December 5th in the Urbanist's Calendar

On December 1st, 1995, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, a watershed moment in the modern Civil Rights movement. Protests up that point were important but small: Freedom Riders on a bus, for example, or protesters at a lunch counter. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was a mass movement, in which 50,000 people boycotted the bus system for more than a year, until integration was achieved. The mass movement actually started on Monday December 5th. People who were leaders of the movement all described what it was like to wait for the first buses that Monday morning, wondering if the masses of black people would agree to boycott. It was thrilling when the buses started to roll past empty! That night, in the first mass meeting of the Montgomery protest, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., stepped forward to lead the movement. In film of that night, we can see him hesitate for second, knowing that he is changing the course of history and of his own life. He steps forward humbly to do his part. December 5th, then, is an important day in the urbanist's calendar. A quirky aspect of the day in the New York Metropolitan area is that December 5th marks an abrupt shift in the weather, from fall to winter. There is usually a storm on that day. This has frustrated our efforts to have December 5th parties, I can assure you. Just as we know that the first weekend in June is likely to be fine for our Hike the Heights party, we know that December 5th will be blustery for whatever we have planned. In these uncertain times, I found today's snowflakes reassuring. Happy December 5th to one and all!

Main Street Shopping

Main Streets, like every part of our commercial sector, are trying to get a piece of the holiday shopping action. In Orange, the Urban Enterprise Zone has hung signs telling people to come "Home for the Holidays." In Hoboken flyers have been announcing that there will be entertainment this week during special evening hours at participating boutiques. In Jersey City, which is also an urban enterprise zone, the mayor has been on television urging people to shop locally and save on taxes. I like these campaigns and intend to do my shopping on Main Streets. It will be a fun time for meeting friends and family, and taking in the sights and sounds of the neighborhoods. But more important, I can find out what's up in America. What will the people be doing? How are they managing? There's no place like Main Street to find out what's up with "Main Street." As we face the expansion of another terrible war, more bad news about the economy, and the strains of the cold and flu season, I want to know what my fellow Americans are feeling.

Creating a plan for the Heart of Orange

I have been participating in a team that is developing a plan for the center of Orange, NJ, an area we nicknamed the "Heart of Orange." When I was growing up in Orange, that area was divided into an east side ghetto for black people and a west side ghetto for Italians, each equipped with a Y and a housing project. When I was a teenager, the building of Interstate 280 added a north/south divide, cutting off the more working class north side from the wealthier south. The "Heart of Orange" addresses these divides, posing the question, "Can we create ONE ORANGE?" At the end of March, Michel Cantal-Dupart came to consult with us. Cantal-Dupart, who is chair of the department of urbanism and the environment at the National Conservatory of Arts and Trades in Paris, France, pointed out the ways in which both the railroad and the highway cut the city, neither injury to the urban tissue treated in the elegant manner that would create unity in the city. Furthermore, the train, the city's trump card for the 21st century, was treated as a stepchild. He pointed to the dismal lot that greets people arriving from New York and Newark and asked us, "Is this a welcome?" Shamefacedly we all had to admit it was not. "Organize a day," he urged, "and clean the litter. Plant trees. Play music from all the world. In no time at all, this will be such a beautiful urban center that people will have a new image of Orange. They will say what a great place to go for fun!" As we worked on the Heart of Orange plan, Cantal-Dupart's words rang in our ears, reminding us to think forward into the 21st century, as we clean up of the messes left by history. We'd appreciate comments on the Heart of Orange plan. It can be found at the University of Orange website.

When sidewalks rule

In Northern New Jersey, this Halloween was sensational, thanks to its being on a Saturday and having warm weather. People were outside all day, ohhing over princesses and ahhing over superdogs. In Jersey City, where I live, people sat on the stoops with bowls of candy for passing sprites. Crowds in costumes congregated in the small front yards. I took granddaughter Lily to Hoboken where she went trick-or-treating. The usually difficult streets were impassable, clogged in the afternoon with small batmen and in the evening with slutty nurses. Lily rushed home to weigh her candy and was thrilled to have 8 pounds of the stuff. One of her classmates--an even more aggressive hunter-gatherer--ended up with 25 pounds of candy. Lily said, "People in Hoboken are so rich they just put out bowls of candy and we all took a lot." The pleasure of this was insane, and eclipsed all the Halloweens she'd observed to date. In the milling and giving and smiling and admiring, the cities I passed through--Englewood, Hoboken and Jersey City--celebrated with great style the urbanists' holiday, the day when sidewalks rule.

"Nobody" goes there

I had a wonderful visit to Muhlenberg College in Allentown, PA. In addition to spending time on the lovely campus, I got to poke around in the city, enjoying Historic Allentown especially. I walked on the Main Street, Hamilton Street, and took pictures as I do everywhere I go. In front of the city's tallest building a guard warned me that it was forbidden to photograph that location. There were no signs announcing this, but he insisted that if I were spotted on the cameras, the police would be called and they would take my camera away. My attachment to my camera is profound and this antagonized me, though I tried to remain civil. "I'm just telling you," he said in a tone that was none too friendly, which provoked me further. I looked around at their all-too-empty street, and thought, "That's why nobody's here: you lot don't trust people." This, of course, was a snap judgement based on annoyance and not information, but sometimes bad judgements provoke closer inspection and help us get closer to the truth. This was such a time.

