Why does everyplace claim to be “world class?” And what does that even mean? In introducing Wynton Marsalis’ tuba concerto, Aubrey Foard, its principal tubist, asserted that the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra was one of best in the world. Why did he feel the need to point that out? Why isn’t it good enough to be just a very fine ensemble. Baltimore is a really nice place, with some great neighborhoods and important legacy institutions – and it has clearly spent billions and billions of dollars on big projects trying to be a “world class” something. There is a sense it which the city elders appear to be trying way too hard, and don’t have confidence in the city’s virtues.
My first trip to Baltimore was probably in 1968 for Super Bowl III, in which the favored Colts lost to the NY Jets 16-7 (I remember being at the game, the details I had to look up). The business my dad worked for had printed the game tickets, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad tickets we used to get back and forth to the game. I felt like a 12-year-old big macher. In the 90’s, the Downtown Baltimore Partnership was an early adopter of the Grand Central Partnership downtown management model, of which I was a part, and we visited then. Inner Harbor and Camden Yards were breakthrough urban revitalization projects at that time. The innovating commercial development urban revitalization firm, Rouse Companies was founded in Baltimore.
Baltimore is known for its neighborhoods of row houses and as the home of Johns Hopkins University, which is, among other things, a bio-medical behemoth, and the largest beneficiary of the largess of one Michael R. Bloomberg. Hopkins has annual revenues of around $7 billion. Baltimore was historically the major mid-Atlantic port, with access to the nation’s interior via the mighty Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, through the Harper’s Ferry gap in the Appalachians. The downtown has a fine collection of the majestic former homes of long-gone financial institutions. A couple of major finance firms continue to be headquartered there. Its population maxed out at about a million souls in 1950. The subsequent decades were not kind to the city, which, in additional to experiencing the same urban traumas as other eastern cities, became a satellite to the metastasizing center of the American empire, Washington, D.C. Continue reading →
Clyde Warren Park in Dallas works. A recent visit, more than ten years after its opening, showed it to be heavily used and reasonably well managed. On a weekday afternoon the park had quite a few visitors, including lots of children. The park has most of the elements that make public spaces successful:
Shade – essential in the southwest
Playgrounds. The one here is very cleverly designed and attractive – including fun water features
Lawns
Food kiosks and restaurants
Water features
Regular programming
Movable chairs
Adequate maintenance
As we have written ad nauseum, there are so many new public space projects, and so few of them are successful. Clyde Warren was built over a highway culvert – a category of assignment that has proved particularly challenging for public space planners over the last couple of decades. Building over a highway cut can be an essential move in re-knitting a downtown together. But doing it right is a tough assignment. The designers of Clyde Warren, The Office of James Burnett, got what animates a public space on a deep level that seems to elude almost all landscape architects and public officials. After ten years, Clyde Warren is still performing well – attracting a broad swath of users. On the day we visited a large portion of the park was closed for a private event – but there was still quite a bit of space available to the casual visitor.
A good contrast with Clyde Warren is another public space in the southwest, Santa Fe’s Railyard Park of about the same vintage – which remains virtually unused, despite quite a bit of interesting development around it. The arts district of downtown Dallas is not the most promising or hospitable of environments for a public space. Downtown Fort Worth is way more walkable, human scaled and attractive. The surrounding streetscape to Clyde Warren is towers and institutions set back from the street – essentially bleak, unwalkable and car oriented. Prominent among the high design structures of the arts district (Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster) are a large number of parking structures. But somehow, pedestrians find their way to the two large blocks that constitute Clyde Warren — most likely from the offices and residential towers that overlook the park.
The nonprofit that operates the park, The Woodall Rodgers Park Foundation, has an operating budget of around $15 million. The biggest challenge for public spaces with water features is keeping them running. And the features at Clyde Warren are complicated and fun to watch. The Foundation seems to have the resources to keep things running. The water features are open for kids (and adults) to splash around in – which is just great, and unfortunately not standard practice. These water features are complex and they work. Kudos to the park’s managers.
That not-withstanding, the Foundation appears to contract out for the park’s maintenance, and it shows. Outsourced maintenance is never as detailed oriented and perfectionist or as highly motivated, well-compensated internally managed staff. The park demonstrates a lot of wear from high use and is not kept to the high standards of Bryant Park. The lawn panels are need aeration and reseeding. The horticultural elements are designed for low maintenance and aren’t well maintained even given that. They don’t have the kind of visual pop that a public space of this caliber really ought to have. Some of the arts institution facilities in the district have much more imaginative and appealing plantings nearby.
Big Belly trash receptacles are in use – which are a bête noire of mine. They are a mark of managerial laziness. The design is awful – they are a squat box. The labor they supposedly save, is labor that the park really needs. Staff dumping out the trash bid are a visible mark of social order. Visitors want to see people working in the park – maintaining the horticultural elements and emptying the trash bins. It contributes to the perception of public safety.
But those issues aside, Clyde Warren Park, is a clear model for others to follow as to what makes a park lively and attractive. The built environment in downtown Dallas makes creating lively public spaces a challenging task, and so the park’s success is even more a particular achievement.
The hostile environment of a highway overpass, makes the success of Clyde Warren even more of an achievement.
The fabulous water feature amidst the forbidding neighboring towers. One of them was once famous for hostile reflection of the Texas sun into the neighboring sculpture park.
A close up of the water feature.
Contract worker — looking disconsolate.
The lawn is beat. Needs aeration and reseeding.
Low maintenance shrubs. Boring.
The dreaded Big Bellies. Ugly and bad.
And…movable chairs.
A shade structure. Essential in the southwest — along with the trees.
Signs of consistent programming. Probably not enough though to really contribute to the space’s animation. In a space in a downtown of this size, daily programming is essential to energizing the park.
Fantastic playground, even though its play equipment is liability lawyer-proof in design.
Wonderful climbing structure.
An adjacent dog park. A great move!
Shade and movable chairs contribute to the attractiveness of the space.
Among American cities, Charleston and Santa Fe have unique characters – and not surprisingly are both important tourist destinations, as well as significant housing markets for second and retirement homes. They are in such high demand because they have maintained a remarkable sense of place, in a country with a limited number of great places urban places. As I have been maintaining, American needs more great places in order to attract people from more expensive locations to less expensive ones – lowering housing costs while at the same time promoting economic development and equity. What can be learned from these two attractive places?
I have been going to both cities annually for decades. Charleston, which had a population of 70,000 in 1980, now has 154,000 people. It hosted 2.2 million visitors in 1976 and 7.25 million visitors last year. Of course, Charleston had the benefit for more than two decades of one of America’s best mayors in Joe Riley, who skillfully leveraged the city’s substantial assets to make it both a desirable place to live and a favored destination. At the heart of those assets is a dazzling collection of well-preserved and restored 18th Century homes, a large number of which are available for tourists to visit. Those homes are physical evidence of Charleston’s place as a successful port and agricultural and religious center in Colonial America, one of the colonies’ largest cities. Charleston is also an important site for Black America, being a hub of the slave trade, a home for successful plantation and slave owners and the location of the opening salvos of the Civil War. It is also the location of the recent racially motivated mass shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church.
Joe Riley Waterfront Park
Charleston is the site of the Spoleto Festival USA, the largest arts event in the South, with dozens of performances of music, theater and dance, with the adjacent Piccolo Spoleto adding scores more of smaller performances and art displays for several weeks in June each year. Charleston is also, perhaps, the country’s fourth most interesting dining destination (after, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago), punching well above its weight in eating excellence. The dining scene was established by the late, great Louis Osteen, initially at the restaurant at the then new resort, Charleston Place, and later at his own establishment. That legacy was continued by Sean Brock at his Macready’s and Husk – who has recently decamped his principal operation to Nashville. Add to that the adjacency to wonderful beaches and historic plantations, and you have an unparalleled number of authentic attractions. This has generated a huge tourist draw, a luxury housing market (a house in downtown Charleston goes for around $1.4 million. Here is a typical “single” style house on the market for $4.5 million: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/13-Church-St-Charleston-SC-29401/10904815_zpid/), and most recently a great deal of new multi-family housing development.
The Santa Fe Opera. Photo may justify the cost of upgrading to an iPhone 14
I spent the summer of 1977 living in Santa Fe. At the time it was a quiet, dusty town of old adobes, with a long history of artists and galleries of Western Art, a noted market for the arts and crafts of local indigenous people (particularly pottery, weaving and silverwork) – and the more recent establishment of a major opera company and chamber music festival. The city had a laid-back, counterculture, hippie-ish vibe, with a large highly visible white clad and turbaned group who called themselves “sikhs.” Ten Thousand Waves, a former marijuana farm, turned Japanese style spa was (and continues to be) a major attraction (with nighttime hot-tubbing a blissful experience). The opera performed during the summer in an unusual outdoor theater and was led by the remarkable John Crosby, one of our greatest cultural entrepreneurs. Santa Fe is also located in a region of incredible natural and cultural richness. Day trips can be taken to a number of notable pueblos of tribal nations, including Taos and Acoma – which provided the inspiration for the unique local adobe-based architectural style. The Sangre de Cristo and Jemez Mountains provide a spectacular backdrop for both walking and driving adventures. Particularly unusual is the drive from Toas to the pilgrimage village of Chimayo, the famous High Road to Taos (actually, better driven from Taos, to get the best views as you drive downhill), with unparalleled vistas and fascinating small hamlets with a unusal religious observance, along the way. Distinctive about North New Mexico is a rich cultural history of native peoples going back centuries, with settlements like Bandelier and Puyé available for visits, over-layered with Spanish colonization dating to the late seventeenth century. There are few more interesting places in the US. The population of the city grew from 40,000 in 1980 was to 87,000 in 2020, with the number of tourists at 2.25 million in 2022.
