Tag Archives: place

IT MAKES NO SENSE TO FALL IN BALTIMORE

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Crabs at the Lexington Market

With apologies to Audra McDonald https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isQr674sN1k

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 →

TACTICAL HYPOCRISY

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Where is Charlie Brown?

It seemed great when the book “Tactical Urbanism” was published in in 2015. Here were a bunch of placemaking ideas that were easy to understand and implement. The first chapter was a promising summary of the principles of placemaking developed over the prior three decades. The rest of the book felt kind of skimpy – the case studies it described weren’t terribly impressive or interesting, but they were certainly a step in the right direction. And then tactical urbanism came to my block.

During COVID, New York City’s Open Streets program arrived on 103rd Street between Central Park and Riverside Park. Two metal barricades appeared at the end of each block each morning with signs noting that no through traffic was allowed, and that the speed limit was five miles an hour. 103rd came to a T intersection at each park – limiting its utility to through traffic. While no one was using the street bed to hang out in, and the street closing complicated bringing a Zipcar around from my local parking garage to my front door, I did enjoy the additional open space for walking the dog. I noticed over the years an occasional lame event advertised for the street being put on by “Park to Park 103/Open Streets.

 

          The Plan

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A SUCCCESS STORY IN DALLAS

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The park is full of people on a Friday afternoon.

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.

ROCKIN’ THE CANADIAN ROCKIES

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Olympic Plaza with no skaters

It is truly wonderful how many beautiful and great places there are in North America. Calgary, Alberta sits an hour from the Rockies and enjoys spectacular mountain views. Calgary is a little like Dallas, after having morphed into Houston. It started as a cow town (and I had a fantastic shell steak during my visit) and became an oil and gas city – the fourth largest city in Canada with a population of well over a million. It has eight buildings of over 40 stories in the downtown. The city was very much built around the car – with numerous parking structures in the center. You can drive downtown from the suburbs, park downtown and as a result of the extensive skyway system (called locally the “+15”), your feet never have to touch the ground in getting to and from your office.

My visit was sponsored by the downtown business improvement area (BIA), Calgary Downtown Association (CDA), as part of an exercise to revitalize Stephen Avenue, one of the city’s principal shopping streets. Several blocks of Stephen Avenue have been pedestrianized and are mostly made up of low-rise late 19th and early 20th century buildings. The street is shadowed by the surrounding office towers – which, at present, have in excess of a 30% office vacancy rate. The street abruptly “Ts” smack into the superblock containing City Hall.

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Book Project: Learning from Bryant Park: Placemaking in Bryant Park. Revitalizing Cities, Towns and Public Space

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BP After

I have just contracted with Rutgers University Press for the publication of Learning from Bryant Park: Placemaking in Bryant Park. Revitalizing Cities, Towns and Public Spaces in the Spring of 2019. I am so fortunate to be working with the experienced publishing professionals Peter Mikulas and Micah Kleit on this project.

Improving Suburban Downtowns

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IMG_0596The Village of Larchmont has two downtowns. One is focused around the commuter train station and the other along a six lane state road. Last week, working with my colleague, David Milder of DANTH (http://www.ndavidmilder.com/), I was asked to make a presentation about improving the downtowns to a group of local residents. The group was engaged and thoughtful. The talk was as much about improving the experience of living in this highly regarded commuter suburb (where the quality-of-life is already quite high). The catalyst for our being asked to present the talk was the number of empty storefronts along the main shopping streets. The link to our presentation is here: Larchmont Power Point

The commercial center at the transportation hub has excellent “bones.” It was interesting to think about and attempt to analyze why it has the number of empty stores that it does. What struck us in walking around was how many cars and how few people we saw on a Saturday. The downtown has a number of municipal lots and quite a bit of curbside parking. Both are unmetered and have a two-hour limit. While most of the spaces were full, there were enough empty ones to be able to say that anyone coming to the downtown could reasonably find a space. But where were the people? Continue reading →

