation. The housing authority has promised three months of free rent, and will bump any resident who requests it to the top of the public housing waiting list. But the city has been quite explicit in its hopes that some of these people will just go away. When the housing authority first unveiled the project, it included an economic report estimating that roughly a third of the neighborhood’s citizens would leave town, thus saving the city money on social services and police.

The city council approved the project a year before Duany came to town. But partly because of the controversy, city officials looked to Duany for approval of their plans to tear down the neighborhood. One official described Duany as “the doctor” with ultimate authority to decide whether to save or amputate the “diseased leg.” During a week-long charrette held in a senior citizens center, Duany discussed saving a few homes, but decided against any guarantees. A completely clean canvas, Duany opined, was more valuable than saving homes for a few lucky people.

In the course of the charrette, Duany did not duck complaints from those being forced to move. Elderly couples sought him out, and he listened patiently to what they had to say. Then he explained why their homes had to be torn down to build a better, more beautiful neighborhood.

Duany’s argument rests on two main points, one financial, the other architectural. The most important consideration, he says, is that the new neighborhood would raise the city’s tax base. The sacrifice of low-income residents is for the common good of the city.

“I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say,” Duany says. “But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because they don’t pay taxes. They bankrupt cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick is to bring the middle class back to the city.”

Of course, cities need stronger tax bases and new ways to stem the tide of middle-class flight. Many of the original urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s were designed for that purpose. But there’s no evidence that such programs work any better now than they did then. Clear-cutting a neighborhood often exacerbates social problems by splitting up supportive relationships and scattering poor residents into new and unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes, that means the streets. Some of East Ocean View residents are refugees from past urban renewal schemes. Now they face the same thing all over again.

Duany’s support for the project seems to clash with certain core values of the New Urbanists, many of whom are inspired by the philosophy of Jane Jacobs and her methodical critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Further, Duany’s New Urban vision for East Ocean View comes at the expense of what is already an urban neighborhood. It’s got a street grid, with a variety of building types and a mix of incomes. One of the city’s best restaurants, and virtually the only building likely to be spared, is in East Ocean View. The buildings are not all situated according to strict neotraditionalist tenets, but the basic parts are there. The neighborhood is urban not only in its buildings, but also in the way the community interacts. This is not some cul-de-sac haven of isolated citizens. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you see a group of friends in T shirts, their young children in tow, heading to the beach with a six-pack of beer to enjoy a summer afternoon.

Outsiders often express surprise that the city is pursuing such an old-fashioned strategy. But Norfolk is something of an anomaly, as David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, freely admits. “Cities lost enthusiasm for redevelopment in the Sixties and Seventies,” says Rice, almost boasting. “Except for Norfolk. We pressed on.”

It’s hard to see what advantage Norfolk has gained by this persistence. Likewise, it’s hard to tell how Duany reconciles his professed faith in urbanism with his actions in East Ocean View. His flip architectural assessment of the homes people are being turned out of seems narrow and ill considered. Cities are not defined by buildings alone; they are made up of an intricate web of relationships- physical, social, economic, cultural- that are rooted to places. The trouble with cities is that there are so many forces tearing these relationships apart. You would think architects would have learned by now to be healers, not wreckers.

Eurosprawl

METROPOLIS MAGAZINE
JANUARY/FEBRUARY ISSUE, 1995
BY ALEX MARSHALL

[Editor’s note: This version of the article “Eurosprawl” is slightly different than what ran in Metropolis Magazine in January 1995.]

The cheese selection was enormous. Giant wheels of Gruyere, tiny pucks of Chevre and every other sized cheese in between were stacked on refrigerated shelves that ran half the width of the store. The wine, separated by region of course, took up one-and-a-half aisles. This nod to French cuisine in this discount supermarket the size of a football field was one of the few indications you were in Lyon, France, and not say, Connecticut.

The supermarket anchors the Auchan mall, a low-slung rectangular concrete box that sits off the A43 freeway heading into Lyon. It’s a typical mall in most respects, surrounded by parking lots and various European mega-stores like Toys R Us and Ikea.

