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This got me into a little trouble yesterday, as it made me very late for a breakfast meeting, but it was pretty cool nonetheless. On my way up the Pulaski Bridge (which connects Brooklyn and Queens) I heard a loud horn blowing, saw the gates going down, and realized I was going to see the bridge open for the first time. It took a long time. The bridge took about five minutes to open fully, then the ship going underneath -- some sort of square barge thing with four enormous vertical pipes sticking up from it -- moved through very slowly, and then the bridge slowly closed, and (not visible in the video) jiggled back and forth in slow motion, one side raising, the facing side lowering, until the two sides were properly meshed together and the bridge closed. So I spent a good 20 minutes watching this, along with a few dozen other morning commuters, pedestrians and bicyclists, and learned a little bit about (one small sample of) the Williamsburg/Greenpoint community. Most of the people waiting were what I'd describe as "hipsters" -- white, younger than me, dressed in fashionable clothes -- or people whose first language was not English. I made a humorous remark at one point, and felt like a fool because no one even responded. Then I realized that everyone standing within earshot either had earbuds in their ears, or likely didn't speak English well enough to understand what I'd said and why it was funny. For the entire period, everyone pretty much stood there in silence. I didn't feel old, but I did feel bad for all these people who were so militantly resistant to a pretty wonderful opportunity for a NYC community moment. Tags: nyc, photos
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I'm mentioned in a New York Times article today, thanks to some consulting work I'm doing on the next edition of The AIA Guide To New York City, a book I own four copies of, one of each edition. A friend of mine and musician in the local roots scene, Fran Leadon, is co-authoring the guide with Norval White, one of the deans of NYC architecture. I built them the content management system they're using to work on the text and the many accompanying photographs ( You can read a bit more about that on my web site) and a few weeks ago I volunteered to drive the two of them around Brooklyn to see all the new buildings. It was a testament on many levels to why I love New York City. Norval has an astounding memory, with a historical anecdote about almost any block in New York (at one point he took us a few blocks out of our way in Crown Heights to see a lovely little church tucked away on what seemed like just another residential block), and seeing the city with him is to see it entirely differently. Beyond that, New York City makes for wonderful random connections, like meeting a world-famous architect by virtue of the fact that I play bluegrass with a guy who is an architecture professor, and I love it. Fran and I have actually been in the Times before, but via music rather than architecture. I guess it's a twist on the old cliché: talking about architecture can come from playing music. Tags: nyc
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I rode over the Brooklyn Bridge and met ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mary_wroth, her friend Jon, and his cousin, to see David Byrne's installation, Playing The Building, down at the old Battery Maritime Building. This is the beautiful old ferry terminal, just north of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, that was abandoned for decades and is now finally being restored. The new Governor's Island ferry (which allows BIKES!) now runs from there. Byrne's installation is a lone organ sitting in the midst of a huge room, with wires running from the organ to every corner of the room. As you play keys on the organ, hammers hit pillars, air rushes through pipes, and motors vibrate the structure, and you are literally "playing the building." I didn't actually play, since the line was long and it was more fun to wander around the room and be surrounded by the noises. Even on a sunny Friday afternoon, it's thoroughly spooky, especially since you enter and leave through the deserted entrance hall to one of the ferry slps. It's a fascinating installation in a wonderful old building and I think I'll be going back. More photosTags: nyc, photos
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As someone who's been riding the subways for more than 30 years, and commuting on them for about 20 years, I've been asking myself recently, "Did the subways always collapse completely every time it rains?" I don't remember the magnitude of disruption that we've seen today, or several times this year, happening very often if at all years ago. This morning, every single line in the city ( great screen shot of the MTA's site, courtesy nyhamsterhouse) was disrupted by an intense, but not unprecedented storm. Newsday is reporting that 1.5" rain was falling per hour overnight (from the National Weather Service). And the entire subway system is flooded out and not working. So I spent some time this morning searching back through the New York Times archives, and I found that my memory is accurate. System-wide disruptions caused by rain are much more frequent, and more severe, than they used to be. Storms like today's and worse have happened in the past with much less effect. ( It didn't used to be like this! )Tags: nyc, politics, subways
