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.

Inner Harbor

The great fall of Baltimore was vividly and darkly portrayed in what was perhaps the greatest television series ever shown in the U.S., The Wire – a highly nuanced drama of cops and drug dealers fighting for territory. Baltimore has punched above its weight in popular culture because of native sons, filmmakers John Waters (Hairspray) and Barry Levinson (Diner). Most recently, the Baltimore of the 1960’s was dramatized in “Lady in the Lake,” a creepy vehicle for Nathalie Portman, which revolved around the charged relationship between Blacks and jews as the city changed.

Today, Baltimore’s population has settled at about half of what it once was. Baltimore is now a 61% Black city, with only a 27% white, non-Hispanic population. The Inner Harbor is an attempt to draw tourists to town, as are the nearby multiple stadia and a convention center. Inner Harbor has all the usual brand name national high-end restaurant chains (McCormick & Schmicks next to a Ruth’s Chris), big box mid-market retailers (Burlington Coat Factory), and dozens of chain hotels. It also includes a number of newly built apartment buildings and the T. Rowe Price offices. While I had a pleasant lunch outside on a pier (in November) at a local place, Inner Harbor could be anyplace. The real character of historic Baltimore is in the downtown. I stayed at the Lord Baltimore, an Historic Hotel, built in 1928 (comfortable enough, with dark rooms, and a lobby in the style of Miami-based owners and art collectors Don and Mera Rubell) (fun facts: Don started out as a dentist, and as a junior attorney I worked on some of his early ventures. His brother was the late scenester and Studio 54 impresario, Steve).  Adjacent to it, the Monaco Hotel, is in the imposing former offices of the B&O railroad. However, Inner Harbor has sucked most of the street life out of the neighborhood.

Adaptive reuse from handsome bank into hotel.

The downtown has many high-quality buildings from the past. There are the elegant row houses from the 19^th Century. There also dozens of high quality pre-war commercial buildings, ranging from imposing financial institutions to smaller interesting retail structures. There are also many post-war, glass and steel structures, an early one of which is the 1962 Mies van der Rohe, One Charles Center. The ensemble is an interesting mix. Many residential conversions, both for sale and rent, have taken place in both pre- and post-war buildings. This is all good, and the downtown appears well kept and populated.

What it doesn’t appear to be is lively.  There isn’t much street life in the historic downtown. Inner Harbor is vibrant with bars and restaurants, most with outdoor seating. The historic downtown has little to none of that. There are scattered restaurants, but no outdoor cafes, and very few high-quality retailers. Most storefronts appear to be let to whoever landlords can find – low-end jewelers, hair care places and off-price athletic wear sellers. The lack of street level commercial activity makes the downtown feel sterile and disconnected. The old major department store, Stewart & Co., is now the offices of Catholic Relief Services and looks to be under-maintained. The Lexington Market is a major draw (it is no longer a farmers’ market, but more of a food court). It is the only majority Black space I visited (more on that in a bit) and operates in a brand-new facility, with substantial structured parking near it. The market is surrounded by empty and underused store fronts. By contrast, the neighborhoods just outside of downtown appear to have some scattered appealing retail strips, with interesting local shops and restaurants. But not downtown.

Downtown retail near the market

This impression of half-hearted urbanism is also reflected in the transit system, which includes a subway, light rail and bus system. There is a much-advertised free downtown circulator bus system. However, each system is so under scheduled that none of it is very reliable. The subway system was shut down for maintenance the weekend I was there. I took the bus once, during my visit. On my other four tries I gave up and took an Uber after fifteen minutes of waiting. The metro would do well to give up on the light rail and the subway and make the bus system more reliable in order to increase ridership. I know buses aren’t sexy, but rail is so 19^th Century.

All of this is evidence of Burnham-ism, the making of no small plans, to dysfunctional effect. Inner Harbor. Camden Yards. The light rail. Big projects that appear not to contribute to the vibrancy of the historic downtown. Downtown needs the implementation of incremental small ideas to provide ligaments between the people in the buildings. Small scale retailers and food and beverage operations need to be incentivized to locate downtown with subsidized rents and buildouts. Activity needs to be generated on the sidewalks, with tables, chairs and heat lamps. As noted, the Downtown Baltimore Partnership has been around for decades, and I observed some desultory teams of cleaners, and some branded trash cans. But the Partnership’s presence isn’t what it should be. I should also note that I always felt safe downtown (although I didn’t see any BID ambassadors or public safety staff). The streets and sidewalks hosted substantially less anti-social behavior than you see in midtown Manhattan. Public spaces just didn’t have enough going on. Especially, given the high level of residential development. No doubt it would be great for downtown residents if there was a more active street life.

Meyerhoff Hall interior

The recent history of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is an interesting one. Marin Alsop was hired as the only female music director of a major American orchestra (with the exception of JoAnne Falletta in Buffalo) in 2006. She was replaced in that job by Jonathan Heyward, an American and British trained, Black American conductor. More recently, Heyward was appointed to the leadership of the orchestra formally known as Mostly Mozart in New York. The Baltimore Symphony has an annual budget of almost $30 million, and, as such, is one of the country’s largest. It also has recently taken on two homes – one in the city and one in the suburbs – the Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore, and the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda. Another piece of the orchestra’s environment is that 40 miles away (and even closer to Bethesda), the National Symphony plays at the Kennedy Center (from which it receives significant support) under the direction of international star conductor Gianadrea Noseda. Like with Pittsburgh and Cleveland, you have two first rate ensembles competing for audience and resources in essentially the same market. Not ideal.