Nicole Depardon, Veronique Tassa and her mother Michelle, ages 35, 33, and 56, come to Auchan about twice a month. On this sunny weekday, the three women sit on a backless bench in the mall’s low-ceilinged central hallway. While the three women chat, the three toddlers with them each sit in the top drawer of a shopping cart, legs dangling, munching French fries.

“We love it here,” says Depardon. “It has everything we need under one roof. The prices are low.”

“And you’ve got free parking,” Veronique Tassa says.

On another mall bench sit Catterine Christine, 21, and Castaldi Bruno, 28. They are munching pizza from cardboard boxes held in their lap. The two behave exactly like the classic inhabitant of an American suburban office park. They not only come to the mall for lunch, but they drive here as well. The two make the 10-km trek in Bruno’s Citroen “almost every day,” they say cheerfully.

“We come here to eat, to look at the shops, it’s relaxing,” Bruno says.

About midway in the mall sits, Jaque Martin, a balding man in his 50s. Martin is at a bar called “L’Absinthe.” It is essentially a mall version of a sidewalk cafe, with customers sitting at small chairs and round cafe tables pushed out into the mall aisle. Matin is reading the morning paper, “Lyon Matin.”

“I come here about once a week to shop, and to relax,” Martin says.

These mall dwellers have the same relationship with the center city of Lyon that most Americans have with theirs – they don’t go there. None of these people frequent the peninsula of ornate buildings laced with expensive shops and museums five miles up the highway, much less live there.

“We never go to the center,” says Depardon. “It’s another world.” “It’s too difficult to park,” says Veronique. “We only go to the center when work requires it,” Bruno says. “Or maybe once in a while to stroll. About two or three times a year.” “I go less and less,” Martin says of the place where he was born and raised. “The traffic is too bad.”

Americans have long idealized European cities. But it’s taken on a new twist since World War II when the form and character of our metropolitan areas began changing so dramatically. Like workers in the field dreaming of the next life, Americans, harried on the freeways or sick of the mall have held a soothing pie-in-the-sky vision of places without the troubles and tribulations of our cities. Europe, most people believe, doesn’t have suburban sprawl, it doesn’t have vacuous shopping centers, it doesn’t have crime- and poverty-ridden inner cities, it doesn’t have the isolation of home, work, play and social life that seems to define American life. Architects and urban-planners have egged the masses on in this veneration. Like a parent lecturing their children about the perfect kid next door, virtually every book on the ills of American suburbia is sprinkled with asides about how Europeans still care about community, still value public spaces, still value lives built around the rhythms of a street built as much for feet as for tires.

Well they don’t. At least not as much as we think.

I must confess that I too, held such a mytholized image. As a reporter for the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk and Virginia Beach, I’ve made a living out of covering one of the biggest stretches of suburban sprawl on the East Coast. I had become an expert on the vagaries of shopping malls and the subcultures of the cul-de-sac. But I lived in one of the few remaining urban neighborhoods in Norfolk not leveled in urban renewal. There, I dreamed of a better way that I believed still existed on the opposite shores of the Atlantic.

What I found was that the Europe we see on the postcards, the shop-lined streets we pay to stroll on, is no longer the real Europe. It is Europe in a box, kept there to remind the natives of their pasts, to look pretty, to reap tourism dollars, while the life of the city goes on outside it. The real Europe is this Auchan mall, its nearby business parks and homes. The economic engines of the city are here, the commercial centers, the principal residential areas.

Viewed from an ocean away, European center cities look great. They have full shopping streets, functioning subways and bus systems, fewer muggers and murderers. And it’s true their problems still do not match those of American cities. Nor has the physical or spiritual distance between the center cities and the suburbs lengthened as much as in the States. But when cities in Europe are examined closely, you find, once you veer from the guidebook recommended streets, neighborhoods falling into disrepair and the city oozing outward in great quantities in a form that can only be called suburban.

