Quiet and chaos

Walking through downtown Boston today, I was struck once again by the quiet. No honking horns, not even a revving engine, nobody hawking anything, no construction noise. No animals bleating, either. I had the same sensation the night I got back from India: the deafening silence of Brookline. It's ringing in my ears. I traveled to India Jan. 10-16, presenting at a Thane College conference called The Geography of Change. I walked through Darahvi and soaked up Mumbai, before flying to Chandigarh to get a first-hand look at the city Le Corbusier designed from scratch. I wrote this essay about the ratio of men and women in the country of over 1 billion at The Atlantic Cities. I had been to India before, in the 1990s, traveling to Delhi and trekking in Ladakh. This time, overall, India kicked my butt. I was overwhelmed by traffic-clogged, sprawling Mumbai, and couldn't help thinking, if this is the way things are with 20 million people, how in the world is this place not going to implode with 20 million more people by 2050? I also found Chandigarh less than inspiring -- it was doubtless a big deal at the time, but today resembles nothing so much as a bad 70s Maryland suburb. The grid requires a car dependence that seems out of step with a post-carbon future. The informal settlement was not outrageous -- Darahvi was full of industry and a thriving local economy. Even the kids seemed relatively happy. But it all seemed so tenuous, or untenable, like it couldn't possibly last. At the Lincoln Institute we try to assess efforts of regularization and slum upgrading. Yet the conditions on the ground are so overwhelming -- it's like helping Haiti or trying to mitigate climate change. One can make the effort but it's so obviously just a drop in the bucket. Similarly, it's hard to know how to be useful in advising India how to plan her cities going forward. The coda was I got gravely ill, hitting me on the way back, and all that free booze on British Airways went to waste. Sobering all around.

When it comes to sprawl, it's meet the new boss

I'm at the Starbucks in Acton while my son plays in a tennis tournament here. The last time I was out this way was 10 years ago, when I wrote a story for The Boston Globe datelined Groton about a pilot transfer-of-development-rights program. A little environmental militia at the time was trying to scale back at least some of the subdivision sprawl overtaking the area framed by the Route 128, the Mass Pike, and I-495, northwest of Boston. The piece is kindly being re-broadcast, without the Globe's knowledge I suspect, at a Forests.org site here. So what's changed in 10 years? From a brief look around, very little. The air is filled with the sounds of leafblowers and carpenter's hammers, and the same old subdivisions are sprouting up once again. The 2008 financial and housing crisis surely slowed things down, but instead of a major redirection and moment of soul-searching, around here it was just a pause. This is a key question I raise in the revised introduction to the softcover edition of This Land, being published this fall by Johns Hopkins University Press. Surely with all those zombie subdivisions dotting the country, the reasoning goes, towns and builders and planning boards might rethink the 3,000-square-foot single-family-home, solo-driver-commute, must-drive-to-everything layout. Not around here. The homes may be crowded in together with a little more net density, with a little more "conservation land," typically in the form of a retention pond surrounded by chemically treated lawn, reserved for nature. Out from the cul-de-sacs and down the secondary roads, there are more freshly minted could-be-anywhere strip malls, where I currently reside. Foreclosures, energy costs, climate change -- whatever. The last time state government did anything to guide towns like Acton towards smarter, more sustainable growth, a guy named Mitt Romney was governor. Acton, rock on.

This Land, in softcover

This morning I received in the mail a copy of The Johns Hopkins University Press fall catalog, and on page 78, there is my first book, "This Land: The Battle Over Sprawl and the Future of America," being published in paperback. I updated the introduction to include the implications of the 2008 housing crisis and recession, given the ways that "drive to qualify" areas were hit particularly hard with plummeting values and foreclosures. The nation seems to be at a turning point -- whether to continue in the patterns of sprawl, or embrace more compact, mixed-use development that is more efficient and holds its long-term value better.

