BLANG's blog

I visited the Freedom Tunnel with a few friends on a brisk April morning.  We were told that to experience the tunnel fully, we had to be there to see the first rays of light penetrate the cavernous darkness.  So we set out at 5:00 am and entered the tunnel in total darkness.  After a few minutes of blind exploration, sunlight began to seep in and the tunnel was slowly revealing itself to us.  Out from pitch black, the murals on the walls started to illuminate.  A man with sunglasses, a cacophony of color, broken glass and the Venus de Milo - all glowing in the sparse light amid piles of rubble and trash.  Another beam of light broke the stillness and directed my gaze to a splash of red paint at the foot of a spraycan with a bullet hole through it.  I had entered a post-apocalyptic cathedral, a blurry vision of a former epoch.

The Freedom Tunnel, between the 70’s-110’s on the upper west side, was an active place twenty years ago.  It was filled with the characters who used to be a more visible presence in New Yorkers’ lives - the unshaven, the uncouth, the unclean.  In need of space to live and work amid the skyrocketing real estate, the street artists; the apartment-less colonized an abandoned piece of New York City infrastructure: the train tunnel beneath Riverside Drive.  At its height of residence and activity, thousands gathered to live and work in the Freedom Tunnel.  The tunnel was covered in make-shift dwellings - a village - a subterranean shantytown.  It was a community existing in its own set of rules.  The people who made houses in the tunnel made a place to call their own.  Like Michael Pollan, these men and women left a piece of the City they once called home because they could not work or live there anymore.  The street artists built for themselves a creative place of escape and expression.  And in setting up camp beneath the City that inspired their work, they were able to regard New York with a new perspective.  

Robert Moses built the train tunnel in the 1930’s in the same environment of public access and utility associated with his early work and planning.  But public transportation grew to be increasingly irrelevant for a culture in love with the automobile.  The tunnel was thus never used and abandoned.  It became a perfect place for those experimenting with graffiti art in the 1970’s and 1980’s because it was outside the purview of law enforcement.  The community grew and grew in the 1980’s to become a sacred place for those who could not afford a place to live.  The people of the street transformed an unused public utility into a creative workshop for artists to spread their subversive art form around the City.

But the Freedom Tunnel could not survive Giuliani’s obsessive campaign to sanitize a city overrun with windshield cleaners and boom boxes.  The people who lived there were forced out in 1991 when the Amtrak trains started running through the tunnel.  Thousands were evicted throughout the 1990’s and now there are virtually no residents.  The people left to find sanctuary in the outer boroughs, and what we are now left with is a cultural museum in disrepair - a rotting emblem of street and youth culture. 

As a twenty-two year old living in 2011 New York City, I tend to romanticize the city of the seventies and eighties.  I am nostalgic for a city I have never remembered - the city of The Warriors and Style Wars.  I long for a city of open spaces for expression and run by a mayor who is an appreciator of street art and culture.  As someone who can only visit the ruins of a former New York, I resent the twenty year campaign to rebrand Manhattan and New York City as tame and showered.  I wonder where the primordial grime on which the City was once constituted has gone...washed clean or drifting somewhere beyond the metropolis.   

The Freedom Tunnel was never planned for the activity that took place there.  Moses was probably turning in his grave when the shantytowns were erected within his pristine tunnel.  The anarchistic spirit of the place grew from it being unplanned.  Abandoned factories, warehouses and tunnels always attract artists in need for space to express themselves.  So much of post-war street art was adapting preexisting spaces and forms into works of art.  Unplanned expression, working on the fly and sometimes on the run are foundational to the murals now molding in the Freedom Tunnel.  While I find it difficult to really define authenticity, I would call the art in the Freedom Tunnel authentic.  I deem it such because of its unplanned rawness.  Realness for me is a genuine ignorance of significance.  By that I mean the moment someone or something realizes importance, some authenticity dissipates from its soul.  The Freedom Tunnel is an important place in New York, but its not really open to the public.  It is a functional Amtrak tunnel, which again complicates the Freedom Tunnel’s legacy.  The community that lived in the tunnel relied on the disuse of infrastructural space - a disuse that was the result of a booming automobile industry.  So in some way, the Freedom Tunnel was a product of the Automobile Age - a period in American history that we associate with a myriad of societal and ecological problems.  And when the tunnel resumed its original programmed use of public transport, the Freedom Tunnel died.  

