Tag Archives: revitalization

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE III/DESOLATION – SYRACUSE

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The Course of Empire, Desolation, Thomas Cole

Why do the prospects for downtown Syracuse seem so much bleaker than those for Rochester? Syracuse has a current population of about 150,000 (from a peak of 220,000 in 1950), while Rochester’s population is 210,000 (peak of 330,000 in 1950). Those seem like about the same orders of magnitude, and in fact, the depopulation of Rochester over the decades has been more severe. Syracuse has a very important anchor institution in the Upstate Medical University, with over 10,000 employees and a budget of almost $2 billion. It also has Syracuse University, with 4,500 employees and 21,000 students. The University, unlike any of those in Rochester, has a noted sports program, with a high-profile basketball team. The Syracuse metro has a population of about 670,000.

Clinton Square on a Friday afternoon.

But something about downtown Syracuse gives it a feeling of desolation and lack of activity. Its public spaces are empty and poorly maintained. It has acres of surface parking lots (presumably where abandoned buildings were demolished), while Rochester has an extensive network of structured parking. Syracuse’s nods to current trends in urbanism, like shared scooters, fixed public seating, Victor Stanley trash baskets, and expensive newly installed hardscape like distinctive pavers and traffic calming bump-outs (traffic calming, where there is no traffic?) feel like afterthoughts. This is probably because they are so static – with almost no pedestrian activity. Of course, at one point in the 80’s built pedestrian skybridges were built, to get office workers off the “unsafe” streets and out of the winter weather – a move that has proven disastrous for most places. There also appears to be a small amount of residential development downtown, following the trend (including adaptive reuse of commercial structures) – but I would imagine downtown life in Syracuse to be a hard sell. 

One observation I drew from the Rochester/Syracuse comparison is that in terms of a perception of safety and activity downtown, parking structures do way less damage than open lots. This isn’t something I had previously noticed. Garages continue the street wall and give at least some sense of activity – although they generally, unless they are well designed, present blank walls to the street and create pedestrian dead zones. But walking around Syracuse leads one to conclude that flat parking conveys a much stronger feeling of a lack of activity and dereliction. Continuous street walls, even ones without ground floor retail activity, are important to a sense of urbanity. Lots full of cars lead to a feeling of abandonment, particularly if the lots are mostly empty. 

New multi-family housing in downtown Syracuse.

It is highly worth noting that I walked to dinner through the dark, bleak downtown, past the city’s main public space, Clinton Square, which looks abandoned and ominous, to Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. I was told that there was a half hour wait for a table. The place next door, Apizza Regionale, was also hopping. So, people were coming downtown on a Friday night for dining and drinking – even though there appeared to be no one on the street. 

My internet search for a distinctive place to stay yielded only chains along highways, with almost no acceptable options downtown (the Trip Advisor reviews of the non-chain places downtown were hair raising) – so we stayed at a bleak Quality Inn, with small (clean) rooms, no closets, outdoor corridors, and a plexiglass window with a slot where customers once slid their credit cards through for payment. The motel was located right next to the elevated IH 81, which slices through the middle of town, and is charged with much of the city’s ills. Planning is underway to tear down the highway as a vehicle for revitalizing the downtown.

The lobby of the Hotel Syracuse.

Oddly enough, Syracuse has a great, historic hotel. The Hotel Syracuse, built in 1924, is beautifully maintained with spectacular public rooms. It is both a Marriott and a member of Historic Hotels of America. Why I didn’t find in in my internet search is a mystery to me (and no one recommend it to me as I was planning the trip). The property also doesn’t come up on Google Maps until you have magnified the image to the maximum. The hotel is a major civic asset, and I was glad I eventually found it during my walking around. It is likely the grandest hotel in Upstate New York. The dark, cramped Quality Inn, at $285 per night, was the most expensive place we stayed on our bi-state odyssey. I have to think this whole business a detriment as to the way Syracuse presents itself to the world, even if I am an embarrassed, incompetent internet searcher. 

Buildings facing Clinton Square

Clinton Square is truly awful. It has some important neo-gothic buildings around it, and those two restaurants are adjacent to it. It is organized around an impressive City Beautiful era Civil War monument completed in 1910. The monument was erected adjacent to the Erie Canal, which in time was covered over and became Erie Boulevard. The square also has seen some recent rebuilding of adjoining sidewalks and curbs. There is ice skating on the square in the winter and it appeared that the infrastructure for the ice rink is just left lying around during the off season. The square looks unused and neglected, with a few scattered desultory benches and picnic tables cemented to the ground. The extensive hardscaping is windswept and empty. 

A historical map of the downtown, showing where the canal used to run

South Salina Street was once the main shopping district of Syracuse and today has many empty stores. One bright spot on Salina is the recently opened Parthenon Books, a large bight store, with a carefully curated inventory. There are a half a dozen midcentury modern office towers nearby. The city has quite a few older architecturally interesting commercial and civic buildings, but they are spread out around the downtown and don’t create any sense of urban synergy. It would be hard to say what the 100% corner of Syracuse is. The downtown doesn’t have a center. Given that, I’m not sure what good tearing down the highway is going to do towards revitalizing Syracuse, particularly if it is replaced with a multi-lane boulevard. The theory is that removing that highway will “reknit” the city. Under present circumstances, there isn’t actually enough downtown activity to be connected. A better focus for Syracuse’s boosters would be to pick a corner (near the book store?) and focus on creating a constant stream of activity at that place – through incentivizing food and drink (with outdoor dining and drinking) and other distinctive retail uses; as well as in activating nearby public spaces with activity. The billions of dollars that will be expended on bringing highway traffic to ground level might be better spent on filling in the gaps in pedestrian activity created by the flat parking. 

The downtown skyline

The University is a good long walk from the downtown and seems to be off by itself. This is most likely by design, to separate the campus in its marketing to prospective students from a drab urban setting. The University certainly needs to be encouraged to be more aggressive about attaching itself to the downtown, by moving high visibility, street level uses there. Also, two and half miles from downtown Syracuse is Destiny USA, built in 1990 and formerly know as Carousel Center. It is a 2.4 million square foot project (the country’s 8th largest), featuring over 250 stores. The mall markets itself as a travel destination. That probably explains a lot about the absence of pedestrian life downtown. 

This about says it all

It is telling that while the Rochester Philharmonic is a first-class organization, the Syracuse Symphony, conducted at one time by Christopher Keene, was allowed to fold in 1991. It may well be that civic leaders of Syracuse don’t much care about how the downtown works. It certainly looks that way. Likely for the corporate leaders who drive in to Syracuse in the morning and leave for the suburbs in the evening, the situation is good enough. The political structure, no doubt, fears that economic or demographic change will threaten its grip on the reins of power, the otherwise comfortable lives they lead outside the downtown and the contracts they let and control. 

There is positive energy to be harnessed in downtown Syracuse as the two busy restaurants and magnificent hotel demonstrate. Again, as with Amsterdam, there is a lot of stranded social infrastructure in downtown Syracuse, at a time when pundits have declared a national housing “crisis” and tens of thousands of people are eager to move their lives to the United States from the many places across the world in turmoil and economic decline or stagnation. It just doesn’t make any sense not to use and leverage Syracuse’s still substantial resources to address those problems. It will take small scale risk taking and large-scale civic leadership, particularly by private sector anchor institutions to make the downtown once again a great place. 

Why are these seats here? Who is going to sit on them? Why would they?

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE/DESTRUCTION – II – AMSTERDAM, NEW YORK

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The Standard Approach to Economic Deevelopment in New York State

Amsterdam is an object lesson in how downtown revitalization and economic development strategy might be better implemented in New York State. Replacing a project-centered and economic sector strategy with a place-centered approach to improving conditions in Amsterdam would likely make a substantial difference in outcomes. A number of expensive, major initiatives implemented in Amsterdam to revive its economy over the past half-century have been failures. 

This small city, located on the Mohawk River between Rochester and Albany, was for decades a major center for the manufacturing of carpets. In addition to access to the transportation advantages of the Erie Canal, the Chuctanunda Creek, running through the middle of the city drops three hundred feet during its last three miles, provided the power that drove the many mills that became central to Amsterdam’s development. With the carpet and other mills running at full production, by 1930 the city’s population grew to 34,000. With the transfer of mill operations away from the unionized north to the lower cost south beginning in the 1960’s, the population has dropped to just over half that. The mill buildings have now either been demolished, abandoned or are lightly tenanted. Nothing approaching the economic vitality of the high value-added textile business has replaced them. 

The New York State Thruway, the major transportation corridor across the state, runs by and has an exit hundreds of yards from the city’s center. This has been less than a blessing for Amsterdam, as the street though the downtown that became the access road to the bridge over the Mohawk leading to the Thruway (built in the 50’s), Route 30, appears to have been widened to increase its capacity, while bifurcating, and effectively obliterating the downtown. 

The Amsterdam RiverFront Center facing Route 30.
Inside The Riverfront Center

Two major traditional economic development projects in Amsterdam illustrate clearly the problems with traditional capital intensive, large scale, “silver bullet” redevelopment thinking. Adjacent to Route 30, just as you drive over the bridge is the RiverFront Center (formerly, the Riverfront Mall). It is a 250,000 two-story, grim structure that appears to sit directly in the middle of what used to be Amsterdam’s main street. The Center has a rather small presentation to the street but stretches way back. It is about half leased, poorly lit and poorly maintained (including non-operating escalators). Most of the tenants are government agencies, social service organizations or health care providers. This project had to have cost tens of millions of dollars and is a net negative for the city, not only because of its utilitarian design, but also because of the sense of failure about it. 

The Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook crossing the river

By contrast, the Mohawk Valley Gateway Overlook, is beautifully designed and well maintained. The Overlook, completed in 2016, is a pedestrian bridge over the Mohawk leading to a well-landscaped riverbank park, principally designed for occasional outdoor performances. However, access to the bridge and park are very difficult to obtain – making any positive contribution the project might make to Amsterdam’s vitality clearly minimal. The bridge can be accessed from a parking lot across the river from downtown, a few hundred yards from Route 30. We had a difficult time finding it. The greenspace is on the same side of the river as the downtown but is cut off from downtown by the former New York Central Railroad tracks (now used by Amtrak). I saw a bridge over the tracks from the RiverFront Center to the park, but a rather thorough investigation of the Center yielded no access to the bridge – which leads to a very substantial stair structure (with a non-working elevator). As a result, in order to get to the park, one has to drive across the river, find the parking lot, and then walk back across the river on the pedestrian bridge. In addition, in my experience, having a few outdoor concerts during the season provides little economic benefit to the vitality of a downtown. In order for cultural programming to generate the kind of activity that makes a difference, it has to be on a daily, or near daily, schedule. There was no one else visiting the park or the bridge on the day I was there. It’s a shame, because walking across the Mohawk on the pedestrian bridge is a lovely experience, and the riverbank park also provides attractive views of the river and its surroundings. The location between the tracks and the river provides a sense of the richness and importance of the location in the state’s commercial history (even if it is an obstacle to access). There is also an unusual view of the Chuctanunda pouring through an arched viaduct into the Mohawk from the Overlook – providing a tangible idea of the energy of the water that powered the mills. 

The bridge over the railroad tracks and stair tower at the Overlook park

No doubt both of these projects provided local elected officials and civic leaders with a sense of pride and a great opportunity for media attention when they were completed. But then what? Downtowns are rarely revitalized by “projects.” And it is obvious that these two aren’t contributing. Big projects often involve extensive planning and large capital outlays, and if they have problems are difficult to improve or correct. The same is true about industrial parks and multi-million-dollar industrial plant subsidies, often the go to strategy for local economic development. At their best, those kinds of traditional economic development projects are viable for only as long as government hands them money. They rarely become self-sustaining.  For example, projects like the RiverFront Center (and, for example, the former NYC World Trade Center) usually rely on government tenants to fill them up, when the market demonstrates its lack of enthusiasm for a development that isn’t market driven. 

What’s left of Main Street, Amsterdam

Much better is the iterative process of making incremental changes and providing continuous programming, which has worked in successful downtowns (like Corning, Schenectady and Troy). The placemaking approach takes time (and patience) and rarely provides for photo ops, but they generally involve much less money. I did notice one interesting center of activity in a former mill in Amsterdam, a company called “Sticker Mule,” which does internet printing and claims to have an international customer base, seemed to have a full parking lot. I’d certainly want to know a lot more about how they ended up in Amsterdam, what they see as it’s benefits and try to build on that. 

I also wonder whether the kinetic energy of the Chuctanunda continues to have commercial value? Would it be economically possible to install micro-turbines to generate electricity in the old mills built on the banks of the creek? Those mills were designed to use its power to turn the spindles driving the mills, and so might be relatively straightforward to retrofit. Are there other efficient uses of that sustainable source of energy? Gravity has been pulling water down that 300 foot drop of the Chuctanunda for centuries, and will continue to do so without further investment.  

The Castle hotel in Amsterdam — ready for Halloween!

I should also note that while in Amsterdam we stayed in a former National Guard armory that had been converted into a hotel and event space called The Castle. The armory was built in a neo-Gothic style and has all the external attributes of a castle perched on a hill overlooking the river, on the opposite bank from the downtown. The drill hall has been turned into a feasting hall, with suits of armor, heraldic banners and period paintings covering the walls. It’s a total trip. And the rooms are modern and comfortable. It was close to the parking for the Overlook, and equally out of the way, but a find. It is an usual resource that has been turned into a civic asset. The kind of creativity that went into buying and restoring it is what Amsterdam needs more of. It was an obsolete government-owned structure, that rather than being demolished and redeveloped using subsidies, was repurposed into a viable business. 

I note, with a considerable sense of irony, that the Member of the U.S. Congress for Amsterdam is Mega-MAGA Elise Stefanic. It is not a sense of victimhood, nationalism or xenophobia that will improve the quality of life of the people of Amsterdam. It will take some risk taking, creativity and hard work. New York State’s economic development agency ought to make Amsterdam into a laboratory for exploring a range of placemaking initiatives through its underfunded Main Street program. In addition, given that it is half the size it once was, it is another place that might benefit from an infusion of energetic refugees and other immigrants. Clearly, what has been done in Amsterdam over the last century hasn’t worked. It needs new people and new ideas. 

The Course of Empire, Destruction, Thomas Cole

THE COURSE OF EMPIRE – ROCHESTER

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The Rochester Philharmonic in Kodak Hall

The cities that flourished as a result of the construction of the Erie Canal during the first half of the 19th Century are great places, blessed with abundant natural beauty around them. I took a recent driving trip to Rochester, Syracuse, Amsterdam, Schenectady and Troy (with visits to Auburn, Seneca Falls and Corning in the Finger Lakes region as well). Rochester, the state’s fourth largest city by population has a tremendous depth of anchor institutions, and a downtown with great potential for a mixed-use 24 hour downtown. Schenectady and Troy have beautiful, active downtowns. Syracuse and Amsterdam have serious, but solvable, problems. Over the next several weeks I hope to share my thoughts about these visits – my first to all of these places – a trip which I have long wanted to make. This week I will focus Rochester and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Over the distance of almost two hundred years, it is difficult to appreciate the historical significance of the Erie Canal to New York City, New York State, and, in fact to the country as a whole. The Mohawk River Valley, which more or less encompasses the geography between Lake Erie and the Hudson River, is the only flat body of water that crosses what is otherwise the transportation obstacle of the Appalachian Mountain range. The Appalachians, running from Maine to Georgia, served as a barrier to commerce and communications between the eastern and western portions of the early United States (before railroads and the telegraph). When completed, the canal enabled the shipping of commodities from the all over the Midwest to the East, utilizing the Great Lakes, the Ohio River and the Mississippi as feeder routes. At the same time, it permitted manufactured goods to be shipped from the industrial states of the North and the cotton growing states of the South to the growing Western states. At the fulcrum of this commerce was New York City, and its deep and sheltered harbor at the end of the trade route at the mouth of the Hudson River; between east and west, and between the US and Europe as well. It is hard to imagine today, but the rise of the New York City as the financial and commercial center of an empire was nearly entirely originally based on commerce supported by the canal. 

The canal was built over about seven years beginning in 1825, in an effort led by Governor DeWitt Clinton. While it used the water and geography of the Mohawk River, much of the canal had to be dug by hand parallel to the shallow, non-navigable river. The canal was a truly amazing accomplishment of human effort – and of engineering. While the canal was used for almost a century, the development of railroad infrastructure came hard on the heels of its completion, with the final leg of what became the New York Central Railroad across New York State finished in 1839. The “Age of the Erie Canal” was short but world shaking.

The canal required 83 locks along its 350-mile route to move freight vertically along its route, in many places enabling the circumnavigation of waterfalls. The vertical drop between the Lake Erie and the Hudson was only about 700 feet. But even more impressive were the 18 aqueducts that were built to cross over other rivers. The idea of building a structure over a river to carry freight loaded barges on water over other bodies of water is hard for the modern imagination to conceive. The longest of these aqueducts went through what became the city of Rochester over the Genesee River. 

Innovation Square Building

Over the next 150 years Rochester became the silicon valley of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Kodak, Bausch & Lomb and Xerox all got their start in Rochester. The huge Gannett newspaper chain was based in Rochester until recently. Rochester, and the region, also played a large role in the abolitionist and women’s suffrage movement. For a large part of his adult life, Frederick Douglass lived in Rochester with his family and published his newspaper “The North Star” there. The level of political and intellectual activity in Rochester and the nearby small Finger Lake towns was truly remarkable (and the number of 19th century-founded institutions of higher education in the region is reflective of that).

The civic and business leadership of Rochester over the many decades took establishing a major metropolis seriously. They created the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, and more recently the George Eastman International Museum of Photography and Film. Rochester became an essential part of the US’ art music ecology as the home of the Eastman School of Music (one of the country’s two or three best) and the Rochester Philharmonic. 

The RPO is in the second tier of American orchestras by budget size as designated by the League of American Orchestras. Led music director Andreas Delft, however, it plays at a level that matches those of our largest ensembles (his predecessors in that role included Eugene Goosens, Erich Leinsdorf and David Zinman). It plays in Kodak Hall of the Eastman Theater at the Eastman School of Music. Originally built with 3,500 seats, it is a very, very large, high-ceilinged room – although the seating was reduced by 1,200 in 2009. When I stepped into the tremendous mass of space that is Kodak Hall, sitting about halfway back, I was concerned about the sound possibly being hollow and swallowed up. The orchestra, dressed in the now decreasingly used white tie, filled the space with a rich, clear, accomplished sound. I heard a program that included Strauss’ “Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28,” Saint-Saen’s “Carnival of the Animals, with duo pianists Christina and Michelle Naughton and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka.” The program was billed as “Orchestral Showpieces,” and that provided a first-time listener a good idea of the group’s musical capacity. 

