Poison on Wheels & Freight Trains Runnin'

Next time you see someone online raving about the wonders of the car and pretending it has no drawbacks, send them this image and link:

(You can read the article about the NYC Health Department's study at Streetsblog.)

Outside of the major gridlock zones (i.e. Midtown), the map above represents an almost perfect trace of the interstate highway system in the New York City area. These ribbons of dense truck traffic are literally stifling people with their noxious fumes.

Think about that, and then watch my new favorite TV commercial.

This brings me back to America's plan for nationwide HSR, and begs me to ask yet again: why invest trillions to connect far-flung American cities with high-speed passenger rail for intercity travel?? Freight travels a much longer distance than we do on a regular basis: an article at "Car Free in Big D" (one of my favorite blogs on the web) mentions that the average meal travels 1500 miles to arrive on your plate. Why not dedicate some more effort to improving and expanding our rail freight system?

Even better, how about targeting long-distance trucking on corridors that have parallel rail lines? Shipping companies are saving a few bucks to ship with their own trucks instead of using one of the major rail lines - but this comes at a major environmental cost, safety cost, and health cost to everyone. Even worse, these trucks degrade our highway system at many many times the rate of a typical passenger car. At the very last, the companies that ship by truck should contribute to this maintenance nightmare.

Think about it -billions of dollars so that people can get from Minneapolis to Chicago in less time, or a fraction of that toward moving more freight by rail?

What the People Really Want

A common argument by anti-New Urbanists and Smart Growth opponents is that form-based codes dramatically limit the freedom of property owners. Stylistic cues, height limits, porch requirements and build-to lines are stifling, anti-democratic, and downright dictatorial rules, or so the argument goes.

My parents just bought a home in a cookie-cutter subdivision in Vero Beach, Florida. As in virtually every South Florida gated community and in many neighborhoods throughout the United States, their new home falls under the jurisdiction of a homeowner's association. The avowed "free marketeers" who think that any form of centralized planning is verboten often praise these associations. They are local, responsive, and practically self-limiting, and the stakeholders have far more say in decisions than they would at a city or county level.

So you can imagine my surprise when I opened my parents' homeowners covenants and found the following statement:

The Architectural Review Committee does not seek to restrict individual taste or preferences. In general, its aim is to avoid harsh contrasts in architectural themes and maintain harmony between all residences to preserve and enhance values of the Properties.

In tamden with this succinct statement is a two page list of "architectural standards" that constitute a simplistic form-based code: materials lists, front door type standards, color choices, minimum roof slope, etc. Despite the freedom to do whatever they want in their small corner of the world, these homeowners continue to embrace a restricted architectural palette.

But to me, the true marvel of this code is its source. The vision of a unified yet varied community of homes came not from an architect or planner or from some top-down master plan. It came from the local developer and builder who set up the rules, implemented them in the homes it built, and passed them on to the homeowner's association.

So what's the deal? If categorically non-urban sprawl builders are freely imposing Smart Code-like limitations on themselves, and if homeowner's associations are maintaining and even strengthening these rules, why aren't NU and Smart Growth more universally accepted? To put it another way, why do the histrionics of sprawl supporters trump the tacit support for Smart Growth-like ideals already in place?

Is it a matter of an ad campaign? Connections to news media? Grassroots coalition-building and community awareness events? How do we quash those who rail against creating human environments that everyone already understands and loves?

Great Animation

Go here: http://students.washington.edu/zvs/the-block/

This is a concrete way of showing anyone and everyone what traditional urbanists mean when they talk about how much our cities lost during the 20th Century.

An American Piazza?

The public space of a car-dominated culture.

This friendly car park is at Illinois & State in downtown Chicago, only three blocks from Michigan Avenue and four blocks north of the Loop. Surely an exorbitantly valuable piece of property, even in today's economy. Imagine turning this into some sort of urban plaza with low-rise mixed-use buildings and three levels of parking beneath. If only we cared as much about public space as we did about parking our cars.

