Pidgin's blog

SoHo is defined by Michael Sorkin as “bounded by Houston Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Canal Street to the south, and Sixth Avenue to the west” (Sorkin 140). By this definition, I do not live in SoHo. However, the sense of place of a given neighborhood has a way of making boundaries like this fuzzy, such that in his discussion of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (Lomex for short) Anthony Flint generally refers to the neighborhood that would have been demolished by the highway as SoHo, despite the fact that the heart of resistance to the road resided at “the Church of the Most Holy Crucifix, located on Broome Street between Mott and Mulberry streets in the thick of Little Italy,” (Flint 147) just a block from my residence hall. Given this fuzziness, the tourists who stop to ask me directions while I sit in front of my building ask the way to Little Italy, as if they’re standing in SoHo.

The building where I live is therefore, depending on perspective, in Little Italy, Chinatown, Nolita, SoHo, and the Lower East Side. It occupies about half of the block defined by Broome Street, Mulberry Street, Kenmare Street, and Cleveland Place. Though its entrance is on Broome St, when I say that I sit outside I mean that I sit around the corner on Cleveland Place. On this side of the building, the street-level windows are set back from the facade such that one can stretch out on the sill created there. It is a perfect spot for writing in a journal, for taking shelter from the rain in order to have a cigarette, and for observing the neighborhood by watching the people who walk through it.

Waldie's Holy Land is undoubtedly a memoir, though it details not only the life of the author but the life of his hometown. The pairing is deliberate. Waldie wove his personal life with the history of the suburb where he has lived that life as a testament to the place. The intrinsic message is a response to authors like Kunstler who define “all mass-produced housing since 1945 as a failure, not just a failure of design but a failure of the spirit” (Waldie 188). Holy Land is a demonstration that the spirit of Lakewood is something beautiful because people like Waldie lived and loved there and were grateful for it. Waldie’s message seems to be that the value of a place is tied up in the meaning that people derive from it, that meaning comes from participation in a community because “when lives are placed side by side… they seem larger” (Waldie 94).

When I sit in the windows of my building and watch pedestrians walk by, I am inclined to agree with him. The things that make this neighborhood special are written in the stitching on the outfits of passing hipsters, the creases of the faces of the aging Chinese women on their way to hang chickens in the windows of the groceries on Grand, and perhaps more than anything the fact that the two walk side by side past my perch. From the well-liquored and well-dressed (if a little scantily clad) patrons of the bar across the street to the “McClaren baby carriages being pushed by a pair of yuppie moms... gabbing on their cells” (Sorkin 142), the lives implied by the appearance of those who pass me is an illustration of diversity that gives my neighborhood its charm. As Flint writes about Jane Jacob’s value system for urban neighborhoods, “density with diversity [is] ideal” (Flint 123). When Jacobs fought the Lomex plan in the 1960s, she did so with “Republicans and Democrats, businessmen and professionals, piano teachers and artists, Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, socialists and conservatives alike” (Flint 152). The diversity looks a bit different now, but we are diverse nonetheless. The range of classes and the social make-up of groups moving through make the neighborhood easily accessible, such that a broke college student can just as easily feel at home here as a sophisticatedly dressed businessman or a pair of parents with toddlers in tow.

From my vantage point, I watch so-called “hipsters” in thick-rimmed glasses, vintage tee-shirts, and skin-tight jeans. These are the folks who visit SoHo for the “communal institutions that marked the artist community as distinct” (Sorkin 141) when the term hipster originated in the 1950s as a mark of rebellion and alienation from established society. Sorkin writes as the artist community grew, outsiders saw the money to be made and moved in to “bathe in the hip vibe” (Sorkin 141). Squatters were replaced by condos, shoe and clothing stores moved in, and cheap eateries morphed into upscale bistros and “the streets were jammed on the weekends with people who, with no thought of art, had come simply to shop and brunch and to look at each other shopping and brunching” (Sorkin 141). The SoHo of today, not unlike the hipsters of today, is a watered-down version of its historical identity; the attractiveness of living on the edge of Art has brought in tourism and gentrification that in turn dilute the personality which was attractive to begin with.

Still, music venues like the living room and the galleries that hide between boutiques on Mulberry serve to insist that the broke and avant-garde continue to have a place here. They represent the last vestiges of a community on the cutting edge of artistic expression. And as local price-points soar, retailers with no virtually overhead take to the streets. Galleries are supplemented by street artists, which in reality amounts to less and less original art and more vendors of cheap jewelry and sunglasses. Nonetheless, the presence of these street vendors no matter their wares makes shopping in SoHo accessible not only to those who can afford the upscale mall that is Broadway but to anyone with $6 an a need for new shades, facilitating “bazaar-like quality of the street… [a] nice dialectic of high and low created by the juxtaposition of no-rent vendors and high-rent shops” (Sorkin 145).

