Polis

BOOK!

2008-07-04T10:04:00.003-04:00

I have a new book out titled Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction. Read more about it on my new website http://slackonomics.com/

Bye-Bye Blogger!

2006-09-03T12:36:00.000-04:00

Hey all! I've moved the whole dog and pony show over to
www.polisnyc.wordpress.com

Much better design, better organization, all around big improvement. So come take a look!

BAMN! Grand Opening

2006-08-28T19:48:00.000-04:00

The automat has returned with the grand opening of BAMN! Drawing a big crowd on St. Marks Pl. this evening, people lined up to experience the pre-fast food phenomenon of dropping a coin in a slot and having fresh hot food appear like magic. According to a surprisingly good New York Sun article, in the 1950s there were 180 automats in New York and Philadelphia, feeding 800,000 people a day such things as beef noodles with burgundy sauce. The last automat, in Times Square, closed in 1991. The 21st century version -- complete with hot pink signage and even hotter concierges (click pic at left) -- will serve grilled cheese, pizza and dumplings with an Asian twist for $1.50-$2.50. Once the crowds disperse a little, I'll give it a whirl and write up a review.

Que Serra Serra

2006-08-28T15:44:00.000-04:00

Andy Roddick - who is now receiving wisdom from the legendary Jimmy Connors - just pummeled Florent Serra (6-2 6-1 6-3). This is a decidedly better start for Roddick in Flushing, Queens than last year. After a big advertising build-up, he was dismissed from the US Open in the first round by a player ranked only 70th in the world. This year looks to be a whole lot different. With Jimbo in the house, not only is Roddick playing confidently, he got lucky with an easy draw. I predict he'll meet Rafael Nadal in the quarters (which will be a screamer of a match), and defeat him to go on to the face Roger Federer in the final. The downside: Roddick could face Agassi in the fourth round, at which point, Agassi will likely bid a a fond farewell (if he hasn't already).

The Times has a great piece about Agassi in a US Open supplement today. My favorite anecdote:

While playing a trivia game online to pass the time before a match, Agassi came upon a question he was sure he would ace: “Who is the only woman to win a Grand Slam final 6-0, 6-0?” The choices were Graf, Helen Wills Moody, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Agassi turned to Graf, who was in the room, and asked, “Did you ever win a Grand Slam final love and love?” She answered, “No, I don’t think so.” Agassi picked Moody, but the answer was Graf, who beat Natasha Zvereva at the 1988 French Open. Agassi turned to her and said, “How could you not remember that?”

There's also a good timeline about Agassi's career at the US Open. Click here.

Photo from Andy Roddick dot com.

NYC Loves Agassi

2006-08-27T06:12:00.000-04:00

Last year, I paid tribute to Agassi at the start of what was his 20th straight US Open showing. This year will be his 21st and final appearance. (He had a spectacular run last year, beating James Blake in a fantastic five-set match -- a la Jimmy Connors -- to make it all the way to the final, wherein Roger Federer sliced and diced him with the precision of a zen master.) Agassi will play opening night (Monday). Here's what I said last year, which is even truer this year:

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Agassi, U Da Man

It’s easy to love Andre Agassi these days, this being his 20^th straight appearance at New York’s Flushing Meadows (he won the US Open men’s singles title in 1994 and 1999). This wasn’t always so. He was often dismissed as all sizzle, no steak. People took his long-running advertising campaign for the Canon Rebel camera with its tagline “image is everything” a little too seriously. But as a full-fledged member of Generation X, Agassi has a well-developed sense of irony. (Of course, he’s very much an Xer in this sense as well: expressing apolitical rebelliousness with misguided fashion statements.) The ultimate irony is that he skipped Wimbledon from 1989-1991 because he refused to wear the required all-white uniform, but then made his grand slam breakthrough by winning the grass court title in 1992. That’ll shut up a few critics, no? But then he handed them a gift by getting fat on sprinkled donuts and losing his way with Brooke Shields in the mid-1990s. Schedenfreudians said his career was over. In one of the most humbling and determined comebacks in sports, Agassi hit the small and medium-sized tournaments and built his game back up from the bottom, becoming one of only five men to win all four grand slam titles (Wimbledon, French Open, US Open, Australian Open). Of course, everyone loves a comeback, especially one fueled by so much integrity. But with Agassi, it’s more than that. He is a truly charming and substantive person with a vast love of the sport that has treated him so well. Pete Sampras, his long-time rival who was always considered a substantive if not charming tennis player, might have won more grand slam titles and dominated the sport in a way that Agassi never did. But when Sampras rode off into the sunset with his model/actress wife never to be seen again except wearing a Movado watch, there was Agassi, still hitting the tennis courts because he loves the game, not just winning. And here’s the kicker: Mr. Image ended up married not to a waifish model, but to the least image conscious, most serious tennis player of all: Steffi Graf.

In retirement, Agassi will probably take a little time off to figure out how to reinsert himself in the game that he loves. But don't be surprised if, in the not too distant future, he's coaching the Davis Cup team, playing Team Tennis, coaching individual players (a la Brad Gilbert, who was instramental in Agassi's comeback), and/or supporting any number of other tennis related causes. In the meantime, it'll be a joy to watch him play his last US Open. Wish I had tix.

NOL v. WTC: The Truth Hurts

2006-08-25T11:26:00.000-04:00

Chocolate City Mayor Ray Nagin throwin down! In an interview to be aired on 60 Minutes this Sunday, Nagin reportedly said, "You guys in New York can't get a hole in the ground fixed, and it's five years later. So let's be fair." Touche, Mr. Mayor. Touche.

Photo of WTC pit taken May 2006.

Cornershot

2006-08-24T17:28:00.000-04:00

Cary of Visual Diaries started a unique blog while Polis was on hiatus, so I'm just getting to it now. The angle -- no pun intended -- is that he's a double shooter: pool and photography (works for the Village Voice and the Times, the latter is how we met). And now he's combined the two passions in a blog, Bank the Nine: Some Observations from a Pool-Playing Photographer. Who knew there were outdoor pool tables in Battery Park? Read all about it here.

NYC: Nature Thrives, Development Idles

2006-08-24T06:23:00.000-04:00

The Times has a great little slideshow about nature adapting to the urban world, from flowers poking through cracked cement in Williamsburg to monk parakeets nesting on power poles -- which, according to legend, arrived in the region in the 1960s when a shipment of the birds fell off a plane at Kennedy Airport. To view Andrea Mohin's slideshow, click here.

Prefer your news a little more hard boiled? The Times Metro section is chock full o' fun today, with three different stories about how to stop anything -- good, bad or ugly -- from ever happening in New York City.

Lawsuits Seek to Void $1 Billion New York City Deal for Bus Shelters, Newsstands and Toilets

Raucous Meeting on Atlantic Yards Plan Hints at Hardening Stances

Spitzer lobbying to put the brakes on projects mayor has been trying to accelerate

Script Doctor in the House?

2006-08-22T11:27:00.000-04:00

So good to be back in NYC after a hiatus in Cleveburgh (my hometown, see below). A quick tour around the nabe yielded sights, sounds and smells that can only be had in the E.Vil., including this sidewalk trash montage that looks like one of those faked photo-ops that newspaper journalists used to stage back in the day. The streets of the E.Vil. are littered (literally!) with failed screenplays, as seen on E. 9th Street (note the Mud to-go coffee cup). I googled the authors and the screenplay title but alas, did not come up with much. Here's a thought: The first open-source screenplay writing contest. Start with the title Super Duper and take it from there. Or not.

P.S. I've been posting about redesigning Polis for awhile now, and I'm a little confounded about what is the best approach after discovering that the MAC iWeb software SUCKS. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know. I'd like to launch a website that Polis can be incorporated into (along with a home page, a photo page, a bio page, etc.), but I'm not the savviest tech person. Thoughts? Email me: lisacchamberlain@gmail.com.

Vanilla Ice, Cleveland Style

2006-08-14T14:46:00.000-04:00

So the story goes like this... Denny Blaze aka "Average Homeboy" from Cleveland, Ohio sent in a demo tape to MTV some 20 years ago. Someone there was cleaning out a closet and decides to post the video on YouTube and next thing you know, Blaze is a freakin' YouTube "star." Check these sizzling hot rhymes: "As you can see, I'm not black. I don't do drugs and I'm not on crack." ... "I don't have a butler or a maid. My exterminator is a can of Raid." ... "For enjoyment I like to shoot some hoops, but not until I eat all my Fruit Loops." Imagine a low budget David Hasselhoff with a learning disability trying to make it as a white rapper circa 1985. And he's still at it!
Yo, check it, Blazin' at the Rock Hall:

Spanning the Cuyahoga

2006-08-04T16:05:00.000-04:00

As I already mentioned, the river that divides the east and west side of C-town (putting the cleave in Cleveland, I suppose) is called the Cuyahoga, which is an Indian word for crooked because the river takes several crazy turns through downtown and further south. There are more than 330 bridges spanning the river, many of them quite beautiful, especially the moveable ones. Not all are still in use, such as Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Bridge called a jackknife (pic above taken this afternoon), built in 1956. Below is a view I took from the Center Street bridge, one of the few swing bridges in the country that is still in use -- although it's been rebuilt several times, the current version completed in 1901. It was originally wood and became the central point of contention between eastsiders and westsider, who fought a war with each other over which side of the river downtown Cleveland would be established. The eastsiders won, and downtown can be seen looking east, with views of the B&O on the left; Key Tower in the center (the tallest building in Cleveland, designed by Cesar Pelli); and a glimpse of the Detroit-Superior Bridge on the right, completed in 1918. Not that you want to, but to read more about The Bridges of Cuyahoga County, click here.

Hot But Not Burning

2006-08-03T11:13:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons Polis is on summer hiatus is because I'm actually not in New York, but in Cleveland. The above photo is where Moses Cleaveland* landed in 1796, taken from the Detroit Superior Bridge, which spans the Cuyahoga River. The Cuyahoga -- an Indian word for crooked, the river does a loop-d-loop through downtown -- became infamous in 1969 for catching on fire. It actually had caught fire many times, but this particular fire was covered by Time magazine, which described the Cuyahoga as the river "that oozes rather than flows," in which a person "does not drown but decays." The Clean Water Act and other environmental laws were subsequently enacted, and it has been cleaned up considerably, as have many other urban waterways as a result. But the metaphor of a burning river lives on. There's the Burning River Fest, a music fest with an environmental awareness mission; a really good beer made by Great Lakes Brewery, Burning River Pale Ale; and a book entitled Crooked River Burning. Sadly, when a performance artist once proposed an event to recreate the river catching on fire, the city didn't see the humor in that and nixed the idea.

More Fun Facts: A few years after the river caught on fire, the mayor set his own hair on fire while attempting to use a welder's torch at a ribbon-cutting. As if that wasn't enough to make Cleveland a regular Johnny Carson joke, the mayor's wife declined an invitation to the White House because it was her bowling night.

Maybe I'll just blog about Cleveland for the next couple of weeks... plenty more where that came from.

