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:

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.

Full day yesterday at the Americans for the Arts convention, and we’re already partway through day 2. I fell asleep last night at an embarrassing early hour with the lights on, so I’ve decided to take a few minutes now and start catching up on yesterday.

First, the venue. I can’t say enough good things about Baltimore as a meeting destination. From where I sit, looking west over the Inner Harbor from the waterfront Marriott’s convention annex, I see a panorama of thoughtfully developed waterfront public spaces, half a dozen museums, even a pirate ship (alas, not pictured below) loaded with children sailing into port between Piers 5 and 6. The tent in the foreground is where Peter Frampton (!) played last night.

This new development where the Marriott is located, occupying what I think of as the no-man’s land between the Inner Harbor and Fells Point, is a great success, bringing residents, office workers, tourists, and entertainment seekers into the neighborhood at all hours, and tying the eastern waterfront into the central city. And Little Italy and Fells Point entertainment districts are only a few blocks’ walk.

There are too many museums here to count (I think I’ve passed 7 of them personally and I’ve barely left the hotel), and I do plan to make time for at least one. I had hoped to make a visit to the Baltimore Public Works Museum, located in the iconic building at the edge of the Inner Harbor that I think of as the “pumphouse” (presumably because, once upon a time in a previous life, someone once told me that that’s what it was).

It combines three of my passions: museums, urban infrastructure, and buildings that look like Victorian workhouses. However, I just learned from the Internet that it was apparently closed a couple of months ago due to the city’s dire budget situation, so I might have to choose another.

And, of course, the American Visionary Art Museum, the site of last night’s party, will get its own post, but let me ask right now: what happened to Federal Hill? This once-edgy neighborhood, where the city was selling abandoned townhouses 25 years ago for $1, is now one of Baltimore’s most desirable residential and entertainment districts — I’m looking across the harbor right now at Ritz-Carlton Residences, for chrissakes. Compared to what it was in 1980 or even 1990, the neighborhood is nearly unrecognizable, after one of the most successful transformations I can remember seeing anywhere.

I’m on my way to Baltimore tomorrow afternoon for the Americans for the Arts convention. I do own a car, and I’d been planning to drive — I even told the parking lot where my car lives that I’d be picking it up tomorrow.

But now that it’s time to go, I don’t feel like driving. It’s going to be 93 degrees tomorrow. And I don’t have air conditioning. And I have a full morning, starting early. And there will be traffic and I’ll be on I-95 for three hours. And the train is so convenient! Even with the schlepping to Newark and the waiting for the train, I’ll be in Baltimore a full hour earlier on the train, and I’ll travel in air-conditioned comfort…with wireless Internet.

So I’m leaving the car in Brooklyn, and taking the train.

There are things I might want to do in Baltimore that would be easier with the car, but so what? I’ll just do other things instead. Or, like, I’ll hail a cab — just like I would here at home if I found myself in Williamsburg at 1am. It’s not a deal.

The BIXI bike share program that’s been so successful in Montreal has begun taking hold in other cities; the first expansion city is Minneapolis.

I’ve used the BIXI bikes myself, and I think this is a great implementation of bike share: well-designed bikes, easy-to-understand rental system, pricing that’s advantageous for heavy users, hardy infrastructure.

Photo credit: yours truly

From the Brooklyn Paper via Curbed: downzoning fever is  coming to my old neighborhood Boerum Hill.  The worst of the sore-thumb inappropriate development is probably over for a while, given that the money stopped flowing 18 months ago, but it will still be good to have clearer rules in place.