As I walked along, the people of Allentown set out to disprove my unfair idea about their friendliness. I was taking a picture of the New Museum when a passerby smiled and pointed out the Indian Store, which she said she loved and she showed me the ring she'd gotten there. She also showed me two lovely bracelets she'd gotten at the dollar store. A young man, wearing a dollar store uniform, walked by and smiled and said hello in a very friendly manner. I laughed at a bit of urban collage made by someone who had the bright idea to add two stickers of eyes to a piece of abstract art on the wall of a very ugly building. The silly eyes humanized the whole thing, and seemed to saying, "It's OK!" Then a woman blowing leaves as part of the Hamilton Street Crew said that she was making a pile and I could jump in in a minute. She laughed and so did I.

By this time, I was in a much better mood. I climbed up on the Civil War Monument to get a picture down the length of the street. I expected the police to arrest me as the forbidden building was looming on the horizon and I got it in my photo, but I got clean away. I stopped to admire the ruins of an old bridge that crossed the rushing Jordan Creek, and which was beautifully decorated with a graffiti refrain that read Jesus Saves. "Is spray-painting a religious slogan a sin?" I asked myself, still a bit stuck on crime and punishment.

At the college a bit later that morning, one of the students described Main Street in her hometown and said that there's a lot of violence on Main Street so "nobody" goes there. This, of course, raised a paradox: if nobody goes there, who is doing the violence? Anyway, in that case violence was keeping people away, while in Allentown I was wondering if repression were the cause.

With so many questions in my head, I figured I should go the Visitors' Center and get some information. The woman who ran the place was very helpful, and I learned that there was an outstanding regional art museum, just 3 blocks away. I immediately went over, and was rewarded handsomely by the chance to see an outstanding exhibit of artists who had funded by the Julius Rosenwald Fund to do work on Black life in the 1930s and 40s. I knew a few of the paintings, but not most, and the sculpture and dance were entirely new to me.

As I exited the museum, uplifted by the chance to imagine the world in a new way, I was struck by a block-long paved plaza across the street in front of the museum. It was bounded to the north by a large bronze horse that flanked the Art School, to the east by a mural with a wonderful trompe l'oeil, and to the south by a historic county building. The plaza was not empty: people were having lunch, walking to and fro, chatting, enjoying the beautiful fall day. It was a place anybody would go.

Civil Rights on Main Street

I went to Raleigh, NC, a while back, and to Birmingham last week. The two cities have this in common: they have a black Main Street parallel to the white Main Street. In decades past these were flourishing streets, home to an array of businesses and cultural institutions. Much of the strength has drained away, as commerce has shifted to other sites. But the streets remain a vital part of the history, including the history of the struggle for civil rights. My visit to Birmingham was led by two veterans of the civil rights movement there. As young people, they had faced the fire hoses and been to jail. They remembered the police coming down black Main Street and every spot in the days of confrontation. "We were having a ball," remembered one. His sister had more somber reflections. She pointed to a photograph of one of the girls killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and said, "That was my best friend." The others who died were also part of her world, and the seriousness of her experience weighed in her voice. The struggle to undo segregation was essential for survival, and it meant that the side-by-side Main Streets would face a new future. Desegregating the lunch counters, the movie theaters, and the clothes stores eliminated the need for redundancy which fell hardest on the black side. But that it did was a failure of the commercial sector -- the Chamber of Commerce and City Hall -- to envision how to reorganize and repurpose existing stores and experienced business people. This is a sad pattern in our nation's economy. White Main Street faced a similar crisis when malls drew commerce from downtowns. The current downsizing is revisiting that problem, albeit that China is taking over, not white Main Street. How does that which is redundant by one yardstick come to have new usefulness by another? This is a fundamental question that we should ask and answer throughout our nation.

Homesteading on the urban prairie

The large spaces in cities weigh heavily on urban function. They are evidence of really really bad policies carried out in the past. They cry out for really really good interventions in the future. Ecologist Rodrick Wallace, co-author of A Plague on Your Houses, has pointed out the policies that led to the burning down of New York, Newark, Detroit and other cities replaced urban renewal when that program became the target of citizen protest. The replacement policy -- planned shrinkage -- itself went out of vogue, but has had a recrudescence lately. Politicians and policy makers have proposed planned shrinkage for Youngstown, Flint, Detroit and other cities with substantial amounts of vacant land. The proponents of planned shrinkage argue that the best thing to do is to consolidate functions in the best developed parts of the city and let the semi-deserted places be bulldozed, and left fallow for later development.

Walking past a very large empty block in Newark, NJ, I considered this proposition. What is left unsaid in the paens to planned shrinkage is that such upheaval is the cause of social disruption and disease which is impossible to control. Indeed, the fallout of planned shrinkage in New York includes a chilling list of epidemics that includes AIDS, crack, violence, asthma and obesity, as well as associated social problems like high rates of infant and maternal mortality, school failure, and delinquency. What sane society would choose such a self-destructive path?

What is the sane alterative? I have seen glimpses of it in cities all over the US, where people are working to restore the urban ecosystem, using a combination of tools designed for careful recovery. They must restore the space, protecting what exists and rebuilding where needed. At the same time, they must get people excited about the possibilities for their own living in the restored space.

I saw this two-pronged approach come alive this weekend at the Valley Arts District Open Studio Stroll in Orange and West Orange, NJ. The Valley was an industrial center, but its big factories are now silent, and much of the area abandoned. Out of years of community planning came a vision for making the Valley an Arts District. For several years this plan has been pursued by builders building, artists creating their works, and organizers gathering people. In "don't you love it when a plan comes together" fashion, the places were finally open, the art ready for display and the people eager to come. The joy and excitement were palpable, the experience fulfilling, the possibilities for more development nearly endless.

The existence of large spaces in cities is unnatural and intimidating, but it should not automatically lead us to think, "Oh let's bulldoze the whole thing." We can reknit cities, restoring the urban ecosystem, by systematic application of the principles of careful recovery.