The neighborhood may have changed a great deal, but the architectural aspects of its sense of place remain intact.  Sorkin writes that the appeal of SoHo can be largely attributed to its scale, asserting that “if there is a place in New York with the dimensions of a nineteenth-century European city, this is it” (Sorkin 141). Flint seems to agree in that he calls the area a “Paris-like reprieve from height” (Flint 153). The scale seems to be tailored to the walker, and it slows down the pedestrian to a snail’s pace by New York standards. It is no surprise that parents regard my neighborhood as a nice place to walk their dogs and push their strollers, given the pace of traffic on the narrower streets and the lessened pedestrian pushiness here. Even in the middle of a weekday, men in suits and ties (and the kind of protuberant shoes that are meant to convey strength and style simultaneously) hail cabs almost casually from the corner of Cleveland and Kenmare. In midtown, where I have also lived, these same men shoot their hands into the air at a severe 90 degree angle, determined to show the cabbies that they mean business.

Further, there is a beauty on the face of these buildings that compels a person to periodically gaze at the streetscape; they wear a uniform of cast-iron jewelry that qualified them as an historic district worthy of preservation, and the elegance of that uniform is striking to me every time that I walk home from campus. That said, “good neighborhoods cannot be reduced to their architecture but architecture has the capacity to aid and abet forms of association and affinity that are at the core of such places” (Sorkin 154). This part of sense of place can only be sensed in transit, by taking in the neighborhood while walking through it. Consequently, it is only a footnote in my understanding of my neighborhood. I prefer to see this place through a cross-section of interaction.

I watch my corner lovingly because it is a meeting point. Across the street from the entrance to my residence is part of the Museum of Chinese in America, the locations of which highlight Chinatown. On the corner of Broome and Mulberry is Caffe Roma Pastry, a bakery and café with a decidedly vintage and, of course, Italian feel. Broadway, the official border of SoHo, is two blocks away and always crowded with tourists, many of whom look like they’ve never been to New York before. On my corner there are always several someones on their way to somewhere else, and more often than not the somewhere else is different for each of them. I relish this diversity, because the specialness of this place is bound to look different to each of us. The fact that, even in the chaos and the inherent subjectivity of finding a place like Broome Street appealing, people banded together to preserve it and people still come to visit it is inspiring.

For a while when I was living in (you guessed it) Troy I toyed with the idea of producing some sort of This American Life type story on stoops and the people who sit on them. I thought that sitting on one's stoop must be a social experience, an opportunity to have engage with the neighborhood. Elsewise, I saw them as a retreat from one's un-air-conditioned third floor apartment in an otherwise unforgivingly hot summer month. I saw using one's stoop as enjoyable much the way that Sorkin's neighbor Jane enjoyed their stoop in her time, emerging from her apartment “at the back of the first floor, a space with little light and no view... as soon as it was warm enough” (70). She was “constantly engaged with passers-by, often sharing her encyclopedic and up-to-date knowledge of block matters” (70) and this is how I saw the practical/entertainment value of sitting on a stoop. That's how I used my stoop, after all. It was a place to sit and chat with my neighbors that cooled down in the evenings much more than my room did. We sat around drinking wine and chatting about the absurdity of local politics or the problem of the city's poor finding housing or some other such trouble with which to pass the time.

 

I never got around to purchasing a tape recorder or taking it to the streets, and reading Sorkin's chapter on “The Stoop” makes me wish I had. Sorkin has thought of so many more layers of value, social and otherwise, that can be derived from the stoop which I had never bothered to consider, even in all of my fantasizing abut the radio.

 

I failed to consider it as facilitating sociability because of traffic patterns in an apartment building, that “because everyone in the building must repeat the same process coming and going, the stoop is also the site of many holdings of the door, vetting of strangers reading the bell, schmoozings with neighbors, sidelong glances at kids, tourists, and homeless people” (67).

 

I neglected, too, the idea that it might be a venue for entertainment more passive than interactive—a box seat for Jacobs' ballet. I didn't see it as a place of transition, about which Sorkin observes a certain “decompression of the sequential entry up the from stairs, through the vestibule, up the inner stairs, and into the hallway of the apartment” (70).

 

The chapter made me simultaneously ashamed of the shallowness of my contemplation of stoops, and somewhat smitten with them all over again in that they're a demonstration of harmony between the public and private, social and personal. I may start thinking about This American Life again, after all.

Throughout this class we've been unpacking the subjective nature of “progress” as it relates to a changing sense of place. Is the development of Broadway into a mall inherently a bad thing? What about NYU's takeover of the area around Washington Square? The development of the new building next to Kimmel? This book more than any other has made me question where I stand on this sort of issue.

Toward the end of the first half of Wrestling with Moses I was particularly challenged by the role that NYU seems to play in the melodrama surrounding Washington Square Park. NYU is lumped in with private developers on the side of Robert Moses, and while I recognize that the university which I pay $60,000 per year is in many ways not the same university of the 1950s and 60s, it is hard not to feel sort of unwittingly like the bad guy myself. Moses is unquestionably villainous throughout, manipulating government (see page 44) and children (page 74) to satisfy incredibly selfish desires, and the authority which will grace my resume for at least the next 10 years was his ally.

So I can't help but thinking, am I pledging my allegiance (via tuition if nothing else) to the kind of organization that would be so self-serving as to ruin a neighborhood to make way for students like me?