Visiting the Freedom Tunnel was a conflicting experience.  I found myself trying to identify what is more important to a city: public transportation or authentic artistic expression.  But instead of figuring out an answer that does not exist, I just found myself becoming angry with the forces and institutions that have pitted public transportation against public art in this given space.  As Jacobs and many urban theorists proclaim, the presence of artists is a sign of a healthy city - street art especially because it transforms streets into spectacle.  And if uncommissioned art is some of the most authentic expressions of our culture, how do we safeguard its survival? As urban designers, how do we commission the uncommissionable; how do we plan the unplanned?  

The art that exploded from the Freedom Tunnel was an aberration in the City’s history - a fleeting moment in New York’s development that was once conducive to grand spectacles of public art.  There will never be a subway car enrobed in the electrifying patterns and colors of Dondi or Freedom.  There will never entire neighborhoods moving their feet to Kool Herc or Afrika Bambaataa.  Again I find myself romanticizing a time and place I have only heard about or seen in movies.  But I do not think I am not alone in my wistfulness.  My whole generation is nostalgic for this particular moment in New York’s history.  As my friends learn how to breakdance while clutching onto their i-Phones, I see my generation with one foot in the past and one in the future, leaving their bodies wobbling somewhere in the present.  

>Tuan contemplates the motions of time and space and reminds us of how place is a pause in movement.  Place differs from space in its ability to evoke intimacy.  In a place, we have paused to appreciate the given area in which we find ourselves.  We seem to always be drifting in space and it is the place that grounds us.  It is the anchor that brings us back to reality - a reality we construct amid the other realities we simultaneously deconstruct.  The experience of place is only a real experience if it totally enrobes you in its own world - if it makes you travel standing still.  I find that the process of forming connections with places is the same as when we form connections with people: the process of constructing friendships.

When we meet someone with whom we feel a deep connection, we immediately begin creating the reality in which the relationship resides.  We make a world of meaning that only the people forming the connection understand.  Through a series of shared experiences and shared aspirations we develop our own language.  I know that when I’m talking to a best friend around other people, most people cannot even understand how we communicate because of the various names and gestures we have made up to signify various meanings.  Tuan writes, “a brief but intense experience is capable of nullifying the past so that we are ready to abandon home for the promised land.” (184) I see home in this passage as a known place and the promised land as an unknown place.  The adventure of pursuing that unknown promised land with someone is a blind leap into the intensity of true friendship.  It is a demonstration of mutual vulnerability that provides the core experience for a relationship.  

Intimate friendships are a pause in the perpetual mundane - a passage into an alternate reality of fun.  We actively reject any and all external realities; the outside world does not exist when sharing intimate moments.  Place and friendship are similar in that regard, but friendships require more social construction.  We arrive in a space, pause, think and deem it a place.  We return if the intimacy of the place is strong enough.  A friendship on the other hand requires work from the start.  We simply don’t arrive into friendships the same way we arrive into places.  But the same removal from a wider shared reality into one you construct is unifying phenomenological thread.  