The concert I attended was at the Meyerhoff, which is outside of the downtown. The structure, from 1982, appears to be an urban bunker designed by prominent brutalist Pietro Belluschi, the original architect of Alice Tully Hall and the Julliard School. The interior, unfortunately, is now showing its age and looks a little worn. While it has some wooden acoustical panels, it essentially a cement box, much like Paris’ Bastille opera, and the principal interior public space design element is a coarse red brick. The inauguration of the hall was much celebrated at the time in the orchestra world, and the acoustic is neutral and clear, but without the 19^th century plushness that marks Orchestral Hall in Boston and Carnegie Hall in New York. Also significant is that the stage is very low relative to the audience seating on the main floor, making the presence of the band very direct and immediate – unlike, for example, Carnegie, or the new Geffen Hall of the New York Philharmonic (which I heard the next night, more on that, also) which are raised and as a result makes the orchestra feel remote (and isolated).

The orchestra after 16 years of Alsop and under Heyward’s baton is a very fine one. Heyward briefly introduced each of the pieces on the program. He is tall and skinny, with a lopsided smile. He’s a very modern maestro, in that he goes for regular guy-ness, rather than the calculated majestic diffidence of yore – with a schmear of a British accent. The affect of the concert, with two-thirds of the hall filled, was a kind of hometown hominess. I would be remiss in not noting that less than a dozen of the audience members appeared to be people of color. Under Alsop the orchestra had a reputation of being the leading American symphony in successful community outreach. The place of a symphony orchestra in a majority Black town is a challenging one. And yet, with the work of a major Black composer (and the finest classical trumpet player [before switching solely to playing jazz] that this country has produced) and the country’s most high-profile Black conductor, the Black community of Baltimore did not turn out. This is a major conundrum for arts institutions across the country. I might suggest that these great institutions perhaps need to be more confident in the quality and importance of their output and stop trying so hard politically. This is an excellent orchestra, playing great music. That strikes me as enough, as long the organization is as open, welcoming, supportive and accessible to first time concert goers as it can be.

Under-programmed public space. Particularly sad in a memorial to the holocaust

Heyward announced that the idea for the program was to bookend the concerto with the music of two Nordic composers. The opener was Carl Nielsen’s “Helios,” musically following the sun as it transits the sky from morning until sunset. The performance was lovely, even if some of the wind entrances were insecure and the ensemble playing a little ragged.

The Concerto is an interesting mix of things and was an enjoyable listen. It isn’t, somewhat surprisingly, an opportunity so much for virtuoso tuba playing as for displaying a range of musical possibilities for the instrument. The first movement is programmatic (with the story told by Foard at the outset), the second is based on a boogaloo dance rhythm, the third, the most engaging, is a chance for the tuba to demonstrate its lyrical possibilities (which are substantial), and the fourth an homage to Charlie Parker. While it was not clear what held the four movements together musically, other than all featuring the tuba, the piece, which was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra in 2001, earned its place on the program.

Foard isn’t a particularly charismatic person or performer, he has a kind of goofy, aw-shucks demeanor, but he is a distinguished player and made the most of the various possible characters of the tuba the piece projects. The first movement didn’t quite come off in its idea of the tuba representing a street preacher in New York City. The second movement hit a syncopated dance groove using rhythms from popular music. The third movement gave Foard a chance to play expressively, while other brass instruments wah-wah-ed and slid between notes behind him. The lively last movement was reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein’s theater music orchestrations, with a touch of Billy Strayhorn.

This was followed by a short piece by African American composer, William Grant Still, “Threnody (In Memory of Jean Sibelius),” not listed in the program, and announced by Heyward. It was played with great affection by the band. It was an attractive piece and was a nice fit given the context of Heyward, Baltimore, Sibelius and Nielsen.

Adaptive reuse into housing

The big symphonic work, after the intermission, was Sibelius’ Fifth, a great orchestral show piece in three movements. It’s a lot of spectacular music packed into only 30 minutes. Heywood led a highly controlled, restrained performance of a work that can often break down into an opportunity for the brass to lose themselves in excess. The entire performance was tied together by an overall coherence of concept. This wasn’t the Sibelius of majestic snow-capped peaks and smashing icebergs, but one of the beauty and awe of nature. It was poetic and elegiac. The orchestra beathed together beautifully, and the strings had appealing sheen.

However, by coincidence, the next night I was able hear the piece played by the irascible New York Philharmonic led by the young Finn, Santtu-Matias Rouvali. The players of the Philharmonic can be both virtuosic and aggressive, as is evidenced by the recent firing of two players for sexually belligerent behavior with colleagues. In the awesome finale of the Fifth, the New York trumpets and trombones have been known to blow the roof off the joint (and blow out the ear drums of the players in front of them), as opposed to Baltimore’s refined and handsome rendition. Rouvali had the orchestra on its best behavior and the performance was complex and magnificent. Rouvali masterfully handled the many transitions, and balanced and highlighted the many distinctive melodic voices that Sibelius has flow among the sections. The final climax grew organically, and the brasses were suave and monumental (and, by the way, the Philharmonic has been without a principal horn player in recent years. Note to management: hire whoever was playing principal horn for that show. Flawless).

I wouldn’t have gone on like this about the Philharmonic had it not been for this business about Baltimore being “world class.” Its Sibelius performance was very fine. I thoroughly enjoyed it. But the heft, the weight, the fullness, the confidence and authority of the Philharmonic’s performance was something else altogether.

Inner Harbor dining

My visit to the Walters Museum the next day brought forth similar thoughts. The collection was assembled by two generations of Baltimore merchants and financiers and given to the City of Baltimore. Admission is free. The collection of Medieval and Early Renaissance material, both European and Byzantine, is spectacular – rivaling the depth of the Getty in California. As the Michelin guides used to say – three stars, worth a detour. The museum advertises itself as being comprehensive and has Islamic and ancient collections (which I didn’t get to) and later Renaissance and Baroque works, that are made up of a lot “from the workshop of” and Italian painters named after small obscure towns. There are apparently also later works, but they mostly aren’t on the walls. But for Baltimore to have this unusual collection is a tremendous asset.