As in Charleston, at the center of Santa Fe’s appeal is the preservation of historic structures – both commercial and residential. The Santa Fe style is an international phenomenon, with the construction and decoration of distinctive homes a major local economic generator. As in Charleston, standards for historic preservation are stringent. In addition, new development is required to conform to the prevailing architectural context. The downtown is chock-a-block with stores selling stuff to ornament an adobe home with appropriate accoutrements – as well as to adorn oneself with regulation western wear – boots, silver necklaces and belt buckles, along with the essential hats. When in 1977 I stood in the Plaza, which is the center of Santa Fe and looked out towards the deserts and mountains, I saw stars. Today one sees a myriad of lights from the thousands of homes built in the former quiet landscape and rising up rugged mountain slopes.
When I later became a regular visitor, our home base was Rancho Encantado, a kind of scruffy Ralph Lauren-esque ranch, with a horse corral and trail rides at its center – way outside of town. The rooms were in casitas (small houses), which were rustically decorated with locally made blankets and wooden crafts. The cuisine was that of New Mexico, for example enchiladas with either red or green chili – or both, washed down with a Margarita. The local New Mexican cooking is different than that in Mexico and Texas, and a treasured tradition. We were heartbroken when the Rancho was sold by the family who were it long-time owners. It was empty for a number of years, and then torn down a replaced with what is now an ultra-luxury Four Seasons resort.
Eldorado Hotel, Santa Fe
We’ve hopped around among hotels since then – including a long stretch at Bishop’s Lodge, also outside of town, but closer to the Plaza, and on the historic hacienda (also with a stable) of Archbishop Lamy, made famous by Willa Cather in “Death Comes for the Archbishop.” But it ultimately met a similar fate to Rancho Encatado – being substantially upscaled. This past summer we stayed at the Eldorado, once the premier luxury property in Santa Fe, built by the Zeckedorf family in the 1986, when the Bill Zeckendorf Jr., whose spouse, Nancy was closely associated with the opera, found that there was no modern, comfortable place to stay. The property is now owned by a local group called Heritage which advertises itself as being in the “cultural tourism” business. With the creation of a number of other higher end hotels in Santa Fe, Eldorado has been repositioned. But it has the best pool in the downtown (a major feature given New Mexico’s consistent hot, dry weather), and large comfortable rooms. The property features displays of local art – pottery and weaving— sourced directly from native people. Heritage’s business model for its ten New Mexico properties is to feature the art and food of the region. A magazine available to guests describes the chain’s local sourcing of pottery and weaving for display. The magazine had eye catching graphics and quality writing about some of the most worthwhile destinations in New Mexico. One fascinating article was about the importance of plazas as places in New Mexican towns. Heritage appears to have built its business on the distinctiveness of New Mexico places.
Both cities’ appeal is built on a foundation of historic preservation – and the creation of a sense of cultural authenticity. While the programs to preserve these assets is unusual in these places, many places across the country have the potential to make the most of their special cultures – if they were to choose to take that path. It seems to me that foregrounding the authentic distinctiveness of cities is a far more stable and cost-effective endeavor than building a convention center or sports stadium to attract visitors and new, economically valuable residents.
Building on the historic character of Charleston and Santa Fe, a local food culture was created, based in the one case on historic southern cooking and on the other on the wonderful Spanish colonial food culture. This isn’t necessarily about haute cuisine or Michelin starred restaurants, but more about high quality, unique local places. Although, fancy, expensive places can become the capstone of places with rich offerings based on local produce and traditions.
It’s also not about building grand hotels to attract visitors. Santa Fe has a number of mid-century modern motels (with matching neon signs) that attract both families and hipsters, as well as small, distinctive places without a lot of amenities in historic buildings. The grand dame of Santa Fe hotels is La Fonda, just off the plaza – which has lovely, atmospheric public spaces and small, simple charming rooms. Charleston did kick-start its status as a premier destination with Charleston Place, a large mid-rise property, with extensive ground floor retail. While originally developed as a mid-price hotel, with the popularity of Charleston as a destination, it has been repeatedly been repositioned and upscaled with changes in ownership.
Both cities have also promoted distinctive retail with a local flavor. The historic centers of both cities have small structures and small spaces – unattractive, for the most part, to national retailers. Lower King Street in Charleston, though, has both Ben Silver, a local haberdasher and probably the most high-quality retailer of traditional men’s wear in the country, and the recent influx of more of the usual national suspects – resulting in a dynamic mix of both well-known brands and local offerings. North King, long neglected, and long ago the area center for home furnishing and appliance retailers, attracted quirky restaurants in the 00’s, and has become something of a victim of its own success, with a rowdy night-life scene, that the City is now working to bring under control.
Santa Fe’s downtown has moved more and more upscale over the years, with local art galleries, jewelers, purveyors of native American art and jewelry, and western wear – driving out most sellers of tourist trinkets and similar shlock. Large format national retailers are relegated to shopping strips and centers outside of the historic downtown.
Theodora Park, Charleston, S.C.
Public spaces in both places are something of a mixed bag. Charleston sports the recent large and impressive Joseph Riley Waterfront Park as well as the small and near perfect Theodora Park. But generally, its Parks Department is underfunded, and places like the Battery & White Point Gardens are insufficiently well maintained and programmed. Santa Fe has one of the country’s most ill-conceived new public spaces, the Railroad Yard Park, which is lightly used. The Plaza, the city’s historic zocalo, right in the center of the old town, is extremely popular and hosts near continuous spontaneous programming (buskers, food vendors) – but appears over-used and shabby. One might conclude that these small cities have such strong identities and generally excellent built environments that high quality public spaces don’t need to be a part of their brand.
The character of Santa Fe and Charleston make them great places to visit. Because of its easy access to outdoor recreational activity, Santa Fe is particularly attractive to families. Both cities have brought historic preservation to the forefront, and have created formal and informal, public and private structures to maintain their characters and enhance their brands with significant results. Part of their success is no doubt due to the uniqueness of their historical appeal and the scarcity of other cities with similar strengths. But I have no doubt that the over-tourism of certain locations about which there is substantial and justifiable complaint (Venice being the prime example) is a result of there just not being enough great places to visit. Most other cities around the country, both large and small, have historical and/or cultural assets that they should be able to foreground. But getting there takes serious, comprehensive, thoughtful leadership. It is not just putting up a few signs or having a cute trolly running around town (and certainly not building a huge hotel or conference center). A historic district of character needs to be identified, preserved, maintained and expanded over time. The more authentic and unique, the more likely it is to become successful. The brand needs to be leveraged with appropriate cultural activities that create critical mass (not the occasional folk concert or once a year parade). But anyone visiting Santa Fe can see that the demand is there both among tourists and second/retirement home buyers for the kind of experience the city has carefully curated.
“characterized by the predominance of the curve over the straight line, by rich decoration and detail, by the frequent use of vegetal and other organic motifs, the taste for asymmetry, a refined aestheticism and dynamic shapes;”
rather than this:
“an architectural movement or architectural style based upon new and innovative technologies of construction, particularly the use of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete; the idea that form should follow function (functionalism); an embrace of minimalism; and a rejection of ornament.”
The first describes “modernisma,” a design practice present in Barcelona from about 1890 to about 1920, very similar to Art Nouveau in France and Belgium, Jugendstil in Germany, Vienna Secession in Austria-Hungary, but deeply intertwined with Catalan nationalism. The most famous practitioner of moderisma was Antoni Gaudí, whose work from photographs prior to my traveling to Barcelona never spoke to me. In addition, the use of the term modernisma is confusing, as it has little to do what Americans call modernism.
A recent trip to Barcelona, however exposed me to the work of Lluís Domènech i Montaner, something of a predecessor of Gaudí, whose work I found beautiful and engaging. His spectacular Palau de Musica, Barcelona’s concert hall, got me to thinking about the humanism invoked by the foregrounding of natural materials and high craftsmanship. The Palau wows you with its masterly use of highly worked stained glass, tile, woodwork and plasterwork. It radiates the sense that sophisticated culture happens in this place. It speaks of the labor and skills of the many masters who shaped that plaster and carved the wood.
Ornate plasterwork at the Casa Batilló
How different this is from what became the International Style, which eliminated craftsmanship from its vocabulary, and backgrounded materials to the big ideas of its designers. Glass, steel and concrete were reduced to their basic functions, and manual working of materials was made to disappear into the overall design. At the same time, the contemporary backlash to modernism has been a regressive promotion of a return classical orders – as evidenced by the controversy created by the Trump appointment of a retro-classicist to the position of Architect of the Capitol. That politization of design seemed political and degenerating on its face. But what about looking back to an architectural style that highlights the human elements in the details of the implementation of design.
The Palau isfilled with color, shape and elegant forms. It draws the interest of the viewer into its details. It creates a welcoming and comfortable atmosphere. It promotes a sense of calm, civility and ease. Also significant is that must have employed scores of highly trained and skilled crafts people who contributed to its success and could take pride in their work. It speaks of place, rooted in that Catalan nationalism.