          We all know the story of how the Girl from Scranton battled the Man from Yale; how just a housewife defeated one of the most influential men in history.  We all get the historical references of crushing the establishment by the will of the people.  Coming into Wrestling with Moses, we all have an intellectual repository of this type of epic tale.  And I think Flint is guilty of fanning the flames of this melodrama.  By dressing up his main characters in full on superhero and super-villain garb, Flint expounds on the myth of Jacobs and Moses as epic foils to each other's aspirations.  But after a closer read of some of the material, I began to appreciate the similarities between Moses and Jacobs and eventually began to sympathize with Moses more than I thought I would.  Both Jacobs and Moses believed in the city.  Both lived in the city because both felt that the city was the center of citizenship.  And most importantly, both rewrote the rules.
            The prewar Robert Moses, Moses 1.0 if you will, was quite the radical.  His aggressive campaign to get parks, pools, beaches and playgrounds to New York yielded some of our most cherished urban spaces.  Moses's Robin Hood attitude was most palpable when he took away the waterfront of some wealthy few and gave the people Jones Beach.  What he did was not legal until he rewrote the clauses of legality.  He expanded the power of the City to provide needed services to the people.  By opening up Long Island to the people of New York, Moses flipped off the nation's Gatsby's in much the manner as Jacobs did.
            Like Jacobs, Moses also believed in a meritocracy - the subject of his dissertation.  He very much loathed the pedigree and coronation of early 20th century American politics.  As a Jew, Moses had to fight his way into being taken seriously.  While Jacobs was very much the fighter and activist in the sixties, she originally broke into the scene of urban planning by chance in 1956 when she gave her speech to Architectural Forum.  Only after this speech did the people of the urban planning community start pressing her to continue "hammering at it," as Mumford suggested.  I do not think Jacobs would have been such the voice of democracy as she was had this event not occurred and had the professionals in the field not urged her to continue her work.  Be that as it may, Jacobs fought on when she could have stopped, proving to the world that a true meritocracy does not rest on the shoulders of higher education.  Through uniting the diverse clamoring of the Village into one voice, Jacobs rewrote the rule book on activism and civic engagement.
            What is so interesting to me is that Jacobs fought and rewrote the rules that Moses fought and rewrote himself.  Both rewrote the rules in the name of the people - Moses so he could deliver nature to New Yorkers, and Jacobs so she could protect her neighborhood.  We are temped to vilify Moses because his later career - the Moses 2.0 who brought us the Cross Bronx and almost the LOMEX.  We are quick to forget the raw grit Moses once possessed and quick to remember the legacy Jacobs picked up from a fallen giant.

In his“Roof” chapter of A Place of my Own, Pollan sites his building in architectural time and place.  He wants to know whether his structure is post-modern or not - a question weighted with millennia of reinforced baggage.  For a very foundational human need, the craft of shelter has undergone some profound shifts over the last hundred and twenty years.  The question of “what type of building is this?” is more complicated to answer now than ever before because of every generation in the 20th century wrote their own architectural manifestos. 

Instead of asking what kind of building his house is, I think Pollan is really asking, “what kind of relationship with nature does my house have?”  The fact that Pollan wants his building to have a symbiotic and positive relationship with nature would definitely make it not modernist.  The modernists wanted to completely wipe away thousands of years of design in search for a universal, international concrete slab.  They saw nature as dirty, and they wanted to cleanse architecture.  Pollan uses Eisenman’s House VI as his image for the hyperintellectualism modernism engendered among designers - “the elegant There.” (196) Modern in form; post-modern in conversation, House VI relies on a background of art and architectural history to be fully understood.  Pollan uses House VI as his hut’s foil, offering that “architecture might be done with nature, but the experience of House VI, now on its third roof, suggests that nature will never be done with architecture.” (197) 

I think Pollan’s house and ultimately his book seek to readdress fundamental questions of nature and feeling in the framework of contemporary architecture.  By erecting a small house with the help of a friend for himself, Pollan circumvents conventional architectural labeling.  Maybe it’s post, post-modernism for the simple reason that it is not in the post-modern historical dialogue.  Post-modernism was very much a reaction, often ironic and witty, to modernism.  Its legacy is in its relation to its predecessor.  So if modernism was anti-nature in many ways, post-modernism was not anti, anti-nature, but rather an ironic depiction of that form.  Pollan’s hut on the other hand does not have a real relationship with any form of architecture.  Instead, Pollan prides his dwelling on its relationship to him and its surroundings.  

Pollan’s little hut serves as foil to the highly gnostic and referential designs implicit in modern and post-modern architecture.  Like Charlie’s wooden duck house, Pollan’s house is site specific (as all architecture should be).  It must interact well with Pollan, his home and his land.  It must be a smart building, respectable and livable.  In this way, I think Pollan outlines central tenets to green building - designing buildings that speak to you because they speak with their environment - buildings that put you right close and personal to the internal mechanics and mystery of nature and the self. 

