Here’s a beautiful slideshow about our Golden Age of Skyscrapers, by Slate’s Witold Rybczynski. Except for the Gehry design for the NYTimes building. I hated that.
No double-whammy, no double-whammy!
The City Journal’s Steven Malanga explains why my home state sucks:
But today New Jersey is a cautionary example of how to cripple a thriving state. Increasingly muscular public-sector unions have won billions in outlandish benefits and wages from compliant officeholders. A powerful public education cartel has driven school spending skyward, making Jersey among the nation’s biggest education spenders, even as student achievement lags. Inept, often corrupt, politicians have squandered yet more billions wrung from suburban taxpayers, supposedly to uplift the poor in the state’s troubled cities, which have nevertheless continued to crumble despite the record spending. To fund this extravagance, the state has relentlessly raised taxes on both residents and businesses, while localities have jacked up property taxes furiously. Jersey’s cost advantage over its free-spending neighbors has vanished: it is now among the nation’s most heavily taxed places. And despite the extra levies, new governor Jon Corzine faces a $4.5 billion deficit and a stagnant economy during a national boom.
While over at the New York Times, we find out that my hometown is about to be put back on the EPA’s Superfund cleanup list:
Contractors hired by Ford dumped tons of paint sludge laced with toxic chemicals and other polluted debris in a remote area of Ringwood around two Revolutionary War-era iron mines. Some local residents, most of them members of the Ramapough Mountain Indian Tribe, have serious illnesses, including certain cancers and skin diseases that have been linked to the toxins. They also have leukemia rates that are twice the statewide average, according to a lawsuit they filed against Ford in January.
Toddling with Mr. 3000
Off to Chicago for the BIO Conference. I’ll try to get Bernie Mac’s autograph at his plenary session.
I’m also hoping to get out and meander in the city for a bit. I was in Chicago in March 2000 for a small conference, but that was my only visit. I remember that the architecture in the core area (I forget what it’s called: the Loop or something?) was interesting because, while grand, it didn’t have the sheer vertical overwhelmingness of NYC’s major buildings. It felt more welcoming, in the way that the buildings seemed to sweep away and up, rather than upupUP.
Anyway, if I take any good pix, you’ll be the first to know.
Also, I just finished re-reading the Shakespeare’s Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV 1&2, and Henry V), and have decided to make my next couple of readings “books other people really like and told me to read.” So I’m taking along Geek Love (my wife adores it) and Clockers (my buddy Mark contends it’s like good Charles Dickens, with crack).
The Cos on the Cleanup
Bill Cosby spoke at a rally in NO,LA about reconstruction:
Cosby, whose criticism of some aspects of modern African-American culture has stirred controversy in recent years, told a rally headed by black leaders that the city needed to look at the “wound” it had before Katrina struck.
“It’s painful, but we can’t cleanse ourselves unless we look at the wound,” Cosby told the rally of about 2,000 people in front of the city’s convention center.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you had the highest murder rate, unto each other. You were dealing drugs to each other. You were impregnating our 13-, 12-, 11-year-old children,” he said.
“What kind of a village is that?”
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Pastor Johnny Ray Youngblood also discussed the introspective portion of the rebuilding process:
With Katrina, as with East Brooklyn and North Philadelphia and Southeast Washington, the way out is straight ahead. We have to act our way out of this — as in constructive action by hopeful actors who work with a trowel in one hand and a sword in the other.
We have to raise our own money, not just wrestle over government money. We have to find our own housing sites. We have to hire and monitor builders and developers who work for us, not for some bureaucrat in Washington.
We have to deflect all the hustlers and talkers within our community who see this catastrophe as just another opportunity to shake people down and line their pockets.
We have to see this as a generational struggle — 10 years, maybe 20 — not as a quick fix.
About that fountainhead . . .
Neat interview at BusinessWeek with Joshua Prince-Ramus, the lead partner and owner of the New York branch of the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the firm founded by Rem Koolhaas. It’s all about the rational process of designing “outrageous” buildings:
We believe in a hyper-rational process where you accept the constraints, conditions, and challenges of a project, and you attempt to engage them by going back to first principles. You don’t accept any convention. If someone says, “This is how you solve that problem,” you give them the bird. You just say, “I don’t want to hear it.” [. . .]
We’re seeing constraints as opportunities. It’s not like we’re getting around the constraints. We’re saying, “The project’s just the constraints.” If we can solve the constraints, that’s where the form will come, that’s where the beauty will come, that’s where the logic will come. And more likely than not, you can get it built, you can get it financed, you can get it on budget.
I find this stuff fascinating, but I have a different view on art than some of my friends. Read more.
Before the flood
Just finished reading Rob Walker’s Letters from New Orleans, which I enjoyed much more than Tom Piazza’s Why New Orleans Matters. I found the latter to be far too preachy, bordering on a sort of “White Man’s Burden” for why no expense must be spared in rebuilding the city. Walker’s book, on the other hand, made me care much more for the city and what it means and has meant.
Maybe the big difference is that one writer was discussing NO,LA pre-Katrina, and the other post-Katrina.
Or maybe it’s that one writer is a journalist, and the other is a novelist.
Or maybe one guy is someone you could just chill out and have a beer with, and the other guy is a douche.
Double Down
(Stories that begin with “I was a pizza delivery man” tend to go in a different direction than this one, so I apologize in advance for the letdown.)