*In 1830, the first newspaper was established, called the Cleveland Advertiser, which dropped the 'a' because it didn't fit in the masthead.

Hip or Dangerous?

2006-08-01T10:47:00.000-04:00

While I'm taking a break from Polis (see below), here is a seriously fun time-waster. My friend Jeremy alerted me to The Burg, a web-only TV series made by a group of Williamsburghers that makes fun of hipsters in Williamsburg (very meta). One of my faves: a short entitled, "Hip or Dangerous?" where two of the characters decide if various people on the street are either hip or dangerous. It's a question that could be asked of the series itself. The ultimate procrastination tool.

The episode below, "Project," is where Courtney tries to turn her new Wall Street boyfriend into a hipster, among other hipster projects (such as actually going to the "projects" to buy drugs). There's some awesome original music, too. Just watch (click Play in Pop Up below to make this work, or go straight to the burg).

project: | Play in Popup

Under Construction

2006-07-28T00:30:00.000-04:00

I'm taking a break from Polis, which will be back online and completely redesigned and updated by the end of August. Feel free to be in touch by email. Stay cool.

Revisiting Jane Jacobs One More Time

2006-07-20T16:38:00.000-04:00

Metropolis columnist Karrie Jacobs has a really well crafted piece about all the wrong-headed assumptions that are made about Jane Jacobs, making some of the very same points that I did in a recent Polis post. Karrie (no relation to Jane) admits that she never actually read The Death and Life of Great American Cities until recently, and when she did after Jane's death in April, she realized that much of what is attributed to Jane is just wrong. She was not opposed to modern architecture or to all things "big," nor was she a precursor to the New Urbanist movement. She criticized the Garden City movement, the real precursor to New Urbanism, dismissing it as "harmony and order imposed and frozen by authoritarian planning." Ouch. Jane was a master at evisceration, using her pen like an X-acto knife.

Karrie also applies what she thinks would be a more nuanced Jacobsian criticism to Atlantic Yards. Well worth a full read.

Jane Jacobs Revisited [Metropolis]
Jane Jacobs In Memorium [Polis]

Abandoned Building Census

2006-07-19T17:23:00.000-04:00

Given the insane real estate market in New York City, abandoned and/or underutilized buildings aren't the problem they once were, but they do still exist. City Limits is reporting that Scott Stringer, the Manhattan Borough President, is undertaking the first ever survey of abandoned properties in Manhattan. Prompted by homeless activists, Stringer's office will unleash a cadre of volunteers this Saturday, who will identify buildings such as 190 Mercer St. (which is certainly underutilized, if not entirely abandoned). According to City Limits, other cities have conducted similar surveys with good results:

Boston does an annual street-by-street count of abandoned properties that covers most of the city. When housing agency staffers find buildings that qualify, they post the addresses online to urge neglectful owners to either use the buildings or sell them. Since 2000, the number of abandoned buildings in the city has dropped by 43 percent.

Of course, that drop also coincided with the real estate boom, so it's not necessarily a causal relationship, but shaming neglectful property owners is never a bad thing.

The Cube Defaced

2006-07-19T14:49:00.000-04:00

Hey! Some piece of sh*t defaced The Cube! No self-respecting urban artist would do that to The Cube. The hack who did this (and I highly doubt it's the guy pictured here, much too unmotivated to lift a can of spray paint) better hope s/he doesn't get caught. This warrants vigilante justice.

99 Degrees of Stink

2006-07-18T10:03:00.000-04:00

According to an article in today's Times, City Council is about to vote on Bloomberg's long-standing plan to deal with the 50,000 tons of trash generated in New York City every day. So now that the macro-trash plan is about to pass, can we talk about the micro-trash issue?

One of the first posts I had on Polis was about a demonstration project last summer in Queens, where solar powered trash compactors were installed on street corners, which simultaneously prevents the above from happening and contains the smell (and on a day when it is going to be 99 degrees, this is no small matter). Just as Giuliani took on the squeegie men as his "quality of life" issue, Bloomberg should take on street trash and make that his signature quality of life issue, especially now that we've figured out where all that trash is going to be hauled off to. Solar powered trash compactors on every corner.

I took the above photo this morning at the corner of 2nd Ave. and St. Marks Place in front of Gem Spa, birthplace of New York's first "egg cream," which is neither eggy nor creamy. But I digress.

Update: Better late than never, City Council did finally pass Bloomberg's trash plan, with this little piece of stupidity attached: according to Gotham Gazette, "The plan also includes ... a new office for recycling outreach." Little old Chinese ladies who scour the streets every night for bottles and cans will be thrilled to know there's now a recycling outreach office. It's enough to bring out the libertarian in me.

Advertecture Invades the E.Vil.

2006-07-18T08:31:00.000-04:00

I'm getting in on the advertecture game a little late; Curbed and the Municipal Art Society held a contest for the most offensive/illegal advertecture and picked a winner and runners-up some time ago. But I spotted this monstrosity just yesterday at the corner of Avenue A and E. 9th St. -- the first advertecture I've seen in the E.Vil. And as far as I can tell, a banner on a residential building in a residential neighborhood is illegal, much like the winner of the "Shoot It Down" contest.

I checked out the Helio website -- "Hi. We're a new mobile brand created to give young, passionate consumers (like us) the type of wireless experience we've all been waiting for." Yes, haven't we just been dying for a mobile device that comes equipped with MySpace? Fun Box, rockin those young, passionate consumers.

From the Dept. of Who Knew?

2006-07-14T23:19:00.000-04:00

I happened upon a skate contest in Tompkins Square Park today sponsored by two companies I've never heard of (this is getting to be a theme -- perhaps I'm in the wrong demographic): Boost Mobile and éS, which produces the "éS Game of SKATE," based on the basketball game "HORSE." The first skater performs a trick, and if completed, the skater she is playing has to do that trick. If she does not complete the established trick, she receives a letter. The first letter is "S," the second letter is "K", and so on, until "S-K-A-T-E" is spelled out and that person is out of the game. Anyhoo, it turns out Boost Mobile is owned by Nextel and éS is a footwear brand. Who knew. (Or more importantly, who cares? I just like the photo. Click to enlarge.)

Take the Shortcake

2006-07-14T10:35:00.000-04:00

All the little worlds that exist out there, totally unbeknownst to 99 percent of the rest of humanity ... I had seen posts on Curbed about a couple of enterprising people selling Strawberry Shortcake on the boardwalk at Coney Island. Seemed cute enough to ignore. That is, until this morning when I looked at their blog a little more closely, and -- seeing the pure joy captured on their customers' faces, a small bit of loveliness at a time when we seem to be on the verge of WWIII -- I got curious. Who are these dispenders of joy, figurative and virtual, via Strawberry Shortcake and the Internet? I'm still not entirely sure, but according to their website, they are street artists operating under the moniker Thundercut as well as publishers of the zine Sherbert (nominated by Utne Reader for an Independent Press Award, their latest issue is fresh off the presses). Never heard of them (but perhaps that's not saying much). Ah well, nevermind. Just enjoy the Shortcake.

I'm Shouting Into the Gaping Void

2006-07-13T10:23:00.000-04:00

I've been a big fan of Gapingvoid for a long time now, and in fact I've tried several times to make contact with Hugh about using his cartoons in my book (he keeps ignoring me! wassup?). So here's my shameless attempt at getting his attention: a big fat shout out.

Gapingvoid, in case you've been under a cartoon/blog/creative rock, started when Hugh MacLeod began drawing "weedoodles" on the back of his business cards when he handed them out. Now he draws blog cards and posts them on his endlessly entertaining website. He then wrote a creative manifesto ("How To Be More Creative" which spread like wildfire on the internet). In his own words, How To Be More Creative "was ... a series of meditations on the lessons I had learned the hard way over the years, as I tried to bridge the nearly impossible gap of making an OK living without letting my soul die from the inside out." This is an ESSENTIAL component of the book I'm currently contracted to write for Carroll & Graf (click here for more about that).

So Hugh, wassup?

Gov's Island: Vote Early and Often

2006-07-11T12:30:00.000-04:00

The Governor's Island Alliance has released guidelines to redevelop perhaps the most important piece of undeveloped land in the Northern hemisphere, and there are three illustrated alternatives that can be voted on by going here: www.governorsislandalliance.org

There's the harbor park (park that faces the Statue of Liberty), channel park (facing Brooklyn) and the prow park (at the southern most tip of the island). Pictured above: channel park. Can't say I have an immediate opinion except, let's get it on, already. For some thoughts about what the hold up is, read post below.

Gondolas to Gov's Island [Polis]

Five Pointz

2006-07-10T23:36:00.000-04:00

When I was in LIC (see below), I came across something that I'm probably the last person to know about... Five Pointz, a building in Long Island City that got tagged with graffiti so often, the owner of the building decided like ten years ago to sanction the urban artists and let them do their thing. Now it's probably the most important collection of urban art in New York (and hence, the world). An artist who was about to go up in the lift to do a piece said that there's going to be -- get this -- a coffee table book about all the artists and the work on the building.

Update: My dear friend Michael writes from South Africa to tell me that: "yeah, you are the last to know about it. which sort of makes you cutting-edge! ;-)". Apparently, one of Michael's ex-roommates, Kezam, did a lot of the work on this building, and Kezam is now finishishing his sociology disertation on NYC graffiti. Here's his flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kezam/

Silvercup Sprouts

2006-07-10T17:16:00.000-04:00

A year ago, I reported on the largest green roof in New York City being installed on top of Silvercup Studios in Long Island City near the Queensboro Bridge. (Silvercup is the largest film and television studio in New York, where Sex and the City was filmed and the Sopranos still is. If you don't have Times Select, email me and I'll send a PDF of the Silvercup greenroof story for the Times.)

I was out there this afternoon and snapped a couple of pics. While green roofs are big in Chicago, they are pretty rare in New York and most other American cities. This one is 35,000 square feet (it's actually three green roofs spread out over the Silvercup site, one of which is literally on top of Tony Soprano's house). The pic below is of a monitoring system that is collecting data in order to show how much less storm water runoff there is as a result of the succulent plants absorbing rain, as well as temperature fluctuations and air quality measurements.
Silvercup Sunset [Polis]

Idling At Zero 2.0

2006-07-05T18:23:00.000-04:00

While we're on the topic of irony too rich to require comment (see below), Gawker made a time-lapse video out of photos taken of the World Trade Center site over the past 101 days so we can watch absolutely nothing happen. It's a much more concise way of conveying what took me 2500 words in a piece I wrote for the July issue of Planning magazine entitled, Idling At Zero (which is not available online to non-members, so email me if you'd like to read it ... for the two Polis readers who are American Planning Association members, click here.).

Become Your Dream... Or Not

2006-07-05T17:02:00.001-04:00

The irony of the above pic (snapped on Avenue A this afternoon) requires no further comment, but perhaps a little context. DeLaVega, whom I've posted about on Polis a few times, is an East Harlem artist who has a gallery/shop on St. Marks Place where he sells his original artwork as well as t-shirts and such. He's known for writing aphorisms on the sidewalk in chalk, such as, "I just bought real estate in your mind," and "Sometimes the king is a woman." He's probably best known, however, for this one: "Become Your Dream."