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This fascinating book is a new examination of the earliest days of New York City, focusing on its days as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. While most NYC histories brush past this period pretty quickly, Shorto makes a convincing case that the Dutch origins of New York are responsible for its unique place in the country now and in fact for much of the modern American character. The flag of the City of New York got its colors from the seventeenth-century Dutch flag, and the influence goes much deeper than that. The story of New York's founding and commercial origins has been told many times, but I've never read anything with as much detail and thought given to how the Dutch era influenced the political character of the city and of America. ( Like a great natural pier ready to receive the commerce of the world... )This is a great story, and one that simply hasn't been told well enough. Gotham brushes past van der Donck in a single paragraph, referring to him as the "suave young" "ringleader," and The Epic Of New York City covers the entire affair in two pages (55-56). Shorto's argument that van der Donck represents the Dutch character that would later inform America is well put and well-supported by his careful reading of documents most other historians seem to have ignored. His belief that Holland's tradition of welcoming refugees would allow Manhattan to grow exponentially, his love for what would become New York, and his fiery advocacy of free expression and politicaly diversity make him indeed worthy of being called the first New Yorker. In the final chapter, Shorto looks at the traditional historical view, of thirteen English colonies, and judges it an inaccurate history written by the winners. The Dutch colony covered parts of five of the original thirteen states, and after the takeover, the Dutch did not leave. Dutch legal traditions heavily influenced the New York City charter granted by James II in 1686, acknowledging that citizens of the "ancient City ... Enjoyed ... sundry Rights Libertyes privledges [and] ffranchises" that derived not only from its English rulers but from the "Governours Directors Generalls and Commanders in Chiefe of the Nether Dutch Nation." [315] While phrases like "Dutch treat" and "Dutch courage" [319] show the history of English antipathy towards their former rival, the Dutch colony "set Manhattan on course as a place of openness and free trade" [310] with the freedoms James had left intact. One has to keep in mind what an oddity the new city of New York was to people of the seventeenth century, with its variety of skin tones and languages and prayer styles coexisting side by side. The English leaders in Whitehall Palace were surely aware of this unusual characteristic of the island across the water, and they may have been confused by it, but at the same time they understood that it was part of what made the place function. [305] Tags: books, nyc
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The fourth and last part of The Death and Life Of Great American Cities discusses possible tactics to solve some of the problems she discusses. She opens by noting that city planning does not lack for tactics that are "aimed at carrying out strategic lunacies. Unfortunately, they are quite effective." [321] ( Obvious solutions and an inevitable conclusion )In the end, she finally has to concede the point she's resisted for much of the book: That the destruction of cities, and what she calls the "Great Blight" of suburban sprawl, are not the result of chance, but of deliberate malice. This misunderstanding and simplification, she says, "could hardly have ocurred, and certainly would not have been perpetuated...without great disrespect for ... cities." [435] It's the working of "an all too familiar kind of mind ... a mind seeing only disorder where a most intricate and unique order exists." [447] And she concludes with a prophetic point, which fails only in that she does not go far enough: Thirty years from now, we shall have accumulated new problems of blight and decay over acreages so immense that in comparison the present problems of the great cities' gray belts will look piddling. Nor, however destructive, is this something which happens accidentally or without the use of will. This is exactly what we, as a society, have willed to happen. Tags: books, nyc
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As the plans to build the so-called Freedom Tower get clearer, so does the fact that we're repeating the terrible mistakes we made when the World Trade Center was built originally. WHen completed in the mid-seventies, the Trade Center dumped millions of square feet of unneeded office space into an already stressed downtown real estate market, depressing it for years. The buildings would have remained largely vacant if not for the state renting almost all of one tower for government offices, adding billions to the public money already wasted on the project. It wasn't until the late 1990s that the WTC was finally rented out fully to private tenants. And this week, Pataki announced that we're going to do it again. Nobody wants to rent the Freedom Tower; it's not only unnecessary in the current market place, as the original WTC was, it's a scary place to locate your company. So, government agencies will spend millions of unnecessary dollars propping it up. On Sunday, Gov. George E. Pataki and other officials announced that federal and state agencies would be the anchor tenants in the planned Freedom Tower, occupying a million of the 2.6 million square feet, at a rate of $59 a square foot. As of last month, the average rent for office space was $35 in Lower Manhattan and $58 in Midtown, according to Newmark Knight Frank, a Manhattan real estate advisory firm. (The New York Times) And, unsurprisingly, state employees aren't too happy about locating there. "It was there in 1995 and it will be there when the Freedom Tower is completed," Pataki said of the state government, failing to mention that it was not in 1996, 1997 and through 2001, since the Trade Center had finally been rented to private tenants. ( The history we're repeating )Tags: books, nyc