The performances were simply excellent with a warm string resonance and glitch free solos – no small achievement in the Strauss’s exposed wind and horn parts. The Strauss was played in technicolor, with the piece’s humor and theatricality highlighted. The color coordinated and brightly dressed Naughton twins attacked their pianos aggressively, with precise coordination in the “Carnival of the Animals”. So much of this music has worked its way into the heart of the culture and is very familiar, none more so than The Swan movement, beautifully played by principal cellist Ahrim Kim. The soloists’ moments in all three pieces were played with great musicality and skill, but without showy virtuosity. This is an orchestra that clearly enjoys playing together with its music director as an organic ensemble. It was particularly evident in the “Petrushka,” another colorful work with comic moments. “Petrushka” is rhythmically complicated and spare, with much of the exposed orchestral scoring that is so characteristic of Stravinsky’s early music (the piece premiered in 1911). The orchestra made a tight, delightful show of its contrasts of both dark and light moments. I walked out after the concert into downtown Rochester musically contented. 

The former headquarters of Gannett Newspapers

Downtown Rochester suffered from the degradations of the now mostly discredited ideas of mid-twentieth century urbanism and design. Its peak population was in the 1950’s, and only in the last decade has the population stopped declining. The downtown is filled with structured parking (and very few parking lots) and has a good number of daunting, tower in the park-like office buildings. The lack of lot parking gives the downtown a feeling of continuity. The city, though, has superficially followed a number of the latest urban trends, with some restored public spaces, scooters and bike lanes (without many people using any of them). Most distressing to me was the empty complex of buildings once occupied by Gannett newspapers in the center of town, before it decamped to a suburban Washington, D.C. office park in 1984 and moved the production of the local paper to another Rochester location in 2016. These are massive art deco and Albert Kahn designed buildings created around now obsolete technologies like the printing press and the typewriter. I am an optimist and have thought that the market will find uses for the post-pandemic half filled, midtown Manhattan, midcentury modern office towers. But walking around the Gannett complex gives one pause about the destructive capacity of modern capitalism and the difficulty of recycling gargantuan 20th century edifices. 

Across the street from the Gannett complex, at the foot of what was the aqueduct across the Genesee, is an 80,000 square foot, mixed-use – loft, office, retail – adaptive reuse development in a former mill that may demonstrate what the future of Downtown Rochester could be like. However, in order to get there, Rochester needs to veer away from both obsolete planning doctrine and the superficial trappings of up-to-date urbanism – a bench here, a planter there, public sculpture somewhere else, and dig deep into placemaking practice in order to become a mixed-use, 24 hour downtown. I even saw a sign opposing the formation of a business improvement district – a thirty-year-old concept, the best days of which have passed, particularly in cities of fewer than one million people.

An unused bike lane on the Aqueduct Bridge over the Genesee. The bridge also has nice, unused benches and planters.

Right now, downtown Rochester is a place designed to accommodate people who drive to work in an office building, and drive home to adjacent neighborhoods and suburbs at night. There is a mindset in Rochester that needs to change to make the most of its substantial social infrastructure. The blank walls and lifeless plazas around the downtown’s major office buildings are a challenge. I even saw a sign on steps leading to what appears to be the city’s leading office building prohibiting sitting on the steps up to its plaza! That is exactly WRONG. Property management ought to be encouraging step sitting and working to animate the baren plazas. The city needs to select a promising central location and build a critical mass of activity around that place. Scattered residential loft buildings throughout the downtown aren’t going to build that critical mass of activity. Especially given the lifelessness around the major office towers. The downtown needs sidewalk activity in the form of restaurants with outdoor seating and public spaces programmed with activity like Bryant and Dilworth Parks. The deep cultural resources of the community, like Eastman School and the excellent RPO, can be leveraged to bring vibrancy downtown, particularly at night. 

Steps to the plaza of the Metropolitan office tower
Sign next to the steps
The tower

With 100,000 fewer residents than at its peak, Rochester is excellent evidence that we don’t have a housing crisis in the United States and in New York State, but rather we have a lack of great places (and a failure to provide adequate mental health services to our most disadvantaged neighbors). Rochester and its neighbors have capacity. Tens of thousands of people, most recently from Venezuela, want desperately to be in the US. Upstate New York needs those people and their expertise and energy. We need policies that move them from the Southern border to our postindustrial cities. The Erie Canal corridor is a place of great beauty and opportunity. Utica, for example, has been recharged by an influx of Bosnian immigrants.  The legacy of the Erie Canal could be more great places across one of New York State’s most naturally stunning locations. More on that when we move on to other Mohawk Valley cities. 

By Thomas Cole

NEWSRACKS ARE ANCIENT HISTORY

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The multi-vend newsrack has become an obsolete blot on urban streets all over the country – and I am mostly to blame. It is the solution to a problem that no longer exists. Its useful life has come to an end, and the business improvement districts and cities that erected them need to put them out of their misery. They are a legacy of one of the symptoms of social disorder of the 1990’s that has been largely forgotten or were never known by those who are younger. Like public telephone kiosks (which I still notice in cities around the country) they need to be removed. 

In the mid 90’s structures selling or distributing printed material became a highly visible blemish on streetscapes, contributing to the perception of disorder that was the principal obstacle to urban revitalization all over North America. In midtown Manhattan, there were hundreds of them, most of them put out by free publications. Many were helter skelter chained to light poles and signal stantions. A detailed narrative of the problem and the creation and implementation of the solution can be found at length in “Learning from Bryant Park,” and in an earlier form on the blog here.

But those publications are almost entirely gone or have gone on-line. In some cities the racks retain some economic value as vehicles for outdoor advertising (in San Francisco, digital ad panels). But they are empty of printed material, and in some places, like with phone kiosks, they appear to be abandoned. There is no reason to keep them, and every reason to take them down. 

I hereby lay down the gauntlet to my BID colleagues, to tear them down. As their father (along with the late Arthur Rosenblatt), and in the spirit of the return of Cherubini’s Medea to the Metropolitan Opera stage later this month, I encourage their demise. They have become an orphaned symbol of bureaucratic lethargy and sclerosis – a failure to change with changing conditions. 

LEARN FROM THE BEST — CINCINNATI

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 If you want to learn about best practices in downtown revitalization, you couldn’t do better than to just walk around Cincinnati. They seem to do most things right there. I hadn’t intended to write again about the Queen City, as my most recent trip was a quick overnight one, but the continued marked apparent improvement in economic conditions there merits notice. Both the downtown commercial center and the adjacent Over-the-Rhine neighborhood continue to expand their blocks of economic vitality. More blocks seem to have new stores, new adaptative reuses of structures with high quality vernacular architecture and new residential construction and conversion. 

Residential new construction on Vine Street

Cincinnati and Des Moines are actually comparatively sized cities. Cincinnati has a population of about 300,000. But its metro is substantially larger, at 2.5 million, the 30th in the country. Interestingly, while Des Moines is about at its peak population, Cincinnati is considerably smaller than its population of 500,000 in 1960. Cincinnati is 42% Black. While the Black population is only 12% of the metro. 

The strength of Cincinnati Center City Development Corporation (3CDC) sets Cincinnati apart. 3CDC strikes me as the most aggressive and effective organization of its kind in country. Up until recently, 3CDC kept a low profile – but on this recent trip their brand was all over its many properties – on parking lots it operates, on empty storefronts it leases and on parcels it is seeking to develop. The thing that differentiates 3CDC from its peers is its balance sheet. Based on 2019 data, it has gross assets of over $400 million, debt of a little less than $400 million and an annual operating budget of about $20 million. That is a scale of operations and a leveraging of resources that is unmatched. 3CDC purchases property using debt financing. It repositions those properties though adaptive reuse and it carefully curates their occupants. Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine is the most dramatic and fastest commercial corridor revitalization case study of which I am aware. Vine Street and Main Street in Over-the-Rhine are now lined with interesting looking shops, bars and restaurants. A key component of their capital stack is an internally operated low-interest revolving loan fund.

 Downtown Cincinnati shows similar attributes of growth. We stayed in the 21CMuseum Hotel – part of a Kentucky-based chain (https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com). The facility was the reuse of an office structure into over 300 rooms (beautifully designed by Yale architecture dean, Deborah Berke). The hotel displays an extensive art collection, focused on Black artists. As you walk into the lobby, your experience is flooded by the image of Morpheus by Kahinde Wiley from 2008 at 108 by 180 inches (https://www.21cmuseumhotels.com/cincinnati/blog/2020/morpheus-by-kehinde-wiley/), which is behind the front desk. This is not art by the yard. Our stay was very impressive. Downtown Cincinnati has more street level retail, bars and restaurants than most other mid-western cities (although the retail on many block is far from continuous). There are very few totally blank block fronts. Downtown is connected to Over-the-Rhine by a tram, which is free and runs every ten minutes or so (not quite enough, but close to it). Unlike many other such projects, it appears to be well-used. 

(I also note that we had breakfasts in both St. Louis and Cincinnati in First Watch restaurants, a chain that has almost 500 locations, with which I was previously unfamiliar. The quality of food and service in both places was superb. Quite remarkable for such a large chain.)

Too many economic development entities are ineffective because their boards are averse to property ownership, operation and debt financing. Those organizations are resigning themselves to unsuccessfulness – particularly in today’s real estate environment where downtowns need more than “clean and safe.” Downtown revitalization requires risk taking and rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty in real estate brokerage and construction. Downtown economic development organizations need to be in the business of revenue generation (through parking, if nothing else) and leading the real estate market with high quality repositioning of derelict property. Nothing else works as well. The 3CDC financial statement is a lesson in itself in how to do this. 