P.S. Note the graffiti on the right (click to enlarge photo). I love this nabe.

Previous Polis posts:

De La Vega Takes the E.Vil.

DeLaVega, an East Harlem artists who opened a shop...

E.Vil.: Too Sexy for National Retailers

Robert Moses Gave Me a Sunburn

2006-07-03T12:29:00.000-04:00

Alright, alright. Robert Moses wasn't all bad. I admit it.

Pic taken July 1 at Robert Moses State Park on Long Island where I went with my friend Alex Bandon, she of The Shelter Life. It was the perfect beach day: not too hot, slight breeze, room to breath and take in an expansive view. I did get a sunburn, though, which is surely the wrath of Moses.

X-Treme Makeover

2006-06-29T08:52:00.000-04:00

Now that New York mag is publishing oral histories of the golden age of graffiti and a bank in the E.Vil. has commissioned "graffiti" art and placed it underneath the teller windows (see pic here), it's definitely time for this artform to mutate, and indeed it has. Call this X-Acto graffiti. Someone spent a lot of time making very precise cuts in this poster on E. 12th for what looks like a bad Uma Thurman romantic comedy. It probably wasn't intentional, but this is a brilliant little commentary on beauty and plastic surgery.

JJ in Memoriam: Washington Square Park

2006-06-27T14:19:00.000-04:00

Better late than never. Jane Jacobs, who profoundly influenced urban planning not just in New York City, but throughout Western Civilization, will be honored Wed. at 5:00 pm (rain or shine) under the arch in Washington Square Park, the site of her first victory against the ravages of urban renewal that were being waged by the notorious Robert Moses. She died April 25, 2006 in Toronto, where she moved with her family from NYC's Greenwich Village in 1968 so her sons wouldn't be drafted into the Vietnam War.

It has become the contrarian fashion to say that Jane Jacobs' contribution to urban planning didn't address many of the problems we grapple with today, and that Robert Moses wasn't entirely destructive and wrong. I find this to be an intellectually lazy argument. No single person could simultaneously explode an entire profession AND anticipate every possible consequence of that (such as gentrification, which did not exist at the time that she wrote her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961).

Still others have the impression that Jacobs was a milquetoast housewife who presaged New Urbanism by only favoring small, quaint neighborhoods -- which couldn't be further from the truth. What she was critiquing at the time -- brutal urban renewal practices -- compelled her to attack large-scale planning and modern architecture in favor of community and neighborhood, but that doesn't mean she dismissed everything big and modern as inhumane and unworkable. What makes Jacobs so compelling and enduring is the power and flexibility of her ideas, rooted in an instinctive response but articulated with precision and clarity.

As Paul Goldberger recently wrote in a Metropolis magazine piece entitled Jane-Washing, "Jacobs herself had little patience with much of what was presented as an extension of her views; she knew better and understood instinctively the difference between the real street life of an old New York neighborhood and the packaged synthetic urbanism of the new make-believe streetscapes." I can well imagine Jacobs might have been a big fan of, for instance, contemporary Dutch planning and architecture, which is both large-scale and ultra-modern.

What's more, to say that not everything Moses did was bad is to entirely miss the point. His unchecked power and dictatorial style coupled with a non-existent process for public input was the disease. The highways that crushed entire neighborhoods were the highly visible symptoms (parks and beaches being the positives externalities). Jacobs took on a dictator. We could use more of that kind of ballsy housewife nowadays.

On another note, people point to her long-running public feud with Lewis Mumford in order to degrade her ideas as those of an unsophisticated simpleton compared to the intellectually superior Mumford. No disrespect to one of New York's last great public intellectuals, but he could be a dyspeptic critic himself, launching attacks at everything including Rockefeller Center. "Architecturally, in short, Rockefeller Center is much ado about nothing," he wrote in the New Yorker in 1933, which he later reversed somewhat, leading one exasperated NYC official to complain to the magazine, "The problem with Mumford is, nobody can tell what he wants." With Jacobs, unlike Mumford, there was never any question about what she found lacking and what she thought worked. Mumford's thinking wasn't always so clearly-- and gracefully -- articulated, not to mention that he was more prone to urban utopianism than Jacobs ever was.

Scheduled speakers at Washington Square Park include New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger, Ned Jacobs, Jane'’s son, and others. Since I am in full-on book-writing ~~procrastination~~ contemplation mode, I'll see you there.

UPDATE: Andrew Salzberg of Messy Diversity writes from Toronto to point out that, indeed, Jane Jacobs did like contemporary Dutch planning and architecture. In an interview with James Howard Kunstler (in Metropolis magazine), JHK asked her what parts of the world she likes and admires, and her immediate response was to say The Netherlands. "...The human scale of the whole thing and the density is far above what we are used to in North America, or anywhere. The high density and human scale are not incompatible at all."

The Netherlands is, of course, highly regulated and planned, contrary to the assumption that Jacobs only liked "organic" neighborhoods. Andrew goes on to point out that an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal recently praised Jacobs, practically labeling her a libertarian, because she didn't like planning. Again, totally false. She didn't like top-down, FASCIST planning that left no room for public participation and resulted in the destruction of neighborhoods. Thanks, Andrew.

Breathtaking Inanity: Grand Transit Here, There and Everywhere

2006-06-27T11:47:00.000-04:00

After decades of neglect, New York is suddenly in love with its monumental transportation hubs, even if all the grand architectural gestures in the offing won’t do much on the most basic level: make more people’s commutes easier.

Today’s installment of breathtaking inanity (the new irrational exuberance) takes note of three facets of this latest craze.

1. Moynihan Station, in its third (or is that fourth?) design iteration, will cost $1 billion to turn part of the Farley post office building into a partial replacement for Penn Station across the street. The catch: the only tenant is NJ Transit, which will leave behind 80 percent of commuters who currently use the old Penn Station in the pit below Madison Square Garden. This makes absolutely no sense. The inanity of this was pointed out when an even grander plan was floated recently to move the entirety of Madison Square Garden across the street as well, thus forcing Amtrak and the rest to move into the new space. Even though this will take much longer to build and will be much more costly ($7 billion) at least it makes sense in the long run, but of course Gov. Pataki might quash this plan because he wants a groundbreaking before he leaves office on the long delayed Moynihan Station.

2. Santiago Calatrava’s beautiful transit station design at Ground Zero will cost $2 billion and serve only those people who ride PATH trains from New Jersey to Lower Manhattan (so New Jersey commuters are getting not one, but two grand transit hubs built for them here in New York City?). Don't get me wrong. It’s a lovely, lovely train station. No question about it. But here’s the rub: it will be connected underground to yet ANOTHER architecturally grand and very costly transit hub, the Fulton Street subway station, less then two blocks away, which brings us to the final point:

3. The new Fulton Transit Center, run by MTA, is behind schedule and over budget even after the signature architectural element, a huge “oculus,” was reduced in size and – get this – the plans to untangle the clusterf**k of subway lines underneath Fulton were also scaled back. In other words, MTA is prepared to spend another $800+ million on a duplicative grand transit statement while backing away from the original intent of making the subway lines more rational for commuters ... New York commuters.

Hey, I’m all for grand architectural gestures, WHEN THEY ALSO WORK FOR THE PEOPLE WHO USE THEM.

An Incovenient Truth: NYC Gridlock

2006-06-22T15:48:00.000-04:00

Using The War Tapes and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth as primary examples, the Times' David Carr recently argued that documentaries have become an effective vehicle for advocacy journalism, and are quite successfully turning "the most boring of issues — and public personalities — into an entertainment."

Add to this genre a new doc from Transportation Alternatives, Contested Streets: Breaking NYC Gridlock, which will premier next week at the IFC Center in the Village. Whether or not this doc rises to the level of "entertainment" remains to be seen, but it will show how other cities are using innovative ideas and technology to solve traffic problems ... and, of course, how New York is not.

To see a trailer, click here.

ARO to rehab Columbia's Architecture School?

2006-06-20T08:48:00.000-04:00

I had a post here at Polis last fall about a Times story noting all the architecture schools in NYC that were hiring big names to design new, flashy buildings, including Steven Holl at Pratt in Brooklyn, Lyn Rise at Parsons downtown, Rafael Vinoly at City College in Harlem, and Thom Mayne at Cooper Union in the E.Vil.

I then noted that Avery Hall at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture was badly in need of an overhaul ... which is now in the works. I happened to be in the architecture library yesterday and spotted Stephen Cassell who, along with Adam Yarinsky, are the founders of ARO, one of my favorite architecture firms. It seems the firm will be undertaking the Avery Hall rehab.

They are not starchitects but smarchitects, intent on -- hold on to your socks now -- designing buildings while keeping in mind 1. the people who will use them, and 2. the surrounding environment. They are a whole lot less focused on developing a signature style that shouts, "ARO!" the way a ten year-old can now spot a Gehry building (ARO stands for Architecture Research Offices ... so obviously, they're not too concerned with branding their own names, either).

Just to make the point about how they brilliantly design for the surrounding environment, here are two very different projects: The Army recruiting station in Times Square (above) and home in Telluride, CO (below). Some of the firm's other NYC projects include rehabbing the currently underutilized building at the north end of Union Square Park, working with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburg on Brooklyn Bridge Park, as well as other commerical and residential projects around the city (and the rest of the country).

Arthouse in Tribeca

2006-06-20T07:04:00.000-04:00

Holy crap. Usually I avoid posting about luxury private residences (i.e. real estate porn) mostly because I just don't care (I know I'm in the minority here), but this slide show of an "art house" in New York Magazine is not to be missed. Click here for the article and a link to a slideshow of the Tribeca townhouse. P.S. I did a quick google of the architect, Andrea Ballerini, and couldn't find anything, and the NY mag article doesn't elaborate. ??

Reno Girls Love NYC

2006-06-19T10:36:00.000-04:00

Quite randomly, I found myself giving a walking tour of the E.Vil. yesterday to a small group of high school girls from Reno, Nevada who are all theater-arts people. It was a favor for a friend of a friend, who had organized a learning by location tour through a company that went bankrupt a few days before they were set to depart Reno for New York City. Anyhoo, it was interesting to discover their points of reference as well as what they didn't know. They were familiar with Little Shop of Horrors (which premiered at the Orpheum on 2nd Ave. in 1982) and of course Rent (centered in the E.Vil.), but not up on graffiti artists Keith Haring and Basquiat. They had heard of Andy Warhol but not Lou Reed (both performed at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Pl.). They had never heard of Hari Krishnas (I took them to the Hari Krishna tree in Tompkins) but they did know who Allen Ginsburg was (he was at the first Hari Krishna gathering in NYC underneath the tree). The kicker was taking them to St. Marks Church in the Bowery where washed-up party girl Lexi was memorialized after she famously fell out of a window in a Sex and the City episode. Above, I snapped a pic of the girls posing for another photographer at Tompkins Square Park (homeless person in the background, natch). Pop quiz, girls. Explain in fifty words or less what gentrification means.