While Bobst is briefly mentioned in the book, I found myself grappling with this question in light of more recent construction, namely the Genomics building and the Center for Academic and Spiritual Life.

The Genomics building on Waverly is, I think, a really lovely solution to the problem of needing to use a building but maintain its contribution to sense of place. The facade has been kept largely intact, though one can see through to a clearly very modern building behind. I wonder, though, if any of you might see it as akin to the two lane instead of four lane proposal discussed in the text.

The Center for Academic and Spiritual Life is a bit of a trickier situation for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it's a new structure, not an existing one requiring re-purposing. It did, however, require the removal of trees, garnering neighborhood backlash outlined here. Is NYU ruining sense of place by replacing trees with the building? Does it make it any better that somebody else was in line to buy the plot of land before NYU did, and the trees may have gone without the help of the university? Would another builder be ridiculed the way that NYU has been for this choice? And most importantly, for me at least, is it worth it?

I work for the fledgling Center for Spiritual Life here, and I can tell you firsthand that we desperately need a space of our own. It pains me to watch students praying in hallways beside other students having conversations that I find really offensive to hear in any context. Worse, when students are looking for a religious or spiritual community, they don't know where to look. A facility gives us the opportunity to provide space for prayer and quiet meditation, but also for interfaith community. It is a chance to bring people of many different religious traditions into shared space rather than sequestering them away in different “centers” all of the time.

As a building I don't love the idea. I think the facade is pretty ugly, and I'm never one for cutting down trees. But as a space, somewhere that will shelter much needed programming, I couldn't be more for it. In this book it's really easy to write off Moses as the villain and Jacobs as the hero, and maybe rightly so. But in this case as is most cases, it's not so simple.

Pollan's discussion of modernism (flat roofs) and post-modernism (House VI) really got me thinking about what exactly the point of architecture is.

If modernism is a reaction to ornament and frivolity, and post modernism is a reaction to extreme functionalism, it seems like in an effort to be new and exciting these movements are getting further away from house building and into the realm of some sort of discourse in philosophy or Art, the likes of which Pollan has been talking about throughout the book. When architecture leans toward literary-like argument, we're left with Eisenman's House VI, a building which is highly impractical and a major pain to inhabit. House VI's residents are effectively trying to live in a sculpture that sort of nods in the direction of house, in which "the goal was to 'shake them out of [their] needs" (195); needs like a a double bed (which anyone in a long-term relationship knows is a very serious need).

This attitude  just strikes me as kind of malicious. I mean in any discipline there will be content that nobody outside of the field gets or cares to get, but for the most part nobody who doesn't care ever sees that stuff. but if architecture is necessarily a kind of manipulation of human experience... isn't it kind of sick to use that power for anything other than pleasure? Maybe my perspective is naive and reactionary, but I can't help but lean on the axiom of the necessity to use one's powers for good.

The idea of architecture as a balance of form and function rouses the question: where is the balance struck? At what point does the effort to be avante garde sacrifice something essential about the discipline? Is architecture about human experience or pleasurable human experience or about human experience and the potential to shape it? Is one's building making people dizzy, for example, still a triumph of architecture? Some buildings, like House VI, are designed to be unpleasurable in ways to evoke certain feelings. In the case of House VI, the desired feeling seems only to be disruption, an aim that I see as really unnecessary. But in the case of another Eisenman work,  Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe,  all the stones are slightly out of level and out of alignment with each other  so that as you walk through them you feel a bit off balance or uneasy. The monument makes one deliberately uncomfortable because presumably the atrocity of the Holocaust should make us feel this way. Is this manipulation acceptible, even just?

So in the ideal sense architecture is about evoking feelings, not making life more difficult, but it probably doesn't always come out that way. And there's no way to guarantee it will, because if we were to establish conventions to that end, they'd simply be railed against in the name of Art in some post-post-modernist movement.

I spent a very long time looking for the image below, Marc-Antoine Laugier's conception of the primitive hut, which seems to be what Pollan describes "the archetypal hut consist[ing] of four substantial corner posts (actual trees in some accounts) surmounted by a gable made of timbers only slightly less substantial" (135).



He talks about the connection he felt to the pieces of fir tree as he prepared to cut into them, saying that "had the ton of lumber sitting on the floor of my barn been an equivalent pile of two-by-fours instead, I doubt if any of these thoughts would have crossed my mind... it takes a more strenuous exercise of imagination to see the tree in the two-by-four" (134-135). Given his proclivity for finding the connection between his writing and the building project, I'm surprised he didn't push the exercise of imagination further to the printed page by which he makes his living. After all, from two-by-four to the paper used in books is not much more of an exercise in imagination, and this sort of parallel is all over A Place of My Own.

I must admit, I'm a little smitten with this book. Unassumingly, Pollan shows us interconnectedness; he describes the overlap of feng shui, Vitruvius, and garden designers' thinking which points him to his site, the relationship he cannot help but feel with the living things he interacts with on his journey, and even the way that literature and architecture lean on one another for support in rethinking themselves. Throughout the first half of the work I felt myself musing along with the author about necessary symbioses: human and tree, architect and contractor, harmony with and domination of the earth for survival. Not unlike the omnipresence of the Golden Circle, I see concord born from conflict in every interaction he has in this book.