The center cities that offer an opposite lifestyle are now isolated pockets of urbanism increasingly inhabited only by a marginal bunch of oddballs who hanker to such an existence or those who have no other choice – artists, a few rich people, students, junkies, immigrants, poor people. The rest of Europe is going for what Americans go for – the biggest house or apartment, as far away from anyone else as possible.

Eurosprawl takes many forms. It can be the unplanned bag of building blocks that ring Italian cities, or the well mapped out hierarchy of apartments, offices, train lines and bike paths in Scandinavia. In can be the La-Defense style mass of plazas and office buildings courtesy of central French planning, or the battalions of tall tower apartment buildings that guard the outposts of virtually every European city. But there are some common themes. Malls are one. They are the lingua franca of European shopping. Mainly it is separating living from shopping, working or virtually anything else – the very definition of suburbia.

As the European middle class discovers the suburbs, their center cities are quietly slipping into an American style decay. Their tax bases are weakening, their crime and unemployment rates rising, their populations shrinking.

Lyon is a good example of the real Europe. The second largest city in France, Lyon is a go-getter, something of an Atlanta or Houston in personality, (if Atlanta or Houston had 2,000 years of history.) It is ambitious and insecure at the same time, always looking for ways to point how it’s better than Paris. The city has drawn into its orbit various European headquarters, including Euronews, (Europe’s answer to CNN,) and Ikea’s European distribution center. The TGV high-speed rail line from Paris to Lyon is now more than a decade old, and the city opened this summer, with great fanfare, a gulled-winged high speed train station at the city’s Satolas airport, designed by Catalan architect Santiago Calatrava. It’s the first combination air and high-speed rail center in Europe.

It’s center city reminded me of a mini-Paris. The historic section is mostly located on a long peninsula of land which has been carved into streets and parks, with rows of Beaux-art style apartments buildings. Seine-like bridges, complete with walkways underneath by the river, stretch across the water to the medieval sections of the city on the left bank. As in Paris, people talk of the right and left banks. One could spend a few weeks in this area, strolling its shopping streets, visiting museums, eating at its fine restaurants, quite content you were seeing Lyon.

But the region’s bustling economic activity virtually all takes place outside the historic city, or outside any area that could be called urban. Many company headquarters and important consulting firms are located in the city’s Part-Dieu, a La-Defense style collection of office buildings and a mall set on a sweeping concrete plaza, surrounded by suburban style boulevards and parking garages, and connected to the metro line. Others are in office parks like Porte Sud, Porte Du Rhone and Porte Des Alpes that are perched around the city’s freeway system. The center city is ringed with shopping malls – “hypermarches.”

Population figures give some ideas of the limits of urbanity. The Lyon metropolitan area has 2.5 million people. A smaller political entity called Greater Lyon has 1.2 million. The city proper has 420,000. Of these, only about 150,000 live in the urban areas of the center city. So of the region’s 2.5 million, less than 10 percent live in the urban core. Of the other 90 percent, only a fraction live in an urban style.

The city’s economic literature notes that the number of small neighborhood stores, defined as those with less than 400 square meters, has dropped from 14,000 in 1973 to 12,700 in 1990. At the same time, the number of stores with large floor areas tripled, to 448 from 147.

“There has been a general decrease in the number of local neighborhood stores,” the literature states, and “a trend towards large and medium-size supermarkets.”

The smaller towns that ring Lyon, once with independent economies, have blended together to form Greater Lyon. Their old town squares, while not abandoned, have been sucked of much of their life. Townspeople live in apartments or private homes outside the old towns and use the surrounding supermarkets and malls.

One evening I cruised through an exclusive suburb named La Terre Des Lievres set into a hillside 7 kilometers from Lyon. The winding streets wound around in a confusing fashion similar to American suburbs, yet different. The winding streets were narrow and lined with trees that formed a canopy overhead. Lots of speed bumps. Hedges hided tasteful split-level homes set into the hillside. It was deathly quiet. Not a soul in sight. A typically suburb. The neighborhood owned and maintained the streets, just like in some locked-gate Florida enclave. I was surprised a security guard didn’t kick me out. Lawyers, engineers and college professors lived there, said the people on whose doors I knocked.