What’s interesting is that while Gaudí gets all the attention, Domènech seemed to me the greater artist. Gaudí’s works are among the principal tourist attractions of Barcelona. Most famously his massive church of Sagrada Familia, but also his Güell Park, Casa Batilló and Casa Milà, among others. But while Casa Batilló includes many beautiful details of wood and plasterwork and Casa Milá has some fascinating structural elements (particularly catenary arches in the attic space), a funky roof space and an undulating façade, Gaudí appears to have fallen victim to his celebrity and created overwhelming, chaotic designs. The Sagrada Familia in particular is gigantic in its crazed ornaments and abundance of novel architectural details. The whole business is exhausting. It is far from a contemplative, spiritual space.
Domènech seems to have quietly stayed true to his craft and sense of place. While the Palau is a jewel box, his Hospital de Sant Pau, is a graceful campus that speaks deeply of healing. It is a collection of 12 pavilions, connected by underground galleries and surrounded by landscape. Not all of the buildings have been fully restored. Some are in use as offices. Others are open to the public. All are decorated by extensive tile work and are flooded with light and color. Both the interiors and exteriors display the kind of hand work that marks modernisma. Everywhere there are facets to delight and engage the eye.
The Hospital of St. Pau
Domènech’s work was a revelation. What if New York’s essentially new $500 million concert hall were more like the Palau de Musica, bathed in colored light and couched by curvilinear, floral wood and plasterwork and less like a modern Hilton? Yes, Carnegie Hall is a 19th Century plaster box – but it is a relatively simple, inornate auditorium, with cramped public spaces. But what a pleasure it would be to attend concerts in a space like the Palau that emanates human warmth, art and culture.
We did also go to the Liceu Opera while we were in town. The auditorium, located on La Rambla, is a conventional European 2,300 seat one from 1864, embedded in a 1999 renovation following a fire in 1994. I found the sound surprisingly hollow and unflattering (thought it should be noted that the show we saw featured a small on-stage orchestra, rather than one in the pit). The programming is comparable to opera houses at the highest international level (with respect to conductors, directors and casting). It does have a tony adjacent opera club, which we were delighted to be able to visit.
Barcelona itself is overwhelmed by tourists, who are drawn by Gaudí and a lively street and night life. It has very attractive mid-rise residential neighborhoods, some of the streets of which are being pedestrianized. Barcelonans live life outside, and as in the other cities in Spain which I have visited, there is eating and drinking on sidewalks and streets everywhere late into the evenings. Even the residential side streets have ground level retail. A good many of the stores in Barcelona (and not just the high-end ones) are elegantly presented. Barcelona was designed with broad avenues, some with wide pedestrians walkways down the middle (like the famous and tourist infested La Rambla). Many of the blocks were designed with shared green space at their center.
St. Pau interior
Barcelona is a seafront city, with broad Mediterranean beaches making up its entire Eastern edge. Those beaches as well were jam-packed (but with locals) on the weekend we visited. The city has an active cultural life, with a major orchestra and the opera company, as well as galleries and art museums. It is the home to two universities. It is famous for its public markets (which have also, unfortunately, turned a good deal of their attention to the tourist trade). It is clearly a desirable place to live – what with the attractive built environment (particular the many, many solid midrise buildings of substantial residential flats – the best of which are influenced by or the product of modernisma), the climate, the many places to eat and drink and the beach.
The attractive, oldest parts of town are particularly crowded with tourists – and the draw is clearly eating, drinking and partying – which is remarkable since Barcelona was regarded as a failing post-industrial city at the time of Franco’s death in 1975. Locals attribute the city’s rather recent turnaround to the hosting of the Olympics in 1992, which is unusual since Olympic programs have generally been regarded as economic development failures. Barcelona, though, has been a remarkable success, of which it is to a certain extent now a happy, overwhelmed victim. And there is much to be learned from its distinctive, high profile design history and its place-based, human scale successes.
The view from the State House down Market Street in Indianapolis.
What is one to think about a state capitol city where the streets have the names of other states? What comes to the mind of a non-Hoosier when he or she thinks of Indiana or of Indianapolis. Yeah, probably not much. Also, what is to be made of a Potemkin Village of high-end architecture, much ballyhooed by the architectural cognoscenti, that has a dull main street, many of the high design projects are far flung, and most are, to be truthful, pretty pedestrian? This card-carrying member of the Eastern elite’s teeth were set on edge by a sign at the edge of the town of Columbus, Indiana bragging that former Vice President Michael R. Pence is a native son. That, notwithstanding, I think I was able to maintain an open mind. There certainly is much to like about Indy (not including the dopey colloquial shorting of the name, which does the city no service). Not the least of which is a truly excellent symphony orchestra, which put on an interesting program during my visit, albeit to a far less than half full house.
Indianapolis
The city is bigger than you might think, with one million inhabitants and a metro of twice that size. That, though, is still only about a third of the state’s population. Indianapolis is a geographically large, sprawling urban center in a deeply red, rural state. Sources I checked indicate that there even remain quite a few farms within the city limits – and that isn’t exactly what urbanists are thinking about when they discuss urban farming. The downtown is quite compact, with only a few skyscrapers. But it is easy to see that the 60’s through the 80’s were not kind to downtown Indianapolis. With many soulless, indistinctive midrise office buildings having replaced the city’s historic fabric – which dates back to the early 19th Century. There are some architecturally interesting structures left amid the brutalist colossi – but there aren’t many intact blocks of vernacular design. Oddly, the older, more distinctive buildings seem backgrounded by the newer additions.
It appears that the city fathers wanted to make sure that Indianapolis was up to date with the latest trends – both good and bad – right up to the present. Today, the city has a downtown management organization, a fancy schmancy system of bike paths (called the Cultural Trail), wayfinding signs, extensive scooter and bike sharing options, the modern street amenities for a walkable neighborhood downtown. But here’s the rub – there is nowhere worth walking to. The people in charge have made the moves, but don’t seem to get the essence of placemaking. There aren’t many of the features of a downtown that draw people to the center. It’s a city that made a big bet on the car and is organized around that. It has a huge parking structure on many blocks downtown. Like Kansas City, it is a place you drive to, to go to work, and drive out again at night. You’re also likely to drive to shop, dine or party. Because of the parking garages and the brutalist mega developments, there is little continuity of activity along street walls.
The Omni Severin. To the left is the original structure. To the right is the addition.
My hotel, the Omni Severin is an interesting example. I booked it because it is a member of the Historic Hotels brand of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is a classic early 20th century property, built adjacent to the old intercity train station. Modern additions were made when Omni bought and renovated the structure in the 00’s – leaving some of the historic façade visible. But the additions obscure a good deal of the exterior character. The modern port cochere, on the rail station side of the building, appears to have moved the original main entrance away from the downtown facing side of the building, which is now locked from the outside. The public spaces and rooms in the older parts of the building are entirely characterless. Why bother with the adaptive reuse when the resulting project is drab? Little is left that makes the hotel distinctive, other than a few historic photographs and prints. Surely the National Trust can find a more interesting member in Indianapolis (perhaps Le Meridian around the corner, which seems more stylish).
The rose window of Union Station.The restored waiting room of the former Union Station.
The train station, just across the plaza from the Omni has been adaptively reused as a Crown Plaza Hotel – much in the spirit of Union Station in St. Louis, with windowless rooms built into the interior of the elevated former train station. It has considerably more historic character then the Omni, but is odd. The former grand waiting room of the station, which has a splendid rose window, has been turned into an event space. Part of the project has been made to recreate the atmosphere of the track waiting areas. There are even sleeping rooms in an old train (or a replica of one). The whole thing is very cleverly designed, but the lack of external windows and sunlight in the sleeping rooms probably makes it a hard sell. And the impressive waiting room is difficult to access from the rest of the project or the street. The whole place seems kind of dark and peculiar. One piece of advice to management – light up the rose window at night. It’s bad enough you can’t get into the waiting room directly from the street, but the window could be a beacon, activating the area around it.
The Cummins HQ, the garage to the right, the plaza in the center, and the Deborah Berke office buildings to the left,The Cummins HQ.
Emblematic of the issues of Indianapolis is the most appealing piece of architecture I visited in either Indianapolis or Columbus (more on Columbus’ famous collection of architectural projects in my next post). Like the buildings of Columbus, the Indianapolis standout was commissioned by Cummins (formerly The Cummins Engine Company). Cummins is probably the most publicized and prolific patron of high-end architecture in America. Its downtown Indianapolis HQ was commissioned from New York/New Havener, Deborah Berke (who also did bank branch and a library in the Columbus area), with landscape design by local firm, David Rubin Land Collective. The Cummins HQ is a knockout. It’s an elegant, distinctive addition to the Indianapolis skyline (except that it is responsibly mid-rise). The landscaping around it is a combination of undulating greensward (incorporating all the mod cons of water management and native species) – and even utilizes the Bryant Park/FERMOB chair. The greenspace is adjacent to the Cultural Trail bike/pedestrian path. The ensemble is spirit lifting.