More and more I envy Pollan's communing with nature by trying to make it bend to his needs. As a student I recognize that perhaps the best way to really learn something is to work with it; when I struggle with a concept for a paper, trying to make it serve my purposes, I often discover its meaning more fully... or at the very least I find out what questions to pose to that end. I am thus very grateful for Pollan's account of his struggle with nature and architecture, as these are worlds both fascinating and largely foreign to me.

So I told my partner in jest that I want a hut, and that I want to build it myself. And he scarcely batted an eyelash. Maybe that's because he expects nothing less of me than whimsy, or maybe there's something about the notion of building oneself a hut that's elemental to those of us who like the idea of problem-solving, of doing so with graceful design, and of having a place of our own.

1

My brother and I would walk north on Meadow Lane, the street where I grew up, and take a left at the fork to walk west on Elm Street.

On Weyman Avenue there was a shop that sold us garlic knots for a quarter each. It had vending machines filled with stickers with words like “brat” printed on them in bright metallic pink.

The trip always felt terribly adult.
 

2

After we moved away, Meadow Lane was renamed Lou Gehrig Way. Lou Gehrig lived elsewhere in New Rochelle, but he bought number 9 Meadow Lane for his parents in 1939. The house is on the east side of the fork in the road.

My brother and I walked past it every time we went to get garlic knots and stickers.

 

3

Many people have lived in and loved the town where I grew up. Countless musicals make reference to New Rochelle, and a number are set there including Ragtime. The Dick Van DykeShow was set in New Rochelle.

The town boasts many famous residents. Among them are Carrie Chapman Catt, Penny Chenery, Faith Daniels, Matt Dillon, Kara DioGuardi, W. C. Fields, Laurence Fishburne, Noah Fleiss, Eddie Foy Jr, Lou Gehrig, Claude Harmon, William Randolph Hearst, Jay Leno, Andrea McArdle, Don McLean, Branford Marsalis, Willie Mays, Alan Menken, J. P. Morgan, Vincent Pastore, J. C. Penney, Thomas Paine, Carl and Rob Reiner, Frederic Remington, Charles Revson, Mariano Rivera, Norman Rockwell, Ray Rice, and Joe Torre.

J. Fred Coots , who wrote Santa Claus is Coming to Town, lived in New Rochelle.

 

4

I walked to my best friend Briana's house as often as I was allowed. It took 15 minutes.

I started in a squarely middle to upper middle-class neighborhood, and walked past my middle school and elementary school into a working class neighborhood. Briana's apartment was in a complex with which police were not entirely unfamiliar.

This is where most of my classmates lived.

 

5

My middle school is 45% latino, 24% black, and 28% white. I was a “little white girl” and nobody thought that was cool.

I felt like I was in the minority.

 

6

From Briana's house we could walk for 20 minutes to a shopping center with a movie theater, various restaurants, and a bowling alley. Briana and I would dress up and walk down for a nice dinner out. We were 13, but the freedom made me feel three years older at least.

It wasn't far from the library. We hung out with older kids who skateboarded on railings in the library's parking lot. I had my first cigarettes in that parking lot.

The first time we hung out there, I watched high school kids dreadlock each other's hair.

 

7

When my dreams take place in my home, it is always at 42 Meadow Lane in New Rochelle. 

I have an intimate relationship with Troy, NY. I am not only a former resident, but I spent a year working for the city's brand new business improvement district. Working for the BID gave me an in-depth understanding of both the physical characteristics and economic characteristics of Troy. It also made me fall in love with the place. The 19th century architecture, the creative community, and how easy it was not to have a car made Troy a really wonderful place to live. In reading all about the nature of place, I could not help but think about much of the theory in terms of Troy.

Each of the authors we've read so far have something to say about what gives a place value, whether their comments are explicit or implicit. So I thought I'd use this post to speculate about what Yi-Fu Tuan, John Brinkerhoff Jackson, and James Howard Kunstler might have to say about this place. At best the three thinkers can offer me a little more insight into the city and if nothing else the city can help me to illustrate some of the theories we've encountered. Ultimately, I will be measuring Troy using the rubrics provided by each author to determine if they would see the city as a “good” place.

Yi-Fu Tuan might rephrase the question entirely. Tuan might ask what makes Troy a “place” rather than just space; here place implies identity and space potential. Place is destination while space is location. This crucial distinction is an implicit statement of value. The desirability of the former makes the latter somewhat lack-luster. Truthfully, Tuan might not like to be included in this conversation at all. As stated on the cover of Space and Place, Tuan adopts “the perspective of experience.” To that end, he tries to avoid even positive or negative connotation in his writings. And for the most part he succeeds. His hand tips most, however, in Chapter 5: Spaciousness and Crowding. This is not to say that he gives up the perspective of experience, but rather that he shifts focus to examine what might be universally pleasant for human beings. For example, where previously he described the difference between space and place neutrally, here he says that “enclosed and humanized space is place” (Tuan 54). Enclosed is fairly neutral, but the word “humanized” means to make human; or in this case to make human-friendly. So, even though “humans require both space and place” (Tuan 54), place is the space that humans have made their own. Place has parameters significant to experience.