I know nothing of the politics of 3CDC, or how it is viewed in the community. I also don’t know anything about its community engagement practices. While those things are important, the results speak for themselves. Cincinnati’s quality of life is better as a result of 3CDC’s work. I would like to see an income distribution chart for Black families in the city and metro for 2000 and 2020. If 3CDC’s efforts are not bringing substantial benefit to the city’s least well off, then that’s a problem. I noticed a considerable amount of residential new construction in Over-the-Rhine. 3CDC has developed 416 affordable units, with 70% of them designated as affordable. Given where Cincinnati now is, and 3CDC’s financial strength and expertise, if they were to ask me (which they haven’t), I would advise that they focus their efforts on mixed income (with no more than 30% of residents below 50% of AMI), mixed-use projects as a means to improve the circumstances of the worst well off and improve the quality of the local public schools. 

The view up Vine Street

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Our trip to Cincinnati was to see the world premiere of “Castor and Patience,” at the Cincinnati Opera, with music by Gregory Spears and libretto by Tracy K. Smith. Spears is the composer of the highly successful “Fellow Travelers,” also premiered in Cincinnati, and Smith is a Princeton professor, former poet laureate of the United States and a Pulitzer Prize winner. It is my practice not to discuss the musical or dramatic aspects of the operas I hear, since that’s not my department (“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun”. Heidi’s review will be found here: andymanshel.nyc), the theme of the opera was of particular interest to me.

The opera is about an inter-racial family from Buffalo, New York, who, during the home mortgage debacle of 2008, are in danger of losing their house. They travel to an island off the coast of the Southeast where the family’s father (Castor) grew up, and where he and his cousin (Patience) (both Black) own thirty acres, which are valued in the story at over $20 million.) Patience sees her role as protecting the family’s legacy in the property – highlighting the importance and rarity of property ownership to Black folks. She is opposed to selling even one acre of the twenty – which would eliminate the father’s debt problems.

This story interested me because as a real estate lawyer I have always advised clients that the first rule of success in real estate is to never develop an emotional attachment to a parcel. Also, in the 00’s I joined the Queens County Bar Association’s Volunteer Lawyer’s Project representing families in foreclosure. The membership of the Queens County Bar pledged to represent, on a pro bono basis, any Queens family during conferences with the Court’s Special Master dealing with foreclosures in Queens. This project was so successful that ultimately families were represented by highly skilled, full-time staff from the project with extensive experience with foreclosure, rather than by the pro bono volunteers.

I represented more than a half dozen families over the course of five or six years – all of them were eager/desperate to remain in their homes despite the fact that the houses were worth less than their mortgages. My clients’ best economic move would certainly have been to walk away from their homes. While staying was not necessarily a canny business decision, ultimately all were able to remain in their homes with monthly payments well within their means. The actual facts of these cases were very different from the prevailing narrative regarding the “mortgage crisis” that began in 2008, and that narrative underlies the story line of “Castor and Patience.” Southeast Queens, New York, generally regarded as the Jamaica neighborhoods, is one of the largest communities of Black homeowners in the United States. I was told that in the 2010 census, Queens was the only county in the country where African American household income exceeded that of white households.  

My clients ran the gamut from a family on public assistance to a barber to a laid off nursing assistant. All had refinanced their homes in order to generate cash – all of which they had spent or lost. In some cases, the refinancing produced upfront lower monthly payments which later either ballooned or reset to a high variable interest rate. All of their homes market values were substantially less than (generally 2/3) than the principal of the mortgage on them. In almost every case, a local mortgage broker – someone they knew from the community – had sold them on the refinancing. None of those mortgage brokers were anywhere to be found by the time the families came to me. In one case, I believe the mortgage broker stole most of the cash generated by the refinance – taking advantage of the borrower’s lack of financial sophistication. 

The most obvious thing to me as an attorney representing these families was that the banks and mortgage servicers were in chaos. Their attorneys would show up in court with a list of properties on the docket for that day. Most were unprepared. None had the supporting documentation required to sustain their claims – much of which had been lost in the shuffling between the mortgage originators, the creators of the collateral debt obligations (CDO), the buyers of the CDO’s and the servicers which were on the front lines doing the administrative work for the holders of the CDO’s. Also, the Courts were loath to kick people out of their homes – and made every appropriate effort to protect homeowners’ rights. It was easy for me to throw sand in the gears of the process to keep people in their homes. It was much more difficult to actually work out payment arrangements which would be manageable by my clients.

A home in Southeast Queens — not one of my clients’. Just an example.

It is important to know that while these properties were in foreclosures, their owners continued to live in them and weren’t paying any occupancy costs – not mortgage, not insurance and not taxes. The CDO holders were on the hook for all of these and were adding them to the borrowers’ principal. My clients dealt with this situation in different ways. My lowest income clients took two trips to Disney with their grandchildren during my representation of them. Another of my clients took the opportunity of six years of essentially free housing to get a BA in nursing – and ultimately secured a near six figure entry level hospital job. 

The Obama administration had set up a program called the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP), which, at the time, none of the mortgage servers knew much about accessing. This lack of knowledge (or interest) served to prolong the foreclosure process. It was in the mortgage servicers’ interest to keep the process going – as fees were generated by each Court appearance and each action taken by the servicer – charged to the holders of the CDOs. It was not in the financial interest of the servicer or the CDO holders to bring the matters to closure. An actual foreclosure or settlement would almost always result in the banks having to immediately book a loss, which was definitely not in their interest.

At one point, I got the quasi-governmental agency that has a guarantor’s interest in most home mortgages involved in order to bring my cases to settlement (they have the ultimate authority to approve mortgage restructurings). All of my clients stayed in their homes and got monthly payments they could live with. The downside for all of them was that the restructured payments, the defaulted amounts, deferred interest and penalties were all added to the value of the principal – which, in practical terms, meant the principal would never be paid down. When the owners passed away, the CDO holder would be left with an underwater property, which it would sell and then book the loss – hopefully many years in the future. This was the ultimate in kicking a can down the road. So, at the end of the day the holders of the CDOs were left holding the bag. 

This wasn’t the story of “Castor and Patience,” and it would make a pretty terrible, long, complicated, boring theater piece. But it is what happened in my experience, and probably what happened with the majority of people caught up with homes with deflated values and defaulted, inflated mortgages. In the real world, if Castor has adequate legal counsel in Buffalo, he probably could have held on to his home. Better yet, Castor and Patience could have obtained a small debt consolidation loan (at very low interest rates during the turmoil in the markets), using the island property as security, to eliminate Castor’s financial problems. While that alternate story isn’t particularly important to the opera audience, it is important to how we understand home ownership and race in America. 

IMPRESSIONS OF IOWA

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            We stayed at a hipsterish hotel in Des Moines, Iowa (The Surety) that had an excellent restaurant (The Mulberry Street Tavern).  The hotel lobby had a pool table and the room mini-bar offered condoms. As we drove from the airport in Cedar Rapids to Des Moines (we missed our connections in both directions at Charlotte and had to scramble), we drove passed scores of wind turbines. We were there for Heidi to cover the opera (https://andymanshel.nyc/2022/07/13/review-arias-over-the-fields-at-des-moines-metro-opera/), which I don’t usually independently comment on, but which was excellent. The “Porgy and Bess” was the best of my experience, and the production values of each of the two shows I thought were higher than any of the other summer festivals (Santa Fe, Glimmerglass, Opera Theater of Saint Louis). Despite the conventional wisdom, there is a progressive, sophisticated national culture, which has reached deeply into the medium sized cities of the mid-West. This is a non-trivial change.  

            As a child in the sixties, I can recall our annual trips by car to French Lick, Indiana for a business conference that my father attended. We stayed in some pretty dismal motels along the way and ate some pretty awful food in local greasy spoons. The food at the fancy resort where the conference was held was of the mid-century modern American sort – a silver colored bucket with ice and raw vegetables on the table when we arrived and well-done roast beef as the signature menu item. We’ve come a long way from that. Food culture is everywhere. Social media spreads trends and fads like lightening. Almost anything can be delivered by UPS and Fed Ex – from bagels and pastrami to esoteric books and high design furniture. You don’t have to drive to the nearest university town to see art house movies – they’re on Netflix and Amazon Prime – or you can subscribe to what seem to be dozens of more specialized services like Sundance and BBC America to get even more exotic fare.

            Des Moines is a city of about 200,000, in a metro of about 400,000. It has long been a center of the insurance industry and its largest private sector employers are Wells Fargo and Principal Financial. It has only a half dozen office towers of more than 20 floors, the tallest of which is the Principal HQ at 45 stories. Many of the downtown buildings are high quality art deco/city beautiful buildings of less than 20 storeys. The post war period, as in so many places, was not as architecturally kind to Des Moines as prior decades, but most of those buildings are mid-rise. The downtown streets and sidewalks are wide, and there isn’t much street level retail and there are many, many parking structures. There is a large, active farmers’ market in the downtown on Saturdays. The downtown’s scale feels more human than Kansas City, because there are fewer tall buildings and there are wider streets. There also seem to be more downtown restaurants. But there still isn’t much pedestrian activity (other than the farmers’ market). The main arteries leading into downtown are lined with the usual low to medium income retailers and fast food brands.

            Des Moines is the Iowa state capital, with an impressive capital building that unusually has five domes. The capital sits on a hill overlooking the city that has a large collection of public sculpture, the most impressive of which is a civil war monument. In the chaos of today’s political order it is easy to forget Iowa’s important place in American history as a free state, with John Brown having used Iowa as a base for his anti-slavery campaign of 1856-1859. While Barak Obama won Iowa in 2012, Donald Trump took the state by 9% in both 2016 and 2020. Iowa’s current senators are Republicans Charles Grassley and Joni Ernst. Their predecessors were Democrats Tom Harkin and John Culver. Des Moines is 15% Black. The state is 4% Black. It is certainly interesting to contemplate Iowa’s place in the national culture. This is a place with a sophisticated history, including one of the country’s great state universities, particularly known on the coasts for its writing program. Retired, 40-year U.S. Navy veteran and former Rear Admiral Mike Franken is running against the 88-year-old Grassley this year as a Democrat and has turned up on my social media feeds. He seems impressive, and some polls have put him within striking distance. But Grassley is a formidable opponent with a very high profile. If Franken were to get any traction in the wake of the Supreme Court’s hard right turn, that would be a big deal. 