Special thanks to New York Songlines for helping me organize this tour.

Chelsea Photo Montage

2006-06-15T16:50:00.000-04:00

Tom Parsons, who lives at the Chelsea Hotel part of the year (when he's not flying around as a commercial pilot), made this photo montage from pics he took at the Living With Legends anniversary party. I wrote about the party for The City section of the Times (as well as Polis), and this montage is of me interviewing Mia Hanson and Hawk Alfredson, whom I quote in the story. They're both artists whose works have a dark, surrealist edge, although Mia is a photographer and Hawk is a painter (click names to view their work). The party took place in an apartment where Thomas Wolfe once lived and wrote You Can't Go Home Again. Click the montage to enlarge.

My Red State Summer Vacation

2006-06-12T14:49:00.000-04:00

Well, it was more like a working vacation, but pretty great nonetheless. I took this photo of Tellico Lake at sunset (click to enlarge). The lake was created when the Tennessee Valley Authority built a dam that was completed in 1979 (which was very controversial at the time). Tellico Lake has more than 300 miles of shoreline in eastern Tennessee, just at the bottom of the Smoky Mountains, where good ol' boys proudly tell hillbilly jokes.

Other than a little whiplash from a jetski mishap, fun was certainly had, even when I was working. But it's good to be home. Will do my best to get caught up on Polis posts soon.

Be Back Soon

2006-06-05T08:40:00.000-04:00

I'm gone on a work/play trip to Tennessee of all places. More later.

Chelsea Hotel Blog Party 2.0

2006-06-04T14:16:00.000-04:00

After sitting on the piece for weeks, and after the copy editors drained all the life out of it, and after the caption editor inserted an error by calling it a "new blog," the New York Times' City section finally ran a piece I wrote about the year anniversary party of Living With Legends. Polis readers know I attended the party at the Chelsea Hotel more than a month ago hosted by Debbie Martin and Ed Hamilton, creators of the blog, in an apartment once occupied by Thomas Wolfe. It was a wonderful evening full of rich characters and stories ... which sadly, doesn't quite get conveyed in the piece. I'm probably being a little overly dramatic, so read it for yourself. And watch a slide show here.

The Ghost of Retail Past

2006-06-03T00:08:00.000-04:00

New York is an endlessly amazing place. I walk by this building on 2nd Ave. almost every day, and for whatever reason, just happened to look up and see the remnants of this oddly placed second story retail window. The building is a reminder of what the E.Vil. and LES used to look a lot more like (click to enlarge).

Extra Low Budget

2006-06-02T09:42:00.000-04:00

I'll be making my film debut as an extra in some low budget movie called "Path." They were filming a wing-eating contest scene in Tompkins Square Park yesterday. My job was to talk to people next to me without making any sound while trying not to look at the camera. I lasted about six takes at which point I realized, I would never, ever want to be in the film industry.

Holy Bricks and Mortar, Batman!

2006-05-31T16:52:00.000-04:00

New York magazine wraps it all up and puts a pretty bow on top: Every New York development real and imagined that's ever been bandied about is summarized in the June 5 issue. The magnitude of it all is pretty astonishing, and some of it will actually get built. But this self-described "cautiously opstimistic" collection of articles doesn't even cast a skeptical eye towards Ground Zero. What's more, it's become the contrarian fashion to say Robert Moses wasn't so evil and Jane Jacobs' ideas weren't all that. The irony is too rich to be making this intellecutally lazy point while promoting the wonders of something like 20 million square feet of new development, the vast majority of which will benefit only the wealthest New Yorkers. And mark my words, the wonderful things closest to and for the little people -- such as the East River Park -- will take the longest to get built, if at all.

Memorial Day Fun

2006-05-29T20:05:00.000-04:00

On Memorial Day in the rest of America, people pull their grills out of the garage, set them up in the back yard and throw meat on the fire. In New York City, however, we pull the grill out of the closet, climb up to the roof, throw in a match ... and wait for the fire trucks to arrive. Ah, Memorial Day grilling in the E.Vil. Did we make enough Johnsonville Brats for the hottie firefighters?

Old Wine, New Bottle (aka WTC clusterf**k)

2006-05-27T17:16:00.000-04:00

It's been a few days since I hammered away at the WTC disaster, but Miss Representation takes up the slack in a big way with another one of his scathing take-downs. This is a must-read, but I'll whet your appetite here:

"...it’s a total clusterfuck. Not a total clusterfuck like last year, when no one knew what the Memorial would look like, or even what the final program was; when the deconstruction of 130 Liberty was marred by poor oversight and flawed planning; ... when no progress was being made on the Freedom Tower; when Pataki was a bumbling idiot who couldn’t marshal the forces ... to finalize any site planning; when no one knew how anything was being paid for, but that all the money was definitely running out.

No, now it’s a new kind of clusterfuck, one that -- I was going to cut and paste the above paragraph, for dramatic effect, but even that isn’t worth it. Can we agree once again how unfathomable it is that these people can speak without shame in public? If this were medieval Japan ... wouldn’t they all have committed ritual suicide by now for their failings?"

I wrote an article for the July issue of Planning magazine (a trade publication for professional urban planners) arguing that the utter lack of planning at Ground Zero is the root of all the problems there. But given how milquetoast that publication is, I wasn't able to make the case as strongly as it really needs to be made. Oh well, I'll link to it anyway once it's up on their website.

(I took the above photo from inside the Winter Garden, which overlooks Ground Zero, to accompany the piece.)

Gov's Island: Photo Essay

2006-05-25T15:19:00.000-04:00

The Governors Island Alliance and the Regional Plan Association held a fundraiser last night to move plans along for this historic island just off the tip of Lower Manhattan, the first European settlement in New York (established by the Dutch in 1623). The weather could not have been more perfect. I hope something spectacular comes of this unique place in my lifetime.

View a short photo essay on flickr of the bucolic 93-acre island that was a military base for 200 years.

Gondolas to Governor's Island: Breathtaking Inanity [Polis]

Sculpture for Living: Don't Take That Literally

2006-05-24T21:32:00.000-04:00

I happened to be walking by the Astor Place "Sculpture for Living" high-rise condo building in the E.Vil. (aka, the Green Monster, which hasn't been selling very well, especially after the bad reviews) when I came across a much more literal "sculpture for living" just outside the entrance. There were no less than a half-dozen cops standing around waiting for this dude to pack up his "sculpture for living" and move it on down the block closer to the parking garage where he belongs.

Book Deal

2006-05-21T15:30:00.000-04:00

I'm excited to tell everyone that I recently signed a book deal with Carroll & Graf, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group. The origins of the idea came from an article I wrote for the New York Observer more than two years ago entitled: Generation X: Born Under a Bad Economic Sign (I would link to it, but that requires a paid subscription, so email me if you're really interested and I'll send a PDF). Following the publication of the article, I was interviewed on the Brian Lehrer show, which you can listen to by clicking here and scrolling down to the third item, Forever Broke.

The premise of the book is that not since the Depression era has a generation been so whipsawed by the economy, from McJobs to outsourcing, and two unprecedented back-to-back bubbles (to name just a few issues here), and how all of the cultural trends, lifestyle choices and sociological circumstances of this generation have been dictated by economic insecurity and ultimately by diminshed expectations. The good news? Well, I'm no Ben Bernanke (click here for a hilarious video made by some Columbia Business School students featuring Dean Glenn Hubbard spoofing Mr. Bernanke), but I will argue that it will be up to Generation X (right now, approximately aged 29-41) to bring the economy back from the brink, and that diminished expectations could very well be exactly the right sensibility to pull that off!

So, having said that, I will do my best to keep up with Polis (and of course I'll still be covering real estate for the Times), but I probably won't be quite so active here as I have been in the past. Look for a couple posts a week, plus updated photography. Cheers.

The Manhattanville Project: So?

2006-05-21T08:58:00.000-04:00

The Sunday Times magazin e has a piece about the dispute between Columbia University and Harlem over plans for a new campus designed by architect Renzo Piano (labeled "dispute" right at the top in case the combination of "Harlem" and "Columbia" doesn't already say "dispute" quite enough already). Plenty to chew on here, no doubt. Yet, please let me know if any readers can find one original idea, one good turn of phrase, one surprising thought, one timely bit of information in this entire piece.

Photo credit: Brenda Ann Kenneally

Sometimes a Photo is Just a Photo

2006-05-20T20:11:00.000-04:00

Polis readers know I'm into photography, but usually there's a back story to my pics. This one happens to be just a pic I like, no back story other than it was taken at Mud Cafe on E. 9th, my favorite hang in the nabe (click to enlarge). I've also posted a new photo essay (at right) combining some of my favorite pics of St. Marks Place.

E.Vil.: Too Sexy for National Retailers

2006-05-17T12:04:00.000-04:00

Crain's has a big real estate edition, and one of the stories is about how small spaces have immunized the East Village and Lower East Side from big retail chains. Hallelujah.

"Welcome to the East Village, a modern-day real estate anomaly, virtually untouched by the astronomical rents and multiplying mass merchandisers that have afflicted neighborhoods from Harlem to SoHo in recent years."

In addition to the nabe's small spaces, the article attributes the lack of major retail chains in the area to two other factors: low density and a more economically diverse population (which distinguishes it from the West Village, although this point isn't made).

"The population of Community District 3, which encompasses the entire Lower East Side, is 164,000, according to the 2000 Census. By comparison, Community District 8, which comprises the entire Upper East Side and Roosevelt Island, has 217,000 residents. Though the East Village is no longer the blighted slum it was as recently as the 1980s, average income levels lag those of many other Manhattan neighborhoods."

Need I say it again? Hallelujah.

I took the above photo of the artist DeLaVega in front of his gallery/shop on St. Marks Pl. Below: Another quirky small shop on St. Marks, Dumpling Man, which is owned by Lucas Lin.

Breathtaking Inanity: Memorial Turmoil

2006-05-17T10:01:00.000-04:00

I've been terribly negligent here on Polis. Too much to do. But for the few people who read Polis and don't follow the WTC rebuilding effort, turn your attention to this must-read New York mag piece -- a behind the scenes blow-by-blow of how Michael Arad's memorial design got to the point of teetering on the brink of collapse.

It's clear to me from reading the piece that Arad agreed to go on the record because he thought he was going to get a positive review. And he mostly does. But even a cursory read reveals that Arad is one arrogant guy. Even the most sympathetic presentation of his side of the story can't hide that fact. Of course, I totally believe him when he says that he's had to fight off any number of dumb ideas. But this guy is out of his league. Period. He had been tauted as the next Maya Lin, but that just goes to show how incredible and unique Maya Lin is. There is no next Maya Lin. Only she could come up with the breathtaking Vietnam Memorial design as well as have the grace and internal fortitude to see it built. No true for Arad, it would seem.

So, we add arrogance on top of the fact that memorial designers were encouraged NOT to follow the design guidelines laid out by the original Libeskind plan (which wasn't really a plan to begin with), and what you have here my friends is a failure to communicate. Big time.