But. The tipoff is the bespoke garage, connected to the office building by a skywalk. The office building was not made to be walked to. It was meant to be driven to. The Friday I was there the lobby and the park were empty (it was admittedly cold and raining). The project sits by itself, with its front (which nobody is going to walk up to) facing the landscape, and the back facing the street. It sits at the edge of the downtown and doesn’t connect to anything else. I suspect that the tables and chairs in the park are used on the occasional nice day for lunch by Cummins employees (but how many warm, sunny days are there in the Mid-West – and shouldn’t public spaces be designed so that they can be used even dicey weather). It is unlikely that anyone will walk there (other than this crazy New Yorker). Adding insult to injury, there is no indication of the identity of the designers (true also in Columbus on the many significant structures there). When I asked the building staff about the architect, they didn’t know and had trouble accessing the information (kudos to the kind man at the front desk who came out to me in the rain, while I was walking around the park to identify Berke). There were informational signs lauding Cummins’ forward-looking commitment to sustainability and respect for local landscape conditions. But I have to suspect that Cummins’ decades of art and architectural patronage are more about demonstrating the taste, sophistication and generosity of the Miller family that has run Cummins for a few generations, then actually being committed to improving life for the people of either Indianapolis or Columbus. This theme runs through both places.
A mixed use hotel/office/retail project in the downtown.
There seems to be only a very few downtown residentials buildings – and why would you want to live downtown, when there is so little street life? There is not much that makes for an interesting neighborhood – little local retail (or dining), few art galleries, not even a department store. The garish signs for the national retailers and restaurant chains overwhelm the street and give it a honky-tonk feel – obscuring the handsome historic facades. The near-in northside residential neighborhoods of one family homes are leafy and attractive. The housing stock is from the first half of the 19th Century – mostly wood construction (with plenty of gay pride flags flying from neighborhood porches). While the lots seem narrow, many of the homes are larger than 3,000 square feet. Prices appear to be between $500,000 and $750,000. Not inexpensive by any measure (southside neighborhoods, with similar housing stock, seem substantially less well kept). If you can live in a four bedroom, 3,000 square foot house a five-minute drive from downtown, why would you want to live in a downtown loft or tower? Only if it was a real mixed-use neighborhood, which, right now, downtown Indianapolis isn’t.
The fundamental question is raised: what makes a great place – a place where people want to be. It seems that the hard part about placemaking is understanding that’s it is not about great design and spending on capital projects. It’s about igniting the spontaneous generation of human activity – the release of creativity and the stimulation of connections. That is, the creation of a community that celebrates its inherent uniqueness and strengths. Building stuff doesn’t make that happen by itself. Successful placemaking requires humility and careful observation of how people behave in public space and supporting and catalyzing connective activity. This is generally the opposite of what local grandees are about. They want to be adulated and eulogized. Humility and understanding the needs and desires of other people, and patiently and carefully programming public spaces, just isn’t in their DNA.
The Arts Garden from below.The interior of the Arts Garden.
Two other connected, wrong-headed projects also stand out in Indianapolis as grandiose failures. One is something called the Arts Garden. It is a social/performance space built over a major intersection. It is a glass winter garden with a high ceiling connected to the city’s skywalk system (almost never a good idea – diverting activity from street level) set up as a performance space. It must have cost a fortune – and why is it there? It also dominates what otherwise would have been a main downtown intersection. In order for such a thing to be successful, it has to be constantly programmed with high quality events. I’m talking every afternoon and evening, just about 365 days a year. That is management intensive and expensive. That didn’t seem to be happening – and the venue appeared to be underused for public events.
The Circle Center mall.
Attached by the skywalk to the Arts Garden is the Circle Center Mall (Monument Circle being the 100% location in Indianapolis) – which appears to be deeply ailing, with many empty stores – and few visitors on either a Friday or Saturday. Some mall passageways were literally dark – without stores or light. The mall includes some adaptively reused buildings and massive parking operations. Simon sold out its interest in the failed project last year – and someone is losing a bundle of money on the development (likely a good deal of which is the taxpayers’ of Indianapolis and Indiana). The project is too big, off the street and generally ill-conceived. It is no substitute for creating a real place.
[And while we’re mentioning Monument Circle, may I respectfully suggest that whoever is responsible for the music piped out of loudspeakers around the monument turn them off and take them down. I love Mozart as much, or even more, than the next person, but recorded music does nothing to contribute to the attractiveness of a public space, and its canned nature contributes to a feeling that the people managing the space are desperate for a good idea.]
The handsome Columbia Club on Monument Circle. Membership is down from 3000 to 1000 members.
Clearly, there is lots of cash around in Indianapolis to execute ambitious projects – some of which likely because it is the state capitol and has access to state funding. This is clearly a wealthy, successful community. Indianapolis has a huge convention center, with a dozen big convention brand hotels (Westin, Conrad, a couple of Marriotts). There’s an entertainment district near the center that on a Friday night was drawing a lively crowd to bars and music joints downtown. The City and the BIDs attention needs to be drawn away from capital projects and towards public space activation, if they are serious about making the downtown more livable. The place needs more outdoor food service designed for three plus season use (space heaters, enclosures). They need to foreground their landmark structures with more imaginative lighting and better controlled retail signage. They need to highlight local retailers. Leasing brokers and building owners likely think that national brands like McCormick & Schmick’s, Ruth’s Chris and P.J. Chang, with their garish signs, add to the profile and pizazz of the downtown (and are a draw for conventioneers). Here’s a newsflash – they make the downtown generic and indistinctive. That creates a downtown like everywhere else, without a distinctive sense of place – without a soul. Indianapolis needs to take pride in its identity and individuality – beyond the mass market products of the Pacers, the Colts and the 500 – if it wants to be a great place. On the other hand, civic leaders may be happy with what it is – a successful 5 day a week generic office district and convention destination. I should make clear that there is no shame in that. But the question is definitely raised, why have an extensive system of bike paths, an outstanding (if underappreciated) symphony orchestra and distinctive building and public space architecture? They have created an economically successful, but grey, one-dimensional state capitol, commercial and conference center. Many people (residents, business leaders, real estate owners) are likely happy with just that. But, there is certainly something important missing.
More on the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra and Columbus, Indiana in next week’s post.
The downtowns in Schenectady and Troy are both success stories. They are similar-sized small cities, with commercial centers that developed in very different ways, likely because of the different periods that proved to be their hay-days. Both have populations substantially below their peaks (Schenectady, now 70,000, peaked at 95,000 in 1930; Troy, now 50,000, peaked at 76,000 in 1910). Both have anchor institutions of higher education. Union College, founded in Schenectady in 1795, and now with 2,200 students. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institution was founded in 1824 and has 8,000 students in Troy. Neither particularly has the feel of a college town, though. They are certainly archetypes of what the downtown of a post-industrial Mohawk Valley city can be—even despite a one-third decline in population from their largest. What signifies that these places are successful? They are busy and lively, they have few empty storefronts, their buildings are architecturally interesting and well maintained, and they have an interesting mix of ground floor uses.
What is particularly impressive about Schenectady is the harmony between old and new buildings along State Street, its main commercial corridor. All down State Street the street wall is continuous, the building heights are consistent and the facades of the new developments, several of them mixed-use retail/residential and others retail/commercial, are respectful of their context. None of these new developments draw attention to themselves, and all are knitted into the urban fabric, while clearly marking themselves as someplace interesting and new. It appears that several of these structures were designed by a local firm. State Street has to be one of the best main streets in the country, by most measures. For example, it feels more substantial and more modern (less like a stage set), than Corning’s famous downtown.
A new, mixed-use structure that fits right in
Schenectady was the corporate home of General Electric (before it veered away from manufacturing to become a brutally managed ponzi scheme of financial services), which retains a small presence in the town – but is nowhere near what it once was. GE had both corporate offices and manufacturing facilities in the town. A large historic factory structure continues to bear a gigantic sign for the company. A fun fact is that because of GE’s presence, it had the country’s second commercial radio station. Railroading was also a major factor in Schenectady’s economy. The New York Central stopped in town, and it continues to have Amtrak service. But, at least equally important, it was the manufacturing home of the American Locomotive Company, a major American builder of steam, and then diesel, engines for trains. That company no longer exists.
Jay Street Mall
The city mostly has the feel of a leafy suburb with an attractive downtown and a self-contained, traditional college campus. One of the features of the commercial district is a very good looking and interestingly tenanted pedestrianized alley that leads from State Street to the near the train station, called the Jay Street Pedestrian Mall. It is clearly well managed and maintained. State Street also features a 1926 Proctor’s Theater that remains active and in use. The beautiful homes lining the residential streets are very much the result of the cadre of well-compensated GE executives who once made their homes in Schenectady and a community planned by the company to attract them.
It seems pretty clear from walking around that Schenectady’s is a planned, managed success. Civic leaders focused their efforts on State and Jay Streets and created and enforced smart zoning and design standards. No doubt it was just as devastated by the GE’s downsizing and ALC’s demise, as Amsterdam was with the collapse of the local carpet manufacturing business. But use was made of its in-place social infrastructure to produce what is likely a very, very nice place to live, work or shop.
A taste of Troy’s charm
Troy is different. It has more of a downtown area than a main street. Troy was a major commercial center very early in the history of the country. Located on the Hudson River at the point where it ceases to be navigable, it was already a locus for transportation before the construction of the Erie Canal, which met the Hudson near Troy and super-charged the local economy. The railroads, similarly, used Troy as a center, where the Hudson could be bridged to connect them to the West. If you were traveling west from New York City, you either had to take a ferry across the Hudson to Hoboken or Jersey City, or a train which turned to the west at Troy. This was true, and mostly remains true, for both passengers and freight. The Amtrak station in Rensselaer, just south of downtown, serves the city of Albany and is a major link between the state’s capital and its largest city.