    In his preface of A Place to Call My Own, Michael Pollan laments over the lack of realness that plagues the profession of writing.  Like all art, writing seeks to express that which is experienced.  Something happens to us outside, in the world, and we meditate over it and communicate it indoors, in our own world.  Intellectualizing into expression is what secludes the writer and what ultimately prompts Pollan to exit his Platonic cave and get his hands dirty.  Only by erecting a physical something can he find the “antidote to the abstract and abstracted.” (x)
    I find this process quite ironic.  Pollan constructs ideas and evokes concepts for a living - a living that predicates itself on free-falls into the metaphysical.  And yet he decides that the only way he can continue this profession is to build a roof over the head that continually drifts into the space of daydreams.  His home, where he used to find the solace he needs to write, has become creatively infertile.  He alas must build his very own refuge.  To build books, Pollan must build a shelter.
    By occasionally removing himself from real life, Pollan is able to view life from a different perspective.  Hemingway believed that one could only really write of a place once one has left it.  Somehow the distance between a place you recollect becomes the intimacy you need to write about it.  Hemingway was probably on to something.  In Montana he wrote of Kilimanjaro, and in Paris he wrote of Seville.  I've experienced the same thing.  My ability to write about a place is strengthened by the distance that separates me from it.  I think it has to do with the writer's propensity for the poetic: to bring back what is gone.  
   Pollan definitely echoes these sentiments in his early chapters on his shelter.  His allusions to Thoreau's transcendental hut draw on the romantic convention of seeking truth and perspective in the dirt between fingernails.  Pollan needed some distance to bring him back to his writing.  In his words, "it might be that I wished for a place that stood a little apart from this life of mine, but only to get a better view.” (43)  Perhaps we can learn from Pollan - that indeed a little distance makes the heart grow fonder.

1
I used to go on long walks with my nanny.  We would walk along Sussex street from my backyard.  Sussex connects all of the postwar houses to the prewar houses of New Rochelle.  It winds down a hill parallel to Pinebrook boulevard.  We used to walk down it everyday.  When it rained in the spring, puddles would turn into little ponds.  I used to sit by them and watch frogs jump in and out.
 
2
My house sits on a postwar development, Wykagyl Estates.  It’s a brown and white tudor with a long driveway.  My dad tells me that the houses in the development were built by the mafia.  Two of our neighbors were part of the mafia too.  They’ve all moved away.
 
3
I would pick up my sister from school everyday with my nanny.  We walked down Skyview lane and crossed Quaker Ridge road to Ward School.  There was a very nice cross guard.  She always gave me a lollipop.
 
4
There used to be a farm at the east end of Quaker Ridge road.  My parents tell me it was still around when they moved in.  It didn’t last long when the eighties came around.  It was converted into a real estate development.  The only thing that’s left from the farm is a farm-style grocery store called Cherry Lawn.  They import a lot of their food from Mexico. 
 
5
Passed Cherry Lawn and south down Weaver street, you’ll find a big house with a tower. My Dad told me Judy Garland lived there.  “She lived here when New Rochelle was called ‘the country.’”  I found out later that Judy Garland never lived here.    
 
6
On Weaver there used to be a country club - Wykagyl Country Club.  The first Jews they let in were in the 1960’s.  It’s now a housing development.  All the houses are McMansions.                          
 
7
I was old enough to walk around the school field alone.  My sister and her friends played at the tennis courts at the foot of the school field.  They had lots of sticker books with lots of stickers.  Some were shiny, some were fuzzy and some smelled nice.  They were all bright. 
 
8
I remember the wall of the tennis court.  It was covered with colors and patterns and letters.  Big puffy letters and bright colors.  Some figures on the wall looked like the ones Keith Haring used to draw.  The wall is white now.   
 
9
My sister’s friends drank soda.  Coca-Cola.  They would snap open their cans of soda and play handball.  I was too young to play with them.  I watched.  I wasn’t allowed to have Coco-Cola.  It had caffeine in it.  I am now addicted to coffee.    
 
10
I had two friends in my development.  Michael and Vinny.  Vinny lived in one of the mafia houses.  There was always a white van parked outside his house.  We used to play manhunt in the school field.  We had to climb over a fence to get in.  We also played in my tree house.
 
11
Merardo, my Dad and I built the tree house.  It’s an open tree house.  It’s great for playing manhunt because you can see far away. 
 