            The local airport is small, and most of the flights are to midwest hubs, Minneapolis, Chicago and Saint Louis. I also noticed a direct flight on a small airline to New York, and other flights to Phoenix (a Southwest hub) and Charlotte (an American hub). The airports in Cedar Rapids (even smaller) and Omaha are driving distance – providing more options. We found it difficult to get to from New York. I didn’t notice any flights to Los Angeles or San Francisco. But who needs the coasts, really?

            I suspect Iowans know how good they have it. The state’s mean family income is about $80,000. I would conjecture that if a Phillips curve (demonstrating income distribution) were drawn for Iowa, it would be pretty flat. Des Moines seems to have adopted a lot of the best of the urban renaissance of the 90’s – with restaurants, a market and quite a few downtown loft conversions. The weather was pretty intensely hot while we were there. But life there seems excellent – with lots of amenities for a small city (this listing caught my eye: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10307-Grimes-St-Indianola-IA-50125/87084714_zpid/. $540,000 for 4 acres and a pool).  I would go on to speculate that the most important vector moving Iowa’s political needle is Iowans wanting to preserve what they have – and isn’t that the very definition of conservatism. 

THE REST IS HISTORY

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The first class of Urban Park Rangers, with Mayor Koch and Gordon Davis at the center. In the lower right, with the tie, is my friend, neighbor, collaborator and future Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe.

“New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation” Thomas Dyja (Simon & Schuster, 2021)

The great goal of social science is to amass large amounts of data relating to a social phenomenon, and then organize and synthesize that data in order to explain how that phenomenon works – essentially separating the out the signal from the noise. In “New York, New York, New York; Four Decades of Succuss, Excess, and Transformation,” Thomas Dyja sets out for himself that extremely high bar. He pulls together an overwhelming amount of information about the governance and culture of New York City from 1978 to the present and attempts to tease out what actually happened. It is nearly impossible to believe that one author could accumulate and one mind could retain and come to an understanding such an avalanche of facts. In telling this story, he succeeds beyond any reasonable expectation. 

I came to New York in 1978 and have lived here continuously ever since. I began working in the public sphere in 1991. So, in a very material sense, this is my (along with a great many other peoples’) story. I was in, or near, the room where some of the stuff he describes happened. I worked with or knew a significant double-digit percentage of the people he talks about. I generally come out where he does in his broadest conclusions, but as is absolutely inevitable in the blizzard of information Dyja has digested, some of the “facts” and figures he cites either are incorrect or can’t be right (There have never been 50,000 people sleeping on the streets of New York. There have been 50,000 people receiving services for the homeless from the City – mostly living in shelters, most of them families – and not the single adult men who most New Yorkers have in mind when they think of the homeless. While he cite’s Kaiser’s The Gay Metropolis, can it be true that 50% of gay baby boomers died of AIDs?). Dyja also accepts as true a number of the basic assumptions that constitute the conventional wisdom regarding public policy in the city over the last forty years, some of which are just aren’t true or are gross over simplifications (gentrification leads to displacement, homelessness is caused by lack of housing). But, certainly, Dyja’s heart is in the right place, and he is willing to call “bullshit” on a good many self-serving and false claims. I certainly can’t argue with his placing our work on the Bryant Park restoration, and the thinkers we relied on like Holly Whyte and George Kelling, at the dead center of his epic. 

The book relies on press reports and interviews with high profile players for much of its factual foundation. Unfortunately, the New York press often gets the details of local coverage wrong (and more than occasionally gets the entire story wrong), taking the press releases of public officials at face value – and while newspaper reporting may be the first draft of history, it constitutes an unreliable basis on which to write its later versions when it comes to New York City government. It has also been my experience that folks in public life in New York tend to gild their lilies – they take credit for stuff they didn’t do and they seem to remember that positive results they stumbled into were things they planned. Relying on those sources without questioning them will lead to false positives. But when bringing together so many stories, checking them all out would be a lot to ask. 

The book’s great accomplishment is to highlight the policies of the Koch administration that laid the groundwork for New York’s revitalization (particularly in housing and public space) that continues through today, and the cadre of smart, effective professionals that Koch attracted to government the like of which has not been seen since (unfortunately). My personal recollection of third term Ed Koch was of a bullying narcissist. As the New York Times recently reported on at length, Koch remained in the closest during the AIDs crisis and actively worked to cover his personal tracks. Koch also deployed racially inflammatory rhetoric, amping up the city’s most debilitating division. To put it mildly, he consciously failed to attempt to understand, and even dismissed, the concerns of New York City’s large Black community. But, at the end of the day that didn’t drive Koch Administration policy, which, using clever financing mechanisms, built tens of thousands of new affordable housing units (which over decades ultimately became hundreds of thousands), transforming the city’s most neglected, abandoned and disinvested neighborhoods into desirable places. And speaking of places, Parks Commissioner Gordon Davis thought up the idea of private non-profit entities to secure resources for and improve the management of parks – leading to the restoration of Central, Bryant (in which I was directly involved) and Prospect Parks. I am convinced that those two programs, in housing and parks, were the key elements that changed the perception of cities and sparked the return to urban centers across the country – a force so powerful that it has continued through 9/11, the financial turbulence of 2008, hurricane Sandy and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Dyja’s writing about 9/11 is particularly beautiful; capturing the moment perfectly. He avoids the solipsism and self pity that infects so many other attempts to describe that horrific day. It was a primary election day, on which I was working the polls for mayoral candidate Mark Green in the northeast Bronx. I ended up in a four hour walk to the Upper West Side, with a non-functional transit system, limited information and an inability to get through to home on the phone. All along the walk home I had a view of smoke rising from lower Manhattan as I moved south. When I got home and turned on the television, the video of the time between the planes’ flying into the buildings and their collapse was the worst thing I have experienced before or since. Dyja bravely and frankly identifies the forces that made the return to normal at the former World Trade Center site impossible and that have left us with a permanent, disheartening gash in New York’s side (which will never be remedied), and a collection of inhumanely scaled towers. 

It was interesting to read of the yin and yang during the Bloomberg Administration of Amanda Burden and Dan Doctoroff, which I didn’t understand at the time, while I was toiling ten miles away from City Hall in the neighborhood development fields of Jamaica, Queens: Burden having worked for William H. (Holly) Whyte, the advocate for small scale urbanism and close observation, and Doctoroff being the purveyor of grand plans (like the failed New York Olympics) and big ideas (like the failed Hudson Yards). The bastard child of this dynamic is the hugely popular tourist attraction of the High Line, which isn’t really a successful public space (because it is mostly a place to walk through, rather than linger in) but has been a powerful engine for real estate development along its flanks, and a model for similar projects across the country.

There is a lot in the book about the commercial worlds of hip hop and the art market, which may be useful scene setting – but about which I, personally, don’t very much care and think aren’t particularly culturally important. The New York of the late 1970’s and early-to-mid 1980’s may have been one of urban decline, but it was also a uniquely yeasty and important era for high culture here – particularly in music and dance. To me, it would have been much better to use the work of people like Phillip Glass, Steve Reich, Trisha Brown and Twyla Tharp as the cultural yard stick against which to measure changes in the city over the period. The transformation of Carnegie Hall from an overheated place where paint chips fell from the ceiling on to your head during classical concerts to the glamourous outpost of European high culture fostered by Sandy Weill is a story worth telling. The book has no mention of other cultural innovators like Stephanie French. But, Dyja wrote his book, not mine. 

On the homelessness front, Dyja only briefly quotes Rosanne Haggerty, my social entrepreneurial heroine, and instead relies on testimony from the crafty, sly fox of the unhoused, Bob Hayes. I would like to know more about the Haggerty’s departure from the path-breaking Common Ground and that organization’s transformation into Breaking Ground, now a central institution in what Haggerty calls the homeless/industrial complex. The current state of services for the homeless in New York is the result of bad data, misinformation and worse public policy, which Dyja doesn’t clearly explain. 

Oddly, NY x 3, provides more detail and moves more slowly through the early Koch years and accelerates the narrative pace during DeBlasio Administration. It’s the opposite of how history is usually recounted – with the past receding and the present in the forefront. As a result, the beginning of the book is a rewarding slog, and the end of the book feels rushed and less detailed. There is a great deal about David Rockefeller (Chase) and Walter Wriston (Citi), but nothing about Jamie Dimon (Chase) and Dick Parsons (Citi) (another one of my heroes). That, notwithstanding, Dyja provides the most telling analysis of the eight years of DeBlasio’s mayoralty of which I am aware; which is impressive, given that we’re it is only months behind us. While I was a middling official in City government during DeBlasio’s last four years, I wasn’t sure of what was hitting me. I was a believer in DeBlasio’s attempts to improve the situation of the city’s worst well off, but was mystified by the chaos, lack of direction and just plain bad decision making that seemed to be trickling down from above. Dyja sympathetically explains DeBlasio’s lack of managerial skills, diffidence and indecisiveness.  

Typical of the kind of small inaccuracies that creep into daily journalism, I was counsel to all three BIDs. Taken by the Times at a City Council hearing in 1996.