The museum is an odd collection of three buildings – two old and one new and getting around is confusing. The curators choose to show the art in rather glaring light, which makes some of the larger pieces and those hung higher on the walls difficult to see. But most distinctively, the museum has a philosophy of restoring pictures to what they might have looked like when new. The colors pop and the surfaces gleam. That’s not what most other places do – which tend to have a philosophy of minimalism, and “do no harm” in restoring old works. They are left to look old. At the Walters, paint that has flaked off is replaced. Every layer of varnish discolored with time has been removed. This is the Romanesque in technicolor.

But the Walters has the most pathetic and off-putting land acknowledgement/institutional apology of any arts institution I have encountered. Wall text at the entrance describes the Walters family businesses (alcohol trading and railroads), which had to have benefited from slavery in the 19^th Century. The Walters were supporters of the Confederacy and decamped to England during the Civil War. The text notes that while the Walters claimed their collection to be comprehensive, it failed to include many cultures and indigenous peoples. It also stated that European art, while featured in the collection, is only one of many forms of artistic expression and was overemphasized by the collectors. Again, Baltimore is a majority minority town – and creating a path for cultural institutions arising out the interests of monied white elites in a community where the demographics have radically changed is a significant intellectual and political challenge. But I would suggest that temporizing and apologizing for the excellence of western cultural production is philosophically bankrupt, counterproductive (in that it attempts to minimize the value of the cultural product) and does nothing to draw in a more diverse audience. At both the Symphony and the Walters most of the Black folks I saw were employees of those organizations, which, of course, is a good thing, in and of itself, but not the same as attracting a local audience and patronage.

This was altogether a fascinating and rewarding trip, to a city with more going for it than I think its civic, cultural and business leaders realize. It has great buildings, important institutions and livable neighborhoods. It has made itself into a significant tourist and sports destination, for better or for worse. Baltimore, cultivate what you have. Think smaller. Stop apologizing.  You’re fine.

Appealing vernacular retail buildings

******

Here are the lyrics to the song referenced aboveWhen my mother told me don’t forget your rain boots when it’s wet
I listened up, just like a good, good little girl
And when she prudently suggested I should lose the cigarette
I knew that bit of wisdom was a pearl
But in all of the advice that I collected through the years
I admit to you, with trepidatious dread
Unfortunately, there was some that whizzed right through my ears
Ah, WHERE.? WHERE was my mind, when Mother said

Avoid navel-contemplating floppy haired actors originally from Baltimore
Who excel at mime, collect stamps and have issues with their mom
Sure at first they’re very charming, their attention is disarming
But give attention in return and dear they’ll drop you like a bomb
Yes, do avoid REO Speedwagon loving Christopher Walken imitating thespians originally from Baltimore
Who can’t piss unless their shrink says it’s ok
Why let them break your heart, dear?
Put your head on and be smart, dear
Put some bug spray on and make them go away.

When my daddy told me look both ways before you cross the street
I took his words to heart and I complied
And when he told me be yourself, and I should march to my own beat
I did and found THAT truth was bonafide
But in all of the advice that I collected through the years
I have to say, I am a bit surprised
I missed the best advice that Daddy trumpeted my way
Ah, where where was my mind when he advised

Avoid narcissistic alcoholic think-they’re-French-but-they’re-not waiters originally from Baltimore
Who deflower you, carry a copy a Fountainhead in their pocket and lie about their age
Sure at first their eyes are steely, and their words are touchy-feely
Have them cheat upon you twice and my advice is more than sage
Yes, do steer clear of Renaissance festival loving food service consultants originally from Baltimore
Who say they dance with NYC ballet but are really an administrative In-TERN

For it’s clear upon reflection
When you give him your affection
You will understand the concept crash and burn

The singles world out there can be a scary land
I have to ask, is it me, or is it Maryland?

So if you can possibly avoid it, don’t fall in love or lust
Or have crushes on Boys from Baltimore
Though indeed at first they seem filled with style and class
Sure Cal Ripken’s charm is actual but he’s married and it’s factual
Pamlico is not the only place you’ll find a horse’s ass
Yes, at all costs avoid ridiculous though amusing experiences cultivated in Baltimore
Barry Levinson, I mean no disrespect
If you have to go to Baltimore, and meet boys, do not marry em
Although it’s true I’ve heard that they’ve got quite a nice Aquarium
Ladies, take your hearts and run as fast as little legs can carry em
From Baltimore

There are better boys in Boise
Boys in Boise always call
You’ll have better luck in Josie
Or St. Paul
Well, not St. Paul

But no matter where life takes you
It just makes no sense to fall
In Baltimore.

Hey, where are you from? Silver Spring? Oh!

By: Marcy Heisler and Zina Goldrich

The post IT MAKES NO SENSE TO FALL IN BALTIMORE first appeared on The Place Master.

Environmental and Community Activism, Politics and Greed

By: Tom Fox

Rutgers University Press 2024

The looming question about the Hudson River Park has long been obvious. Why isn’t it better? In his book, Creating the Hudson River Park, environmental activist, Tom Fox tells us why, in copious, gruesome detail. For those of us concerned about creating and maintaining great public spaces the issues are laid out clearly, fairly, and with specificity in this excellent volume. It is an absolutely essential contribution to the literature of public space-making in America. Tom has gone deeply into the archives to tell as much as possible of the now 70-year history of this highly visible project. Perhaps most remarkably, he fairly explains the subjects, giving the competing ideas of those over the years who have (fervently) not agreed with him their due. Most of those concerns are ones that face the development or restoration of any large and/or highly visible public space.

