Rich Mintz  

Urban walkability is a chicken-and-egg problem. In many cities, municipalities and businesses don’t invest in relatively cheap promoters of pleasant walkability (better sidewalks, street furniture, pedestrian-oriented displays — nevermind things like zoning changes and parking reconfiguration that require political will) because there’s a perception that “nobody walks.” And people are disinclined to walk because there’s a perception that “walking is unpleasant.”

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

“A funny thing happened on the way to the Cheesecake Factory,” writes Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, about the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles. “The economic collapse has also managed to freeze downtown’s transformation from sleepy to energized — and freeze it at a particularly appealing spot.”

Like most positive assessments of LA’s urban scene throughout my life (including some that have come out of my own mouth over the years), this one seems like it’s reaching a bit — in particular, I don’t think the spaces among all those downtown microneighborhoods are so “easily [navigable] on foot or on a bike” — but the fundamental point he’s making is right on:

Gentrification has decelerated in several parts of downtown into a kind of limbo, leaving them sufficiently changed to feel newly vital but not enough to seem overexposed. At the same time, plummeting housing prices and the conversion of several ill-fated condo projects into rental buildings means not only that the area is continuing to attract new residents but also that it may see a more compelling mixture of people — more teachers and designers, fewer real-estate speculators — than it did when forgettable two-bedroom units were selling for $800,000.

Something similar is happening in New York. Nevermind the neighborhoods that shouldn’t have been gentrifying at all, and wouldn’t have been if the market hadn’t gone crazy. Whole desirable swaths of the city — including parts of Manhattan, like the Financial District where I live — have become living choices again for people whose means are within the range of “ordinary.” And the projects representing the worst of the excess (on the Williamsburg waterfront, and the far West Side) are mostly in trouble, and at the very least have had to ratchet back the most odious of their marketing in order to attract a broader range of clientele.

I pay more to live here than I was paying in Brooklyn — but if rents hadn’t tumbled a year ago, I wouldn’t have considered it. And there’s a much wider range of people living down here than there was two years ago — and a lot wider than a few blocks away in Tribeca, which has managed to hold its position as the most expensive neighborhood in the city.

I enjoyed my visit to downtown LA last spring, and can see the evidence of revitalization everywhere. It was exciting, given that I don’t think I ever knew a single person who lived or played downtown in the first 30 years I was alive. No one would be happier than me to see the central core continue its upswing, so I’m glad to see Hawthorne shining some light on the things that are worth paying attention to.

Lay down a Google map, take out all the streets, and what do you have? Well, my neighborhood looks something like this:

See for yourself. Via Information Aesthetics, via Chris Lysy.

Thanks to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and a passel of other inflammatory scab-pickers, the country’s been newly reminded that the World Trade Center site is still mostly a big hole in the ground. Those of us who live here, and deal daily with the dislocation of living a few blocks from a gigantic construction site, with arterial streets running along both sides and half a dozen subway lines in continuous service underneath and around it, don’t need reminding. (For the record: “yes” on the Islamic cultural center, which is six blocks from my house. Muslims were living and working in this neighborhood long before I moved in.)

There’s a piece of the project that isn’t about the World Trade tower reconstruction, isn’t about the memorial, that’s much more important than these to those of us who live down here. And that’s the Fulton Street Transit Center construction, which is just over halfway through its nine-year construction. It got a kick in the pants from the WTC project, and a $424-million-dollar jolt of energy from the stimulus, but we needed it in any case.

Being built mostly by Skanska USA, the Swedish construction behemoth you’ve never heard of but that dominates civil engineering projects here in New York, the project will link 13 underground train lines that currently pass through about six unconnected station complexes, serving hundreds of thousands of people a day. These train lines currently run through infrastructure that’s as old as the subway system itself, and they all have to continue running throughout the duration of the project, so this constitutes a massive project from the standpoint of both capital investment and logistics.

We see the logistics everywhere in Lower Manhattan, where we’re constantly detouring around construction equipment, Skanska employees, and Jersey barriers on the sidewalk and in the street. Fulton Street has been torn up, for this and other projects, the entire time I’ve been living in New York. (DeLury Park opens next month!) But the project is sorely needed, and those of us living and working down here are trying to be patient. When it’s done, we’ll have a shiny new station and vastly improved transit usability down here in Manhattan’s original dense urban neighborhood.

You know the movie Freaky Friday? With Jodie Foster and John Astin and Barbara Harris and Dick Van Patten and a passel of other B-listers from the 60s and 70s? (I’m talking about the real Freaky Friday (1976), not the superfluous remake with Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan.)

Well, here’s a fun fact: the baseball game near the end of the movie was filmed in Encino Park, across from my elementary school — on the very same baseball diamond where we once played a “students vs. teachers” softball game when I was in the sixth grade — which was, incidentally, right about the same time the movie was made. In fact, if you squint, in one scene you can see my school across the street.

