Rich Mintz  

Thanks largely to decades of incentive zoning, Manhattan is full of privately owned, municipally owned, and institutionally owned plazas, arcades, and other types of quasi-public space. Some of these spaces are gorgeous (I’m looking at you, Elevated Acre); but many are windswept plazas with a few sad chairs, or cavernous semi-climate-controlled lobbies patrolled by wary security guards.

New Yorkers are desperate for public space, though, and even when we don’t love these places we use them intensely. One of the most frustrating things about Occupy for the other (OK, I’ll say it) 99% of us who live and work in lower Manhattan is that it effectively privatized Zuccotti Park, a surprisingly well-trafficked park, recently renovated and refreshed, occupying a tight square block in this dense neighborhood.

One of my favorite public spaces in the entire city has been open for three years, but I only discovered it recently, and since I did I’ve been back over and over. It’s the grand glass lobby of the 2009-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center. As The New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger wrote in 2009:

In terms of its configuration and the precision of its details, this is probably the most urbane lobby at Lincoln Center. It avoids the grandiosity of Philip Johnson’s space at the State Theatre and the sappy romanticism of Wallace K. Harrison’s Metropolitan Opera lobby. One wall of the new lobby is covered in muirapiranga, a Brazilian wood, set in narrow tongue-and-groove panels. There is a huge freestanding café bar made of Portuguese limestone, with one end sculpted in the form of a flying wedge. It looks like a model of a building by Zaha Hadid, but more elegant.

Because of the soaring glass curtain walls, this lobby is in effect a grand indoor plaza, feeling fully open to Broadway and to 65th Street on two sides. When you’re there on a sunny afternoon, as I was recently, the sunlight streams in. Half the room is furnished with cafe and bar tables, open to use by anyone (the lobby seems to be open to the public at all hours of the day and evening), and in the afternoon and evening, an excellent cafe/bar counter (from the school of “art institution catering,” i.e., artisanal beet salad, not hot dogs) serves reliable, interesting small plates and stocks a full range of beverages. The other half is the open entrance lobby for Alice Tully Hall, which serves as overflow cafe and sitting space during the day.

Because of my schedule I’m typically there in the late afternoon or early evening, when the daytime crowd is starting to give way to a well-dressed and usually older (depending on the evening’s program) night crowd. You get the full people-watching experience, both inside and out, something to eat, and a cheery public space with a pleasant bustle to read your email or whatever.

In “Why Don’t People Move to Opportunity,” Matt Yglesias points out that even for unemployed or underemployed people with limited job skills, the rational thing to do is to market those limited skills in a high-median-wage metro area. So why don’t they? For some, the cost of moving (both in dollar terms, and in terms of social connections left behind, which are expensive to replace in both time and money) is the deciding factor. But for others, it’s simply that “the rent is too damn high,” which is conveniently the title of Yglesias’s upcoming book.

In the general case, Yglesias will presumably argue (and I will agree) that restrictive zoning, parking requirements, and so forth, which have the side effects of artificially limiting the supply of housing in attractive precincts of central cities to much less than the market would prefer, lead to an artificial boost in the cost of living that distorts American settlement patterns, making urban living seem less attractive and popular than it actually is and leading (in a vicious circle) to a further concentration of policy and resources behind conventional suburban development patterns.

In this specific case, Yglesias will presumably argue that under the current state of affairs, the cost of living in high-wage metros is artificially elevated, but the extra money spent doesn’t benefit the polity in those communities — it’s skimmed off by rentiers who have an interest in maintaining policies that are at their foundation antisocial.

Obviously, as someone who was pushed out of California almost 20 years ago in part by Proposition 13, I agree, and I can’t wait for the book.

After 2 days in DC I have to say the central city feels more alive and healthy than I’ve ever seen it. Things are clean, infrastructure looks good, public services are visible, and more people seem to be living downtown than ever, with newish apartment buildings all over the place.

I had a conversation last week with someone that went like this — “Do you live in the District?” “Haha, who would live in the District? Services in DC are terrible!” — and all I could think was “dude, are you serious?” Or maybe his definition of “adequate public services” is different from mine. Whatever. In any case, the city looks great to me, clean and well-run, friendly to visitors, with more places to go, things to see, restaurants to try in more parts of the central city than at any time in the last generation or so.

I stayed in a hotel carved out of the 1839 General Post Office building, ate excellent barbecue, had coffee in a neighborhood that 15 years ago I avoided walking through at night, played with a terrier in an adorable pea coat, and of course enjoyed use of the bicycles maintained as a community service.

Besides, DC has the third-awesomest American city emblem, after Chicago and LA.

Thanks to the BSD DC crew for hosting — I’ll be back again soon, I’m sure.

OK, sure, I like greenmarkets as much as the next guy, but aren’t these people coming off as a little… whiny?

If you live in Southbridge Towers, not only do you have a (rundown, grungy, crowded, but serviceable) supermarket in your complex, you have Jubilee 2 blocks away, Zeytuna 3 blocks away, and a bright new Gristedes 4 blocks away, all of which are well-run and well-stocked, with lots of local and organic items. Zeytuna alone has about 100 varieties of olive oil. There’s a Whole Foods 5 minutes away by cab (and right on the M22), right near those greenmarkets they’re complaining are too far away.