(Photo: Michael O'Neill)

Now, the Memorial Fight

2006-05-11T10:26:00.000-04:00

The "Freedom Tower" fight has been settled with Larry Silverstein (for now), and we move quickly into the memorial fight. As most people reading this probably know, the latest estimate for building the memorial came in at an alarming $1 billion, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg jumped in to say that it should be capped at $500 million. This provided an opportunity for those who have various beefs with the design to use its cost as a wedge; namely, those who think the memorial should be above ground are now saying the design should be radically overhauled. [See Times article today.]

Michael Arad's original design, which was selected from more than 5,000 entries, put the memorial under ground with water falls and galleries. I haven't studied the design closely, but I can well imagine that the decent into the memorial would be a powerful experience. I can also imagine the benefits of having different levels serving different purposes, the most solemn area being below ground, and more relaxing and serene areas at ground level. No one who is contemplating the horror of this tragedy wants to encounter kids running around acting goofy. But there needs to be room for joyfulness as well as solemnity, and giving those emotions separate levels to take place is one good solution.

Having said that, there is obviously a very serious safety issue that is exacerbated by an underground memorial. As the late Jane Jacobs said, safety comes from eyes on the street. If you're below the street, it's hard to keep an eye on things. And there is the other practical matter of cost. Unquestionably it will be more expensive to have any part of the memorial below ground.

These are all legitimate design issues, and therein lies the rub. While the "planners" of Ground Zero have been focusing on the commercial towers and the shopping mall of the site, the memorial design has been at best an afterthought. So it is only now that we're getting around to having a perfectly reasonable debate about how this should be built -- now that most people have all but disengaged from the whole sordid process.

Chelsea Hotel Blog Party

2006-05-01T14:16:00.000-04:00

Living With Legends, the Hotel Chelsea blog, hosted a party over the weekend. The blog has been chronicling the dark and quirky side of living in the Chelsea Hotel for a year now, and I have to say, it was one of the more interesting evenings I've had in awhile. I met fascinating and slightly crazy artists, musicians, composers, photographers, designers and writers who have lived in the hotel for years and even decades, and boy do they have stories to tell. I'll have more to say about the party, the people and the hotel when I get passed a couple of other deadlines, but here's a slide show. The party took place in an apartment where Thomas Wolfe once lived (and wrote You Can't Go Home Again -- how appropriate), which is now occupied by photographer Julia Calfee (her B&W photos adorn the walls). Debbie & Ed, Living With Legends bloggers, live one apartment over.

Click here to see a slide show of the Living With Legends anniversary party.

March of Folly

2006-04-27T16:47:00.000-04:00

So, with the cameras rolling, construction begins on the Freedom Tower, or monumentum horibilis. A description of a book entitled The March of Folly goes like this:

Defining folly as the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interersts, despite the availability of feasible alternatives, [Pulitzer-prize winning author Barbara] Tuchman details four decisive turning points in history that illustrate the very heights of folly in government: the Trojan War, the breakup of the Holy See provoked by the Renaissance Popes, the loss of the American colonies by Britain's George III, and the United States' persistent folly in Vietnam.

To which I would add a fifth government folly: building the godforsaken "Freedom" Tower. Orwellian doesn't even begin to describe it.

Photo credit: Timothy A. Clary/AFP -- Getty Images

Street Ballet Contest

2006-04-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

I introduced The Most Jane Jacobs New York City Block contest, co-hosted with Curbed. From Curbed's post today, using a photo I took of St. Marks Place after the big Nor'easter:

In honor of urban thinker extraordinaire Jane Jacobs, Curbed is teaming up with Lisa Chamberlain at Polis to sponsor a contest to name the Most Jane Jacobs Block in New York City. As Lisa puts it, "The idea is to celebrate the 'street ballet' of your favorite block," keeping in mind Jane Jacobs' neighborhood tenets, but with your own spin. The directions:

· Choose a single block within NYC (define the street, and the cross-streets)
· Submit at least 3 but up to 6 pictures of the block
· Write 250 words or less describing the block and its Jacobsian characteristics. Any style welcome.
· Video in lieu of pictures and words (2 min or less) is cool

Entries can be submitted directly to the new Jane Jacobs Block Photo Pool on Flickr (and tagged janejacobsblock), or by email. We'll narrow down the finalists and run them here, then open it up for you to vote for the winner. The winner will receive $500 and no small glory. Deadline for submissions is Friday, May 12. Updates-a-plenty to follow here and at Polis, so stay tuned.
· Jane Jacobs Block Photo Pool [Flickr]
· Nominate the Best Jane Jacobs Block in NYC [Polis]
· Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006 [Curbed]

Sea Carousel at the Battery

2006-04-26T11:28:00.000-04:00

I was at an event last night for the Sea Carousel at the Battery, a beautifully designed 21st century carousel. The top photo is a life-size model of one of the rides (the second photo shows how the little fishies will glow ... which, quite honestly, was no match for the fantastic view from a deck in Greenwich Village). The high-tech carousel itself, designed by Weisz + Yoes, uses "smart" glass that will switch from translucent to opaque where scenes of undersea life will be projected when the carousel is in motion. When the ride is not in motion, the nautilus-shaped building will be see-through, with the floor and fishies glowing. Thirty sea creatures, which harken back to fish that were at the site of New York's first aquarium from 1896-1941 in Lower Manhattan, will swim in Battery Park by 2007.

Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006

2006-04-25T13:30:00.000-04:00

There are very few public figures whom I would mourn more than Jane Jacobs. She died this morning in her adopted home of Toronto, where she moved with her family from New York City so that her son would not be drafted during the Vietnam war. Of course, her life and letters are well known by most anyone reading Polis, but her impact has been so personal for me and many others. Reading a magazine interview with Jane Jacobs many years ago led me to The Death and Life of Great American Cities (her seminal work published in 1961, although it reads as if it could have been written last year), which then took my journalism career in the direction of urban planning and design, economic development, and all the concomitant issues of city life. She was more than a national treasure, but a maven for citizens everywhere. I propose a gathering at 555 Hudson Street in the West Village between Perry and W. 11th, where she lived for many years and waged her battles against Robert Moses, and composed The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Who's in? (photo by Globe and Mail)

Incomplete Globe and Mail obit
Metropolis interview with Jim Kunstler, 2001

The Art of the Flâneur

2006-04-20T12:40:00.000-04:00

From today's Planetizen:

The art of the flâneur -- wandering aimlessly around the city, observing its daily rhythms -- has been revived by photobloggers.

Maisonneuve urban affairs columnist Christopher DeWolf takes a look at the flâneur, the dandyish boulevardiers who wandered aimlessly around nineteenth century Paris, observing the city and its inhabitants. Flâneurism was dealt a blow by car culture and suburbanization, but lately, it seems to have made a comeback. Can part of the credit for this revival be given to photobloggers? "Today's flâneur is the photoblogger," writes DeWolf. "Wandering around town, snapping photos of places and faces, these men and women are urban ethnographers, observing and interpreting the city around them."

Par example: The above photo is one of my favorite street shots that has a great back story. I took this awhile ago at Times Square when I was just wandering around taking photos and observing the city. Nearly two years later, I was interviewing someone for an arts-related real estate story, and the interviewee mentioned they were moving their office out of Times Square. That's all she said. While we were still on the phone, I emailed this photo to her, and sure enough, it captured a birthday party her office was having that spilled out onto the street. Totally random New York story ... and a perfect little example of flâneurism. (Flâneuring is also how I happened across the whole St. Marks squat story ... scroll down for more on that.)

For the whole flâneur article (a good read), click here:
The Urban Eye: The flaneur is alive and sauntering in the modern metropolis

Breathtaking Inanity: Village Voice in "Turmoil"

2006-04-19T13:02:00.000-04:00

Against my better judgment,* I'm veering way off the usual course here at Polis to comment on the turmoil at the Village Voice. See, its been purchased by the New Times company, ending a long-standing rivalry between the two competing alt-weekly chains in order to dominate what has rapidly become an obsolete media market.

The breathtaking inanity of this otherwise little league media story became evident with a quote by New Times editor Mike Lacey, who has been firing Voice people en masse since taking over last fall. His main complaint has been that the Voice writers are all commentators and navel gazers, and that they don't do any real reporting. New Times reporters do real reporting, he declared to The New York Observer. They actually get on the phone and talk to people!

"We can our wrap our hands around the throat of the beast, find out what happened, and give that to readers," he said. "It's fun. It's a kick-ass way to make a living."

"Wrap our hands around the throat of the beast"? A "kick-ass way to make a living"? Is this guy serious? To my ears, that sounds as retrograde as if David Schneiderman had said when he bought the Village Voice in 2000, "We're going to stick it to the man! It's a groovy way to make a living." Lacey's absurd bravado is just as amateur and outmoded as the Voice's unreconstructed leftism. There's something sad about a fat, middle-aged man in the throes of total irrelevance talking about "kicking ass."

Hey, no argument from me that the Village Voice has been boring and predictable for a long time now. (Of course, there's a smattering of good writing here and there, and even some serious reporting now and again.) But is the New Times' apolitical gotcha brand of journalism the answer? Doubtful.

The New Times formula goes something like this: "Some guy we don't know or care about did some fucked up thing to someone else we don't know or care about," and it goes on like that for 6,000 words, because that's what real reporters do. They get on the phone and talk to people! And talk to more uninteresting people. And then they write a very long, shaggy-dog story about it. It's just as boring and predictable, if not more so, than "I hate Bush" navel gazing.

The fact is, in this era of media saturation (do I really need to use the word "blog" here?), and the more recently ramped up class of professional journalists out-reporting each other on war, terrorism, hurricanes, wiretapping and whatnot, there's very little left of the beast to get a hold of, much less its throat. In order to really do "original reporting," that means reporting on the leftovers. The kids don't care because they're on MySpace. The adults don't care because 9 out of 10 New Times stories are beside the point to anything important in people's lives. On the occasion that they do break important stories -- and they do -- I have no doubt those stories could have and would have been reported elsewhere. That was the whole point of alternative weeklies back when they were important: They reported the stories that the mainstream media wouldn't touch, for whatever reasons. That environment just no longer exists, in part because the MSM does report on things it didn't used to, and anything they miss or ignore is reported to death online.

I predicted back in 2002 that the two companies would eventually merge after they were embroiled in a Justice Department antitrust investigation for agreeing to sell each other papers and shut them down in order to improve their competitive advantage (which they announced, just like that, in their own damn press release, all but using the word "monopoly"!). I also predicted back then that once the merger took place, the chain would die a slow, painful death. Not because I buy into the notion that print journalism is all but extinct (did radio disappear when TV came along?), but because this particular brand of one-stop-shopping-alt-weekly journalism is a dinosaur and has been for awhile now, whether it's a die-hard lefty paper or a juvenile gotcha paper.