Troy Savings Bank Music Hall
With its access to coal and iron via waterways, canals and ultimately railroads, Troy was also an important, early steel manufacturing center. As a commercial center beginning around 1800, it is interesting to note that Troy’s population peaked before then that of other Mohawk Valley cities, but began to decline at around the same time.
Today you can get a sense of Troy’s history by watching “The Gilded Age,” Julian Fellowes American version of Downtown Abbey, where some of exteriors are filmed, and are easily distinguished from the scenes with absolutely dreadful computer-generated backgrounds (the CGI exteriors being the worst part of an otherwise enjoyable entertainment). The downtown retains its early 19th century character and charm. Troy is also known for the concert venue in a (now former) downtown bank, with renowned acoustics often used for recordings during the gold age of the LP. Troy’s historic downtown is made up of many full blocks. It is more of a neighborhood than a commercial strip, I would imagine this reflects its early 19th century origins and development patterns from that period. It has the kind of vibe that you find in New York City’s Greenwich Village or Brooklyn Heights, developed at around the same time, and now are among New York’s most desirable and visited places. While Troy had a number of major 19th Century fires, the blocks of the downtown remain remarkably well preserved. Venerating these blocks isn’t simply historic preservation idolatry or some kind of return to a romantic ideal, but a recognition of the importance of human scale and the centrality of a mixture of uses to creating the kind of places where people want to be. There certainly are people who spent millions of dollars to live on high floors in Hudson Yards, but I would venture to say that those are people who have values that are in the very skinny end of a bell curve in terms of their distribution.
Troy is a little different, in having a commercial area, rather than a commercial corridor. That makes it less of a model for many other small cities. But like Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, a vibrant commercial district can be an ever more powerful driver of urban vitality, and is certainly a place worth looking at for examples of success.
One of the many retail blocks in Troy
The Mohawk and Hudson valleys are places that continue to stop human beings in their tracks with their beauty. The construction of the Erie Canal was a critical milestone in every aspect of the growth and development of the United States. The area has an abundance of natural and social assets, including a large number of important educational and cultural institutions. It also has access to water (not a given in many places today) and a climate that, for better or worse more globally, has grown more temperate as the climate changes. Some of the cities whose growth was fostered by the canal have not yet recovered from the post-World War II deindustrialization. While others, like Schenectady and Troy are thriving. They are models for what is possible. What places like Syracuse and Amsterdam (as well as Utica) need are most importantly a desire to change and a willingness to accept new people, new ideas and new forms of economic and social activity. We know how to do downtown restoration, and we have the cities that demonstrate that. Where an old guard clings to the remnants of the dregs of former expansive wealth and power, desolation remains.
The cities that flourished as a result of the construction of the Erie Canal during the first half of the 19th Century are great places, blessed with abundant natural beauty around them. I took a recent driving trip to Rochester, Syracuse, Amsterdam, Schenectady and Troy (with visits to Auburn, Seneca Falls and Corning in the Finger Lakes region as well). Rochester, the state’s fourth largest city by population has a tremendous depth of anchor institutions, and a downtown with great potential for a mixed-use 24 hour downtown. Schenectady and Troy have beautiful, active downtowns. Syracuse and Amsterdam have serious, but solvable, problems. Over the next several weeks I hope to share my thoughts about these visits – my first to all of these places – a trip which I have long wanted to make. This week I will focus Rochester and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra.
Over the distance of almost two hundred years, it is difficult to appreciate the historical significance of the Erie Canal to New York City, New York State, and, in fact to the country as a whole. The Mohawk River Valley, which more or less encompasses the geography between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, is the only flat body of water that crosses what is otherwise the transportation obstacle of the Appalachian Mountain range. The Appalachians, running from Maine to Georgia, served as a barrier to commerce and communications between the eastern and western portions of the early United States (before railroads and the telegraph). When completed, the canal enabled the shipping of commodities from the all over the Midwest to the East, utilizing the Great Lakes, the Ohio River and the Mississippi as feeder routes. At the same time, it permitted manufactured goods to be shipped from the industrial states of the North and the cotton growing states of the South to the growing Western states. At the fulcrum of this commerce was New York City, and its deep and sheltered harbor at the end of the trade route at the mouth of the Hudson River; between east and west, and between the US and Europe as well. It is hard to imagine today, but the rise of the New York City as the financial and commercial center of an empire was nearly entirely originally based on commerce supported by the canal.
The canal was built over about seven years beginning in 1825, in an effort led by Governor DeWitt Clinton. While it used the water and geography of the Mohawk River, much of the canal had to be dug by hand parallel to the shallow, non-navigable river. The canal was a truly amazing accomplishment of human effort – and of engineering. While the canal was used for almost a century, the development of railroad infrastructure came hard on the heels of its completion, with the final leg of what became the New York Central Railroad across New York State finished in 1839. The “Age of the Erie Canal” was short but world shaking.
The canal required 83 locks along its 350-mile route to move freight vertically along its route, in many places enabling the circumnavigation of waterfalls. The vertical drop between the Lake Erie and the Hudson was only about 700 feet. But even more impressive were the 18 aqueducts that were built to cross over other rivers. The idea of building a structure over a river to carry freight loaded barges on water over other bodies of water is hard for the modern imagination to conceive. The longest of these aqueducts went through what became the city of Rochester over the Genesee River.
Innovation Square Building
Over the next 150 years Rochester became the silicon valley of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox all got their start in Rochester. The huge Gannett newspaper chain was based in Rochester until recently. Rochester, and the region, also played a large role in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movement. For a large part of his adult life, Frederick Douglass lived in Rochester with his family and published his newspaper “The North Star” there. The level of political and intellectual activity in Rochester and the nearby small Finger Lake towns was truly remarkable (and the number of 19th century-founded institutions of higher education in the region is reflective of that).
The civic and business leadership of Rochester over the many decades took establishing a major metropolis seriously. They created the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and more recently the George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film. Rochester became an essential part of the US’ art music ecology as the home of the Eastman School of Music (one of the country’s two or three best) and the Rochester Philharmonic.
The RPO is in the second tier of American orchestras by budget size as designated by the League of American Orchestras. Led music director Andreas Delft, however, it plays at a level that matches those of our largest ensembles (his predecessors in that role included Eugene Goosens, Erich Leinsdorf and David Zinman). It plays in Kodak Hall of the Eastman Theater at the Eastman School of Music. Originally built with 3,500 seats, it is a very, very large, high-ceilinged room – although the seating was reduced by 1,200 in 2009. When I stepped into the tremendous mass of space that is Kodak Hall, sitting about halfway back, I was concerned about the sound possibly being hollow and swallowed up. The orchestra, dressed in the now decreasingly used white tie, filled the space with a rich, clear, accomplished sound. I heard a program that included Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28,” Saint-Saen’s “Carnival of the Animals, with duo pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.” The program was billed as “Orchestral Showpieces,” and that provided a first-time listener a good idea of the group’s musical capacity.
The performances were simply excellent with a warm string resonance and glitch free solos – no small achievement in the Strauss’s exposed wind and horn parts. The Strauss was played in technicolor, with the piece’s humor and theatricality highlighted. The color coordinated and brightly dressed Naughton twins attacked their pianos aggressively, with precise coordination in the “Carnival of the Animals”. So much of this music has worked its way into the heart of the culture and is very familiar, none more so than The Swan movement, beautifully played by principal cellist Ahrim Kim. The soloists’ moments in all three pieces were played with great musicality and skill, but without showy virtuosity. This is an orchestra that clearly enjoys playing together with its music director as an organic ensemble. It was particularly evident in the “Petrushka,” another colorful work with comic moments. “Petrushka” is rhythmically complicated and spare, with much of the exposed orchestral scoring that is so characteristic of Stravinsky’s early music (the piece premiered in 1911). The orchestra made a tight, delightful show of its contrasts of both dark and light moments. I walked out after the concert into downtown Rochester musically contented.
The former headquarters of Gannett Newspapers
Downtown Rochester suffered from the degradations of the now mostly discredited ideas of mid-twentieth century urbanism and design. Its peak population was in the 1950’s, and only in the last decade has the population stopped declining. The downtown is filled with structured parking (and very few parking lots) and has a good number of daunting, tower in the park-like office buildings. The lack of lot parking gives the downtown a feeling of continuity. The city, though, has superficially followed a number of the latest urban trends, with some restored public spaces, scooters and bike lanes (without many people using any of them). Most distressing to me was the empty complex of buildings once occupied by Gannett newspapers in the center of town, before it decamped to a suburban Washington, D.C. office park in 1984 and moved the production of the local paper to another Rochester location in 2016. These are massive art deco and Albert Kahn designed buildings created around now obsolete technologies like the printing press and the typewriter. I am an optimist and have thought that the market will find uses for the post-pandemic half filled, midtown Manhattan, midcentury modern office towers. But walking around the Gannett complex gives one pause about the destructive capacity of modern capitalism and the difficulty of recycling gargantuan 20th century edifices.
Across the street from the Gannett complex, at the foot of what was the aqueduct across the Genesee, is an 80,000 square foot, mixed-use – loft, office, retail – adaptive reuse development in a former mill that may demonstrate what the future of Downtown Rochester could be like. However, in order to get there, Rochester needs to veer away from both obsolete planning doctrine and the superficial trappings of up-to-date urbanism – a bench here, a planter there, public sculpture somewhere else, and dig deep into placemaking practice in order to become a mixed-use, 24 hour downtown. I even saw a sign opposing the formation of a business improvement district – a thirty-year-old concept, the best days of which have passed, particularly in cities of fewer than one million people.