“We like it here,” said a Madame A. Thomasse, a middle-aged woman wearing a crisp white T-shirt, heavy gold earrings and perfume, who stood in the doorway of her brick home. “If we need to go to the center, we have the metro nearby.”

And the hypermarche is right outside the subdivision entrance.

It’s true that European sprawl is not American sprawl. The European suburb remains tied to the center by some form of mass transit. At least a bus line, and often train, subway and bike lanes as well. This means that the overall stain of suburbia on the landscape is less than in the United States. In Lyon, you can travel from the Baroque City Hall to open farm fields in 15 minutes on a good day.

Europeans pay a price for this. In exchange for tighter more cohesive cities, they in general live in smaller, meaner spaces than Americans. They pay more for their washing machines and appliances, because there is less elbow room for a Wal-mart to elbow its way in beside the nearest freeway. Americans, with their uncontrolled development, have bought themselves the biggest living rooms and cheapest appliances in the world. Of course, they have also bought themselves monochromatic cities so dependent on the car that you might as well put yourself on an iceflow to die should you lose your ability to drive.

In looking for the perfect European urban city, I held high hopes for Northern countries like Holland, Denmark or Sweden. These homogenous, progressive, well-planned societies would certainly achieve the urbanity we in America had lost through our unplanned sprawl.

In some respects, the societies worked as advertised. Around Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Copenhagen, I saw how cities and central governments laid down train, tram and bus lines, and only then allowed developers to move in and build houses. The cities or central governments decided the form, density and style of new neighborhoods. Bike paths were everywhere.

But what they achieved by doing this was a more efficient suburb, not anything remotely urban.

In an area called Lyngby outside Copenhagen, the suburban boulevard I drove on had a wide bike lane, plus bus stops and a nearby train line. But it also had gas stations with slab-like roofs and the attached quickie-mart, McDonald’s with the mile-high sign, and box-in-a-lot office buildings. The neighborhoods off this main highways were cloistered groups of homes, protected by speed bumps and few through-streets.

The “Lyngby Storcenter” was a typical mall except that it was capped with a nine-story hotel. Like other malls in Europe, it seemed curiously retrograde in its design, with low, claustrophobic ceilings, stark lighting and unimaginative storefronts.

Shoppers though loved it. They had the familiar comments.

“I like it here,” said Brigitte Hajmark, 26, a cheerful blond holding a package of “Ricola” tea, who was in the mall atrium. “There are a lot of shops, you have everything here. I never go to the center. You can’t park there.”

Meanwhile, center city Copenhagen struggles with an armload of problems. The main one is that the middle class want to live elsewhere. Jens de Nielsun, assistant urban planning director, was candid about the city’s challenges.

“We have the oldest and the poorest housing,” De Nielsun said. “We have the students, the poor and the unemployed. The suburbs have the rich. We have the problems.”

The city has twice the percentage of unemployed as the rest of the metropolitan area, De Nielsun said. Since 1960, the number of jobs in the city have dropped from 460,000 to 310,000. The population had dropped dramatically, in part because of a planned program to de-densify the center city. In 1950, De Nielsun said, 770,000 of the region’s 1.4 million people lived in Copenhagen proper. Today, the city’s population has dropped to 470,000 while the region’s population has risen to 1.7 million. The city’s mix of old to young is exactly opposite the surrounding suburbs. In Copenhagen, 12 percent of the population are children under 16, and 20 percent of the population are over 66. Outside Copenhagen, 20 percent of the population is under 16, and 12 percent over 66 years of age.

“It is very difficult to make this a family oriented place,” Nielsun said. “It may take 50 years.

All these problems aren’t readily apparent when one is walking Copenhagen’s main shopping street. This all-pedestrian street, which snakes from the 19th century brick City Hall to the opera house, is crammed with tourists and overheated luxury shops. The side streets are full of trendy night clubs and Danish design stores. But outside this immediate ring of hipness one comes to long rows of warehouse-like brick apartment buildings. Despite a century of age, these long buildings with small windows and stark facades have acquired only a smattering of charm with time. They still look like what they first were – worker housing. The best are still working class neighborhoods, not trendy, but getting by. Others have plazas where drunks sleep, and are considered dangerous by the Danish.