It is perhaps most worthwhile to discuss Troy's “walkability” here. As I mentioned in my last post, I could walk to any number of things from my apartment in the downtown area. All of the business district is readily experience-able because it is all at most 15 minutes away on foot. Tuan says that “when transportation is a passive experience, however, conquest of space can mean its diminishment” (Tuan 53). Troy makes it possible to live in a small community without a car, and without a car one has almost no choice but to actively engage their surroundings, even during a commute. Transportation is not a matter of conquest but of outing, because the space between points A and B is small enough that one need not travel at high speeds to reach one from the other in a timely manner. We experience our surroundings at human speed; at a speed which our senses can keep up with.

If we measure a good place by Tuan's two values outlined above —ownership by humanity and experience-ability— I believe that Troy is a very good place.

J.B. Jackson, too, for the most part reflects neutrally on “landscape” in his work, though less deliberately than Tuan. Like the case of Tuan, however, we can extrapolate value by examining his definition and a few specific comments.

There is much talk of definitions in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, but Jackson's new definition of landscape seems to be “a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence” (Jackson 8). There are a few striking aspects of this definition which make its values more clear. With phrases like “man-made” Jackson emphasizes landscape as being defined by human interaction. This shows a preference for urban spaces in that they are highly man-made and man-modified. Troy, though small, is an urban area. Single-family houses are outnumbered by high density, mixed-use buildings. Nature is visible only in the trees which line the streets and a few pockets of flora in the form of public parks. Man's creations dominate. The city is also full of repurposed spaces. Churches and residential units become retail shops and single-family dwellings are split into apartments of varying sizes. These revisions reflect the man-modified aspect of Jackson's definition, implying active use and re-use of the spaces by people.

Jackson requires of landscape that it serve as infrastructure; he claims that the physical and social realms are inextricably bound up. In Troy, the overwhelmingly mixed-use building style demonstrates just that. Having apartments above retail spaces and office spaces as well as other apartments means that the community lives quite literally on top of one another. There is a closeness created by this format that facilitates a collective existence not present in, for example, the suburban development. When one's neighbors share amenities and a given local eatery is frequented by many because it is next door to many, it is near impossible to isolate oneself. In this phenomenon, Jackson's assertion that the landscape is a “the by-product of people working and living, sometimes coming together, sometimes staying apart, but always recognizing their interdependence” (Jackson 12).

Jackson believes that “we have the need for sustained discourse, for the exchange of ideas and, what is no less essential, for disagreement, since both kinds of communication lead to a sharpened sense of our identity” (Jackson 11). Troy certainly satisfies this need. As already discussed, the city's size facilitates outings. Consequently, on a given weekday when going out to get lunch or to run some other errand, running into someone that one knows is inevitable. Even these small connections make it difficult to reach the “moment when we begin to suffer, psychologically and even physically, for the companionship and presence of others” (Jackson 11). Once again it is easy to see that this format facilitates community. Looking at Troy as an example, we can also see the sharpened sense of identity that Jackson says comes from this sustained discourse. Downtown residents, as well as those who visit the downtown area very frequently, identify strongly with the city. For example, Troy does not have typical tourist t-shirts. Instead, we have shirts deigned by local people for local people; they read “troy boy” or “troy girl” or “enjoy troy.” Moreover, as with many places Troy has a large contingent of people who have lived in the city their whole lives, some for many generations. Even as it has changed a great deal, they stay not necessarily because they like it but because the place is part of who they are.

Of all three authors, James Howard Kunstler talks the most explicitly about what makes a good place, though one wishes for the sake of summary that he'd provide some sort of checklist or formula to accompany his ranting, rambling style. Instead we are left with impressions about what he views as important to worthwhile places. I have identified three primary qualifications gleaned from The Geography of Nowhere.

First, Kunstler requires of good places that they be built to “human scale.” In the most generalized way, this means that neighborhoods should be appealing to humans. To illustrate the practicalities of this idea, there is no better place than Troy. Storefronts in Troy's BID are in large part inviting, with large windows across the facade framed by terracotta moldings and other such architectural embellishments. Almost nothing is built higher than 4 stories, making elevation no more insurmountable than distance (as discussed previously). Further, streets in Troy are more inviting for pedestrians than for cars simply because they're small. Almost all streets are single lane, one-way. In short, the neighborhood is sized to fit the single human being rather than the car or corporation.

Second, Kunstler echoes Jackson's statement about interdependence by emphasizing attention to the public realm. He says that good places have well designed, well maintained public spaces. Again, this facilitates community through collective use and collective investment. Troy has a number of parks and one large indoor public space, most of which get used as casual social space and as more format social space for festivals and farmers' markets. In the park or at the market as on the street, it's hard not to run into acquaintances and friends. It's also hard to ignore the beauty of the waterfront when you're at the market in the spring. These places foster community and the pleasurable feelings associated with beauty.