An unused bike lane on the Aqueduct Bridge over the Genesee. The bridge also has nice, unused benches and planters.
Right now, downtown Rochester is a place designed to accommodate people who drive to work in an office building, and drive home to adjacent neighborhoods and suburbs at night. There is a mindset in Rochester that needs to change to make the most of its substantial social infrastructure. The blank walls and lifeless plazas around the downtown’s major office buildings are a challenge. I even saw a sign on steps leading to what appears to be the city’s leading office building prohibiting sitting on the steps up to its plaza! That is exactly WRONG. Property management ought to be encouraging step sitting and working to animate the baren plazas. The city needs to select a promising central location and build a critical mass of activity around that place. Scattered residential loft buildings throughout the downtown aren’t going to build that critical mass of activity. Especially given the lifelessness around the major office towers. The downtown needs sidewalk activity in the form of restaurants with outdoor seating and public spaces programmed with activity like Bryant and Dilworth Parks. The deep cultural resources of the community, like Eastman School and the excellent RPO, can be leveraged to bring vibrancy downtown, particularly at night.
Steps to the plaza of the Metropolitan office tower
Sign next to the steps
The tower
With 100,000 fewer residents than at its peak, Rochester is excellent evidence that we don’t have a housing crisis in the United States and in New York State, but rather we have a lack of great places (and a failure to provide adequate mental health services to our most disadvantaged neighbors). Rochester and its neighbors have capacity. Tens of thousands of people, most recently from Venezuela, want desperately to be in the US. Upstate New York needs those people and their expertise and energy. We need policies that move them from the Southern border to our postindustrial cities. The Erie Canal corridor is a place of great beauty and opportunity. Utica, for example, has been recharged by an influx of Bosnian immigrants. The legacy of the Erie Canal could be more great places across one of New York State’s most naturally stunning locations. More on that when we move on to other Mohawk Valley cities.
If you want to learn about best practices in downtown revitalization, you couldn’t do better than to just walk around Cincinnati. They seem to do most things right there. I hadn’t intended to write again about the Queen City, as my most recent trip was a quick overnight one, but the continued marked apparent improvement in economic conditions there merits notice. Both the downtown commercial center and the adjacent Over-the-Rhine neighborhood continue to expand their blocks of economic vitality. More blocks seem to have new stores, new adaptative reuses of structures with high quality vernacular architecture and new residential construction and conversion.
Residential new construction on Vine Street
Cincinnati and Des Moines are actually comparatively sized cities. Cincinnati has a population of about 300,000. But its metro is substantially larger, at 2.5 million, the 30th in the country. Interestingly, while Des Moines is about at its peak population, Cincinnati is considerably smaller than its population of 500,000 in 1960. Cincinnati is 42% Black. While the Black population is only 12% of the metro.
The strength of Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC) sets Cincinnati apart. 3CDC strikes me as the most aggressive and effective organization of its kind in country. Up until recently, 3CDC kept a low profile – but on this recent trip their brand was all over its many properties – on parking lots it operates, on empty storefronts it leases and on parcels it is seeking to develop. The thing that differentiates 3CDC from its peers is its balance sheet. Based on 2019 data, it has gross assets of over $400 million, debt of a little less than $400 million and an annual operating budget of about $20 million. That is a scale of operations and a leveraging of resources that is unmatched. 3CDC purchases property using debt financing. It repositions those properties though adaptive reuse and it carefully curates their occupants. Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine is the most dramatic and fastest commercial corridor revitalization case study of which I am aware. Vine Street and Main Street in Over-the-Rhine are now lined with interesting looking shops, bars and restaurants. A key component of their capital stack is an internally operated low-interest revolving loan fund.
Downtown Cincinnati shows similar attributes of growth. We stayed in the 21CMuseum Hotel – part of a Kentucky-based chain (https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com). The facility was the reuse of an office structure into over 300 rooms (beautifully designed by Yale architecture dean, Deborah Berke). The hotel displays an extensive art collection, focused on Black artists. As you walk into the lobby, your experience is flooded by the image of Morpheus by Kahinde Wiley from 2008 at 108 by 180 inches (https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/cincinnati/blog/2020/morpheus-by-kehinde-wiley/), which is behind the front desk. This is not art by the yard. Our stay was very impressive. Downtown Cincinnati has more street level retail, bars and restaurants than most other mid-western cities (although the retail on many block is far from continuous). There are very few totally blank block fronts. Downtown is connected to Over-the-Rhine by a tram, which is free and runs every ten minutes or so (not quite enough, but close to it). Unlike many other such projects, it appears to be well-used.
(I also note that we had breakfasts in both St. Louis and Cincinnati in First Watch restaurants, a chain that has almost 500 locations, with which I was previously unfamiliar. The quality of food and service in both places was superb. Quite remarkable for such a large chain.)
Too many economic development entities are ineffective because their boards are averse to property ownership, operation and debt financing. Those organizations are resigning themselves to unsuccessfulness – particularly in today’s real estate environment where downtowns need more than “clean and safe.” Downtown revitalization requires risk taking and rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in real estate brokerage and construction. Downtown economic development organizations need to be in the business of revenue generation (through parking, if nothing else) and leading the real estate market with high quality repositioning of derelict property. Nothing else works as well. The 3CDC financial statement is a lesson in itself in how to do this.
I know nothing of the politics of 3CDC, or how it is viewed in the community. I also don’t know anything about its community engagement practices. While those things are important, the results speak for themselves. Cincinnati’s quality of life is better as a result of 3CDC’s work. I would like to see an income distribution chart for Black families in the city and metro for 2000 and 2020. If 3CDC’s efforts are not bringing substantial benefit to the city’s least well off, then that’s a problem. I noticed a considerable amount of residential new construction in Over-the-Rhine. 3CDC has developed 416 affordable units, with 70% of them designated as affordable. Given where Cincinnati now is, and 3CDC’s financial strength and expertise, if they were to ask me (which they haven’t), I would advise that they focus their efforts on mixed income (with no more than 30% of residents below 50% of AMI), mixed-use projects as a means to improve the circumstances of the worst well off and improve the quality of the local public schools.
The view up Vine Street
***
Our trip to Cincinnati was to see the world premiere of “Castor and Patience,” at the Cincinnati Opera, with music by Gregory Spears and libretto by Tracy K. Smith. Spears is the composer of the highly successful “Fellow Travelers,” also premiered in Cincinnati, and Smith is a Princeton professor, former poet laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner. It is my practice not to discuss the musical or dramatic aspects of the operas I hear, since that’s not my department (“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun”. Heidi’s review will be found here: andymanshel.nyc), the theme of the opera was of particular interest to me.
The opera is about an inter-racial family from Buffalo, New York, who, during the home mortgage debacle of 2008, are in danger of losing their house. They travel to an island off the coast of the Southeast where the family’s father (Castor) grew up, and where he and his cousin (Patience) (both Black) own thirty acres, which are valued in the story at over $20 million.) Patience sees her role as protecting the family’s legacy in the property – highlighting the importance and rarity of property ownership to Black folks. She is opposed to selling even one acre of the twenty – which would eliminate the father’s debt problems.
This story interested me because as a real estate lawyer I have always advised clients that the first rule of success in real estate is to never develop an emotional attachment to a parcel. Also, in the 00’s I joined the Queens County Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyer’s Project representing families in foreclosure. The membership of the Queens County Bar pledged to represent, on a pro bono basis, any Queens family during conferences with the Court’s Special Master dealing with foreclosures in Queens. This project was so successful that ultimately families were represented by highly skilled, full-time staff from the project with extensive experience with foreclosure, rather than by the pro bono volunteers.
I represented more than a half dozen families over the course of five or six years – all of them were eager/desperate to remain in their homes despite the fact that the houses were worth less than their mortgages. My clients’ best economic move would certainly have been to walk away from their homes. While staying was not necessarily a canny business decision, ultimately all were able to remain in their homes with monthly payments well within their means. The actual facts of these cases were very different from the prevailing narrative regarding the “mortgage crisis” that began in 2008, and that narrative underlies the story line of “Castor and Patience.” Southeast Queens, New York, generally regarded as the Jamaica neighborhoods, is one of the largest communities of Black homeowners in the United States. I was told that in the 2010 census, Queens was the only county in the country where African American household income exceeded that of white households.
My clients ran the gamut from a family on public assistance to a barber to a laid off nursing assistant. All had refinanced their homes in order to generate cash – all of which they had spent or lost. In some cases, the refinancing produced upfront lower monthly payments which later either ballooned or reset to a high variable interest rate. All of their homes market values were substantially less than (generally 2/3) than the principal of the mortgage on them. In almost every case, a local mortgage broker – someone they knew from the community – had sold them on the refinancing. None of those mortgage brokers were anywhere to be found by the time the families came to me. In one case, I believe the mortgage broker stole most of the cash generated by the refinance – taking advantage of the borrower’s lack of financial sophistication.