The answer as to why the park isn’t better is because it is the product of decades of comprises that were the result of endless fighting over the shape of the park and the adjacent highway. The amount of conflict involved in the creation of the park is both heartbreaking and depressing. It may sound naïve, but “why can’t we all just get along?” The park’s origin was in the conflict over Westway – a highway cum real estate development plan concocted in the shadow of the era of Robert Moses that proposed to replace the southern portion of the West Side (Miller) Highway with an underground expressway, topped with new construction and public space adjacent to the Hudson River on Manhattan’s West Side. So, controversy is unfortunately in its DNA. The project was stopped as the result of the early use of Federal environmental legislation and regulation enforced by legal action brought by private citizens and non-profit organizations.

In the interest of disclosure, it is probably useful for me to point out that I know/knew most of the important actors in this endless saga either first or second hand. Remarkably, many of these folks, a generation older than me, were at Harvard together in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, some of whom came to become friends and an inspiration to me, including the late attorney, Al Butzel, who was the lead attorney in the original Westway suit. It is also important to note, those people did not necessarily get along with each other! During my career I intersected with the park’s development in other ways, including working at the law firm that represented Chelsea Piers (one of whose partners was the brother of the developer), the major park tenant and on a study sponsored by the Regional Plan Association, on the economic impact on adjacent property of the park, in an attempt to persuade the powers that be to create a district to support the park’s maintenance and operation through a special assessment on adjacent property. I also once interviewed for a job at the Hudson River Park Trust.

Tom Fox, however, was not one of those Ivy Leaguers. He grew up working class in Brooklyn, served in Viet Nam (truly, thank you for your service), and became a community environmental activist in the 70’s. He was a kind of Zelig of environmentalism, involved in community gardens, the Brooklyn Bridge Park and the provision of ferry service in the New York harbor. His personal ideals appear to be derived from Jane Jacobs and the anti-poverty programs of the 1960’s – maximum feasible community participation. Tom has consistently been with the project, both as an employee, and for longer periods of time, as a community advocate, for decades. His persistence is one of his great qualities. It has also driven some of his partners and adversaries crazy.

And it is here that Tom and I part ways. He believes the Hudson River Park is great because it reflects active community engagement, and that its best features are the result of such participation. I would argue, by contrast, that, while the park’s existence is something of a miracle and the result of public resistance to substantial government overreach, the execution of the plans for the park isn’t all that it could be because the endless fighting, processes and compromises resulted in something that very much a mixed bag as a vital, attractive public space. Despite being a West Sider, I don’t use the park. That is principally because while the highway was supposed to be transformed into a grand boulevard, it is in fact a dismal, difficult to cross multi-lane, high speed roadway that makes access to the park difficult. It is far from the subway and unpleasant to walk to. No doubt, for the people of Tribeca, the West Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, though, it is a blessing.

Great public spaces are all about balance. One of those balances is between professional expertise and public involvement. Notwithstanding the conventional wisdom among advocates that “the community is the expert,” actually people don’t generally know what they want from public spaces. On the other hand, unaccountable professionals like landscape architects, attorneys and public space managers, usually end up pushing grandiose schemes that fail. Getting to that middle ground of responsiveness and professionalism is extremely difficult, and that is one of the reasons why there are so few truly great public space projects. In the case of Hudson River Park, tipping the initial balance towards total community engagement created a power vacuum that was filled by the professionals of the State Highway Department and the succession of self-promoting, narcissistic public figures who came to dominate the Hudson River Park Trust and the Friends of Hudson River Park, the two organizations that ultimately ended up with the most formal responsibility for the park’s development and operation. The former are responsible for the anti-urbanist highway (in the interest of the moving as many cars as quickly as possible) and the latter for the multiple failed development plans for the commercial piers and the highly questionable enabling of a billionaire to create one pier the way he wanted to (Little (aka Diller) Island) (N.B. the book, by the way, could use a map of the piers – not being all that familiar with the park’s history, I was regularly confused by what was happening where).

Another vector to be balanced is commercial activity. A lot of the book is about the constant attempt to put offices, retail, housing and more into the park, in part in order to create a revenue stream to support the park’s capital and operating needs (and, by the way, keeping piers from falling down is both an endless and expensive proposition). This is not a binary problem. As Tom recognizes, some level of appropriate commercial activity is important to drawing users into the space, especially at night and in the winter.  I don’t entirely understand why some people think they can make a lot of money doing un-waterfront related private activity in the park and are always pushing for more of it. So far, none of the proposed mega-projects have ultimately penciled out. I mean really, why bother? But the pressure for expanding the debacle of Hudson Yards further west out into the river, and to increase the density of development across 9A from the park, seems unceasing, and needs to be resisted. There is no sound public policy reason for more towers in Manhattan.

Billionaires are a big part of the story, as another one of the failures in connection with the park’s development has been the inability to create a sustainable business model for park’s operation. Fox’ idea, and it was (and continues to be) the right one, is the creation of a special assessment district around the park. New York property owner and developer Douglas Durst spent a decade and many hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to get such a district established (Durst, along with Al, are among the heroes of Tom’s story).  The idea for the district being that the value by which real estate adjacent to park increases as a result of the park’s existence should be tapped for the space’s maintenance and operation. This is modeled on the success of Bryant Park, which is supported by a business improvement district. Ironically, the implementation of the assessment district was defeated by loud “community opposition.”