The book made me long for the New York of my youth. Not because the era was more fun or interesting, but because City government during the 80’s effectively implemented policies that made a difference – and the Mayor and Deputy Mayors (like Ken Lipper, Nat Leventhal and John Zuccotti) backing up risked taking innovative managers like Gordon Davis at Parks and Paul Crotty at Housing. What we are now left with is a sclerotic, risk averse local government that is strangled by its outdated, dysfunctional personnel, legal and contracting procedures. What we have inherited is ineffectual public administration by press release. I was privileged to be a part of the private sector effectiveness of New York’s largest business improvement districts, which Dyja also focuses on (although, in a small detail that perhaps only matters to me, he glancingly misses why Rudy Giuliani had Dan Biederman and me fired from Grand Central Partnership). So, I don’t really have much to complain about on that score.

The book’s epigraph is a quote from the wonderful and underappreciated Whyte, whom I also knew and tremendously admired. Whyte was the father or godfather of Bryant Park. Perhaps Dyja’s recognition of Holly, whom he cites through out the book, and Richard Rein’s revelatory recent biography, will give Holly his day. As Deja makes clear, Holly Whyte has given us the tools to create create great urban places. I, for one, will ever be grateful to Dyja for his superhuman research and telling this story with so much elan and passion. I’m assigning New York, New York, New York to my children, who take a safe and vibrant New York City for granted, so that they can get something of a feel for what Dad was doing while they were growing up. 

THAT’S ALL RIGHT, YOU CAN HAVE HIM – LOS ANGELES

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The Grand Center, LA

Gustuvo Dudamel has never done much for me. I’m actually more a fan of his avatar played by Gael García Bernal in the TV series “Mozart in the Jungle” (which, admittedly takes place in NYC). I’ve also long thought that the Los Angeles Philharmonic is at best a second rate band, which is remarkable because it’s recent conductors have included top shelfers Simon Rattle and Esa-Pekka Salonen (not to mention the storied Carlo Maria Guilini in the more distant past) and its managers have been industry legends Ernest Fleischman and Deborah Borda. Why are those people so well-recognized when the orchestra has never been better than pedestrian?

We were in LA for Du Yun’s “Our Daughter’s Eyes” presented at REDCAT by Beth Morrison Projects and the LA Opera. We also took in Fidelio at the Philharmonic while we were there. I will tread lightly about the LA Phil, as the house professional critic has written about both for the Wall Street Journal. It was also interesting to be in Disney Hall after recently experiencing its acoustic doppelganger in Kansas City. While we were settling in to seats about three quarters of the way back in the hall, the bassoonist was warming up on stage and sounded like he was sitting in our laps. But once the performance started it seemed really far away. Not that the orchestra offers much to hear. The strings of the LA Phil can be accurately described as scrappy for a supposedly world class band, and the ensemble was almost disorganized. Maybe because of Gustavo’s jetting around (he’s also the cappo di cappo at the Paris Opera) rehearsal time may have at a premium for a complicated production, but that seems unlikely given the show’s high profile. 

Gustavo Dudamel - YouTube
This photo of Maestro Dudamel appears several stories high on the facade of Disney Hall.

The New York critical fraternity spent a good deal of time this spring panting for Dudamel to replace the unsuccessful Jaap van Zweden at the New York Philharmonic after van Sweden’s contract comes to an ignominious close next year. Dudamel spent two weeks with the NY orchestra in March playing Schumann, and the New York press went into a frenzy. OK, the guy has terrific hair, a gleaming smile and an interesting life story. But, to these ears, he just isn’t that interesting a musician. In any event, my money is on the exciting Finn, Susanna Mälkki taking the reins at the NYP (you read it here first). 

The show’s raison d’être was the involvement of deaf actors doubling the singers and the involvement of a signing chorus from Dudamel’s home of Venezuela. The musical aspects of the evening were disappointing from top to bottom, except for the fine performance of Ryan Speedo Green, who this year has become the Met’s reliable all round utility bass. Dudamel pushed the band to break-neck speed, at which they were incapable of playing beautifully. Once upon a time, the LA Phil was known as an outstanding group of LA studio musicians, moonlighting as classical players. Now, as a full-time orchestra with a 52 week contract, they aren’t even that. I’d rather watch reruns of MITJ. 

I would be remiss not to crab about how Disney Hall doesn’t relate to the street and is anti-urban. I will also please my readers by avoiding the opportunity to once again crab about Pershing Square which continues to suck.

A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term, about 1632–33, Nicolas Poussin, oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Bought, 1826. Image © The National Gallery, London
A Bacchanalian Revel before a Term, about 1632–33, Nicolas Poussin, oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London. Bought, 1826. Image © The National Gallery, London.

But here is the headline – Downtown LA has become almost walkable over the course of the pandemic. Across the street from the loathed (by me) Disney Hall, Gehry has designed a nearly completed massive mixed-use development (1.2 million sq ft, 500 apartments, 20% affordable) that DOES relate well to the street and is massed in a fascinating manner that breaks up its bulk. The building is broken up into two towers of offsetting rectangular forms that humanize it’s scale. It’s mixed uses, including a good deal of street level retail, should seriously animate that stretch of Grand. A hearty bravo to Mr. Greenburg and his patrons at Related. There is lots of other residential development activity that has been recently completed within walking distance. 

I chose not to rent a car for the first time in a trip to La La Land. We took Ubers from Manhattan Beach to Downtown, as well as round trip to The Getty Center from our downtown hotel. All three trips were shit shows. I just can’t understand how Angelenos can put up with it. The trip back from Malibu to DTLA was almost two hours. The Getty Center is magnificent – and its public spaces are uplifting (which is surprising given the extensive use of hardscape. Water features and movable chairs and table soften the experience. The special exhibit of Poussin we visited was lavishly presented. While it goes without saying, it is good to have unlimited money.). But how am I ever going to go there again unless I sleep over or take a helicopter. 

The rest of the visit we walked around downtown. We breakfasted at Grand Central Market and walked along Broadway in historic DTLA. Broadway has made only some progress since the onset of the pandemic. It’s still more than a little rough around the edges. Yes, there is considerable loft conversion, and lots of interesting architecture. The many former movie palaces convey a sense of what tinsel town once was. However, there are still many, many empty, or underutilized, poorly maintained architecturally significant structures. The potential is tremendous. 

By contrast, the Arts District near downtown appears to be a happening place (who knew that LA had an arts district?). The neighborhood is small, and the amount of adaptive reuse is patchy, but apartments are being developed there and there are some cool other uses. We had an excellent meal at a rooftop restaurant, with a rather obscurely marked door at street level. The place (La Cha Cha Cha) was large, entirely outdoors, comfortable and landscaped with cacti. Next door was a club ominously named Death & Co. that we were assured was super cool and had great drinks. The neighborhood was walking distance from downtown. 

I should note that, yes, downtown Los Angeles has a noticeable homeless population, like many other American cities. There are interesting signs around downtown designating special enforcement zones, prohibiting camping and sleeping on the sidewalk. I can’t say the issue appears to be worse than other big U.S. cities or that we ever felt overwhelmed or unsafe. I suppose this has become something of the new urban normal. But by no means did we feel that DTLA was apocalyptic or a set for a new installment of Bladerunner (as I have argued elsewhere, this is a problem that is not principally about housing and is solvable if the political will and data driven social services can be mustered). 

A view down Grand Avenue. The Broad is on the left.

Downtown is brimming with newly built and converted residential developments. The streets still aren’t very active, but the plazas at 1 and 2 Cal have water features, retail, movable chairs and tables and lots of potential. Grand Avenue now has an attractive string of cultural institutions (including Disney Hall, the newish Broad Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art and the expanding Colburn School facilities), even if nobody appears to much walk between them. You can have a pleasant walk from the towers of Bunker Hill through the Civic Center, El Pueblo de Los Angeles, Little Tokyo through China Town. On my first trip to LA in about 1976, Olvera Street in the Pueblo was regarded as a tourist trap. Today it is rather charming. We had lunch at El Paseo (which has been there for decades) and the other diners were wearing Dodger regalia and appeared not to be tourists but locals pre-gaming (it was opening day, albeit not for five hours). 

A note to Christopher Hawthorne, LA’s Chief Design Officer (and the Time’s former architecture critic): how about paying some attention to the landscaping in the area around City Hall? There are decrepit planters and garden beds among the brutalist 60’s municipal buildings. The plazas are strewn with trash and poorly maintained. I’m sure the Mayor, being a serious Angeleno, never gets out of his car when going between municipal structures, but if LA is serious about design, it really ought to start with its front yard.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, as we lawyers say, DTLA is actually getting to be walkable. Who have thunk it. Joel Kotkin must be shocked. Between the cultural institutions, the street level retail, the varied neighborhood offerings and the improved landscaping, someone might actually live downtown and rarely need access to their car (which, under the circumstances, would be advantageous). Grand Avenue is a happening place. And you can go hear Gustavo Dudamel conduct the LA Philharmonic as often as you want – which is fine with me. 

Musical Group on a Balcony. Gerritt van Honthorst. 1622. The Getty Center. A theorbo and two lutes.

ABOVE THE FRUITED PLAIN – KANSAS CITY

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After parking my car at the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts and leaving the elevator from the garage to go to Helzberg Hall to hear the Kansas City Symphony, I noticed something that I found odd. The outdoor temperature was in the mid 40’s and yet none of the men going to the concert were wearing overcoats. How could that be? It was cold. I was wearing a coat, a hat, a scarf and gloves. At intermission it dawned on me – people went from the garages in their homes in the suburbs, into their cars, to the garage at the Kauffman Center and up into the concert hall via escalator. Why would they need a coat? They never went outside to get from home to the concert. It was all very comfortably and conveniently arranged. This, in nutshell was my experience in Kansas City, Missouri. 

An entrance to an office building parking garage. Note the roll down gate, which rolls up when you put your ticket in the gate.