The most obvious thing to me as an attorney representing these families was that the banks and mortgage servicers were in chaos. Their attorneys would show up in court with a list of properties on the docket for that day. Most were unprepared. None had the supporting documentation required to sustain their claims – much of which had been lost in the shuffling between the mortgage originators, the creators of the collateral debt obligations (CDO), the buyers of the CDO’s and the servicers which were on the front lines doing the administrative work for the holders of the CDO’s. Also, the Courts were loath to kick people out of their homes – and made every appropriate effort to protect homeowners’ rights. It was easy for me to throw sand in the gears of the process to keep people in their homes. It was much more difficult to actually work out payment arrangements which would be manageable by my clients.
A home in Southeast Queens — not one of my clients’. Just an example.
It is important to know that while these properties were in foreclosures, their owners continued to live in them and weren’t paying any occupancy costs – not mortgage, not insurance and not taxes. The CDO holders were on the hook for all of these and were adding them to the borrowers’ principal. My clients dealt with this situation in different ways. My lowest income clients took two trips to Disney with their grandchildren during my representation of them. Another of my clients took the opportunity of six years of essentially free housing to get a BA in nursing – and ultimately secured a near six figure entry level hospital job.
The Obama administration had set up a program called the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP), which, at the time, none of the mortgage servers knew much about accessing. This lack of knowledge (or interest) served to prolong the foreclosure process. It was in the mortgage servicers’ interest to keep the process going – as fees were generated by each Court appearance and each action taken by the servicer – charged to the holders of the CDOs. It was not in the financial interest of the servicer or the CDO holders to bring the matters to closure. An actual foreclosure or settlement would almost always result in the banks having to immediately book a loss, which was definitely not in their interest.
At one point, I got the quasi-governmental agency that has a guarantor’s interest in most home mortgages involved in order to bring my cases to settlement (they have the ultimate authority to approve mortgage restructurings). All of my clients stayed in their homes and got monthly payments they could live with. The downside for all of them was that the restructured payments, the defaulted amounts, deferred interest and penalties were all added to the value of the principal – which, in practical terms, meant the principal would never be paid down. When the owners passed away, the CDO holder would be left with an underwater property, which it would sell and then book the loss – hopefully many years in the future. This was the ultimate in kicking a can down the road. So, at the end of the day the holders of the CDOs were left holding the bag.
This wasn’t the story of “Castor and Patience,” and it would make a pretty terrible, long, complicated, boring theater piece. But it is what happened in my experience, and probably what happened with the majority of people caught up with homes with deflated values and defaulted, inflated mortgages. In the real world, if Castor has adequate legal counsel in Buffalo, he probably could have held on to his home. Better yet, Castor and Patience could have obtained a small debt consolidation loan (at very low interest rates during the turmoil in the markets), using the island property as security, to eliminate Castor’s financial problems. While that alternate story isn’t particularly important to the opera audience, it is important to how we understand home ownership and race in America.
The first class of Urban Park Rangers, with Mayor Koch and Gordon Davis at the center. In the lower right, with the tie, is my friend, neighbor, collaborator and future Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.
“New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation” Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster, 2021)
The great goal of social science is to amass large amounts of data relating to a social phenomenon, and then organize and synthesize that data in order to explain how that phenomenon works – essentially separating the out the signal from the noise. In “New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation,” Thomas Dyja sets out for himself that extremely high bar. He pulls together an overwhelming amount of information about the governance and culture of New York City from 1978 to the present and attempts to tease out what actually happened. It is nearly impossible to believe that one author could accumulate and one mind could retain and come to an understanding such an avalanche of facts. In telling this story, he succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation.
I came to New York in 1978 and have lived here continuously ever since. I began working in the public sphere in 1991. So, in a very material sense, this is my (along with a great many other peoples’) story. I was in, or near, the room where some of the stuff he describes happened. I worked with or knew a significant double-digit percentage of the people he talks about. I generally come out where he does in his broadest conclusions, but as is absolutely inevitable in the blizzard of information Dyja has digested, some of the “facts” and figures he cites either are incorrect or can’t be right (There have never been 50,000 people sleeping on the streets of New York. There have been 50,000 people receiving services for the homeless from the City – mostly living in shelters, most of them families – and not the single adult men who most New Yorkers have in mind when they think of the homeless. While he cite’s Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, can it be true that 50% of gay baby boomers died of AIDs?). Dyja also accepts as true a number of the basic assumptions that constitute the conventional wisdom regarding public policy in the city over the last forty years, some of which are just aren’t true or are gross over simplifications (gentrification leads to displacement, homelessness is caused by lack of housing). But, certainly, Dyja’s heart is in the right place, and he is willing to call “bullshit” on a good many self-serving and false claims. I certainly can’t argue with his placing our work on the Bryant Park restoration, and the thinkers we relied on like Holly Whyte and George Kelling, at the dead center of his epic.
The book relies on press reports and interviews with high profile players for much of its factual foundation. Unfortunately, the New York press often gets the details of local coverage wrong (and more than occasionally gets the entire story wrong), taking the press releases of public officials at face value – and while newspaper reporting may be the first draft of history, it constitutes an unreliable basis on which to write its later versions when it comes to New York City government. It has also been my experience that folks in public life in New York tend to gild their lilies – they take credit for stuff they didn’t do and they seem to remember that positive results they stumbled into were things they planned. Relying on those sources without questioning them will lead to false positives. But when bringing together so many stories, checking them all out would be a lot to ask.
The book’s great accomplishment is to highlight the policies of the Koch administration that laid the groundwork for New York’s revitalization (particularly in housing and public space) that continues through today, and the cadre of smart, effective professionals that Koch attracted to government the like of which has not been seen since (unfortunately). My personal recollection of third term Ed Koch was of a bullying narcissist. As the New York Times recently reported on at length, Koch remained in the closest during the AIDs crisis and actively worked to cover his personal tracks. Koch also deployed racially inflammatory rhetoric, amping up the city’s most debilitating division. To put it mildly, he consciously failed to attempt to understand, and even dismissed, the concerns of New York City’s large Black community. But, at the end of the day that didn’t drive Koch Administration policy, which, using clever financing mechanisms, built tens of thousands of new affordable housing units (which over decades ultimately became hundreds of thousands), transforming the city’s most neglected, abandoned and disinvested neighborhoods into desirable places. And speaking of places, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis thought up the idea of private non-profit entities to secure resources for and improve the management of parks – leading to the restoration of Central, Bryant (in which I was directly involved) and Prospect Parks. I am convinced that those two programs, in housing and parks, were the key elements that changed the perception of cities and sparked the return to urban centers across the country – a force so powerful that it has continued through 9/11, the financial turbulence of 2008, hurricane Sandy and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dyja’s writing about 9/11 is particularly beautiful; capturing the moment perfectly. He avoids the solipsism and self pity that infects so many other attempts to describe that horrific day. It was a primary election day, on which I was working the polls for mayoral candidate Mark Green in the northeast Bronx. I ended up in a four hour walk to the Upper West Side, with a non-functional transit system, limited information and an inability to get through to home on the phone. All along the walk home I had a view of smoke rising from lower Manhattan as I moved south. When I got home and turned on the television, the video of the time between the planes’ flying into the buildings and their collapse was the worst thing I have experienced before or since. Dyja bravely and frankly identifies the forces that made the return to normal at the former World Trade Center site impossible and that have left us with a permanent, disheartening gash in New York’s side (which will never be remedied), and a collection of inhumanely scaled towers.
It was interesting to read of the yin and yang during the Bloomberg Administration of Amanda Burden and Dan Doctoroff, which I didn’t understand at the time, while I was toiling ten miles away from City Hall in the neighborhood development fields of Jamaica, Queens: Burden having worked for William H. (Holly) Whyte, the advocate for small scale urbanism and close observation, and Doctoroff being the purveyor of grand plans (like the failed New York Olympics) and big ideas (like the failed Hudson Yards). The bastard child of this dynamic is the hugely popular tourist attraction of the High Line, which isn’t really a successful public space (because it is mostly a place to walk through, rather than linger in) but has been a powerful engine for real estate development along its flanks, and a model for similar projects across the country.
There is a lot in the book about the commercial worlds of hip hop and the art market, which may be useful scene setting – but about which I, personally, don’t very much care and think aren’t particularly culturally important. The New York of the late 1970’s and early-to-mid 1980’s may have been one of urban decline, but it was also a uniquely yeasty and important era for high culture here – particularly in music and dance. To me, it would have been much better to use the work of people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp as the cultural yard stick against which to measure changes in the city over the period. The transformation of Carnegie Hall from an overheated place where paint chips fell from the ceiling on to your head during classical concerts to the glamourous outpost of European high culture fostered by Sandy Weill is a story worth telling. The book has no mention of other cultural innovators like Stephanie French. But, Dyja wrote his book, not mine.
On the homelessness front, Dyja only briefly quotes Rosanne Haggerty, my social entrepreneurial heroine, and instead relies on testimony from the crafty, sly fox of the unhoused, Bob Hayes. I would like to know more about the Haggerty’s departure from the path-breaking Common Ground and that organization’s transformation into Breaking Ground, now a central institution in what Haggerty calls the homeless/industrial complex. The current state of services for the homeless in New York is the result of bad data, misinformation and worse public policy, which Dyja doesn’t clearly explain.