Before engaging in a discussion of the park management district, I should say that the first choice for new public spaces should always be complete, direct government support for capital costs and operations. This is not crazy or unrealistic. Democratic government is the ultimate form of community engagement. Making this happen is a matter of budget priorities. With respect to Hudson River Park, if you look at the total capital costs over the years, they have not been an out of scale number for the City and State capital budgets. If that amount had been consistently budgeted for over the three decades that it took to finish the park, the park would have been better and less expensive without all the turmoil. Private dollars at a scale sufficient to build and maintain the Hudson River Park were both a pipe dream and bad policy – giving billionaires too much sway over what got built.

But with respect to the implementation of the park management district, here’s a secret. Nobody likes to pay more for something that benefits a broad group. They would much rather be what economists call a “free rider.” This is a good example of how the community doesn’t know what it really wants. Because, generally, once such a district is established and is successfully up and running, everyone in the affected community, except for a few, loud, easily identified cranks, thinks it is the greatest thing since sliced bread. The proposed district would have cost about $75 per residential unit per year. Bupkus.

Here’s another secret. The statute for setting up a BID doesn’t require community input or approval – that’s a layer that has been arbitrarily put on the program by the city’s bureaucrats. As a practical matter, if the local council person (or the Council Speaker) and the Mayor want such a district to happen, it can happen. Period. Full stop. Mayor Adams and Speaker Adams could still make this happen now, and it would be a major advance for the quality of the Hudson River Park experience.

And that is a new additional wrinkle in the long Hudson River Park story. After passionate involvement in park issues by Governor Pataki, Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg and their elite Manhattan-centric (and not always competent) minions to build a monument, the folks now in charge care way less about the park. When this mayor says he is an outer borough, working class mayor, he means it. This development could cut a lot of ways. It is certainly likely to lower the temperature of all the clawing and scratching about what the park should be. It may also be likely to provide leeway to public space professionals to shape the park (for better or worse) without the meddling of politicians and billionaires. I do see an opening for putting in a bunch of fixes by persuading the new sheriffs in town that the right thing to do is to narrow the roadway (if for no other reason than the likely decrease in traffic due to congestion pricing) and get the park management district in place (with the statutory district management association replacing both the Trust and the Friends– eliminating a major source of discord).

One final thought: let’s give up on the estuarium. From the start Tom has been an advocate for riverine and environmental education in the park (along with a romance for recreating the maritime uses of the past). One plan for a river-based museum after another has failed. Some ideas just don’t want to happen – or even may not be good ones. I know how difficult it is for self-styled visionaries to abandon their visions – I’ve talked a couple of them out of bad ideas that the market (broadly defined) didn’t support. The estuarium is probably one of them.

Creating the Hudson River Park needs to be read by all the stakeholders in the park for mapping its future, because Tom has been as comprehensive and fair to the various interests and points of view as anyone could possibly be. It also should be read by anyone planning a new public space project of size. The narrative is compelling, and the book is well-written – so that reading it is by no means a burden. My take away from the book is that if a single entity had originally been put in charge of the park and the highway, given the authority and resources to develop the park over a long period of time and provided with a governance structure that gave it the capacity to execute the park, while at the same time being responsive to (but not trammeled by) park stakeholders from the start (as we mostly were in Bryant Park), the result would have been much, much better. At the same time, we should all be grateful to Tom for his intelligent mania for the park and the environment more generally, both in writing the book and advocating for the park.

The post SWIM WITH THE FISHES first appeared on The Place Master.

Here are some photos I took on my walk.

Yes, Detroit remains car-centric.

Walking down Woodward Avenue, there was no easy way to get to the Riverwalk. You came to a hardscaped park, with few amenities.

.IMG_0285 IMG_0284 IMG_0283 IMG_0269 IMG_028 IMG_0267      

The Renaissance Center in the fog, looming over the downtown.

The new light rail is attractive and more urbanist than the failed people mover. But does it increase pedestrian activity? Probably not. Was it expensive? Probably.

There is a really attractive median in the center of Woodward, with movable chairs, a playground and other amenities. I was the only one there.

The rather forbidding entrance to the Rocket Mortgage headquarters facing onto Campus Martuis.

Campus Martius is one of the great national public space revitalization success stories. The ice rink was in place but not functioning (probably between seasons). There was other construction taking place. While there were a few people in the restaurant, the park was otherwise not usable and not being used.

A major new mixed use project on the site of the former Hudson’s department store.

The view up Woodward. Consistent high quality retail. Nice facade restorations. Some good streetscape amenities. No people.

The pizza place where we had dinner downtown was lively, doing a brisk business. The show that we attended at the lovely Gem Theater downtown was well attended. There seemed to be a lot of activity next door at the Detroit Athletic Club. But when the show was over, the crowd dispersed into the rain.

A colleague who had worked on public space revitalization projects in Detroit for many years observed that “there is no getting around that Detroit is the ultimate automobile-centric city.”

The post A Walk in the Rain in Downtown Detroit first appeared on The Place Master.

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 103^rd 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. 103^rd 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

About a year ago, I noticed a sign describing the imminent implementation of a plan to impose traffic calming features on my block of 103^rd, between Broadway and West End Ave. I found this odd, particularly given the degraded condition of the sidewalk on the north side of the block facing other NYCHA property (including the house where a plaque says Humphrey Bogart grew up). I filed a 311 complaint and wrote to someone I knew at DOT about bringing the poor condition of the sidewalk up to standard. I also wrote Mike Lydon, the author of “Tactical Urbanism,” who appeared to be involved in the “Open Streets” operation with my apprehensions about the lack of planned programming and maintenance of the space.  I was particularly concerned about the upkeep of intended planters for the block. I got a defensive, rather snarky email from Lydon, criticizing my suggestions for improving the project. I responded by pointing out that tactical urbanists generally make a big deal about their community outreach efforts, that I had only recently learned of the project, and had not been engaged about it, that I wasn’t just “the community” – I actually lived on the block. I also think I have a pretty good track record when it came to planning and managing open space. I never heard back from him.