This is becoming the standard pattern in many European cities. A city will often have an elegant shopping street that tourists visit. Nearby are noted museums, a cathedral. But around these bright lights are marginal neighborhoods that remain invisible to the average visitor.

European policy makers recognize this trend.

“Most of us do not need to be reminded again that our cities are in disarray,” said commissioning editor Suzanne Keatinge, in the introduction to the first issue of European Urban Management, published out of London in 1994. “We do not need more pages about urban blight, poor housing, poor education, inadequate health services, security and transport systems and a thousand-and-one other issues.”

This kind of talk is quite a contrast to the starry eyed wonder that many Americans view European cities. The standard diagnosis within Europe, says Catherine Stevens, executive director of Eurocities in Brussels, (European Association of Metropolitan Cities), is that Europeans cities could become as diseased as American cities if action is not taken.

Frankly, I doubt that. For many reasons European cities are unlikely to drop as hard or as far as American central cities. Super high gas taxes, bigger investment in mass transit, greater historical loyalty to the center, more tourism dollars per square foot and societies kept more united by stronger social systems are a few of the reasons. But they are heading in the same direction. A July 30 Economist article stated that Europe was on the edge of acquiring an American-style “underclass.” It noted that neighborhoods in cities like Frankfurt are now being judged as “dangerous” and places to avoid. The increase in immigrants and the rise in unemployment are polarizing many cities. A 20ish Copenhagener told me he loved the central city now but when he married, he expected to move out because he didn’t want his children going to schools where classes would have so many children from North Africa.

Despite the burden they bring in social services, it seems likely that immigrants are for the moment the last true urbanists, and the likely saviors of city of retaining any role other than that of specialized cultural and ceremonial centers. As in New York and other American cities, immigrants are often the last people who actually inhabit city neighborhoods, shop and work in the stores, and live there with their families.

I saw this in particularly close detail in La Chasse, a working-class neighborhood in Brussels. I had an apartment there, which served as a home base during my travels in Europe. These streets, which had lovely Art Nouveau apartments, were gradually being taken over by North Africans. The neighborhood was a short walk from the headquarters of the European Commission. But most of the Eurocrats chose to live outside Brussels, I was told. In La Chasse, the North Africans were gradually taking over the small grocery stores and cafes. In these places, they drank the good Belgium beer, but also served mint tea out of silver pots. Some of the bars retained a loyal Belgian clientele. But these folk, who worked with their hands in various trades, told me they were in effect the last of a breed. Most of their friends and family who could, they said, were moving to the suburbs.

Of course, the balance of urban to suburban changes from place to place. A key to the more urban metropolitan areas, I believe, is that they retain more manufacturing and dirty-hands type of industry within the central city. Despite its present status of an in-city, the central city of Barcelona is still a living, working city. The city’s lovely Eixample, the soft-cornered grid of largely Art Nouveau buildings laid out in the 19th and early 20th centuries, remains studded with small machine shops and purveyors of industrial goods. Next to a trendy, designer-conscious bar, you’ll find a welding shop. Even the city’s gothic quarter, which in other cities have become solely tourism-based, is a working-class neighborhood with small stores and businesses.

Walking on the western side of the Eixample off the Granvia de les Corts Catalanes, I entered what I thought might be a central courtyard inside a city block. Instead, I found myself in the middle of a printing factory. “Fotolitografia Juan Barguno Fotograbado” was etched in scrolly letters on smoked glass on an inner doorway. The factory was a typical Barcelona enterprise, family owned and in the same spot since 1925. The company had 36 workers, and a press that ran 24 hours a day. As I stood there, small forklifts carried stacks of materials on pallets ready for shipment on heavy trucks. All this was invisible from the street, where one saw only a lovely line of 19th century apartments.