UPDATE: A few people have written to me about this post, one pointing out a typo (thank you!). Another wrote to say that it's really the business model that is the problem for alt-weeklies. This is of course the bottom line. I alluded to that by saying that "one stop shopping" weekly papers are dinosaurs, but didn't really get Craigslist, Internet porn, online movie trailers, etc. That the biz model is outmoded is unquestionably true. But if that were the ONLY problem, it could be fixed merely by changing the biz model, i.e. by going online. Many papers have created very good websites, but it doesn't fix the editorial problem. The conundrum is in evidence by the fact that Lacey et. al. are attempting to rebrand the chain while still keeping the Village Voice name. That pretty much says it all.

*I'm going to head off charges of bias right here by saying that, yes, I am biased. I used to be the editor-in-chief of a Village Voice-owned weekly paper in Cleveland.

Stop Work Order at Former St. Marks Squat

2006-04-18T11:45:00.000-04:00

New York magazine has an update on Mosaic Man and 120 St. Marks Pl., the last artist squat in the E.Vil. that I've been reporting on here at Polis. NY Mag made it sound like everyone parted ammicably, which couldn't be further from the case. Nevertheless, here's an update to the update. The gut renovation of the building has been halted by a stop work order, according to Robert Arihood, an E.Vil. resident and photographer (he took the NYM pic as well). According to Mr. Arihood, Benjamin Shaoul and his company, Magnum Management, are allegedly perpetrating a dangerous renovation by poking holes in the building's rear retaining wall. Since we've seen our share of collapsed buildings of late, the city appears to be taking no chances by stopping work until a hearing on June 8.

Alleged Tenant Harassment Saga Continues [Polis]
Mosaic Man and Other E.Vil Squatters Evicted [Polis]
Mosaic Man Update [Polis]
St. Marks Squat Trilogy [Polis]

Your Hidden City Winners Announced

2006-04-17T10:33:00.000-04:00

Your Hidden City, the first "open source" architecture photography contest, is complete after the jury voted for their favorite photos in five categories (for more details, click here). Tropolism has begun unveiling winners, some of which I voted for and others I didn't. Here's one all six blogger/jurists seemed to agree on for the category of Best Natural/Urban Overlap: Adam Pietrala's photo taken in Jamaica, Queens, of all places. For more winners, click here.

Alleged Tenant Harassment Saga Continues

2006-04-13T17:37:00.000-04:00

Updates on Benjamin Shaoul of Magnum Management keep coming in fast and furious. Polis readers know that I've been following the eviction of squatters from 120 St. Marks Place (including the well known Mosaic Man) by Shaoul using what tenants say are harrassing and illegal tactics. After my first post, I was then informed that legal, lease-holding tenants in a building on E. 5th St. are also alleging harassment by Shaoul. Now for the new info:

A tenant in a building also owned by Mr. Shaoul in Chelsea, 236 W. 16th St. contacted Polis to outline more allegations of harassment. One tenant said the gas has been shut off for two weeks. According to the tenant, there's a retarded man who lives in the building who is being routinely harassed by Shaoul and his people for refusing to take a buy-out. This person also overheard Shaoul barking on his cell phone about a reporter who is posting things on a blog about his tactics (i.e. Polis). Shaoul apparently has dragged several tenants into court as not really being legit tenants, which they claim is patently absurd.
Craig Lopez -- who vacated his storefront at 120 St. Marks Place today -- was confronted by Shaoul's people with a piece of paper demanding that he and Rachel Allen retract what they told me. Lopez and Allen refused to sign it. Because demolition of the building was underway while Lopez's store was still open in the building, per the agreement he signed with Shaoul, his asthma was aggravated and he had to to go the hospital.
The Villager, for whatever reason, still hasn't run the story the paper has supposedly been working on for two weeks now. New York magazine is now working on a piece about "The Cave," the artists group that existed in 120 St. Marks up until a few months ago, which one person familiar with the group said was more like a bunch of drunks than an "artist" colony. Nonetheless, Mosaic Man said he got the place cleaned up of all the drunks and things were settled down just when they all got harassed out of the building without "due process."

Mosaic Man and Other E.Vil Squatters Evicted [Polis]
Mosaic Man Update [Polis]
St. Marks Squat Trilogy [Polis]

Chillin' On The Cube

2006-04-12T11:20:00.000-04:00

I took this on my way home last night. The Cube is an iconic work of East Village public art (aka The Alamo). The moon was nearly full (upper left) but alas, all I had was my digital camera and not my big honkin' Nikon, which would have taken a much better shot. (Click to enlarge.)

If Only I Were 25...

2006-04-11T22:10:00.000-04:00

Metropolis turns 25 this year, and to celebrate, they had a party featuring 25 architectural photographers who have contributed to the mag over the years. The exhibit is up at the Art Directors Club, 106 W. 29th St. through the end of April.

St. Marks Squat Trilogy

2006-04-10T09:57:00.000-04:00

I received an email from Robert Arihood (a fixture in the East Village who has been taking photographs of people and the neighborhood since god was a child) about the eviction of some squatters at 120 St. Marks Place, including Mosaic Man. He writes:

No one living in the building ever expected to live there forever. All expected to be evicted eventually. All were willing to leave peaceably when asked to do so. ... The owner of the building knew they were living there, some of them for several years. The owners acknowledgement and accepted their occupancy in the building for such a long time afforded them some limited standing and thus an entitlement to due process when the owner chose to evict them. ... Doors of occupied apartments were broken down with one very surprised individual actually being home at the time of the forced entrance. This behavior is emblematic of Mr. [Benjamin] Shaoul's management and can be seen in other places where he is attempting to evict other RENT PAYING and LEGAL tennants such as 515 E. 5th St.

Is this the last squat on St. Marks? I've walked up and down the three blocks between 3rd Ave. and Avenue A hundreds of times, and I'm pretty sure this is the last one. It's too bad that it had to end this way, when so many other squatters in Alphabet City were able to take control of their buildings and turn them into real homes. Of course, the inability of the squatters at 120 St. Marks Place to do that is not solely the fault of the landlord.

Gorgeous photo by Robert Arihood. Click to enlarge.

Mosaic Man and Other E.Vil. Squatters Evicted [Polis]
Mosaic Man Update [Polis]

Mosaic Man Update

2006-04-06T11:06:00.000-04:00

I bumped into Jim Power, aka Mosaic Man, this morning in Tompkins Square Park. He is well known in the E.Vil. who has done all the mosaic tiling on light posts and planter boxes around the neighborhood. He recently lost the squat on St. Marks place where he had been for three years. (Click here for all the gory details).

He's remarkably sanguine about losing his place, saying that it was inevitable. He said he didn't appreciate the tactics that were used by Benjamin Shaoul to evict everyone, but he realized he wasn't a "legitimate" tenant, and so took the $2500 that was offered and left. He also said that up until about four or five months ago, the building was total mayhem, with people coming and going, drinking all night, with rival groups fighting with each other. It sounded like a Lord of the Flies thing.

Now he's bouncing around from place to place. He's about to turn 59, he said, and has a hip problem that prevents him from walking too far; he will lose all his tiling materials if he doesn't find a more permanent place soon.

I also learned that people who live in a building on E. 5th St. -- with legimate, rest-stabilized leases -- are also alleging harassment by Benjamin Shaoul, who recently purchased the building. It's hardly a new story in New York City, but it's always a bit shocking, nonetheless.

The photos below are of one of Mosaic man's lamp post pieces, and his former squat which I took from a safe distance across the street (the demo crew was in the process of removing bicycles that were in the basement).

Eminent Domain: If not for this, what? If not now, when?

2006-04-05T13:15:00.000-04:00

There's an important op-ed in today's Times arguing what I've been saying (albeit, in a much less in-depth way): The WTC site should be taken by eminent domain. It's an idea I stole from Paul Goldberger, which he advocated for in his book, Up From Zero.

Take Back the Towers [NYTimes]
Idling at Zero [Polis]

Photo by Julian Olivas.

Toll Bros. Condos

2006-04-05T09:54:00.000-04:00

I have a piece in today's Times about the Toll Bros. (i.e. builders of McMansions) moving into the New York market, but the paper didn't use any renderings online. So here's three. The first is 110 Third in the East Village, and the second is North8 in Williamsburg, and the third is the first tower of three also in Williamsburg.

Mosaic Man and Other E.Vil. Squatters Evicted

2006-04-04T16:41:00.000-04:00

A few minutes ago, I stumbled upon a breaking story. Most regular East Villagers know the white-haired Mosaic Man and his constant companion, a yellow Labrador. (Mosaic Man, aka Jim Power, has done all the mosaic tiling around St. Marks Pl. and other streets and he also owns the website EastVillage.com.) Apparently he is now homeless after having been kicked out of his squat at 120 St. Marks Pl. by the soon-to-be owner Benjamin Shaoul, who has allegedly harassed tenants in a Chinatown building he owned, according to AsianWeek.com.

All the above information is according to Craig Lopez, who owns Accidental CDs, and has been living and working in the building for the past five months as well after he lost his retail space on Avenue A, where he had been for ten years. He said four regular squatters and others who come and go were all harassed out of the St. Marks building, and that he personally was threatened by guys wielding sledge hammers. Lopez eventually worked out a deal with Mr. Shaoul, who apparently doesn't own the building yet, but has an option to buy it from Jim Crowley, who inherited the rundown building but did nothing to fix it up, and looked the other way while squatters came and went. Rachel Allen, who also lives in a third floor apartment in 120 St. Marks, said Benjamin Shaoul himself kicked down her apartment door and verbally abused her.

I stumbled into this as I was walking down the street and stopped to take a picture of the ground floor retail space where I had seen Mosaic Man go in and out of; I noticed that everything inside was being removed. One of the demolition guys tried to grab my camera, at which point I got pretty curious, needless to say. I haven't checked on much of the above story yet, but I can say that Craig Lopez seems to be a credible guy and I'll be following up on this as I confirm more of the story. The above photo is of Craig Lopez in his Accidental CD store, which he will be vacating in a week.

UPDATE: It looks like Irene and James Crowley owned the lot and building as of March 20, 1997, when it fell into tax arrears and had a tax lien placed on the property. The current owner is listed on one NYC website as St. Marks Apartments, which was the name that the Crowley's operated the building under, but it also looks like it was put up for sale due to the tax liens. Haven't totally sorted it out. But Mr. Shaoul is not the current owner, although there is a permit on file as of today for demolition.

UPDATE 2.0: The building was put up for sale for tax arrears and it was owned for awhile by Bank of New York, but it was settled by Jim Crowley and he managed to hold onto the building, although there is almost $30,000 still owed in taxes. More importantly, Jesse Jane is the name of Mosaic Man's dog. Their whereabouts are unknown, but supposedly The Villager is working on a story about Mosaic Man and Jesse Jane getting evicted, which I'll link to when it goes up. There's also a better piece on Benjamin Shaoul's dealings in Chinatown by the Village Voice.

myparkspace

2006-04-02T19:20:00.000-04:00

Ah, Tompkins Square Park on a beautiful spring Sunday.... who needs blooming daffodils and singing robins when you have witty social commentary? (Click above photo to enlarge.) UPDATE: Curbed alerts me to MySpace - The Movie!, a satirical series of short movies. Totally hilarious.

So There's a Blonde Reading the Newspaper...