Oddly, NY x 3, provides more detail and moves more slowly through the early Koch years and accelerates the narrative pace during DeBlasio Administration. It’s the opposite of how history is usually recounted – with the past receding and the present in the forefront. As a result, the beginning of the book is a rewarding slog, and the end of the book feels rushed and less detailed. There is a great deal about David Rockefeller (Chase) and Walter Wriston (Citi), but nothing about Jamie Dimon (Chase) and Dick Parsons (Citi) (another one of my heroes). That, notwithstanding, Dyja provides the most telling analysis of the eight years of DeBlasio’s mayoralty of which I am aware; which is impressive, given that we’re it is only months behind us. While I was a middling official in City government during DeBlasio’s last four years, I wasn’t sure of what was hitting me. I was a believer in DeBlasio’s attempts to improve the situation of the city’s worst well off, but was mystified by the chaos, lack of direction and just plain bad decision making that seemed to be trickling down from above. Dyja sympathetically explains DeBlasio’s lack of managerial skills, diffidence and indecisiveness.
Typical of the kind of small inaccuracies that creep into daily journalism, I was counsel to all three BIDs. Taken by the Times at a City Council hearing in 1996.
The book made me long for the New York of my youth. Not because the era was more fun or interesting, but because City government during the 80’s effectively implemented policies that made a difference – and the Mayor and Deputy Mayors (like Ken Lipper, Nat Leventhal and John Zuccotti) backing up risked taking innovative managers like Gordon Davis at Parks and Paul Crotty at Housing. What we are now left with is a sclerotic, risk averse local government that is strangled by its outdated, dysfunctional personnel, legal and contracting procedures. What we have inherited is ineffectual public administration by press release. I was privileged to be a part of the private sector effectiveness of New York’s largest business improvement districts, which Dyja also focuses on (although, in a small detail that perhaps only matters to me, he glancingly misses why Rudy Giuliani had Dan Biederman and me fired from Grand Central Partnership). So, I don’t really have much to complain about on that score.
The book’s epigraph is a quote from the wonderful and underappreciated Whyte, whom I also knew and tremendously admired. Whyte was the father or godfather of Bryant Park. Perhaps Dyja’s recognition of Holly, whom he cites through out the book, and Richard Rein’s revelatory recent biography, will give Holly his day. As Deja makes clear, Holly Whyte has given us the tools to create create great urban places. I, for one, will ever be grateful to Dyja for his superhuman research and telling this story with so much elan and passion. I’m assigning New York, New York, New York to my children, who take a safe and vibrant New York City for granted, so that they can get something of a feel for what Dad was doing while they were growing up.
Gustuvo Dudamel has never done much for me. I’m actually more a fan of his avatar played by Gael García Bernal in the TV series “Mozart in the Jungle” (which, admittedly takes place in NYC). I’ve also long thought that the Los Angeles Philharmonic is at best a second rate band, which is remarkable because it’s recent conductors have included top shelfers Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen (not to mention the storied Carlo Maria Guilini in the more distant past) and its managers have been industry legends Ernest Fleischman and Deborah Borda. Why are those people so well-recognized when the orchestra has never been better than pedestrian?
We were in LA for Du Yun’s “Our Daughter’s Eyes” presented at REDCAT by Beth Morrison Projects and the LA Opera. We also took in Fidelio at the Philharmonic while we were there. I will tread lightly about the LA Phil, as the house professional critic has written about both for the Wall Street Journal. It was also interesting to be in Disney Hall after recently experiencing its acoustic doppelganger in Kansas City. While we were settling in to seats about three quarters of the way back in the hall, the bassoonist was warming up on stage and sounded like he was sitting in our laps. But once the performance started it seemed really far away. Not that the orchestra offers much to hear. The strings of the LA Phil can be accurately described as scrappy for a supposedly world class band, and the ensemble was almost disorganized. Maybe because of Gustavo’s jetting around (he’s also the cappo di cappo at the Paris Opera) rehearsal time may have at a premium for a complicated production, but that seems unlikely given the show’s high profile.
This photo of Maestro Dudamel appears several stories high on the facade of Disney Hall.
The New York critical fraternity spent a good deal of time this spring panting for Dudamel to replace the unsuccessful Jaap van Zweden at the New York Philharmonic after van Sweden’s contract comes to an ignominious close next year. Dudamel spent two weeks with the NY orchestra in March playing Schumann, and the New York press went into a frenzy. OK, the guy has terrific hair, a gleaming smile and an interesting life story. But, to these ears, he just isn’t that interesting a musician. In any event, my money is on the exciting Finn, Susanna Mälkki taking the reins at the NYP (you read it here first).
The show’s raison d’être was the involvement of deaf actors doubling the singers and the involvement of a signing chorus from Dudamel’s home of Venezuela. The musical aspects of the evening were disappointing from top to bottom, except for the fine performance of Ryan Speedo Green, who this year has become the Met’s reliable all round utility bass. Dudamel pushed the band to break-neck speed, at which they were incapable of playing beautifully. Once upon a time, the LA Phil was known as an outstanding group of LA studio musicians, moonlighting as classical players. Now, as a full-time orchestra with a 52 week contract, they aren’t even that. I’d rather watch reruns of MITJ.
I would be remiss not to crab about how Disney Hall doesn’t relate to the street and is anti-urban. I will also please my readers by avoiding the opportunity to once again crab about Pershing Square which continues to suck.
But here is the headline – Downtown LA has become almost walkable over the course of the pandemic. Across the street from the loathed (by me) Disney Hall, Gehry has designed a nearly completed massive mixed-use development (1.2 million sq ft, 500 apartments, 20% affordable) that DOES relate well to the street and is massed in a fascinating manner that breaks up its bulk. The building is broken up into two towers of offsetting rectangular forms that humanize it’s scale. It’s mixed uses, including a good deal of street level retail, should seriously animate that stretch of Grand. A hearty bravo to Mr. Greenburg and his patrons at Related. There is lots of other residential development activity that has been recently completed within walking distance.
I chose not to rent a car for the first time in a trip to La La Land. We took Ubers from Manhattan Beach to Downtown, as well as round trip to The Getty Center from our downtown hotel. All three trips were shit shows. I just can’t understand how Angelenos can put up with it. The trip back from Malibu to DTLA was almost two hours. The Getty Center is magnificent – and its public spaces are uplifting (which is surprising given the extensive use of hardscape. Water features and movable chairs and table soften the experience. The special exhibit of Poussin we visited was lavishly presented. While it goes without saying, it is good to have unlimited money.). But how am I ever going to go there again unless I sleep over or take a helicopter.
The rest of the visit we walked around downtown. We breakfasted at Grand Central Market and walked along Broadway in historic DTLA. Broadway has made only some progress since the onset of the pandemic. It’s still more than a little rough around the edges. Yes, there is considerable loft conversion, and lots of interesting architecture. The many former movie palaces convey a sense of what tinsel town once was. However, there are still many, many empty, or underutilized, poorly maintained architecturally significant structures. The potential is tremendous.
By contrast, the Arts District near downtown appears to be a happening place (who knew that LA had an arts district?). The neighborhood is small, and the amount of adaptive reuse is patchy, but apartments are being developed there and there are some cool other uses. We had an excellent meal at a rooftop restaurant, with a rather obscurely marked door at street level. The place (La Cha Cha Cha) was large, entirely outdoors, comfortable and landscaped with cacti. Next door was a club ominously named Death & Co. that we were assured was super cool and had great drinks. The neighborhood was walking distance from downtown.
I should note that, yes, downtown Los Angeles has a noticeable homeless population, like many other American cities. There are interesting signs around downtown designating special enforcement zones, prohibiting camping and sleeping on the sidewalk. I can’t say the issue appears to be worse than other big U.S. cities or that we ever felt overwhelmed or unsafe. I suppose this has become something of the new urban normal. But by no means did we feel that DTLA was apocalyptic or a set for a new installment of Bladerunner (as I have argued elsewhere, this is a problem that is not principally about housing and is solvable if the political will and data driven social services can be mustered).
A view down Grand Avenue. The Broad is on the left.
Downtown is brimming with newly built and converted residential developments. The streets still aren’t very active, but the plazas at 1 and 2 Cal have water features, retail, movable chairs and tables and lots of potential. Grand Avenue now has an attractive string of cultural institutions (including Disney Hall, the newish Broad Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the expanding Colburn School facilities), even if nobody appears to much walk between them. You can have a pleasant walk from the towers of Bunker Hill through the Civic Center, El Pueblo de Los Angeles, Little Tokyo through China Town. On my first trip to LA in about 1976, Olvera Street in the Pueblo was regarded as a tourist trap. Today it is rather charming. We had lunch at El Paseo (which has been there for decades) and the other diners were wearing Dodger regalia and appeared not to be tourists but locals pre-gaming (it was opening day, albeit not for five hours).
A note to Christopher Hawthorne, LA’s Chief Design Officer (and the Time’s former architecture critic): how about paying some attention to the landscaping in the area around City Hall? There are decrepit planters and garden beds among the brutalist 60’s municipal buildings. The plazas are strewn with trash and poorly maintained. I’m sure the Mayor, being a serious Angeleno, never gets out of his car when going between municipal structures, but if LA is serious about design, it really ought to start with its front yard.
Notwithstanding the foregoing, as we lawyers say, DTLA is actually getting to be walkable. Who have thunk it. Joel Kotkin must be shocked. Between the cultural institutions, the street level retail, the varied neighborhood offerings and the improved landscaping, someone might actually live downtown and rarely need access to their car (which, under the circumstances, would be advantageous). Grand Avenue is a happening place. And you can go hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct the LA Philharmonic as often as you want – which is fine with me.
Musical Group on a Balcony. Gerritt van Honthorst. 1622. The Getty Center. A theorbo and two lutes.