Third, Kunstler talks about the importance of sustainable local economy. Here is where Troy is tricky. It has the potential for a vibrant local economy. People like the town, and are eager to set up shop in such a lovely place. It is, again, mixed-use and small, making it easy to live and work within walking distance and to live without a car. It has a variety of residential spaces for a variety of income brackets, making it potentially diverse. It boasts historic landmarks and architecture, several colleges, and a riverside location, all of which help in getting people to spend time near and/or in its local businesses.

Troy has been “on the verge” of destination status on and off for decades. It seems that every two years or so there is an article in a local paper discussing the city's upswing into revitalization. It has positive attributes by the standards of three men whose lives have been devoted to studying places, it has a contingent of very invested citizens, new small businesses open on its streets every month. But businesses close every month, too. People still buy their furniture at Walmart instead of in antique shops and don't move into the downtown area because there isn't guaranteed indoor parking. People still buy groceries at the Price Chopper (10 minutes away by car, sandwiched between gas stations) because it has a larger selection than the walking-distance food coop.

I think what all of this comes down to is that all of the building for humanity's positive experience doesn't overpower the appeal of corporations or cars. Bureaucracy is no less ideologically enticing and driving no less enjoyable just because we like the feel of places like Troy. If, as in Kunstler's apocolyptic view of the future, distance travel is impossible these things won't matter and Troy will have the framework of a local economy in place. Until that time, however, as long as people are unwilling to give up their cars and their Walmart, these places will struggle no matter their inherent quality.


P.S. The photo is taken from Kunstler's site! It was posted in conjunction with a podcast which discusses the small city (and perhaps Troy especially) as the safest bet for valuable places of the future. This particular podcast is worth a listen.

I was particularly struck by the section in which Kunstler discusses “better places.” With that in mind, and with my repeated mention of Troy, NY in class on Thursday, I looked up principles of New Urbanism as outlined by TND to see if the city with which I am most intimately acquainted fit the bill. Here's what I found:

WALKABILITY 1. Most things within a 10-minute walk of home and work

When I lived in Troy, it took me 5 minutes to walk to work in the morning. On the way I passed a hardware store, 2 clothing boutiques, a bodega, a hair salon, 3 churches, a performance venue, 2 banks, several eateries, and a number of other offices. All of these buildings had residential space in the floors above the retail space, which implies that many people could walk to all of the same things in under 10 minutes.

2. Pedestrian friendly street design (buildings close to street; porches, windows & doors; tree-lined streets; on street parking; hidden parking lots; garages in rear lane; narrow, slow speed streets).

All of the parenthetical attributes are true of Troy, with the exception of porches. Instead of porches, we have stoops.

3. Pedestrian streets free of cars in special cases.

This is true only in Riverfront Park, where there are wide pedestrian walkways which run parallel to the river

CONNECTIVITY

1. Interconnected street grid network disperses traffic & eases walking

Troy has a grid not unlike New York's, as seen in the photo. Almost all streets in the downtown area allow only one-way traffic, and the direction alternates.

2. A hierarchy of narrow streets, boulevards, and alleys

This is also true of Troy, to a certain extent. There are no dead end alleys, but there are a few smaller through-streets that are significantly less trafficked, and they're where one leaves their trash for pick up. They're also not infrequently decorated with murals.

3. High quality pedestrian network and public realm makes walking pleasurable

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure what this means. That said, I do know that at lunch time the streets fill with people. Most everyone who works in Troy takes to the street between 11 and 3 to grab a bite to eat at any number of local businesses: Marmora's Egyptian Cafe, Arnet's Burgers, Francesca's Sandwiches, or one of the two hotdog vendors that operate on either end of the main drag. Walking is pleasurable, if you're happy to see the half dozen friends, colleagues, or acquaintances you're bound to bump into each afternoon.

 

MIXED-USE & DIVERSITY

1. A mix of shops, offices, apartments, and homes on site. Mixed-use within neighborhoods, within blocks, and within buildings

When I lived in Troy, I had two apartments, one of which was above a psychologist's office and a massage therapist's office, the other of which was above another apartment. My boyfriend, who lives there now, lives above Marmora's. His neighbors live above antique shops, a jewelry-making store, and a vitamin shop. Single family houses exists, but they're much rarer than multiple apartments and mixed-use spaces.

2. Diversity of people – of ages, classes, cultures, and races

Troy is an odd place when it comes to diversity. The downtown area is mostly white, though the public schools are mostly black. Economic diversity, however, is really strong here. Troy has some of the most low-income housing per capita in the northeast, and one of the biggest residential buildings in the heart of the downtown area is housing for physically and mentally handicapped people. There are an inordinate number of motorized wheelchairs in the city's streets. Troy is diverse in age, too. There are families, elderly people who have lived in the city their whole lives, and many young adults (18-35) who make their homes in the downtown area.