Off the grid

Last week experienced an interesting one-two punch in New York: first the exhibit Foreclosed and symposium "Shifting Suburbia" at the Museum of Modern Art, a conversation put on by the Forum for Urban Design and the Lincoln Institute. Teams of architects, economists, and artists re-imagined five areas devastated in one way or the other from the 2008 housing crisis. In some ways the landscapes were easy reinventions -- compared to zombie subdivisions miles from anywhere in places like Idaho and Florida. Those single-family subdivisions, platted but empty save for PVC and the occasional streetlamp, are unlikely to be occupied, ever. They never should have been built.
Better planning for growth was thus on my mind at The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan for Manhattan 1811-2011, the equally well-done exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, where I journeyed uptown after a too short comfortable night's rest at The Chambers (highly recommended). The planners had to make a bunch of calculations: radiating streets, location of squares and parks, the big intervention of Central Park, the dyanmics of the fledgling real estate market, even informal settlement (there were shantytowns of Irish and Italian immigrants all over, at places like 105th Street and 5th Avenue). The commissioners planned the grid up to 155th Street, judging the rocky and hilly terrain to be inhospitable, and perhaps satisfied they were adequately planning ahead; how otherwise to imagine filling up every hectare of Manhattan.
My next book subject, Le Corbusier, makes his cameo, urging superblocks and more light and air, and implicitly, husbanding more urban land to the horizon. I was reminded of Solly Angel's work in Making Room for a Planet of Cities. Planning at the scale of Manhattan's master plan will doubtless be needed in the megacities in the developing world. But how far is too far? Probably safe to say, 100 miles outside Phoenix or Boise.

Confessions of a former Giants fan

I've been reading a lot lately about where the equator, or the Mason-Dixon line, lies, separating New England Patriots and New York Football Giants fans. Somewhere outside of Brookline and Cambridge, Worcester and Providence, beyond Hartford and Connecticut's Tea Party country and on down towards the Big Apple. Newsroom editors assign stories in their own banal way. But the mapping of allegiances has been haunting me.
I grew up in Fairfield County and New York City. We used to walk to Gimbel's and check out the sports equipment, the Woolworth's on Lexington Avenue for the terrapins and guinea pigs, the corner newsstand for the Richie Rich comic books. Grand Central and Metro North defined our childhood -- Darien, next stop. My first ballgame was Yankee Stadium, the theatrical entrance from the interior a flash of vivid green through a portal. I could not understand why my younger brother could possibly want to leave in the 7th inning. My second game was where I first had my first beer, a Michelob. In 1986, I drove down from Torrington, Connecticut, where I worked at the Register Citizen, and scalped $200 tickets to the sixth game of the World Series, where the balled rolled through Buckner's legs and we all hugged each other like it was V-J Day. Then we went to Giants stadium and they flashed the New York score on what today would be considered a very crude Jumbotron. Yes, those Giants, the same I cheered a few years later on the field goal attempt by Buffalo, and on and on. A tradition began of partaking in he Giants-Eagles game every year in the Meadowlands, the tailgating thick with accents equivalent to a Saturday Night Live parody, the crowd noise on opponents' third downs deafening.
And so yes, I am descipable. I was a New York sports fan -- the Mets, the Knicks, the Giants, the Islanders. Even when I moved to Boston, I was clinging, defiantly, to that loyalty. As a Boston Globe reporter I interviewed Ray Flynn in Dorchester in a hideous blue and orange Mets jacket. His look of disdain was palpable. I mocked my roommate in Kendall Square for tuning in to his beloved C's. And then it all changed. And the New England Patriots were the first to turn the tide.
I started to learn the players. I read the Globe Sports section like I was studying for an algebra test. The embrace of place started rising up all around me -- New England, Massachusetts, Boston. The New England Patriots. Inevitably, inexorably, the others followed. The Red Sox. The Celtics. The Boston Bruins. I've been wanting to put the sticker of the old Patriots logo on my bumper for some time now.
I go to New York all the time; I am serene when the Acela pulls into Penn Station; I wrote a book where the action all takes place in New York. But when I settle in front of the widescreen tomorrow, Ich bin ein Bostonian. If I ever met Tom Brady my knees would wobble. I'd like for just one moment to be inside Bill Belichick's head, to see the wheels turning, the gameplan, the backup game plan, the adjustments after that. The team's victory will make history, avenge the curse of the perfect season, and secure the dynasty. But it will be, once again, like playing an old girlfriend. I'm all knots and pins and needles for all kinds of reasons. You know I used to love you. But that's all over now.