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Before 9/11, I worked in the World Financial Center, directly across the street from the World Trade Center. My office windows faced the Hudson but the World Trade Center was a big part of my life -- my bank and my dentist were there, I shopped there, bought lunch there, saw concerts there and walked through it several times every day. I was very fortunate -- and have not once, ever, ever regretted -- that I was not there that Tuesday. I was still in Brooklyn driving down to our office in New Jersey, and I turned around and went home. On September 12, I took the R train to the Promenade in Brooklyn (the conductor saying, "This train will terminate at Court Street, due to police activity," as if anyone on the train didn't know what was going on), and I sat on the Promenade and tried to write down every single thing I remembered about the WTC. ( Walking home from work on Monday, September 10, 2001 (very long) )I didn't like the WTC. It was ugly and badly designed, and I would much preferred to have had the neighborhood that was destroyed for it. And I'm completely disgusted at the process that seems to be repeating the same mistakes in the same spot. But I do miss them. Tomorrow, some history. Tags: nyc
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I took the B train in to see shunn read at KGB last night, and it looks like I just missed this mess. People on my train were wrinkling their noses at the strong smell of smoke, but thankfully, I made it to the reading rather than sitting for two hours on the bridge with no air-conditioning. Bill's reading was outstanding, but we left before Elizabeth Bear read, in order to find a place to sit and some food to eat. Meanwhile, the TSA is examining facial expressions of passengers in line in order to find suspected terrorists. It's a half-assed attempt to imitate the Israeli profiling system, but rather than using highly trained law-enforcement officers, they're giving regular screeners a week's worth of training and sending them out to look for suspicious facial expressions: anger, determination, and so on. Doesn't everyone in an airport line have those expressions? I offer my own version of their ridiculous photo graphic:  Tags: nyc, stupidity
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I've posted a new song, " The Scars Of Robert Moses," my latest NYC history song. It was sparked by a conversation with Mike Ford of Moxy Fruvous last year in Toronto. It took a while to write, and the recent death of Jane Jacobs (along with my rereading of The Death and Life Of American Cities) got me thinking that I really needed to finish the song. I have a pretty big backlog of new, unrecorded songs, which I hope will be appearing in this space over the next few weeks. For those who don't know the name, Robert Moses was the man who built the majority of NYC's highways and bridges. He ran the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority like his own personal fiefdom, and the insane tolls you pay on those crossings are a direct result of his manipulation of public authority funding to create a power base independent of voter or political control. From the 1930s until the early 1970s, he was in absolute control of most public works spending in New York City and across the state, and was crucial in the creation of the national Interstate Highway system. Most importantly, he is probably the single person most responsible for suburban sprawl and the decimation of American cities, through his divergence of public funding from transit to cars, and his disastrous ideas of urban planning. ( More on Robert Moses )I grew up on Staten Island, where the building of Moses' Verrazano Bridge began a frenzy of car-oriented overdevelopment. When I was born, Staten Island had a total population of about 50,000 people, and there was a working farm where the Staten Island Mall is now. The population now is ten times that, and what was once an island of small towns and woods is now an expanse of the ugliest houses you've ever seen in your life, and roads endlessly jammed with traffic. I can't stomach the xenophobia of Islanders' anti-bridge sentiment, but if Staten Island had subways, I would have had a happier childhood, the Island would be a better place to live now, and the gorgeous old Victorian neighborhoods on the north shore would probably be booming, rather than moldering away because they're a 2½-hour trip away from Manhattan. Tags: music, nyc, songs
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Just in time for its conclusion, I've written a song about the transit strike. The song is still pertinent, though, since the issues raised by the strike aren't going to go away when service returns. I've taken some creative license but for the most part, the song is true. It came out of conversation with my family over the weekend, being bothered by the disproportionately hostile reactions to the strikers, and listening to a lot of Johnny Cash. Both the rhythm and the attitude of this song owe a great deal to The Man In Black. ( Lyrics )You can hear it, and download it for free, at www.kenficara.comTags: music, nyc, politics, songs, subways
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My grandfather worked multiple manual-labor jobs for much of his youth, and finally "made it" when he got a job for NYC Transit as a token booth clerk. He bought a house and raised his son on that salary and sent him to college, the first one in the family. His son also got a job at NYC Transit, and raised two kids on that salary, and sent both of them to college. My grandmother, widowed for more than ten years, has a house to live in and decent health care because of her husband's benefits. My father has a secure retirement because of those benefits. I have a decent job and a college education because NYC Transit paid a decent salary to my parents and grandparents. There are lots of children out there who will not be able to say any of the above. Most of their parents work for private companies or other organizations that, like my employer, have hacked away brutally at retirement and medical benefits to the point that our old age will be less comfortable than that of our parents. Those children have already lost. But the parents of some of those children are fighting right now to hold onto decent pay and decent benefits. The fact that many of us have long since given up that fight does not mean those workers are wrong, it just means that they're the last ones standing. And the fact that they're fighting for the things that my parents had, and that I benefited greatly from, means that I cannot in good conscience do anything but support them. Tags: nyc, politics, subways
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