2006-04-02T08:44:00.000-04:00

As a general rule dictated by self preservation, I avoid cracking on the paper that I write for. But the cover story in Sunday's City section just refuses to go uncommented upon. The story is so ... well, you be the judge: "Golden Girls: There are blondes everywhere. But in New York, a city that thrives on symbols, they are a breed apart." I read this piece literally slack-jawed at its breathtaking inanity. In order to appreciate the richness of this absurdity, it should be read in full, but here's just one graph:

This polished, pedigreed creature can usually be spotted in her natural habitat, the Upper East Side, dropping off her offspring at the Episcopal School, scrutinizing embroidered 480-thread-count sheets at Pratesi and sipping drinks at La Goulue.

So here's my best impromptu dumb-blonde joke: What did the dumb blonde say when she saw a picture of herself in The New York Times? "I didn't know I could read!" Bah-da-bum.

Update: Of course, this is turning out to be one of the most emailed stories from Sunday's paper.

Good News (For People Who Can Recognize It When They See It)

2006-03-31T09:32:00.000-05:00

Talks to hammer out who will build what at the World Trade Center have once again collapsed, and for the first time in awhile, I'm optimistic about what will ultimately come of the rebuilding effort. That might seem counterintuitive, but the fact is, the best thing that could happen right now is nothing because the people with the most power in these negotiations are completely consumed by what the rebuilding process will do for them, not for New York. As Nicolai Ouroussoff put it:

An aggressive government role in galvanizing the best creative minds is virtually nonexistent in the United States, where political and financial power has shifted to the private realm. ... In New York, the system can foster a poisonous mix of political self-interest and commercial greed, as it did at ground zero.

So the best thing that could happen is for the whole process to get derailed for some period of time while the one person who has no real political agenda beyond looking good for doing the right thing, i.e. Bloomberg and his legacy concern, to step in and impose some common sense at Ground Zero. And it seems that's exactly what's happening.

Photo by Julian Olivas.

Damn Yanks

2006-03-30T15:35:00.000-05:00

If there was any doubt that technology and the internet have radically changed community organizing and activism, it has been permanently put to rest by onNYTurf (via Bird to the North). OnNYTurf makes its case against the new Yankee Stadium with this complex and detailed map, showing exactly how this deal will go down (critics maintain that parkland to be taken for the new stadium is inadequately replaced elsewhere). Activists no longer need to show up to public meetings just to be dismissed when they're ill-informed and short on details. Critics of the plan came to a City Council hearing on Tuesday and put some serious pressure on this deal not just because they showed up in numbers, but because they knew what they were talking about. This is impressive community activism, foshizzle. City Council will vote on the plan April 5.

UPDATE: If the map is a little too complex for those of you not following this very closely, check out a commentary by WNYC's Brian Lehrer (hands down, the best host on the radio anywhere, and a New York treasure). He offers five reasons the Yankee Stadium deal should be voted down by City Council next week. Here's just one reason:

The current stadium has no apartment buildings right across the street from it. The new stadium would, both east and west. That's a big hit to the quality of life of the people who live in those buildings, which now face the park. Imagine the outcry if the city proposed doing THAT to the residents of Central Park West.

Leave it to Brian Lehrer to break this all the way down to its essence.

Corbin Building

2006-03-29T08:27:00.000-05:00

I have a piece in today's Times about the current owners of the Corbin Building -- the Collegiate Church -- who want to turn this historic Lower Manhattan building into the New Amsterdam Center. But it's being taken by eminent domain for the new Fulton Transit Center. Not much to add to the piece, really, so click here to read it in full, and find out how those mild-mannered, tolerant Protestants of Dutch heritage are going to take it to MTA!

Photo: John Harrington Jr., left, and Casey Kemper of the Collegiate Church Corporation and the original staircase and railing from 1888 by Michael Flaco.

VideoBlog on the E.Vil.

2006-03-28T11:34:00.000-05:00

A former real estate agent turned "drunken poet" has a short video on the East Village, with several scenes from my block (via Curbed). I've really gotta get busy learning this video/blog thing.

P.S. The Cube still spins ... all that alcohol appears to have weakened this guy's upper body strength.

Western Massachusetts

2006-03-27T23:16:00.000-05:00

I have a new slideshow totally unrelated to New York City. Click here to see pics of Western Massachusetts (only six slides ... painless). They're all taken with a very unsophisticated digital camera, so the quality isn't great (I was bummed I didn't bring my real camera), but I got a few decent ones nonetheless.

Breathtaking Inanity: The 24-Hour Real Estate Office

2006-03-26T07:20:00.000-05:00

I haven't come across a good candidate for my ongoing series entitled Breathtaking Inanity, but here's a doozy: The 24-hour real estate office at 20 Pine Street, the luxy-condo conversion of a former Chase Manhattan Bank office tower in Lower Manhattan. Mark my words, when the real estate bubble totally deflates, this will become a symbol of its breathtaking inanity.

It's 4 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Realtor Is? [New York Times]

Photo Credit: Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Would You Like Some Brie With Those Crackers?

2006-03-26T06:49:00.000-05:00

NPR: Brooklyn Bridge Gives up Cold-War Secret

Morning Edition, March 24, 2006 · A secret cache of Cold War-era emergency provisions was recently discovered beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Engineers inspecting the bridge found the hideaway, meant to help people survive in case of a nuclear attack. The cache includes water drums, medical supplies, blankets, drugs to treat shock and more than 350,000 crackers.

I heard this story on NPR last week and didn't see any other coverage, so I assumed I had just missed it. Turns out, the Times and every other New York paper got scooped.

But in keeping with the Timesian tradition, when the paper gets beat on its own turf, it comes out with a smarter, more in-depth piece. Without ever mentioning the words "war on terror" the piece uses Cold War hysteria -- with its bomb shelters and stash of crackers -- to shine a light on the current state of affairs:

"'All civil defense can do is to frighten children and fool the public into thinking there is protection against an H-Bomb,' declared a flier calling for a Civil Defense Protest Day on May 3, 1960, in City Hall Park."

Sounds just like Tom Ridge suggesting that we duct tape the windows.

Credit: Above image from The Onion.

Trifecta of Animal Spottings

2006-03-25T14:51:00.000-05:00

New York animals stories abound as of late. First there was the update of Pale Male and Lola, hawks who squat on the Upper East Side. Then there was the coyote in Central Park who succumbed to a traquilizer dart (I'd like to try that on a few obnoxious drunks on St. Marks Pl. some Friday night), and now the Times reports on seals hanging out in the lower New York harbor off Staten Island. Apparently, the seal population has recovered enough to delight the urbanites.

Last year, 1,200 seals were spotted off Long Island and Connecticut alone. This year, for the first time, the count has included the waters off New York City. Donald E. Moore III, the director of the Prospect Park Zoo ... said he had spotted 26 seals off Orchard Beach in the Bronx last week.

Whoa, the Bronx. Now we're talking gentrification.

Photo credit: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

Bring it On!

2006-03-23T12:04:00.000-05:00

Curbed reports that New York City has unveiled some groovy new street furniture designs. It's about freaking time! Go to any other global city (and even a few villages in Europe) and you'll see well-designed, contemporary street furniture instead of the overflowing trash cans that are the most interesting thing on most NYC blocks. Final designs for automatic toilets, bus stations, and newstands by Grimshaw (architecture firm for the new Fulton Transit Center in Lower Manhattan) should be approved shortly, manufactured by local vendors and installed not a moment too soon (although no projected date was mentioned).

King of Queens

2006-03-22T20:16:00.000-05:00

The Architect's Newspaper has a comprehensive piece by David Grahame Shane about all the development that's planned for Queens: "The Department of City Planning’s surgical approach to zoning is stimulating strategic development throughout the borough, promising a series of dynamic urban patches— as well as some awkward seams."

In this article, Shane -- who teaches urban design at Columbia and Cooper Union -- applies the theories he laid out in his book, Recombinant Urbanism: Coneceptual Modeling in Architecture, Uban Design, and City Theory, which I interviewed him about when the book was first published in the fall. Here are some excerpts:

What do you mean by "recombinant" urbanism?
Recombinant comes from genetics. Watson and Crick had a big influence on me. My idea is that through history, urban elements combine and recombine to make something entirely new and unique.

What is the difference between urban planning and design?
My definition, it’s a scale thing. Urban planning is very large scale. Urban design is much more about the fragments. It’s more in tune with the way catalyst development works. People can only assemble so much at one time. It’s more about packaging. Urban design is more pragmatic.

It's a dense book. Can you sum it up?
It starts with the idea that there are basic elements of urban design, one is a centering device, a town square or an atrium. Another is a linear sorting device, a street or a mall. The third one is places of urban change, the recombination of urban elements, or heterotopias as [Michel] Foucault called them.

Your book argues that there’s no such thing as a master planner anymore.
Planners and their dream of a rational scientific world just doesn’t work. The world is an irrational place where strange things happen. In the past, the illusion of planning scientifically was supported by the state and corporate economic planning departments. It was a different world. A lot of the book is about complex interactions and layers of different approaches. People in the past tried to simplify things. Today, in a heterotopia, actors work out their differences and come to some kind of agreement about its future shape.

Progressive urbanists say there’s no good planning in New York. Do you agree?
In certain ways, the New York adversarial model works. Otherwise you end up with Portland, and that doesn’t appeal to me much.

Mies in Newark

2006-03-22T10:43:00.000-05:00

When I was taken on a tour of Newark recently (click here for the resultant Times article), three apartment buildings by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe -- in good, but dogeared condition -- were pointed out to me. I thought it was interesting, but then forgot about it. Today, I came across an article about the Mies buildings in Newark by Fred Bernstein, who points out that the Mies buildings (built in 1960) stand across Newark's "central park" in contrast to the masterpiece Basilica of the Sacred Heart (built in 1899), which I photographed (above photo by Fred Bernstein).

Graffiti "Art"

2006-03-20T10:32:00.000-05:00

Many weeks ago, I posted a photo taken from INSIDE a new North Fork bank branch in the East Village decorated with "graffiti" underneath the teller windows. This morning, I plucked from the Curbed photo pool this piece of work from OUTSIDE a North Fork bank branch. Quick reader poll: Which is the more original/authentic piece of "art," 1. corporate graffiti inside the bank, or 2. street graffiti decrying "yuppie scum"?!

Update: I was informed that the pic I pulled from the Curbed photo pool is not of a North Fork Bank branch, just an advertisement for one. But the question still stands.

Deadlines, Deadlines, Deadlines

2006-03-15T10:47:00.000-05:00

Well, the "deadline" set by Gov. Pataki to resolve who is going to build what at Ground Zero has come and gone with no agreement ... and I have been a little bereft here at Polis as deadlines bear down on me ... deadlines that I actually have to meet. So keep checking back for new and exciting posts on Polis ... there will be some very, very soon. In the meantime, enjoy this pic I took just yesterday of Ground Zero looking west on Dey Street. I think it pretty well symbolizes Lower Manhattan ... building and construction is happening everywhere but Ground Zero (click to enlarge).