Kansas City defied my expectations of what successful cities are supposed to be all about. The city seems to work for most of its citizens. The downtown, while dense, has no street life. The downtown’s public spaces were deserted when I visited. There is hardly any street level retail downtown. And yet, the city, the largest in the state, has consistently grown over the years to a population of 500,000, its highest ever; in a metro of about 2.3 million. It is the country’s 31st largest city and its 26th largest metro. It has a symphony, an opera company, a ballet, a notably well funded public library and an important art museum (the Nelson-Atkins). Unlike most other successful cities, it does not have an important university or medical center. Notwithstanding its representation in the U.S. Senate by the loathsome anti-government, Joshua Hawley, its largest employer is the Federal Government. It’s the home of Hallmark, Commerce Bank, and T-Mobile is a major employer. 

It isn’t the way an Upper West Sider would choose to live, but it appears to be very pleasant. Certainly, it is tough to make an argument that waiting for a subway, crowding into a train car and being hustled for money by someone on every ride from my apartment to Lincoln Center is a superior way of life. What’s wrong with living comfortably, prosperously and conveniently? (The Helzberg family, after whom the hall is named, by the way, sold their regional jewelry store chain twenty years ago to Berkshire Hathaway in an all stock transaction. That tells you what you need to know about the hall’s name. Mr. and Mrs. Helzberg were at the concert I attended, and I am pleased to report that they are hale and hardy.)

A typical Country Club Plaza block.

Before my first visit, I knew very little about the city. What I did know was that it is the home of Country Club Plaza, built by the legendary J.C. Nichols and considered to be, perhaps, the most visionary real estate development project in American history. Country Club Plaza is an open air shopping mall, allegedly designed in the Moorish Revival style covering 55 acres and completed in 1923. Country Club Plaza is whimsical in design and high end in its retail offerings. While it is sort of walkable, it has copious free structured parking, wide streets (more like boulevards) and narrow sidewalks. It is echt Kansas City – in that it is a shopping experience not in the downtown, designed to be driven to. The architecture and landscaping (with many fountains) is however completely entertaining. Unfortunately, COVID has had a seriously deleterious impact on its retail leasing. It appeared to me about 15% of the storefronts were vacant. I was told that the stores that closed were the international high end brands. The stores that remain are familiar national high middle market chains.

Downtown Kansas City has dozens of blocks of office towers, ranging from art deco to glass and steel. There are block after block of high rise buildings, with little to no street level retail. It was not clear to me where office workers grab lunch. Whatever single story or less than, say, ten story structures ever existed in downtown were demolished long ago. The most high end suburbs are about a half hour drive from downtown. It appears that the city’s commercial center was designed to be driven to. You park in a garage, most conveniently in the office building in which you work, you spend your day toiling in that building, and you drive home at the end of the day. 

From 2007 to 2017, downtown residential population in Kansas City quadrupled and continues to grow. The area has grown from almost 4,000 residents in the early 2000s to nearly 30,000 as of 2017. A significant number of office towers of all vintages are empty (including, unlike in most other cities, some post war buildings) and are being converted to residential lofts. There is strong demand for downtown living – even without much street life, downtown restaurants or shopping. The appeal must be large, light spaces with views, and not having to worry about shoveling the snow or fixing the roof. 

Main Street, which traverses the downtown, has a futuristic looking streetcar, which I didn’t see many people riding. Main Street had almost no pedestrian activity on the early spring day of my trip. I visited two large downtown public spaces, one in the civic center and the other across the street from the convention center. Both were unprogrammed and entirely devoid of people. The civic center lawn featured rows of movable chairs (perhaps for an event). It is the only occasion on which I have been in a space with movable chairs with no one sitting in them. The convention center space was entirely comprised of concrete surfaces, with some very stern signs about behavior at the entrances. It was March. It was cold. But still, no people? Not one?

The Kansas City Convention Center

Same deal with other urban functions. The city has a humongous convention center, a number of downtown theaters, as well as the ten year old, Moshe Safdie designed, Kauffman Center. All of these amenities were designed to be driven to. At the Kauffman Center, I couldn’t find a major entrance to the street. Everyone appeared to enter and exit though the garage. The lobby faces a more than triple height wall of windows with an expansive view south (not of the downtown). When you look immediately down out of those windows, you see a line of parked, high end vehicles. There is no relationship between the Center and the street, and Kansas City residents seem to like it that way. 

The Kansas City Symphony pays its players for 42 weeks of service and has a budget of almost $20 million. It is in solid financial shape, with a substantial endowment, and generous annual giving (about 40% of total revenue). It plays fourteen pairs of classical concerts a year, with the balance of its season made up of pops concerts and pit band duty for the ballet and opera. Its music director for 18 years has been the avuncular Harvard and Curtis educated Michael Stern, son of legendary violinist and man of the world (and Upper West Side resident), Isaac Stern. The orchestra plays in a 1,600 seat hall with “vineyard seating,” much like Disney Hall in Los Angeles, and, indeed, shared Disney’s acoustician.  The stage juts out into the auditorium, and the seats are steeply raked – from the front of the stage to the back of the hall is apparently less than 100 feet. The audience member certainly feels like he or she is in on the action. The sound of the orchestra in the space is forward and bright – not necessarily ideal for this group of talented and rambunctious young players. The program I heard included This Midnight Hour by British composer Anna Clyne as well as two crowd pleasers, Debussy’s La Mer and the Brahms Violin Concerto, with Midori as soloist. 

Music director Stern projects the affect of a regular guy. To my effete eye, his jacket and trousers didn’t match, and the jacket most obviously didn’t fit properly. Some (many) might find that endearing. He also wore a yellow tie and started the concert with a few appropriate words and the Ukrainian national Anthem. The Clyne piece was an atmospheric curtain raiser based on two poems, by Juan Ramón Jiménez and Charles Baudelaire, which were printed in the program. The most effective moment of the work featured two mournful antiphonal trumpets on either side of the stage. Stern conducted the Debussy from an obviously well-used study score, with yellowed-brittle pages, some of them ragged. This is one of the most difficult pieces in the orchestral repertoire to get right. There are temptations galore for the brass (particularly trombone and tuba) to go for the gold, which are best avoided. The piece depicts the restless churning of ocean water and the constant rhythm of surf, with an overlay of a broad range of orchestral colors. It demands restraint and subtlety, as I heard last fall in San Francisco under Esa-Pekka Salonen. The KCS caught the bright colors and pounding rhythms (but, as Richard Strauss once said, “Schauen Sie sich niemals die Posaunen an, es ermutigt sie nur”).  

I haven’t heard Midori play in decades. She has long been one of the most popular and acclaimed artists in the classical music world, and while there were surprisingly quite a few empty seats in Helzberg Hall (given the soloist’s popularity and celebrity), Midori delivered. This is one of the two or three most played violin concertos, and Midori must have been called on to perform it in public hundreds of times during her career – but her performance was fresh, committed and perfectly beautiful – in the best sense. The more classical sized orchestra (read: no trombones) provided a supportive accompaniment. The concert was enjoyable experience.

The orchestra must be something of a way station for orchestral musicians on the way up, as a number of the principal chairs were open, and most of its members appeared to be early in their careers. The concertmistress was a visitor from Dallas, trying out for the position. That the country’s 31st largest city sports an orchestra of this quality, speaks (generally unspoken) volumes about classical music and culture in this country. I would guess that the Staatskapelle Halle (founded in 1852) in Halle, Germany (it’s 31st largest largest city), doesn’t play nearly at this level. 

There was one black player in the orchestra, and I only noticed one black attendee at the concert. The city is 30 percent black and 10 percent Hispanic. I had a very nice chat with the black woman who runs the city’s visitor’s center, who was upbeat about issues of diversity in the metro. I was, therefore, unable to get a sense of the reality of life for people of color and lower income folks in Kansas City, so my observations are presented with that caveat.

The place where I tried Kansas City BBQ in Country Club Plaza (which was recommended to me by the staff at the terrific nearby Raphael Hotel) wasn’t quite up to the standard of the BBQ at St. Louis’ Pappy’s. I found the pork and beef tips dry (I did think the potato salad was outstanding). But Pappy’s, in my book, is the ne plus ultra of BBQ.

I drew from my trip a broad lesson about the divisions in our national politics. [Missouri is a red state, while Kansas City, like St. Louis, is something of a blue stronghold within that conservative culture. Interestingly, the folks who live on the Kansas side of the state border within the metro, I was told, tend to be even more liberal and Democratic than the rest of the area. That border isn’t one of the two large rivers (Missouri and Kansas Rivers) that runs through the region. I couldn’t figure out where it was.]. Many Americans like to drive. They like houses with yards. They prefer a short commute. They like to shop and eat at national chains (most Americans don’t remember what a crap shoot eating on the road was before the standardization of chains. I remember some pretty terrible food when traveling as a kid. Howard Johnson’s was a reliable oasis.), and to have convenient parking for their shopping (as for their working). It is unsurprising if they feel judged and treated disrespectfully by those of us on the coasts (all three of them), who think cities should be walkable, people should ride bikes and take transit, and that restaurants should be local and vegan. [And alienating, grandiose, high volume lectures about the imminent threat of climate change caused by a car-based life style don’t win any friends or influence any people, no matter how urgent and important the issue may be.] Kansas City works – and while it doesn’t feature most of my personal touchstones for a successful downtown – it would be outrageous for me to be judgmental or make recommendations for improvement based on my experiences, since many people there obviously enjoy how they have chosen to live and the city’s economy seems to be prospering. We coastal elites need to get with the program on that or we are going to be seeing a lot more of Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, whose political success is drawn from channeling such resentment. And, next time I go to hear the KCS in March, I’m going to leave my coat in my hotel room. 