Nice Summation

This editorial in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel (posted at Streetsblog) expresses in layman's terms why many us of traditional urbanists pine for European cities. If I had to pick one article about urbanism and New Urbanism to give to Joe American, this would probably be it.

Visions of a Division

I went with a friend to the Museum of the City of New York two weeks back. The museum is located in a beautiful building facing Central Park at 5th & 103rd. After enjoying an exhibit on Manhattan before 1609, we left the museum and walked one block over to Madison Avenue to look for a place to eat and to head for the subway at 96th & Park.

What met us as we walked south on Madison Avenue was a startling transition. No matter how many times I looked at a map of Manhattan in my life (there's even one on the wall across from my bed at home), it never once clicked in my mind that the Upper East Side and Harlem are right next to each other. That's right - the toniest neighborhood and the most notorious neighborhood sit side by side. I was curious. What divided these two distinct zones? Would there be some sort of 'ragged', blended edge, or would there be a clear marker?

The answer, as with any question of this type, is multi-layered. First and foremost, Harlem is characterized by the misled "slum clearance" movement of the 1960s, in which blocks of mixed-use walk-up buildings were replaced by midrise towers in parks. Anyone familiar with Le Corbusier understands this type of planning, but to see the contrast in street vitality and urban life is striking:
This first photo is taken facing north on Madison Avenue midblock between 98th and 99th, looking toward Harlem.

This second photo is taken in the exact same spot as the first photo, except facing southbound on Madison toward 98th and the Upper East Side.

Locator map. Without even drawing the Nolli, you can see from the air how slum clearance rewrote the face of Harlem while leaving the Upper East Side untouched.

Four factors contribute to the abrupt shift, and the same four factors have prevented any portion of Harlem from slowly becoming the Upper East Side, or vice versa:

1. The Corbusian "projects" - they exist only in Harlem. South of 96th Street, the street grid is virtually uninterrupted. The fabric was almost never violated and looks the same as it was originally platted. North of 96th, the opposite is true: it is rare to see even 6 to 8 blocks of historic fabric along any one avenue without it being interrupted by towers in a park.
2. Street grid interruptions - created by the towers in a park parks.
3. An elevated train line - south of 97th, the principal rail artery leading to Grand Central Terminal is underground. North of 97th, the rails are elevated, and to make matters worse, they are elevated on a stone-walled embankment instead of a permeable structure. If the towers in a park parks and the hospitals weren't bad enough for creating divisions, this effectively cuts the Harlem community into two isolated parts*.
4. Two large hospital complexes - Mount Sinai Medical Center (which is between 98th and 99th where I'm standing) and Metropolitan Hospital (which fills out two blocks further east) act as giant roadblocks and dividers. They create single-use blocks with monolithic, and frequently uninviting buildings, with hardly any street-level interest.
   

Area map. Pictures taken from yellow mark. Mount Sinai Medical Center is the left red complex and Metropolitan is the right. Cross streets in blue (with 97th in purple). Notice how few cross streets there are north of 97th. From 97th south, not a single cross street is interrupted.

What lessons can we learn from this? Firstly, and the most obvious, is don't do towers in a park. Secondly, don't interrupt the street grid, and thirdly, if you have to have an elevated train, make sure its structure is permeable.

But I think one issue that even good urban planners might miss in their grand schemes is the problem created by the hospital complexes. Urban, governmental, and education projects have increasingly become fortified entities through which people (and cars) cannot pass. These impenetrable islands drain life out of their immediate surroundings. And here, they have helped to bitterly and uncompromisingly divide two different neighborhoods. There is no chance for that nice-looking intact urban block north of Mount Sinai to become part of the Upper East Side. The hospital is a veritable barrier to the natural ebb and flow that might have occurred in this area.