View Larger Map

Also filmed in and around Encino Park: parts of Where Have All the People Gone (1974), an unjustly forgotten low-rent sci-fi flick.

Incidentally, while Googling for that, I found this gem (click for more), courtesy of Encino realtors Marsia and Eugene Powers:

I’ve been in Penn Station, what, a hundred times by now? Two hundred? And yet when the train from Boston pulled in tonight, and I hustled onto the platform and up the nearest stairway, I ended up in some subterranean hole I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. It constantly amazes me how Byzantine everything in New York is. (Even after more than eight months living right on top of it, I still sometimes get disoriented inside of Fulton Street station.)

So I walked down a short corridor filled with Long Islanders and their Long Island ways, followed a cryptic sign reading “C-E Downtown Street” up an unpromising-looking back stairway, and there I was standing in front of a subway turnstile as the downtown-bound E pulled in. What luck! Not only that, I’m at the front of the train, at the closest exit to my house.

I’m guessing I was on some mid-level north-south cross-corridor on the Eighth Avenue side, somewhere near the 31st Street corner. But God knows I’ll never find it again. Maybe next time, it won’t even be there anymore.

And while we’re on the subject, transit in Boston — which, let’s face it, was already pretty good when I lived here 25 years ago — has continued to get better. I’m prompted to say this by the experience of being on an Amtrak train originating at South Station and picking up a big mob of new passengers 5 minutes later at Back Bay. It sounds like a small thing, but it isn’t — Boston distributes its morning train dropoffs and afternoon pickups among two downtown stations, not one, reducing the crowds at each place and putting people closer to their final destinations, in a context in which each block of walking saved translates into some modelable incremental number of passengers willing to leave their cars at home.

I also marvel at the Silver Line, which seems to be some sort of magical underground BRT that whisks people from the airport into the CBD. I know it isn’t fair to expect New York to be the best at everything, but jeez, we already have the infrastructure — would it have been that hard to run a train from Penn Station right into JFK? (No, Jamaica doesn’t count. I put up with it, have even learned to like it, but it’s not the same.)

And, on a more mundane note, the trolley buses with the overhead wires are still pulling into the underground bays at Harvard Square station that were (re-)built almost 30 years ago, still tying the near northern and near western suburbs right into the central city’s transit network more tightly than any diesel bus ever could.

In New York, we have our own innovations on their way — BRT coming to my beloved M15 on 1st and 2nd Avenues next year, the 34th Street transit mall, the very successful Broadway road diet at Madison and Herald and Times Squares — but I’m still always impressed with Boston, which seems to pack an incredible amount of livability into a relatively small number of square miles.

Train station announcers have almost gone the way of the dodo (come to think of it, among people younger than about 40, that expression has gone the way of the dodo), but there are a few left. I particularly enjoy the voice of New York Penn Station’s morning announcer (a woman), whose voice is as distinctive as that of the White Zone Is For Loading and Unloading Only Lady (who is also the Welcome to Washington National Airport Lady, the Your Bags Are Subject to Inspection Lady, and a dozen other things — whom I seem to remember identified by name in a news article a few years back). She (Penn Station Lady, not Airport Lady) is a familiar “welcome home” after a long journey, or an encouraging “safe travels!” at the start of one.

I’ve also taken notice of one particular voice at Newark Penn Station (male, with obvious Philadelphia-area origins) and one at Philadelphia. These are all live people, calling train arrivals and departures in real time, and let’s hope they’re paid well and have good union job security, as they’re as much part of the journey as the Amtrak logo or the hot underground platform.

But what of Boston, where (unless I am grievously mistaken) trains are being called in South Station by a synthesized voice, a highly advanced robot with almost-but-not-quite-human cadence and a credible-but-not-perfect American accent? This can’t be good for the future of humanity, can it?

On that note, iOS just spell-corrected “humanity” (or a close approximation thereof) to “inanity.”. Oh, the inanity!

… I’ve just been busy. Right this minute I’m in South Station heading home from Boston, and I promise to resume my normal frequency of updates Real Soon Now. In the meantime, content yourselves with these fresh new photos of the inside of South Station, a healthy, interesting, sunlit indoor public space if ever there was one. There’s even an octagonal bookshop with browsing shelves on the outside!

Yes, Kerri, I am an Amazon addict. I can’t stop! It’s too easy to see a book that looks interesting and, you know, just CLICK and wait 36 hours and have it land in my lap. So sue me.

In theory I get around to reading all these; in practice, I read the ones that look interesting and accumulate the others until the next winnowing. But at least I got to touch them and look at them. That’s something, isn’t it?

Today’s arrival, which someone from one of the many urbanism lists I’m on recommended: My Kind of Transit: Rethinking Public Transportation in America, by Darrin Nordahl.