The director, Ramon Barguno Bassols, a 3rd generation family member, though, gave me a reality check. Far from extolling the merits of running a center city factory, he told me they were planning to move out of town as soon as the economy improved. The city restricted the hours he could use his trucks, for example, and make it difficult for him to expand.

“A city is no place for a factory,” Barguno said. “It’s a place for offices, museums and residences. Factories should be in an industrial park.”

And even in Barcelona, it was easy to find people who dreamed of a life outside town, or already lived it.

Jose Maria Raig, 24, a stockbroker, works in a firm on the avenue “Diagonal”, one of Barcelona’s principal thoroughfares. He lives with his parents but when he marries he would like to move to the suburbs.

“I have a brother who lives in a smaller town with his wife and two children,” outside Barcelona, said Maria, who sat behind a desk wearing a short sleeve shirt with no tie. Down the hall, other men stood in a big room and shouted as stock prices flashed on a screen on one wall. “Life is better there. There are supermarkets, sporting centers, movie theaters, everything that before was only in the center. There are even discotecs. People like to live outside the center city. There is less noise, less pollution and bigger apartments. An apartment here can cost $200,000 to $250,000. Further out, you can buy a home for that.”

But it’s true that in Barcelona, I met more average people who lived in the center and intended to stay there.

“It’s a city of the middle class,” said Hermenegild Cabamillo, 34, a wholesale pastry seller, who lived with his wife and two children in an apartment in the Eixample.

“Even if you don’t have a lot of money, you can go to the beach or the park. There is the metro and the bus. You can get around. There isn’t a lot of crime.”

Jaume Moreno, the city’s urban affairs publicist, insisted the populace retained “a Mediterranean lifestyle” which still included habits like daily shopping and the mixing of work, home, commerce and play. Even so, Moreno still acknowledged that Barcelona has lost 150,000 people in the last decade. The Barcelona region now stands at 3 million, the city proper 1.6 million.

Whether the suburbanizing of Europe has reached some sort of plateau is difficult to predict. What seems likely is that cities will be less places to raise families and more places for a limited, rarefied set of population and activities. High commerce, art, intellectual trades will happen in them. Cities will likely always retain their role as the ceremonial centers of their cultures, even if they are no longer economic and living centers. It counts for something that, after decades of consciously trying to de-centralize and de-urbanize their cities, all the urban planners of the cities I visited had decidedly urban visions for their cities and regions.

Michel Ide, director of public spaces in Lyon’s urban planning department, basically dismissed the region’s tall towers, the Part-Dieu office district, the malls, as very large mistakes.

“There will be no more malls,” said Ide, with a wave of his hand. Instead of malls, Lyon is focusing on rejuvenating public spaces. Like Barcelona, Lyon is sprinkling statues and parks in neighborhoods. Again like Barcelona, Lyon deserves credit for spending money not only on the fancy tourist areas but on neighborhoods of tall towers and other unsexy spots where few people visit.

Copenhagen has plans to keep its neighborhood shopping streets, which cut through a variety of areas around the city, still functioning. Rather than prohibit malls, they are trying to funnel them onto or besides traditional shopping streets. It also has a multi-million dollar plan to renovate a seedy, but funky area of the city behind the train station called Vesterbrogade. The historic facades of the buildings will be kept, while the interiors will be gutted and renovated. In the past, the director said, the city would simply demolish such old neighborhoods, and rebuild at much lower densities.

Barcelona has a variety of ambitious, far-reaching plans. Most revolve around making the city more hospitable to families, and keeping jobs and industries sprinkled throughout the city. In its Gothic quarter, the city has selectively blown up blocks of thousand-year old buildings to create new public squares and open up the network of tiny dark streets to sunlight. It is a program that might set a preservationists teeth on edge, but it is an admirable example of an effort to keep a historic section of a city livable and not just a museum. It falls within the definition of “constructive urban surgery” advocated by the early 20th century urban theorist, Patrick Geddes. In the Eixample, the city has begun converting the interior of some block to neighborhood parks, which essentially was the original plan of architect Ildefons Cerda i Sunyer, who laid out the Eixample in 1859. In older industrial areas of the city, close to the Olympic village, the city plans to extend streets to reshape street systems back to Cerda’s original soft-cornered grid. All these plans are ambitious and purely urban in their vision.