I get it, farm-to-table is nice to have. But, hello, a record number of New Yorkers are on food stamps — I don’t consider “farmer’s market is 8 blocks away” a serious social problem.

This idea of building a land bridge to Governor’s Island — is it serious? Whether it’s actually a good idea or not, I’ll leave to the experts, but wouldn’t it be awesome to make some more Manhattan and connect it to a great big park?

One of the things I miss most living in the Northeast is the way Western houses are open to the outside. You can’t build that way in a place where it snows, and so much glass isn’t advisable in extreme climates of any kind, but the in moderate climate of coastal Southern California, it rarely gets too hot or too cold, and you can live with your windows and doors open pretty much all the time.

These houses make me covetous — not because Rudolph Schindler is a Famous Architect, but because I want to live in them! They aren’t very big, but I think that’s a feature, not a bug — you don’t need a huge house if you can expand into the outside whenever you like.

I’m back from a quick trip to Ottawa (I wasn’t even there 24 hours) to make a presentation at the Liberal Party biennial convention. I enjoyed the convention, or what I saw of it — believe it or not, despite my work history, I’ve never been to a political party convention in any country, and the Liberals, despite this being a time of challenge for them, are a proud, energetic party with a grand history and a promising future. I had the good fortune to meet Bob Rae, the interim leader, along with dozens of party activists, MPs, and aspiring MPs. A good time was had by all; I made the gaffe of showing up in a bright blue shirt to a party whose signature color (like every leftist party everywhere in the world except the United States) is red, but nobody seemed to mind.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t my only clothing-related gaffe; I came with only one pair of shoes, flat loafers, and realized as we were landing in a blowing snowstorm, that I’d probably made a mistake. Fortunately there was a shopping mall attached to the conference center, so I picked up a pair of low-rise wheat-colored nubuck boots. And good thing, too, because the city was awash in slush and the chill wind drove you into the puddles even when you tried to avoid them.

Cold as it was, it hasn’t been cold enough for long enough for the Rideau Canal Skateway to be open, which is too bad (although I see they opened a section of it today). But I managed to do some of the other things on my Canadian bucket list, including eat passable poutine, have a pint and a great burger in a chummy pub in the Byward Market, and even browse through the men’s department at the Bay.

Ottawa, like Washington, is both smaller than you think it will be and more interesting than you think it will be; from what I’ve seen of the neighborhoods, I could probably live there, assuming I had a suitable job that took me away on a regular basis.

One in a series. First post

Mia Birk writes:

1. Look beyond the bike: bicycle transportation succeeds best when combined with investments in compact development, transit, and walking. Engage in and support various efforts to help shape your sustainable community.

Bicycling is not an end; it’s a means. Sure, biking has lots of benefits (you live longer, you get places easier, you spend less, you interact with strangers more, you’re more connected to your city and neighborhood, etc. times 100). But at the end of the day, investing in bike infrastructure will only do so much to change the character of your community. What really makes change happen is proceeding from two first principles: (1) everyone’s needs matter, and (2) when in doubt, think simpler.

“Compact development,” “transit,” and “walking” described every urban area in the world until about 1950. (Within my own father’s lifetime, Los Angeles had a functional fixed-rail commuter transit system covering hundreds of miles.) Then you-know-what happened. And you don’t have to accept a conspiracy, just accept that for lots of economic and cultural reasons that suddenly aligned, society changed in a way that left us with a lot more cars, disinvestment in public transportation infrastructure, and two generations of auto-centric cultural assumptions.

Things used to be different, and they can be different again. But remember that “bicycle facilities” and “bicycle culture” are just subsets of “human-scaled facilities” and “human-scaled culture.” If you focus broadly on the latter, rather than narrowly on the former, you end up with a mutually reinforcing system (more people bike from home because they know they can take their bikes on the subway, which leads to more bike parking in the city, which leads to a broader range of people trying out biking, which leads to a broader range of bike types on the market, which leads to… etc.).

Portland community activist Mia Birk has probably done as much as anyone in the United States to advance a subculture in which driving everywhere alone in a car is not taken for granted as the only legitimate transportation option. Janette Sadik-Khan’s and Mike Bloomberg’s transformative changes to New York probably wouldn’t have happened in the way they have without Birk and her merry band of Portland trailblazers (see what I did there?).

You should of course buy Birk’s book Joyride: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet, but in the meantime, take heed of her “50 Keys to Transforming Communities and Empowering People, One Pedal Stroke at a Time” (PDF). These 50 principles are not earth-shattering, and most of them are obvious when you think about them; they amount to a mix of traditional community organizing tactics, common-sense urban design principles, and social equity.

If you want a bike-friendlier community — or just a community that doesn’t take for granted that everyone drives alone in a car — you could do worse than starting with Birk’s principles — they’re a system that works if you work it. I’m going to write about these one at a time to try to illuminate them a bit from my own experience.

First in a series. Next post

You may think that going grocery shopping on your bike is impossible, but here’s a picture of what I just carried home on my bike from the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea, about 3 miles:

All of this fit in two full-size paper grocery bags (which I reinforced with reusable cloth bags), in the left and right folding wire baskets attached to my rear rack, along with a cloth bag for overflow odds and ends that I slung over my shoulders.

While in the store, I did have to be conscious of the amount I was loading into the cart, but the only things I deliberately left behind because of bulk were half a gallon of milk and a package of paper towels, both of which I can easily pick up closer to home.