12
It’s still up today.  But I’m too scared to go in it.  It wobbles. 

Many people have a real fear of getting lost.  I’ve been in cars with people that start hysterically crying when we’ve missed an exit.  Maybe it’s my complete lack of a sense of direction, but I kind of like getting lost...sometimes.  I often deliberately take wrong turns to find myself in a place where I’ve never been.  And then because of my poor navigational skills, it takes me a while to get to somewhere familiar.  There’s something about the process of having somewhere to go, getting lost and then getting back on course.  I mean, I know I won’t be lost forever.

The closest I’ve ever gotten to being lost forever was on a backpacking trip my family and I took to the Grand Canyon a few years ago.  My parents were trailing behind my sister and me, and our guide was already down at the base setting up camp.  The sun was setting and we hadn’t seen our parents in a good hour and a half.  So we started looking for them.  We had to veer off the trail to save time.  I put up dead cacti to mark our path because we couldn’t even see the trail anymore.  Looking back, it could have been pretty bad.  But I wasn’t freaking out - as maybe I should have been.  Instead, I soaked in the adventure.  I remember this one moment when I sat down and gazed into the red-orange expanse.  It was only then that I derived a real sense of intimacy with the landscape around me - the desert that I was lost in.  Being lost changed the desert from a space to a place for me.   

Tuan meditates on the meaning of getting lost in chapter four.  He offers the image of straying from a path in a forest.  Disorientated, the person spots a light in the distance and suddenly has a fixed point of reference - a goal.  Tuan writes, “as I move toward that goal, front and back, right and left, have resumed their meaning: I stride forward, am glad to have left dark space behind...” (36)  I think Tuan suggests in this passage that being lost can manifest itself both physically and psychologically.  I was physically lost in the Grand Canyon because I could not find my way.  And I am psychologically lost when I do not have a goal.  I often feel this latter type of lost when I find myself doing nothing - usually during the summer or on vacation.  I have few goals during these times, and after a while, it starts to get to me.  Not having a goal is the worst type lost.  It’s a more helpless feeling because it is harder to find a meaningful aspiration than it is to find the right path or exit.  And yet, maybe not having a goal all of the time is healthy.  Vacation from obligation eases the mind.  It is also a time when you can think about things other than school - things that you might not ordinarily have the time to pursue.  Lost in the months of summer vacation is some of the best time to find yourself because you can make up new goals that stem from profound interest rather than required study.    

If only Cape Cod were a prescribed medication, it would cure so many ills.  It just takes one week on the Cape to come home with a completely refreshed sense of self.  Every time I venture out there, I come back with a new found ease - a softness on my face that stays with me for a while.  It’s the smell of the sun hitting the pine cones on the beach; the sound of low tide drifting out into the horizon.  It is a special place sprinkled with special places - old towns and villages that give the Cape its charm.  Every summer my family goes to the last town on the Cape, Provincetown - the cape-town with the deepest sense of place.  

The physical landscape of Provincetown lends to this sense of place I feel whenever I spend time there.  The most immediate physical attribute is its proximity to the water.  The bay is never far away from whichever area of town you find yourself in.  The bay serves as a natural barrier, instilling an intimacy in Provincetown.  For J.B Jackson, boundaries like this one “stabilize social relationships....they give a permanent human quality to what would otherwise be an amorphous stretch of land.” (Jackson, 15)  The water around Cape Cod both protects its towns from the outside world and makes visitors and residents feel closer to one another.

Provincetown’s organic layout also shapes my experience.  Its gridless design accommodates narrow, windy side streets that wrap around the old colonial houses and open up into the center from Commercial and Bradford, the two main streets in town.  You discover your own piece of Provincetown in these streets - streets that reveal tree lined views of gardens and the harbor.  It is here where I stop and be present, a real place as “place is a pause in movement.” (Tuan, 138)  Provincetown itself is a pause in movement.  No one rushes because there is nothing to rush to.  The only rushing it seems is to get there.  
 

The height of the buildings is even more visual therapy.  The tallest building is the courthouse, which is three stories high.  All the other buildings are houses, restaurants and theaters two stories high, which a lot of the time cohabit the same roof.  Only two hotels and the army and navy store are free standing, single-use structures.  The rest of the hostels, shops and restaurants are all on the ground level of multi-occupant houses.  The tallest structure, however, is the Pilgrim Monument - roughly 250 feet - a granite watchtower in the center of town that sticks out like a minaret.  It is Provincetown’s main focal point - one’s main point of reference.  The tower is an icon of Provincetown.  It peaks out in the distance whether you’re arriving by ferry or automobile.  The town center is also a main point of reference.  In the summer, there are always musicians and performers doing their acts all day and all night.  It is a public space for everyone to spend time in.  It is also right outside the courthouse - the tallest and biggest building in town.
 