I did, however, begin a long correspondence with a very sincere guy who lives in the neighborhood, who was the project manager for the street improvement plan. I asked him about programming plans for the project, and he pointed with pride to a couple of dozen events that had been sponsored on the block over a period of about three years that he claimed were great successes. I pointed out that so few events over such an extended period of time weren’t enough to generate a critical mass of activity in the space, and that as a resident of the block I hadn’t noticed most of them. Even the photos of the event that Open Streets touted in its emails and on its website looked pathetic.

When planters were placed in the street bed, I expressed concern about who was going to maintain them. He assured me that the Horticultural Society of New York had been contracted with for maintenance of the planters (and until recently were doing a pretty good job of it – and that’s a problem, as public space management is 24/7/365 years long endeavor when done properly). The manager welcomed my involvement in the form of public support for the project and encouraged my writing a check to fund it but was otherwise uninterested in my assistance or my expertise. A prominent placemaking colleague of mine is known for saying “the community is the expert” (which, actually he doesn’t believe — he believes that HE is the expert, and that a right-thinking community will always agree with him.). Here I was, a real resident of the block, and they had no interest in what I might be able to contribute.

                        Scraggly plants

The manager’s particular concern was that I was aligning myself with the people who were opposed to the project, most of whom were upset about a loss of parking spaces. Did I really want to be seen as an ally of THOSE PEOPLE? He thought his trumping argument was that he was a well-meaning person, and a lot of time and trouble had been put into advocating for the project over several years. I responded that I cared about the credibility of public space improvement projects, and I was reasonably sure this one was not going to be a success.

                        Posted on my building’s bulletin board.

Recently, the project was completed – and I saw on social media that it was being credited as a resounding success https://parktopark103.nyc . (I had been able to get some of the adjacent sidewalk repaired, thanks to the intervention of City Hall, after a year of inaction at NYCHA). In brief, it was not. It was, in my view, worse than nothing. I was concerned about being seen as an aging neighborhood grouch, but this was my block, and I was not just some random guy throwing spitballs. Again, this was something I actually knew something about (and had written a book about, in fact, thank you very much).

Photos of the completed project and end-zone dancing can be found here: https://twitter.com/MikeLydon/status/1724476002938532339 and here:

https://street-plans.com/project-page-2/tactical-urbanism-project-page/park-to-park-103-new-york-ny-uws/.

The main elements of the plan are traffic calming bump-outs at the corners and the center of the block. The metal barricades are gone. The principal feature of the plan, as with many tactical urbanist projects, is the painting of the street surface with a non-representational design. The project also includes flexible bollards around the bump-outs and the planters.

• The painting is inert and does little to create a sense of place. It is interrupted by various infrastructure elements (grates, manhole covers and other utility access points). Of course, it will degrade quickly, and has already begun to.
• When the bump-outs were created, clever parkers drove over the bollards and parked in them. Unsightly boulders were placed at the edges of the bump-outs to prevent this practice.

• As anyone who has ever driven anywhere has noticed, those sliver flexible bollards also degrade quickly. First, they get filthy, then they get bent, and then they get knocked off their bases – with the ghostly bases remaining unmaintained.
• Winter has come (which, note to Open Streets, in New York is annual occurrence and lasts several months), during which the planters are now filled with dead plants and look untended. We’ll see if the Hort returns in the spring; and for how many springs to follow? I’d bet the ranch that empty, neglected planters will become a permanent feature of the block.

To make a project like this successful takes constant programming. I’ve suggested that restaurants on Broadway be permitted to set up tables and chairs and serve along the block – which would be a form of self-perpetuating activity. I regard the De Blasio administration’s Open Restaurants plan as one of its greatest successes – animating commercial corridors in neighborhoods all over the city during the pandemic – and after. Perhaps residents of the block would object, but perhaps not. It would be worth asking. The sidewalks on the west side of Broadway between 104^th and 106^th Street have been an activated by the restaurant tenants in a manner than can only be seen as an improvement. Our neighborhood is more vital and lively as a result of this important change (now that the pandemic emergency has ended, the City needs to start charging the restaurants an appropriate amount for the occupation of public space).

The bottom line is that the block sporting the “Street Improvement Plan” is WORSE as a result of the project. It now has degrading, undermaintained infrastructure that serves no useful purpose. It does not generate activity on the block. It doesn’t particularly improve safety – cars going down the block were already moving slowly. It’s not particularly attractive. What good is it? I couldn’t tell you. And yet, Open Streets has declared victory and gone home.

At the heart of the problem is the intellectual arrogance of the architects of the project. They likely sat downtown around a table at DOT with a map and said to each other “Oh, this looks like a great spot for this wonderful idea that we have,” without actually visiting and carefully observing how the space is used (as Holly Whyte would mandate). They went to a bunch of community board meetings and met with the local elected officials who didn’t care enough to object – and congratulated themselves for their community outreach (without actually engaging the people who live on the block). They set up a few events, and drew a few people, and declared the space improved. This is a real problem for the walk/bike/places people who seem to have fallen in love with their own ideas and lifestyle preferences, regarding those who disagree with them as troglodytes. One has but to look at the uproar over the poorly conceived bike lane on McGuiness Boulevard in Brooklyn, and the elitist vitriol being poured on local businesses and other opponents of a bike lane through an industrial zone by the “progressive” advocates of biking. They, and their allies within NYC DOT have succeeded in unnecessarily alienating New York’s Mayor with their “advocacy”, which may have the unintended consequence of spilling over into other, more worthy placemaking projects. What Holly has taught us all is that the at the center of successful placemaking is observation in real time and humility.