 

MIXED HOUSING

1. A range of types, sizes and prices in closer proximity

A typical one-bedroom apartment in downtown Troy costs between 500 and 900 dollars. Around the private, gated park (just like Gramercy), the price is jacked up. 2, 3, 4, and 5 bedroom apartments are readily available. There is one high-end apartment building downtown, in which a one-bedroom apartment costs between $1300 and $2000. This building is directly across from a more typical residential building. Their entrances literally face one another.

 

QUALITY ARCHITECTURE & URBAN DESIGN

1. Emphasis on beauty, aesthetics, human comfort, and creating a sense of place; Special placement of civic uses and sites within community. Human scale architecture & beautiful surroundings nourish the human spirit

You can find an extensive article detailing more than you'll ever need to know about Troy here: http://visittroyny.com/aboutTroy/architecture/architecture.aspx . The bottom line is, Troy is chock-full of charming Victorian architecture.

...

I could finish, but it'd all sound much the same. The rest of the list can be found here: http://www.tndpartners.com/newurbanism/ . Suffice it to say, Troy has just about all of the outlined qualities. In many ways, it is a vibrant community. And yet, its businesses struggle and its population doesn't seem to fill it after commuters leave at 5PM. Is this proof of New Urbanist principles, or does it refute the claims that the places which have these qualities are desirable?

Kunstler can be really very charming when he wants to be. He’s got a sense of humor, and a habit of coming off as very witty even when he’s expressing disdain about things which you actually rather like. This is the second of his books which I’ve read, and once again I find myself on his side entirely… until I’m not.

Such is the case with Mies Van der Rohe’s 1958 Seagram Building. I was, per usual, blindly on Kunstler’s side as he bad-mouthed Modernism and the “glass box high rise[s]” (80) which began to cover Manhattan. Throughout the reading, I had been calling out terms to my boyfriend (an architect) for definition.  When I asked about the Seagram building, he was in the middle of something and sort of offhandedly said something like “oh yeah, it’s good.”

Faced with these two conflicting judgments, I looked for myself. The fact of the matter is it isn’t all too striking, especially during the day, at least in pictures. It looks a lot like most other skyscrapers, which I understand is because it was “knocked off by every commercial architecture firm in America,” (80) but even so I find it for the most part lovely in its simplicity. It isn’t particularly stunning to my mind, but it also isn’t the monstrosity which Kunstler made it out to be.

In the text thus far, Modernism is virtually equated with evil in that it is a dangerously appealing “lie,” (81) and Mies is made out to be the villain of Kunstler’s story because he “pioneered” and “brought the concept to full flower” (80) in New York and Chicago, setting the trend for every other major American city. This man made popular what Kunstler sees as a monument to the demise of the American city, and that monument is the Seagram building.

However, all of that does not change that the building itself is not ugly. The values which it represents, sure.  And it isn’t on the whole proportioned to human scale, that’s true, but the first floor is, and intends to have a direct relationship with the public via the plaza in front. I do not understand the problem with a flat roof, a characteristic which Kunstler harps on endlessly. I do not understand why boxes are evil and several boxes stacked atop one another are not.

 In short, while I didn’t think I had trouble following the first half of this text, I am still at this point left with the question: why is the skyscraper bad again?

Right off the bat Jackson and I had a problem. On page 5, he lists several characteristics of "landscape." As far as I can tell, they are as follows:
 
1. space
2. permanence
3. character
4. topographical or cultural context
5. it is SHARED; the word is inextricably bound up with human creation
 
Jackson goes on to define landscape as "a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence" (8).
 
Insofar as by perceiving anything, we put it in the context of humanity, I understand where he's coming from. Even the original definition, a "portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance" (3) makes clear how we relate to this phenomenon. However, to return to Jackson's 5 characteristics, I agree only so far as "topographical." I do not understand why we must characterize a landscape as necessarily man-made. Man-modified I could perhaps get behind, following Goodhart's law and the 'if a tree falls and nobody is around to hear it...' line of thought, but even so I am not wholly convinced. What of formerly uncharted territory untouched by humanity?
 
Is that space, which has permanence, character, and topographical context as well as the potential to be comprehended at a glance not landscape? 
 
This is not to say that landscape is independent of humanity. Quite the contrary, we change landscape perhaps more than any other creature. That said, the existence of a region that seems to have an enduring character is dependent on humanity for interpretation, perhaps, but not for creation.
 
So, with respect to landscape as I see it, I would have liked Jackson to pay a little less attention to the sociology of stone architecture versus wood/clay architecture and a little more time on, well, sense of place. In reading descriptions of farming villages of the middle ages, I no more had a sense of the place than one might have, as mentioned on page 32, after reading Pausanias.
 
Sense of place is inclusive and evocative, not exclusive and painfully politically descriptive. In trying to convey landscape, like sense of place, politics of the time are not unimportant but rather less important than something as simple as temperature and topography.

The image below is my attempt to explore Tuan's assertions that “the built environment, like language, has the power to define and refine sensibility” (107) and that “architectural space reveals and instructs: (114).

I used the idea of courtyard house (specifically Fig. 11D, pg. 109) as a springboard, the question being:

Is it possible to utilize the positive attributes of the courtyard house where “within and without are clearly defined” and “people can be certain of where they are” while working against the downside which Tuan attributes to it, namely that “undisturbed by distractions from the outside, human relations and feelings can rise to a high and even uncomfortable level of warmth” (107)?