Provincetown maintains its vibrance and quality by keeping true to its history.  Kunstler would consider this a mark of success as so many historical American spaces have been wiped clean for further development.  From a sleepy fishing village, to a bustling whaling port, to a rich art community, to a colorful vacation destination, Provincetown’s story is written all over town.  For one, the seafood remains some of the best I’ve ever tasted.  Three hundred years of catching fish have made the people of Provincetown experts in the art of seafood.  Of course, whaling is illegal, but whales are still a big part of the town as whale watchers flock to town over the summer.  Provincetown is also quite famous for its arts.  Artists have been living in Provincetown for a hundred and fifty years, setting up galleries and playhouses all over town.  Some liken it to the West Village in that regard.  Also, in the last forty years, P-town has become an important center for the gay community - perhaps the epitome of a safe zone.  Anything goes.  Over the summer, Commercial Street is filled with parades and carnivals as people in creative drag outfits take over the town.  This palpable continuity of community and culture give Provincetown its unique character.  It’s for families, couples, singles, students, seniors and everyone in between.  

Kunstler would especially appreciate Provincetown’s relationship with cars.  Although many visitors use automobiles to get to Provincetown, once there, the cars usually stay parked on the outskirts of town.  The small, windy streets make it virtually impossible for cars to move around town, establishing Provincetown as a town for pedestrians and cyclists.  But you don’t even need a car to get to there.  A high speed ferry service taxis between Boston and Provincetown everyday over the summer.  The ferry drops you off right on the pier, putting you in optimal range for the best lobster rolls in town.  This absence of motor traffic creates a tranquil and clean environment, where everything is in walking distance. 
 

Provincetown is interesting because its population doubles between June-September.  The summer is when it is really buzzing and exciting to be there.  But Provincetown still has a sizable yearlong community.  The town might be different in the off season from how it is over the summer, but it doesn’t suffer in the off season.  Provincetown has been a stable community for centuries.  And it is still just as beautiful in the off season - if not more.  My mother and her friends go to Provincetown in October and in April for a different experience of the same place.  We travel as family in Provincetown during the summer and do summer activities like biking, hiking, fishing, jogging and going to the beach.  So much of the summer experience in Provincetown is the people and activity.  Perhaps when the summer crowd leaves one can derive a more personal sense of place.  One forges a wholly different connection with a place when fewer people are around.  You don’t go out as much in Provincetown in the winter - although hiking through the Province Lands is still breathtaking.  Provincetown in the winter is very much like Tuan’s description of home.  He writes, “the home itself feels more intimate in the winter than in the summer.  Winter reminds us of our vulnerability and defines the home as shelter.  Summer, in contrast, turns the whole world into Eden, so that no corner is more protective than another.”  (Tuan, 137)
 

Unlike many tourist destinations, Provincetown is not ruined when the tourists overtake the town.  The genius loci remains even when the town is bursting at the seams.  The reason for this is that the tourists who visit Provincetown are not usually one-time or first-time visitors.  Most people who visit but don’t live there have been coming for quite some time.  These families, couples and singles have a long relationship with Provincetown and make it worth protecting - as Kunstler would say it.  The genius loci of Provincetown stays intact because of the the respect with which its visitors treat it.  It’s a place that is passed down from generation to generation.  Far from a secret but not really super well-known, Provincetown is special for me and my family.  I have a connection with it like the many who visit year round.  And I know that it will remain a place I continue to visit and take loved-ones to share the experience of a true place. 

Works Cited:

 

Jackson, J.B. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape.  Yale University Press.  New Haven: 1984.

Kunstler, J.H. Geography of Nowhere.  Touchstone.  New York: 1994.

Tuan, Yi-Fu.  Space and Place.  University of Minnesota Press.  Minneapolis: 1977.