Land and Lenox

The man at the counter at Nejaime's was wistful, retelling a relative's account of continually falling snow, inch after inch, somewhere, but not here. The lack of snow and mild temperatures (until very recently), hampering even snow-making operations, is dragging down the economy of Berkshire County and its smattering of ski areas, though not in a way that seems terribly unusual. Folks around here are used to a certain amount of economic pummeling.
I am in my room at the Yankee Inn, having brought my family to the old stomping grounds, when I lived in Richmond as a reporter for The Berkshire Eagle in the 80s. Though I was physically fit from doing things like team triathlons in those days, I remember the March when I decided it was time to go -- marveling at the phenomenon of frozen mud. There's a barren quality to the landscape that feels familiar. Here on Pittsfield Road, Route 7, Lenox has grouped all its big-box commercial retail close to the Pittsfield city line, drawing in the customers and confining the ugliness and the traffic close to its municipal neighbor to the north, while realizing all the tax revenue. Places to eat are in walking distance, but not really; the four lanes of the sidewalk-less arterial almost dare you to venture out by foot. The Stop and Shop plaza looks like it was carved out of glacial rock; indeed the premiere corner at Dan Fox Drive is just that, jutting black cliffs of rock, the blasting cores visible in neat rows. Dan Fox would have been the first leg of the Route 7 Bypass, just like Melnea Cass was the beginning of the Inner Belt in distant Boston.
Earlier we walked the trials of the Pleasant Valley sanctuary just south of here, and saw the work of busy beavers. Back at the hotel, the carpeted corridors feature pictures by Bill Teague, a veteran editor at the Eagle, who used to chain-smoke Marlboros in the newsroom and ask me if I had any news from the city council meetings. They show Greater Pittsfield in the 50s, all Norman Rockwell potraits, kids eating pizza and ice cream, singing at performances, women in those flared white sunglasses, crewcut teenagers by a lifeguard chair at a local lake beach. We'll see if they've made enough snow to ski down at Bousquet in the morning.

Worcester's next steps

I'm reprinting my Community Voices This Land blog posts here:

WORCESTER -- It's painful to walk around the common here and see the devastation still apparent from urban renewal -- the vacant parcels, the surface parking lots, the double-wide arterials, the monstrosity of the Galleria mall -- a hulking white spaceship plopped downtown as if it was a deliberate attempt to destroy the urban fabric. But perhaps equally sad has been the repeated attempts to recover from that era --not only urban renewal in the 1950s and 60s but the delcine of manufacturing and the flight to the suburbs -- with reinventions and grand new schemes aimed at finally putting the City of Seven Hills back on the map. If only -- and this is what cities like New Haven are thinking, too -- some of the magic of Providence could catch on.
So it is with guarded optimism that Worcester is wecloming yet another plan to breathe new life into downtown, based around the rehabilitated Hanover Theatre, and covered by the Worcester Telegram & Gazette -- itself a property that is poised to be part of surgical but ambitious redevelopment of the area. The Worcester Business Development Corporation, which has been successful retrofitting the area north of downtown, at the site of a shuttered vocational school, with new and rehabilitated space for bio-tech and life sciences, is signing a memorandum of understanding with the city to assess how the emerging "theatre district" might be embellished and reconfigured. The Cambridge firm of Chan, Krieger-NBBJ has been hired to draw a master plan. All of it will accompany the ongoing redevelopment of the Galleria mall, the $583 million CitySquare project set in motion initially by Young Park and Berkeley Investments, and now an undertaking of Hanover Insurance Co.'s Opus Investments Management group. In that redevelopment, new towers will be accompanied by the demolition of some of the fantastically ugly structured parking and the squat mall section that was blocks Front Street like a giant tree lying across the road. Opening that street up so it once again leads to the elegant Union Station will be like Worcester's own version of the dismantling of the elevated Central Artery (if anybody still remembers that).
But this is a tricky business, trying to cultivate downtown living in Worcester, given the current market -- and also the legacy of urban renewal, which messed things up so much in the first place. Civic leaders are essentially saying trust us, we'll get it right this time. There isn't much appetite for tearing down buildings if they have the slightest historical significance, or using eminent domain, ever since the Kelo case prompted by failed redevelopment efforts in New London. The signs at the CitySquare construction site read, "Coming Soon: Mixed Use." What that really means is "Coming Soon: More People." Worcester can only hope, and keep the shoulder to the wheel.