And Now for Some Good News (For People Who Like Cute Animal Stories)

2006-03-10T11:37:00.000-05:00

Taking a break from the apocalyptic posts about rebuilding the World Trade Center site (scroll down), here's one to warm your hearts. Pale Male and Lola, the hawks that occupy some very nice real estate on the Upper East Side just off Central Park, had been mating mid-air (you try that), and then settled down to take care of their new eggs. The Times reports:

According to bird-watchers who have tracked the hawks' behavior for years, Lola has almost certainly laid eggs. If so, it will be six weeks, or perhaps until the end of April, before an unlikely wildlife saga reaches its climax and baby red-tailed hawks are hatched.

Of course, New Yorkers will recall the fight that erupted last year over the hawks' nest, resulting in their eviction by the Fifth Ave. co-op board, which of course resulted in protests. But like tenacious New Yorkers determined to maintain their coveted address, the hawks are back ... and this year, they've already got a ginned-up PR machine that Lizzie Grubman would only dream about.

Yes, It's as Bad as You Thought

2006-03-05T15:40:00.000-05:00

For those watching the “redevelopment” of the WTC site, Miss Representation's latest post is not to be missed. See, Miss R. actually went to the public meeting that I posted about recently, and took notes. That is in and of itself quite admirable. But then he actually wrote a very coherent and important take-down of the whole damn thing. Here's just a sampling:

A new -- to me -- and rather disturbing detail was revealed: due to security concerns, the perimeter of the PATH station will be solid concrete up to ten feet (though this number was disputed by Mr. Plate). So the two projects that have cleared design development and security review [the other being the Freedom Tower, otherwise known as monumentum horibilis -- ed.] both will be complete opaque at street level. Which is perhaps good, since it was also noted that streetscape improvements are currently unfunded. ...

This is just ... I just don't know ... I'm just at a loss for words. Having repeatedly named the planning process at the WTC site "breathtaking inanity," that doesn't accurately depict the magnitude of the tragedy here. Can the worst terrorist attack on American soil be turning into the worst redevelopment disaster this country has ever witnessed ... in slow motion, no less? This can't be happening. And yet it is. Read the whole thing here.

Last Call: Your Hidden City

2006-03-04T13:42:00.000-05:00

Your Hidden City, the world's first open-source architectural contest, is only open for submissions for one more week! On March 10, at 5pm, we will close the Flickr pool and the jury will begin deliberating. Check out the full details at our announcement a couple of weeks ago.

If you place your entry right now, you will join ~~551~~ ~~556~~ 560 entries from ~~156~~ ~~158~~ 160 entrants. The pool is growing. The jury has its work cut out for it already, we hope you will add to the collection. Be sure to include your caption on why this is part of Your Hidden City (posted by Tropolism).

Photo taken in an old Jewish neighborhood in Rome, Italy, posted by ja_mo

My Mom As...

2006-03-01T10:15:00.000-05:00

DeLaVega, an East Harlem artists who opened a shop/gallery on St. Marks Pl. last summer, has the most enteraining storefront on the street (and that's saying something). I've been enjoying the portraits he's made of his mother:

Avalon Chrystie, Phase II

2006-02-28T12:16:00.000-05:00

Round and round we go, where it stops, nobody knows ...

Better By Design

2006-02-27T11:52:00.000-05:00

The default mode here at Polis is urban planning and city life in New York. But I also appreciate good design, which of course knows no city boundaries. One of the more interesting blogs about design is Inhabitat, and just a quick perusal this morning yields these little gems: rubber sidewalks made of recycled tires that are easily replaced and don't require tree removal; bamboo design; gorgeous cork floor tiles; and lots of prefab home designs. It's a great site.

Bring Back the Trolley

2006-02-27T11:19:00.000-05:00

Forgotten New York has a post today adding to its previous coverage of exposed trolley tracks that were once paved over but refuse to go away. It's interesting to note that the same General Motors that could very well go out of business in the early part of the 21st Century was largely responsible for having trolleys removed in the early part of the last century: "By 1948, all the trolleys were gone to be replaced by buses. It has been alleged that General Motors and an unspecified tire company conspired to speed the trolleys' demise," notes Forgotten NY. Here's an idea: let's intentionally expose the tracks and put trolleys on them again ... not the old-fashioned, tourist attraction trolleys, but modern trolleys that are springing up in cities all over America and actually help the city function with less pollution and impact on the enviornment. Read more about trolleys on Forgotten New York here.

Photos from Around the World

2006-02-24T10:58:00.000-05:00

When I agreed to jury an architectural photo contest with Tropolism entitled Your Hidden City, I had NO IDEA the response we would get: so far more than 300 photo entries and there's still several weeks to post. More impressive, however, is the QUALITY of photography. It's just absolutely astonishing. Learn more about the photo contest here, and then check out the photos for yourself. As an amateur photog myself, I'm thoroughly humbled.

Photo posted by scarlisle

Yeah, Whatever ...

2006-02-23T21:10:00.000-05:00

The Center for Architecture has announced a New York New Visions public forum on Feb. 28 (6-8 pm). The speakers: Stefan Pryor, President, Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, and Steve Plate, Director of Capital Projects, Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The topic: "an informative discussion of how the individual projects at the WTC site will relate together." Here's an informative opening salvo: They don't relate. At all. Discuss.

To RSVP, click here. Photo by Julian Olivas.

Gondolas to Gov's Island: Breathtaking Inanity

2006-02-23T10:19:00.000-05:00

Last week when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made another plea for development proposals for Governor's Island and revealed Santiago Calatrava's vision for gondolas linking Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn to the Island, I was tempted to nominate this for another edition of Breathtaking Inanity. But I quickly realized it's meant to be just a teaser, so I didn't bother.

But today, the Times' Nicolai Ouroussoff puts the gondolas into an urban planning context that makes this much more worthy of comment. Ouroussoff rightly points out that this latest plea for ideas is an obvious if not explicit admission that the city's planning/economic development departments are bereft of ideas themselves and have outsourced planning to the private sector (with the notable exception of the West Chelsea/High Line rezoning plan, which recently won the American Planning Association award for Best Community Plan ... and of course, that was a zoning thing, which the city knows quite well, but I digress):

"[C]onjuring an image for the island's future will be left up to developers. ... Not all countries operate this way. In Spain and the Netherlands, city and regional governments typically organize elaborate design competitions for a major urban site, then hire a developer to figure out how to put the idea into practice.

An aggressive government role in galvanizing the best creative minds is virtually nonexistent in the United States, where political and financial power has shifted to the private realm. That's why New York has fallen behind cities like Barcelona, Rotterdam and even London in terms of the level of ambition behind public works projects. In New York, the system can foster a poisonous mix of political self-interest and commercial greed, as it did at ground zero.

And there you have it, the problem in a nutshell. One of the first pieces I wrote as a brand new freelancer in New York City was for Metropolis magazine that touched on this very issue. An urban planning firm founded in Amsterdam had opened an office in New York in hopes of applying their waterfront redevelopment expertise here. As far as I know, since then they've had one New York client in four years because we DON'T PLAN HERE. We throw designs at the wall and see what sticks. Is it any wonder then that Governor's Island, perhaps the most intriguing piece of developable land in the Northern hemisphere, has been collecting dust since the Coast Guard abandoned it more than ten years ago?

The final irony (did I just use that cliched phrase?) is that this Dutch-based planning firm has been trying to get involved with Governor's Island since they first set up shop here more than four years ago -- the same little island that a Dutchman purchased from Native Americans with two ax heads, a string of beads, and a handful of nails in 1637.

Rose Window on the Passaic

2006-02-22T15:15:00.000-05:00

I took the above picture in:
A) Chartres, France
B) Basilica, Italy
C) Newark, New Jersey

It's the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, begun in 1899 and finished in 1954, in Newark. Who knew? I suppose a lot of people who live there.

New Blog, New World

2006-02-21T14:28:00.000-05:00

I love the web. I love blogs. I love the whole damn digital thing. Why? Because it allows smart, interesting and cool people like David Zeev Krieger to get in contact with me. He has a new blog called Distressed Property, which consists of a handful of short videos he's made of, you guessed it, distressed properties around New York City. You can read his quick bio for yourself, but it ends with this bit of real estate intrigue: "now living in new york working to encourage buyer driven real estate development." I'm looking into exactly what that means, and might even do a real estate story about it. But in the meantime, Distressed Property has a handful of very cool short videos. Check them out here.

New York and Photography: Like Cabernet and Chocolate

2006-02-18T17:41:00.000-05:00

A must-see photography exhibit is currently at the Julie Saul Gallery in Chelsea. Jeff Chien-Hsing Liao won the 2005 "Capture the Times" photography contest by the New York Times Magazine, and Habitat 7 is his first solo show (it will move to the Queens Museum of Art from Feb. 26-May 24). The photos are taken around the Number 7 subway line in Queens using a large format camera. Several photos are taken throughout the day and then combined into one panoramic view creating detailed and sharp images that also have a time-lapse quality. The photos are so rich and detailed, I was able to take the above pic (which is just a section of one photo) using my digital camera. Aside from the technical prowess of the photographer, what's so amazing to me is that, as absolutely saturated as this city is with photographers capturing every nook and cranny, there are still original and surprising ways to shoot New York.

In case you missed an earlier post, Tropolism is sponsoring Your Hidden City, an architecture/photo contest (I am on the jury). For more details, click here, but the contest welcomes photos from any city on earth, not just New York.

Who's Spending $11.5 to Live on Literary Row?

2006-02-14T16:17:00.000-05:00

I'm momentarily breaking my silence here on Polis (see next item), but since I've already wasted time today doing a post for the Times real estate blog about a record-breaking sale in Manhattan, here's the scoop: Over at The Walk-Through, "Give Us Your Rich, Your Famous..." is about a townhouse on W. 10th Street that sold for $11.5 million. This breaks the previous record for a single-family home below 34th street of $9.3 million on E. 11th St. The buyer is listed as Doves' Nest NYC LLC, but who that is exactly remains unknown ... for now. Anyone got more info?

Update: Curbed and some readers chime in with a little more info, but not much, except to say that chances are, the buyer is unlikely to be a celeb. As soon as I know more, you'll know more (probably sometime after Curbed knows more).

On Book (Proposal) Leave, Part II

2006-02-12T09:09:00.000-05:00

I'm going to be taking a break from Polis (and the Times) for a week or better to work on a book chapter. Meanwhile, check out a contest I'm helping to jury (click here or go to Your Hidden City) to get details of the first open source architecture photo contest, led by Tropolism. I've been looking at the photos so far, and Hidden City is already shaping up to be a high calibre international contest.

Wish I had a Fireplace

2006-02-12T08:45:00.000-05:00

I took this about 8:15 this morning.

I took this (facing the opposite direction on St. Marks Pl.) about 5:30 this evening. Apparently this was a record breaking Nor'easter.

Question: Is my impression correct that Bloomberg has gotten exceedingly lucky on the bad weather front? If memory serves, every time we've had a major snow storm, it was over a holiday or weekend when cleaning up the streets is significantly easier and cheaper. Anyone care to take on that little research project and let me know?