Even if the population as a whole is beginning to understand walkability as a concept, government leaders, religious leaders, hospital CEOs and school superintendents might still be under the impression that a hermetically sealed place is best. Going forward, we'll have to look for good examples of permeable or semi-permeable institutions. We need to show how "liner retail" can be applied to places like hospitals, as both good for the city and as a moneymaker for the hospital. Most of all, we must be ready to fight what is now a prevailing mentality about how places like these "should" be designed.

*Note: In case you're wondering, the change in the train line from tunnel to elevated is not a deliberate backhand to Harlem's collective face. North of 96th Street, Manhattan's topography quickly drops off into what was formerly a tidal swamp and creek. This area was filled in as the city grew northward to create more developable area, so it is considerably lower than areas directly to the south. Hence the change - Park Avenue falls while the rails stay at relatively the same elevation and become an elevated line.

Awesome Website

If you've got some time to kill online and you're a city buff, a history buff, a subway/train buff, an architecture buff, or you just like New York, go to Forgotten NY: www.forgotten-ny.com.

Be forewarned: it is entirely possible to spend several hours here, sifting through thousands of photos, articles, neighborhoods, and streets of the Big Apple.

Wasilla and Werdau

I saw two different photos of important government buildings in the past 24 hours. First, the City Hall in Wasilla, AK (Kunstler's "Eyesore of the Month" last month):

(from http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200907.html)

Contrast that beauty to today's featured image on Wikipedia, the town hall in Werdau, Germany:

The State of Architecture Elitism in 2009

The NY Times architecture critic released a story on the new Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington, Texas. Nicolai Ouroussoff is your typical high-brow avant-garde architect who pooh-poohs any attempt at traditional design, but I was happy to see his criticism of the location of the new stadium in the middle of Dallas-Fort Worth's endless urban sprawl. He pines for an earlier proposal that had the stadium located in a "more contained urban setting." This location would have spurred the revitalization of older historic landmarks in need of new life.

I give Nicolai kudos for actually caring about the city, and I think it shows how far the mindset of the architecture establishment has changed in the past few decades. Even the pure-bred modernists, the ones who give absolutely no creedence to using a brick or a cornice anywhere on a building, no longer dream about skyscrapers in the park or a fractured urban fabric.

I decided a long time ago that strict traditional architectural style was the least important feature of New Urbanism, and that if we could arrive at a human-scaled, traditional city and fabric, the architectural details could be in any style and work as long as they kept to the idea of a form-based code. When I visited Stapleton and Belmar in Denver, I was pleased to see that the designers had been more daring in their style, allowing large openings and new materials, including metal balconies, columns, etc. The places both worked because the architecture was consistent (in Stapleton, consistent by neighborhood) among the buildings as, reflecting a respect for placemaking and consistency of form.

For me the most unfortunate part of Nicolai's article comes at the end, where he makes a remark about the jumbovision screens that loom over the field. Noting that the screens are so huge that they have already gotten in the way of a punter's kick, he states "It’s a nice irony that for all the space, there may not be enough room at Cowboys Stadium to play a game." This remark signifies a major problem with (Post)Modernist thinking (as opposed to its style). If a building is anything, it absolutely must be useful. We can argue venustas and perhaps firmitas (maybe temporary buildings are more practical?), but if a building doesn't even make the cut of utilitas on day one of its life, we have a real problem. And rather than decry an astonishing functional fault in the building, Nicolai makes light of it, like a playful little architectural joke. I just finished reading From Bauhaus to Our House by Tom Wolfe, and while it is over-the-top in its romance novel-y journalistic flair, it points to the notion of 'irony in architectre' as one of many scholastic constructs that have made the profession so out-of-touch with reality. Twenty-eight years after writing, Wolfe would be sad to see that our avant-garde still thinks this way and is still trying to impose its will on the public.

Water, Water Everywhere...

A very important article about more industrial abuses shows us, again, that we are ruining our environment at an even faster rate than we can imagine - and this time it's water, our lifeblood. Just another victim of the pollution caused by the very unnatural, toxic and lethal ways we make things today... and the industries that shirk their legal and moral responsibilities all in the name of making a few bucks.