What followed is a very rough outline of what that might look like. I admittedly have no idea whether it'd be structurally sound, able to be outfitted with running water, etc. this is merely an exercise. Note that dotted lines indicate a wall of floor to ceiling windows.

The lower level is an attempt to invoke feelings of being connected with the world outside the house from the safety and and security of areas with various levels of enclosure. I envisioned the street at the bottom of the page, so that Tuan's description of courtyard houses “present[ing] their blank backs to the outside world” (107) holds true. I envision children playing on the patio or in the back yard in full view of their parents spending time in the kitchen or dining area. This plays to the idea of creating a sense of freedom even when one is not entirely free in the traditional sense, as discussed in the Spaciousness and Crowding chapter.

The upper level takes the concept of a courtyard out of the open air and into the living room. In keeping with the idea that, as Tuan says of the Pygmies' camp that “the center is public, the periphery is for interaction among friends and kin” (114) , I have situated private spaces around the main communal space. This enables each family member to move to their own personal space. Not only does each child have their own bedroom, but each parent has an “office,” for lack of a better term, the idea being that while they share a space to themselves as a couple, they also have a uniquely personal space to use as they choose. I was careful to make sure that no family member's personal space shares a wall with that of another family member, hearkening back to the fact that sound contributes to feelings of closeness and distance, though not so much as sight does.

The living room then becomes the heart of the home. Every family member must move through it to get to their personal space, and so much share it. As the only truly central space on either level, it draws focus as much as traffic. Its size and open layout is intended to allow for a feeling of spaciousness to counterbalance the warmth of a place so fully shared.

The sitting area, similar to the patio and to the dining area, provides an opportunity to feel only partially enclosed. Still connected both the the core of the home and to the outdoors, it is intended to feel like a midway point between the two.

I am no architect, but in working through this process I was able to demonstrate to myself that yes, a building can instruct. In this case, I have tried to instruct the family to be together in their home, to embrace the outer world from the safety of their personal structure, and to take comfort in the fact that there is a place to go when one wants to be alone. Ideally, this house would instill a sense of interdependence as opposed to independence or dependence. Family members should feel as if they are individual units (with personal space) of a cohesive whole (communal space as the centerpiece of the place) which extends to the world beyond (via sightlines which extend into the surrounding nature).

(The image is obviously of my own creation.)

Let me begin by saying that the reading was strangely difficult for me. It went smoothly and I found many moments in it interesting, but I often found myself having to re-read whole pages because I felt like I had digested the facts but not their overarching meaning. To combat that, it was very helpful to me to think about the most recent installment of Radiolab.

Here (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/you-are-here/) you can read about and listen to a segment that for me was closely connected to Tuan's discussion of how we process spacial relations.

For Tuan, the way to gain insight into our cognition is through looking to babies; if we can see how we developed interpretations of space and place, we can extrapolate about how we experience space and place as adults. This is a logical tactic, but it would seem that Tuan does not feel the need to concern himself with the messy extrapolating... he leaves that to his readership. For me, this makes the tactic he is employing rather ineffective. Having not done the research, I do not feel qualified to prioritize the facts of development presented, nor do I feel capable of drawing conclusions from these facts. Tuan makes many generalizations, but few claims based on the facts presented, that at the end of this first section I am left feeling as if I've missed the point. The text seems more than anything to be a list of anything loosely related to a given topic that may be meaningful to either space or place rather than a coherent discussion of what he has deemed relevant. I feel as if I am reading a brainstorm. I am not saying that this is an invalid style choice, but I am saying that I have difficulty connecting with it.

So I've clearly got a problem with his style. With that in mind, I am sure that you can see why having the Radiolab segment in mind was helpful for me. The segment uses the experience of a woman with spacial deficiency to help us understand function. Not unlike studies in the research community, this tactic served as a compliment to Tuan's style. For example, Tuan says that “even in his fourth month the infant shows little interest in exploring the world visually beyond the range of three feet” (20). Radiolab provided context where Tuan did/could not by explaining the nature of navigation

 

Tuan, drawing on Kant, implies on page 36 that we are inherently directional only in relation to ourselves. The second half of this (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/) Radiolab segment asserts otherwise. The culture discussed here has a directional ability that they would certainly see as inherent. They relate themselves to the greater world rather than the other way around. As with language, this culture would seem to show us that we are built with the capacity to have incredible directional abilities independent of the anthropocentrism described by Tuan. In the same way that lack of exposure to Chinese means that I cannot distinguish between similar Chinese word sounds, lack of exposure to a world-view which emphasizes geography means that I cannot readily orient myself. The kind of directionality illustrated in the Radiolab segment is not against our nature simply because it is uncommon.

 

I hope that this blog post makes some sense to one or another of you, because I had a hard time getting it to makes sense to me. I am making an effort to take Tuan's vagueness and funnel it through personal experience/other sources to turn it into my own conclusions, but it sure ain't easy. Better luck next week, I guess.