But some plans may only accentuate a trend for the center cities to become largely ornamental in nature. Lyon illuminates historic buildings, streets and bridges at night with spotlights. It makes the city a wonderful place to stroll. The city is also requiring owners of historic buildings to paint them various soft shades of color, to give the street line a more harmonious feel. These are all very nice programs but there is a sense that as the center city becomes prettier, it becomes less relevant. I wondered, for example, how someone living in these spotlit buildings like all the light outside his windows.

Urbanism means more than just a style of building; it means a style of living. The notion of urbanity, to me at least, means a greater commingling of people and the ideas, activities and emotions that come with them. It’s implicit in the whole idea of a mixing homes, stores, restaurants, a school and a church in one city block. So far, no one has successfully found a pattern of contemporary development that replaces the street as a common ground for people. The mall is the one attempt. But its private space dedicated to commerce is a long step down from the public realm of the street, as many writers have already commented upon.

Writers like Joel Garreau, of Edge City fame, say suburbs are just an example of cities doing what they always do – forming around the dominant form of transportation. In contemporary times, that’s the car. I agree with Garreau. But even if suburbs are somehow inevitable, that doesn’t diminish their very real drawbacks. Suburbs really do isolate people. A mall is no adequate substitute for a public street, even if people are gathering in the malls. It’s not just nostalgia that has pushed architects like Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe to fame. People really are searching for someway to make the suburbs human. We may not have found it yet. So far, no on has found a way to replace the public street as a social gathering space. Maybe public squares and meeting places are as necessary to a functioning society as running water and flush toilets. So far, no one has figured out a way to conquer the peculiar economics of suburbia, which, even in Europe, favor the big over the little, the bland over the refined, quantity over quality. The economics of the places produces Wal-marts, McDonalds and IKEA, and not neighborhood hardware store and corner delis. It’s the greatest amount of stuff for the lowest possible price.

European cities are not dead. Even in a worst-case scenario, Europe’s center cities are not going to follow American ones down to the bottom of the behavioral sink of urban ills. But what does seem likely is that a much thinner and more rarefied set of activities will occupy them. The question is how or whether the printing factory should be kept in Barcelona. How or whether should the family that yearns for the cheaper, larger apartment outside town be kept in the center city? Even in Lyon, the center city retained a role as a cultural, social and intellectual capital of the region. Even it is only a pretty place to visit, it gives a nucleus to the region. The tragedy of most American cities is that they cannot fulfill even this limited role. Many central European cities are beginning to occupy a role similar to that of the French quarter in New Orleans. It’s a quaint, much loved district, vibrant on the basis of tourism, inhabited by a few subgroups like gays or yuppies, but otherwise not part of the city’s mainstream economy or life.

In general the health of center cities have become accurate thermometers as to the health of societies as a whole. The pleasures and the pains of urban life revolve around closer proximity to other human beings. A good city brings us corner stores, cafes, art and friendships. A bad city gives us crime, noise and dirt. When people cannot live together under a common social code, when inequities between rich and poor grow, when people rob and murder, the suburbs are more appealing.

Next time you visit Europe walk any classic city, say Copenhagen, Lyon or Barcelona, from the center out. You’ll start in the medieval section, with narrow tiny streets built for the foot. You’ll move into the Renaissance, where the streets widen for carriages and horses. Then you’ll arrive at the 19th and early 20th century, which gives you wide, tree-lined boulevards built for carriages and cars. Then you arrive at the latter half of the 20th century, where the streets. . . fall apart, lose themselves, become patternless. Streets defined cities, and streets, in the urban sense, are no longer being built. Cities may be like cathedrals. They can only be preserved, not expanded. It is possible that the age of streets, and so the age of urbanism, is over.

Alex Marshall examined the suburbs and cities of Western Europe over 10 weeks in the summer of 1994. His research was funded by a fellowship awarded by the German-Marshall Fund of the United States.