And while I am being churlish, let me similarly reflect on “Palaces for the People” by Eric Klinenburg of the NYU sociology department, which I just recently got around to reading. This 2018 book made even more of a splash in the public space world than “Tactical Urbanism,” with Klinenburg making a case for a broadening of the definition of the term “public space” beyond parks and sidewalks to include libraries and other community gathering places. He also, importantly, ties the support and strengthening of such places to the essential need to re-engage citizens with each other and the public realm. These are both important and serious insights. But unfortunately, the book is full of what I have come to call aspirational journalism. The Urban Land Institute is a major purveyor of this stuff. Their publications and conferences highlight projects that incorporate what their tastemakers want to see as best practices in real estate development and land use – and call them major trends. But generally, business in the real estate development world is as usual, and the featured projects are most often expensive one-offs that are non-replicable and non-scalable or have hyper-exaggerated claims made for them. The cited projects misrepresent the status quo and represent only themselves – and maybe (given the hyperbole) not even that.

Similarly, “Palaces for the People” is filled with cherry-picked anecdotes and citations to studies that support the book’s theses and doesn’t engage with counterexamples or other inconvenient facts. In addition, much of the book is filled with unnecessary ideological “progressive” “facts” that are actually broadly held, and counterfactual opinions. Klinenburg assumes that there is something pernicious called gentrification happening everywhere, that the U.S. has a vast slew of crises (housing, climate, economic) and so on. The book is devoid of useful tools and arguments for making libraries and other public spaces better. He meets and describes a number of charming, dedicated librarians and excellent library programs. But is video bowling really the answer to the loneliness and alienation of single older people – and are such programs scalable? “Palaces for the People,” is ultimately fluffy, unhelpful and frustrating.

Effective placemaking is difficult to do. That is why there are so few successful projects. Making great places requires careful observation and data collection, patience, an iterative process and the taking of risks. Attention to detail needs to be sustained over time. Great placemaking projects need not be expensive in terms of materials – but they are expensive in terms of the required time and attention. Unlike with tactical urbanism, there are no short cuts. The good news is that small successful, powerful ideas do catch on – and are replicated, like the movable chair. But painting streets does not make better places – and usually, as the paint fades, makes them worse.

The post TACTICAL HYPOCRISY first appeared on The Place Master.

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A video of a talk I gave in Paris in June.

The post Andy in Paris first appeared on The Place Master.

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.

The post A SUCCCESS STORY IN DALLAS first appeared on The Place Master.

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 18^th 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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.  

The post Great Places Thrive first appeared on The Place Master.

What if “modernism” was:

            “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. 

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 is filled 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. 

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 19^th 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.

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. 

More interior details:

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The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra

While in town, I attended a concert of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. The orchestra did a program of Beethoven, Bartok and Schumann, conducted by Markus Stenz, with Zoltán Fejérvári as soloist. Neither of those performers are box office draws, and only the Beethoven Leonora Overture No. 3, is a known crowd pleaser. It was ambitious of the symphony’s management to put on such a program and selling it to any audience would be challenge. But it was a splendid concert, and it was disappointing that it drew so small a crowd – filling less than half of the seats. Fejérvári was entirely new to me, and while I didn’t at first recognize Stenz’ name, upon reading the program biography, I realized I had heard him excellently conduct Kurtág’s “Fin de Partie” last year in Paris.

The orchestra plays twenty classical programs a year in a restored movie palace on Monument Circle – so right in the center of the downtown. The auditorium is very much like the one I recently visited in Pittsburgh –with classical allusions in its decoration. The room is large, and the sound is neutral – making it a fine place to hear a full orchestra. The concert appeared to be something of a love fest between the conductor and the players, and it may have been a try-out for the orchestra’s open music director position for Stenz, Krzysztof Urbański having left the orchestra during COVID. Stenz is a pro. He conducted from memory, without a baton and doesn’t feel the need to beat time, but instead indicates cues, tempo and volume changes, phrasing and articulation with gesture. While the playing of the orchestra was a little, shall we say, enthusiastic during the Overture, the remainder of the concert was compelling – particularly in quieter passages. The violin section work in the second movement of the Bartok was especially beautiful.

Fejérvári is tall and gangly. He was in full command of the technical challenges of the concerto. He coaxed a sweet sound from the Steinway in Bartok’s 3^rd concerto. Bartok is conventionally thought of as a percussive, “modernist” composer, but in this performance the lyricism shone through. The orchestra listened carefully to the musical lead of Fejérvári and followed suit. It was a moving, handsome performance. His lovely and unusual encore was the third movement of Jancek’s In The Mists. The performance of Schumann’s 2^nd Symphony was straightforward and engaging. The orchestra’s playing, while perhaps not the most nuanced or precise, was fresh and fervent. There was a lot of smiling going on the part of both Stenz and the players (many of them young), and that sense of pleasure was contagious. The audience was equally enthusiastic, occasionally applauding, apparently spontaneously, between movements, and with a standing ovation at the concert’s conclusion (which seemed genuine, as opposed the now routine standing response at Carnegies Hall at every performance). It was an altogether satisfying musical evening, particularly impressive from a part-time band, in a city without a major music conservatory from which to draw (although Indiana University, about an hour away, does have one of the country’s leading music schools). 