AN EXCELLENT POINT: JOY IN PITTSBURGH

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It is a surprising thought, but the past has actually been very good to Pittsburgh, leaving it with both an excellent architectural and institutional infrastructure.  The downtown, at the juncture of, and surrounded by, the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers, is crammed with great examples of early skyscrapers, art deco office buildings and even distinctive 1980’s glass and steel towers. On a recent very cold mid-winter weekday afternoon there was a fair amount of pedestrian activity in the downtown – and a few dozen hearty skaters taking advantage of the rink in PPG Place (Johnson/Burgee, 1984). Pittsburgh, with a current population of about 300,000, has the amenities of a much larger city, with two large universities and the center of a huge regional health care system (metro population of 2,400,000, 20th in size in the U.S.). At its maximum, the city’s population was almost 700,000, the 12th largest in the US. Today it is the 66th largest). The legacies of the Frick, Heinz, Mellon and Carnegie fortunes, in terms of both private philanthropy and cultural institutions are evident. The Carnegie Art and Natural History Museum has important collections, and the Symphony is one of the country’s historic important orchestras (although never considered one of the “Big Five”).

One of the things that appears to make Pittsburgh’s success as a city is a relatively unified and enlightened civic leadership. Of course, a “power elite” can be an opaque and anti-democratic force, exclusive of historically disempowered communities. Pittsburgh’s population is over 20% African American, and its black community has been legendary for creating its own independent culture – importantly chronicled by one of America’s most gifted playwrights August Wilson. The Pittsburgh Courier was a Black newspaper of national significance, publishing from 1907 – 1966. That progressive elite leadership continues in the form of the The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, which, among other things, is a major Downtown property owner. I note with pleasure that Don Carter, a Pittsburgh architect and urban planner, sits on the Trust’s board. Don is one of the most thoughtful and articulate people I know in the field. He is a tremendous resource for the city. Also to be noted, is that Richard Florida was a member of the community when he taught at Carnegie Mellon for eighteen years.

Walking around the downtown, even in subfreezing weather, is a pleasure – with its great store of architectural gems, quite a few of which have been, or are the process of being converted into residential structures. One loft conversion advertises in its windows that units are available in the “800s.” By any measure the downtown seems to be a success – even without major shopping offerings (the 1.2 million square foot former Kauffman’s department store closed in 2015 and looks to be largely empty). Downtown Pittsburgh has a “gap-toothed” quality and lacks a critical mass of street level activity. This is something that the Trust might focus on among its holdings on Penn Avenue, including a major undeveloped parcel at 8th, now used for parking.

By contrast, The Strip District, north of downtown, does have that critical mass of activity that has developed organically. At 10 PM on a Saturday night with temperatures in the teens, local bars were jammed, and parking lots were full. The Strip was historically the wholesale food market for the region. It continues to have a diverse array of food offerings, many of them of ethnic character. Former commercial buildings have been adaptively reused for both commercial and residential purposes. We had lunch in a second floor food court that included both beer and wine bars with wide selections. Residential developments were scattered among more commercial uses, with a feel something like Long Island City, without any high rise development. A good deal of the land is devoted to parking lots and garages. Even so, Penn and Liberty Avenue feel like they prioritize pedestrians. Downtown needs exactly more of that feel.

The cultural district to the south of The Strip has its own presence and potential – while not yet quite as active at street level. The Pittsburgh symphony plays in a former movie and vaudeville house in the cultural district, part of the downtown. The Heinz concert hall is surrounded by places to eat and drink. It seats about 2,700, with a very large mezzanine, feels huge and has a neutral acoustic. The performance I attended was about two thirds sold to a very engaged and enthusiastic audience, including a great many young people (although the only person of color I noticed was an orchestral flute player). Unfortunately, the orchestra’s press staff chose to seat me in the fifth row on the side, which was far to close to the orchestra given the size of the hall and the program for an optimal sonic experience. The ensemble is led by Austrian maestro Manfed Honeck, whose recordings with the PSO have been widely praised in the press.

The program began with a chestnut, The William Tell Overture (for those of a certain age, the source of the theme from The Lone Ranger) by Rossini and concluded with the Strauss showpiece, Ein Heldenleben. While the Tell Overture was once a pops staple, the opera itself is something of rarity, because despite some wonderful music and a dramatic story, it feels endless. The high ranging tenor part is also difficult to cast. In between, the Orchestra presented the world premier of a Concerto for two bassoons and two clarinets, by composer, Juilliard dean and Serkin family scion, David Ludwig. The lively, shortish concerto was a virtuosic showpiece for members of the of the orchestra and could become a popular curtain raiser for orchestras with players with the chops for the solo parts. The concerto is made up of eight short movements named for renaissance dances (familiar to lutenists. The balances between the more penetrating sound of the clarinets and the muted bassoons, were difficult to maintain, but the piece was skillfully composed for both soloists and orchestra and was clever and entirely entertaining. In remarks before the performance Ludwig noted that he had tried to write a joyful piece. He succeeded. Joy is right now at a premium and is certainly much appreciated. I also heard a new work by the Pittsburgh Opera, while I was in town, but that is not my department (Heidi’s review can be found here: https://wordpress.com/posts/andymanshel.nyc, The performance was at the Bitz Opera Factory, an adaptive reuse of a commercial structure in The Str. It is significant and worth noting that two local musical organizations presented the debut of new works in the same weekend (both by New York City based composers).

The Orchestra is the equal of any major American ensemble. All of the sections were equally strong, with no apparent weak links. Honeck left the setting of tempi and balances to rehearsals and focused his performance efforts on phrasing and articulation, which were clean and superlative. The Rossini was appropriately very fast in the prestissimo, beginning with a beautifully played cello solo, by associate principal David Premo (marked Andante). The required rush of blood was induced by the performance.

There is also a rather Alpine feel to Strauss’ Op. 40, which has one of my favorite Strauss themes in the horns (at marking 74 in the score), beautifully played by the Pittsburgh brass. Also extraordinarily beautifully played were the violin solos by guest concertmaster, soloist and chamber player, Daniel Chong (the concertmaster position in Pittsburgh is open). The orchestra’s of performance of Ein Heldenleben was balanced, controlled and splendidly executed. It’s extraordinary that America has two great orchestras based within 130 miles of each other (the other being Cleveland), a legacy of the region’s mighty industrial past.

Pittsburgh has skillfully transformed itself from a metropolitan area of dying, environmentally degrading heavy industries (glass, coke, steel) to one of the country’s most livable metros. The legacy of those industrial giants has been leveraged to sustain major social and cultural institutions. The transition has been a great success. The city is now known for advanced manufacturing, healthcare, energy, financial and business services, and information technology. Legacy companies maintaining a presence in Pittsburgh include U.S. Steel, Alcoa, PPG, H.J. Heinz and BNY/Mellon.

The city needs to bring a little of the density of activity of the Strip District to the downtown. Market square is a fine example. It is adjacent to PPG Place but doesn’t relate to it well. On a cold winter day, while the skaters animated PPG Place; Market Square, with a number of active restaurants facing it, seemed deserted. There is a market and a night market in the square from May through October. Perhaps the season for the markets, particularly for the night market need to be extended. The square ought to have movable chairs and tables – yes, even in the winter. Similarly, Mellon square has been completely abandoned for the winter months – being roped off (although it sports a few desultory chairs). The local Conservancy has posted a sign saying it has thrown in the towel on keeping the space safe to use in the off-season. As I’ve noted in the past, I’m wary of flying into town for an overnight trip and making judgements on local decisions, but in my book closing off a major downtown public space is a bad business. My thought is that the resources ought to be found to program and maintain Mellon Square year-round.

I also noticed a number of interesting lighting features around the cultural district. Here is another example of why critical mass is so important. On their own they have very little impact. A more extensive program of light features that are within view of each other can make an important contribution to animating public space during the long, dark periods of winter. There need to be more of them!

Also remarkable are the narrow streets, like Fourth Avenue, with a wonderful array of architecturally significant structures, many converted or in the process of being converted to housing. Those structures, built as headquarters for financial institutions, were not designed to host first floor retail activity, so, much like the office canyons of Downtown Manhattan, they will be problematic to animate. This presents a issue for the perception of safety and quality of life downtown.

Similarly, while there are many beautiful and interesting buildings downtown, there are also a great many generic taxpayers, with either empty or obsolete retail uses. This, perhaps, is where the Cultural Trust can play a major role in continuing to build a critical mass of lively ground floor uses in the cultural district, like Vine Street down the river in Cincinnati, which then might spread more widely around downtown. Frankly, downtown needs more to attract more shoppers. The street level Phillip Injeian Violin shop is the kind of funky use that needs encouragement to flourish. Even with its two dozen or so modern office towers scattered throughout the downtown (notably, the US Steel Tower [Harrison, Abramowitz, 1988]) Pittsburgh has the potential for a truly twenty-four-hour mixed-use downtown. Those towers, while breaking up the continuity of the street wall, provide a density of potential shoppers, eaters and drinkers that could be essential to retail success.

Pittsburgh’s evolution, taking advantage of the wave of urban revitalization of the last two decades is gratifying. It has built on its legacy institutions to compensate for the loss of manufacturing jobs, to become a 21st century city. It is a great American success story that needs to be more widely recognized in a time when the public sphere is dominated by news of failure, decline and self-recrimination. My contention is that the U.S. doesn’t have a housing “crisis.” It needs more great places – and Pittsburgh is shining example of what that looks like. As recognized by composer Ludwig, we need more joy, and Pittsburgh, like its symphony, delivers it.  The beauty part is that there is room for Pittsburgh to grow (its metro once had 400,000 more residents) and continue to expand its appeal.