I was a pizza delivery man one summer during my college years. My mom and I lived in southeast Pennsylvania, in a nice town close to the ivy-covered halls of Swarthmore College and one of the most depressed cities east of the Mississippi. When friends from my hometown in NJ would come to visit, they’d follow my directions from Rt. 95 and look around nervously, wondering why my mom had chosen to move to a ghetto slum. Within a mile or two, as they approached Wallingford, their moods would brighten.
When I began delivering pizzas, one of the other drivers stood beside me and pointed to the map of the delivery area. The area of Chester, PA cut off to the east by 95 was covered with cross-hatched lines. It may as well have said, “No man’s land.”
“What’s the deal?” I asked.
“We don’t deliver to that side of 95. Too many drivers got shot and had their cars stolen,” he replied.
“Uh-huh.”
“You want to buy a gun?” he asked. “I’m a licensed dealer.”
“That’s okay.”
(Keep in mind: this is within a year of my Napoleon Dynamite look)
I did carry a knife that summer, and kept a baseball bat in my car. I managed to make it through the season without getting into trouble, although I did pull out the bat once, when two guys were having a street-brawl directly in front of my car while I was on a delivery.
A year or two later, I drove a shuttle van during late-night weekend shifts for a motel near the Philadelphia International Airport. As part of that gig, I would drive the girls from the housekeeping department home when their shifts were up. They lived on The Other Side of 95. The side where there are corner bars with a line of guys 25 long waiting to get in, looking like a casting call for that bad movie-within-the-movie in The Hollywood Shuffle.
The trip was usually pretty easy, since I always knew how far I was from the highways. Still, a white guy driving a big van through Chester on a Saturday night must’ve seemed a little odd. If there were any cops on patrol, I bet they’d have been suspicious.
Why do I bring all this up? Because Chester’s getting a casino!
That’s right: this hideously depressed shipbuilding town has decided that the best way to revitalize its fortunes is to let Harrah’s come in and build a casino and racetrack.
Officials see the Harrah’s project as a potential economic engine that will bring new investment, service jobs and increased revenues to a Colonial-era city that has been battered by high unemployment, poverty, crime and drugs in recent decades [ . . .] While the city has not done an economic-impact study, [David N. Sciocchetti, executive director of the Chester Economic Development Authority] predicts the daily influx of visitors to Chester will prompt new restaurants, gas stations and businesses catering to tourists. He also sees an opportunity for companies that will supply the complex with goods and services.
No, seriously! The cure for their ills will consist of compulsive gamblers and track-denizens! Even better, the area upon which Harrah’s is building gets tax abatements, so the city and state won’t get as much of a benefit from the commerce!
I understand that Chester’s essentially a dead zone, and probably still doesn’t even have decent pizza delivery, but if you’re going to try to reduce crime, poverty and drug use, I’m not sure that slot machines and harness racing comprise a viable strategy.
The Redline Shoes
VM reader and former official VM bartenderess Bonnie Erickson purports to be close to launching her own blog. I’ll definitely link to that when it’s up.
Meanwhile, as a PSA, here’s a piece she recently wrote about the importance of the Broadway Dance Center, which is threatened by its new owner’s redevelopment plans.
The more I read of Jane Jacobs, et al., the more worried I get about the mall-ification of NYC.
Year Zero?
A week or so ago, I mentioned a whole lot of reading that I’m doing as part of my attempt to understand what can be done to help New Orleans recover from the devastation of last August’s hurricane.
The fact that I’m starting with Virginia Postrel and Jane Jacobs probably indicates that I don’t think that federal micromanagement is the way to go. One of Ms. Postrel’s early points in The Future and Its Enemies is that there is no “scratch” from which to start, in a dynamic society. Even annihilating swathes of the city doesn’t mean it’s Year Zero in NO,LA; there are tons of people who have claims on their homes, who don’t want to move away for good, and don’t want to live in federally subsidized housing projects.
All of which is to say, I’m not in agreement with Representative Baker (R-LA), who proposes an $80 billion federal program to “to pay off lenders, restore public works, buy huge ruined chunks of the city, clean them up and then sell them back to developers,” according to the Times. Or, more expansively:
Under his plan, the Louisiana Recovery Corporation would step in to prevent defaults, similar in general nature to the Resolution Trust Corporation set up by Congress in 1989 to bail out the savings and loan industry. It would offer to buy out homeowners, at no less than 60 percent of their equity before Hurricane Katrina. Lenders would be offered up to 60 percent of what they are owed.
To finance these expenditures, the government would sell bonds and pay them off in part with the proceeds from the sale of land to developers.
Property owners would not have to sell, but those who did would have an option to buy property back from the corporation. The federal corporation would have nothing to do with the redevelopment of the land; those plans would be drawn up by local authorities and developers.
So, from what I gather, the plan will involve massive federal involvement and funding, coercive land sales (why not just employ eminent domain, while you’re at it?), and a close alliance with “local authorities and developers” who are among the crookedest in America.
One of the best things about the article — besides the line “the bill has become increasingly important to Louisiana because the state lost out to the greater political power of Mississippi last month” — is that virtually every positive quote about the program seems to be delivered secondhand by . . . Rep. Baker!
And mourn the likely departure of a NYC institution, while you’re at it.
Chinese Fire Drill
I like some of Rem Koolhaas’ designs. And I enjoyed a bunch of Delirious New York.
That said, I don’t believe there’s any way that his CCTV building in Beijing will actually stand.