      Lieutenant Island



       Pilgrim Monument


     BIke Shop


     Race Point Beach


      Provincetown Pier


     Commercial Street


     Commercial Street


    Lieutenant Island


     Commercial Street


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     Lieutenant Island


      Provincetown Beach


   Provincetown Pier
 

In the chapter Three Cities, Kunstler esteems Portland, OR as one of America’s finest cities.  After having been to Portland a few times and hearing about it a lot from my sister (who’s been living out there for four years), I know Portlanders have a lot to be proud of.  For one, they live in America’s greenest city.  Its bike lanes, public transportation system, parks and farmers markets make Portland an eco paradise.  Everyone seems to be conscious of what they eat and where it comes from.  And when the warm weather comes around, everyone goes camping, hiking and rafting.  Portlanders also live in one of America’s best planned cities - a profound example of the success of Jacobs vision.  Modern LEED Certified buildings are only a stone’s throw from turn of the century luncheonettes and 25 cent arcades - all bound by small and easy to navigate streets.  And perhaps the single policy that defines Portland’s commitment to urban sustainability is its Urban Growth Boundary, which creates simultaneously eliminates urban sprawl and creates a lush green belt just outside the city limits.  

Portland really is an exciting town.  It dances around the decades as you see a group of kids in flannel with devil locks, pumping dimes into a pinball machine and sipping water out of a kleen kanteen.  You can order beer in movie theaters, pay five dollars for great shows and fish for salmon.  It’s filled with young people - artists, environmentalists and students - who all share similar tastes in music and style.  

As an environmentalist and student of urban planning, I consider Portland a monumental success.  But as a New Yorker, I can’t help to notice one weird thing about it: there are no people of color.

I think that Kunstler romanticizes the city a bit too much.  Aside from being a little too generous about the weather, he does not discuss the demographic makeup of the city as well as one should in his type of analysis.  He describes the neighborhood of Albina as “racially mixed,” (203) which again, is very generous description of the area.  The reason Kunstler may think that Albina is racially mixed is that it is the only neighborhood you’ll find any black, hispanic or south asian families.  Kunstler fails to discuss how Portland is one of America’s most homogenous cities.  According to a 2008 census, white residents make up 79% of Portland’s population.  While Kunstler discusses land-use policies such as the Urban Growth Boundary, he neglects to mention half a century of legislation and zoning that makes Portland the white-bread town it is.

After four years living in Portland, my sister is finally ready to come back.  When I asked her why, she told me that she could not find a single hip hop show in town.  I think that we should celebrate Portland’s for its bold policies in environmental protection and zoning.  But Portland still lacks some of the fundamental qualities that makes a city like New York - despite its crass skyline - a city of the world.  

Over this past winter break, I found myself unable to sleep one night and went out for an early morning walk.  It was one of the last days before I had to return to the City, so I wanted to soak up as much fresh air as possible.  As I was walking by some houses to get to a hiking trail, I heard two cars screeching behind me.  I turned around to the flashing lights of two police cars.  I froze.   Two cops step out and approach me with a flashlight.  One started to interrogate me, asking if I know what time it is and why I was outside at this hour, while the other stayed silent.  I told him I simply wanted to go for a walk.  The cop then replied, “no one goes for walks this late.” To which I replied, “well I do.”  After that retort, the cop said that if I didn’t go home immediately, he would arrest me for loitering.  I went home, dumfounded.  

This experience was a real wake up call.  I finally understood the difference between the city and the suburbs.  Somehow, I was a danger to the community being out alone at night.  While it is just the opposite in cities.  Jane Jacobs writes in depth on the need for active sidewalks and streets that are occupied at all ours of the day as a means to reduce crime and foster community. We are safer when there are people around.  But the suburbs are apparently less safe when there are people around.  Suburbia is a vast expanse of “pretend manor houses” (43) and not people.  It makes strangers out of neighbors.  People didn’t move to the suburbs to meet people.  People moved to the suburbs to escape people.    

I go through phases where I love and loathe Westchester.  I mostly love and loathe the same place for the same reason: its ability to isolate.  When I need a break from the 24 hour party my roommates throw, home is there - alone amid the swaying trees whose beauty remains in every season.  I leave the City to find solace in isolation - to regenerate, to be peacefully alone.  For that’s what the suburbs were made for.