Columbus. Indiana

Columbus, Indiana is not to be confused with Columbus, Ohio. It is a town with a population of 50,000 about an hour south of Indianapolis. The town is famous among architecture buffs for its collection of structures designed by leading architects of the last hundred years. Wikipedia provides a good summary of what Columbus is all about:

“Columbus is a city known for its modern architecture and public art. J. Irwin Miller, 2nd CEO and a nephew of a co-founder of Cummins Inc., the Columbus-headquartered diesel engine manufacturer, instituted a program in which the Cummins Foundation paid the architects’ fees, provided the client selected a firm from a list compiled by the foundation. The plan was initiated with public schools and was so successful that the foundation decided to offer such design support to other non-profit and civic organizations. The high number of notable public buildings and public art in the Columbus area, designed by such individuals as Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Robert Venturi, Cesar Pelli, and Richard Meier, led to Columbus earning the nickname “Athens on the Prairie.” 

In a word, I was underwhelmed. A map sold at the visitors center lists 97 buildings and public art works located in this town of 50,000. The best work is mostly that which was commissioned by Cummins for its own use. The rest is generally not the most outstanding work of their designers. Often this appears to be the driven by limited funding resulting in inferior finishes and craftmanship. Some it seems like the starchitect didn’t take seriously a commission in the boonies. The projects are spread out around a large area – some a twenty-minute drive from the middle of town. All of the projects stand-alone – none are knitted into the small town’s fabric. They’re not urbanistic in any true sense of the word.  The landscaping by the likes of Dan Kiley and Michael Van Val Valkenburgh was private, and mostly parking lots, or public, and not particularly well maintained. 

The downtown reminded me a bit of Corning, New York, another company town with a philanthropic, design-oriented family in charge – but the main commercial street was not as well curated as in Corning. I had a tough time finding a place that was open for lunch on a Saturday afternoon. None of the work by renowned architects is on the main drag, Washington Street. The Miller family has been much celebrated for its patronage of high-end architecture (presumably using the money of Cummins shareholders to fund the Foundation). But the commissions seemed performative and attention seeking, despite all the blather in promotional materials about inspiring creativity and making Columbus a great place to live. The whole business felt like something of a stage set and not baked into the town’s planning and social fabric. 

Actually, there seemed to be a lot of disinvested housing in the center of the town, and the adjacent areas were populated by tract house development and McMansions. Notably, just outside of downtown were the usual mid-western strip malls and regional malls featuring the standard national brands. As in Indianapolis, there just didn’t seem to me to be a deep commitment to making Columbus a vibrant place. As much as I love the work of William Rawn, a Bill Rawn boxy, conventional brick recreation center, is still a boxy, brick recreation center – even if his name is attached to. A Deborah Berke bank in a shopping mall – was just a drive-in bank branch. And I went hunting for the Hugh Hardy designed health center and found a grassy lot. Was it torn down? Was Hardy not famous enough to have his work preserved (his elementary school project for Columbus was far from the town’s center and I didn’t get there). A gigantic Robert Stern designed hospital complex was just plain odd – and was likely over-built for local needs – the extensive parking lots were empty on a Saturday afternoon. There was altogether too much banal Kevin Roche work done for Cummins facilities for my taste, the conventional modernism of which is not holding well up over time.

Was there anything I liked? The most impressive spaces I saw were actually interiors – in the stunning, elegant Sanctuary of Gunnar Birkerts St. Peter’s Lutheran Church and the light filled reading room of the Hope library branch, some distance from downtown Columbus. But interior designs do not directly impact public spaces. There is a Charles Gwathmey multifamily affordable senior project that struck me as quite elegant, and an effective use of a narrow site. The Dan Kiley Irwin Conference Center Landscape somewhat anachronistically makes use of the Bryant Park FERMOB tables and chairs – but how could I not like that? However, on the day I was there they were effectively props – no one was sitting in them, like in the Cummins commissioned public space in Indianapolis. 

Indianapolis and Columbus place in high relief the difficulty in making great places – even with the most favorable local conditions. They both seem to have had progressive-minded civic leaders who wanted to ensure the future of their towns, and who commanded the resources to implement their plans. But plans and capital projects don’t make great places. To oversimplify, placemaking requires operating rather than capital funds (generally, much more difficult for government to come by). Activating public spaces is the result of the aggregation of many small interventions over a moderate period of time.

Indianapolis certainly has a lot of the right elements to create a vibrant downtown – by supporting a critical mass of street level activity – through outdoor eating and drinking, markets (the downtown City Market is just a rather forlorn food court needing substantial attention), pedestrianizing a few streets, presenting a consistent schedule of public events, foregrounding its historic structures (toning down signs for national retail) and encouraging modestly scaled mixed-use projects – all the usual moves.

There is a serious question as to why the city might want to do that. It is the state capitol, with all the activity that generates. It is a regional office center. It in an in-demand convention venue. Very few people live downtown. The creative class certainly has the option of living in a number of close in neighborhoods – if those are the people employers need to attract. Who would benefit from a walkable downtown with actual walkers? Living in such a place, is certainly my preference. There is something to be said philosophically for places with unique identities, that is that have soul. I’m of the view that in our polarized culture, drawing people together in attractive public places engages them in civic life and can provide an important unifying social force. Americans across the country need to be less atomized, drawn away from their screens and more engaged with each other. Quality public spaces (including elevating cultural events), with distinctive interesting programming (broadly defined) can provide that kind of collective experience. 

But are there enough Hoosiers interested in that (or in attending the symphony) to make it a viable policy (or a sustainable orchestra)? A lot of people like, P.F. Chang’s – but that is not to be confused with the benefits of visiting a vibrant Chinese-American community. 

The post THE SOUL OF PLACE – INDIANAPOLIS/COLUMBUS, INDIANA Part II of II first appeared on The Place Master.

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 19^th 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. 

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 20^th 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 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. 

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. 

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 19^th 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.

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. 

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.]

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 post THE SOUL OF PLACE – INDIANAPOLIS/COLUMBUS, INDIANA Part I (of 2) first appeared on The Place Master.