What Works

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campus martius

Campus Martius, Detroit

Over the last fifty years a range of economic development agencies, departments and entities have been created around the country. Their goals have primarily something to do with retaining and attracting businesses to a particular place in order to have more jobs in that place. While ideally those would be new jobs, created out of new ventures and entrepreneurship, for the most part they are about moving existing jobs from one jurisdiction to another. The most powerful tool most economic developers have are government subsidies – reduced taxes, government-owned property offered at a discount, cash grants and tax-exempt borrowing rates. But seldom to never is it possible to pinpoint what actually creates new businesses and jobs – actual economic expansion. Even in the best cases, economic development is usually a zero/sum game. Where a business in one place expands it is because it is, at best, taking customers from another firm in another city, another state or another country. We don’t have a firm understanding of where entirely new jobs and economic value come from.

Government also attempts to improve a local economy by moving a government function, and therefore government employees, to a particular place. On the biggest scale this could be a military base. In an urban setting it could be a large government office. In Jamaica, I was able to observe the impact on the community of the results effective lobbying efforts to attract a college, a one million square foot government office building, a court and a laboratory and office space to the community. One thing that I noticed was that government office workers rarely left their offices to eat or shop. Most employees came from outside the community. With electronic record keeping, the largest governmental office employer halved its workforce leaving a massive structure mostly filled with file cabinets. The multiplier effect from such a tremendously expensive project didn’t seem very powerful. When the jobs left, there was a vacuum. There was no real expansion to local economic activity. Only the college seemed economically connected to the community. Continue reading →

Selling on the Sidewalk

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When I went to work for Grand Central Partnership among my first assignments from Dan Biederman was to figure out how to deal with sidewalk issues: vending, newsracks, newsstands, payphones and making public toilets more available. In dense urban centers sidewalks, while public space, are highly contested territory, and the regulation of activity on them in New York City is arcane and labyrinthine. Not only pedestrians care about sidewalks. Adjacent property owners not only have responsibility for cleaning and maintaining their sidewalks, but they care about what happens in front of their multi-million dollar investments; particularly with its impact on ground floor retail. In midtown Manhattan, many buildings have vaults under the sidewalks that expand their basement space – and so are concerned about how much weight is put on them and whether anyone is punching holes in them.

A range of people have traditionally engaged in commercial activity on the New York City sidewalks – and these uses are heavily, if often ineffectually, regulated. There are separate governing schemes for four kinds of sidewalk venders: general merchandise, food, veterans and first amendment vendors. The Department of Parks and Recreation has its own scheme for concessioning venders within city parks as well as on adjacent sidewalks, and even sidewalks across the street from a park! The City permits individuals to erect newsstands at any sidewalk location that meets certain siting criteria – with no discretion by the City with respect to the location. If the proposed structure fits – the applicant is entitled to a permit. The Department of Transportation manages the enforcement of some (but not all) of these rules and is ultimately responsible for the physical condition of the sidewalks and with seeing to it that sidewalk uses don’t interfere with transportation (bus stops) or public safety (fire hydrants). Continue reading →

Advent, Le Chemin de St. Jacques, Ste. Foy, Conques and the Essentialness of Place

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The Way — from Le Puy to Santiago

For more than a thousand years people have been walking from all over Europe to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. What it is about this place that has drawn people to it for centuries? Clearly the idea of “place” must have an incredible hold on the human imagination to draw so many people to a small city featuring an architecturally undistinguished cathedral over such an extended period of time. Not only has the city of Santiago called to millions of pilgrims over the centuries, but the Way itself, the route and the many cities and villages along it, exert their own powerful force on people.

Santiago de Compostela means Saint James of the Field of Stars. The legend goes that in the 9th Century a Spanish hermit, following the guidance of a field of stars, discovered the relics of the Apostle James in a cave near the Spanish coast. The veneration of those relics in the church where they came to rest is the goal of the pilgrims of the Way. Saint James became a particular object of veneration because he was believed to have intervened on behalf of Christian crusaders fighting to evict the Muslims (Santiago Matamoras – St. James the slayer of Moors), who had created a great culture of their own during the Middle Ages from the Iberian Peninsula. Continue reading →