An Alleyway and the Joker Stairs

In a dank alleyway, far beneath the metropolitan skyscrapers, there exists a temporal loop. A rich couple, having taken an ill-advised shortcut from the theatre to reality, are shot dead over and over, each time in slightly different variations but always with the same outcome.

Darran Anderson, Imaginary Cities

On Halloween, I watched the new Joker movie at a cinema in The Bronx. There has been a lot of discussion locally about the influx of tourists to "the Joker stairs," but as an urban planner, I would have been scrutinizing the details of the newest version of Gotham City anyway. As I noted in a review of Imaginary Cities, the variations of Gotham over time show changes in the fears lurking in the dark places of our collective consciousness.

Joker almost entirely abandons any effort at developing a fictional Gotham City. With almost no alterations, it is unmistakably New York City. More precisely, it is the mythos of the "bad old days" of New York in the 1970s and 80s, complete with the 1981 garbage strike. Stylistically, it draws visual and acting cues from Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), a reference that is directly reinforced by Robert De Niro's character in the film. The details in the streetscape that were altered to recreate the appearance of New York in 1981, and even those that were missed, can be informative. The tagging on the subway and the porn titles on the theater marquees (channeling the Times Square's era of infamy) keep the sense of disorder palpable. Choosing this period was an effective way to capture the grit that has always defined Gotham in the comics and movies, something that has become more difficult as cities have been largely rebuilt into glossier places that are much safer. More importantly, it captures current anxieties about going back to the "bad old days."

The only significant real fictional change to New York's built form in this movie was the insertion of an alley into the old Deuce. Although it appears much of this may actually have been filmed at locations in Jersey City and Newark (places where commercial strips have not been as extensively redeveloped), there is no doubt this was a recreation of 42nd Street in the Time Square area. New York is not a city of alleyways, but the filmmakers revised the infamous streetscape of porn theaters to include one. As usual in dark urban fiction, an alley is a residual space where garbage collects and the retreating effects of society no longer reach. The opening sequence of the movie concludes in this lawless Gotham locale; we see the violent nature of this city as we get to know Arthur Fleck as a helpless victim before he transforms into the Joker. It is this attack that sets in motion the series of events that send Arthur spiraling out of control.

Arthur Fleck lying in the alley after he was attacked

Copyright Warner Bros.

Chronicles of Stolen Space - Pedestrianized Pine Street

This is a designated pedestrian street in Lower Manhattan

The quality of our public spaces in New York City is so much worse than they should be. By all appearances, this is due to a negligent municipal government that has failed to shoulder its responsibilities to safeguard these spaces for public use.

Take for example the case of a pedestrianized block of Pine Street between South and Front Streets. This street was pedestrianized in 1978, yet in recent memory, it has increasingly been used for car parking. It seems that the permission for "service vehicles," clearly intended originally to allow for garbage pickup, provided a foothold for parcel services to use the street for their parking needs. Gradually, others followed suit until the whole space has now become filled with cars.

Changing Colors

The subway can lull you to sleep if you're fortunate enough to get a seat after a long day at work.  The movement of the train, that rhythmic clack-clack clack-clack..... clack-clack clack-clack of the wheels on the tracks, and the warmth from so many bodies packed together can draw the shades over your eyes for a while. Then when you wake up... where are you?! Did you miss your stop?!

Looking out of the train, to the extent you can even get a glimpse past the bodies crowded between you and the windows, often does not provide any clear view of a station name. What you can almost always see in the old IND subway stations are the columns and possibly the band of colored tiles. Fortunately, they are... no... until recently they were color coded to help identify the station. If I wake up and see green columns, I know I've reached 125th Street. If the columns are yellow, that means I'm at 145th Street. At Tremont, the columns are red.

This easy identification by classifying sets of stations by color was a key design element by Squire Vickers. It was both functional and esthetic. The color banding provides a clean, modern artistic statement that maintains a sense of movement through the station. The transition along the color wheel as the stations change from green to blue to yellow provides a sense of progress as passengers traverse the system. Maintaining a feeling of movement when you are closed inside a crowded metal box can break up the banality of longer subway trips.

Unfortunately, Cuomo's MTA is destroying this historic design in its rush to look like they're doing something to address the subway crisis. Some of the new information display systems appear helpful, but elevators for people with disabilities or strollers are being left out while they inconvenience passengers with months-long full closures for gut rehabs. These station upgrades are essentially cosmetic, and yet the generic contemporary design is reopening indistinguishable, monochromatic gray stations.

If this program is allowed to continue, the stations will become a dreary subterranean Groundhog Day. Every time you open your eyes, it will look like the same station again.

When spending extensive sums of money and disrupting passengers' regular commutes for lengthy periods of time, it is important to understand the original design and how people use the system now, how they experience it. Instead, a simplistic esthetic is being rolled on in a misguided attempt to make the stations look more fresh.

Fortunately, the color of the columns is just paint. Hopefully the original, superior design will be restored the next time the columns need a new coat. Until then, maybe try not to doze off on the train.

The Mountaindale General Store

Mountaindale isn't really a place. At least, it's not anymore, and it hasn't been for a long time.



When I was a child, there was a little store with a gas pump at the intersection of a couple quiet country roads. For me, it was a sort of landmark; we turned at the store, went past the old, red, one-room schoolhouse, and then we were at Grandma's house. A few times my grandmother took me on a quick errand to get milk or butter at the Mountaindale General Store, although we usually went into the small nearby town of North Plains or further to Cornelius or Hillsboro for any more significant shopping. My memory of the Mountaindale General Store is not very clear, but in my imagination it was a creaky old wooden affair with a few creaky old locals hanging out inside.

Appropriately, during the store's waning years, it served as a shooting location for an episode of some forgotten TV show titled Nowhere Man. I never watched it, but the reviews on IMDb are quite positive. Mountaindale played the role of a Southern town with a population of 37.  "Is this the whole town?" the protagonist asks after getting off the bus. The store was the last remnant of Mountaindale to close.

Little Houses on Charlotte Street

Charlotte Street in The Bronx has a mythic place in the history of The Bronx, and it continues to grow as the borough recovers from its period of neglect and abandonment. As the mythology grows, Charlotte Street becomes increasingly symbolic. Yet it remains a place where real families live and build dreams for their future.

As with any other symbolic place, people impose their own agendas onto its history and argue about its meaning. Its history becomes contested through competing efforts to use its lessons to shape the future. Attention to Charlotte Street will only mount going into next year, the 40th Anniversary of the Blackout and The Bronx Is Burning. Quality discussions that hear and consider different perspectives will be invaluable.

Interest in Charlotte Street has already percolated for much of this year. It bubbled up when Bernie Sanders held his massive rally at St. Mary's Park in the South Bronx in April, and it has boiled over since Netflix released its new series The Get Down. As we approach the 40th anniversary of "The Bronx is Burning," attention is likely to grow.

The Sanders rally naturally led to a round of discussions about historic presidential visits to The Bronx. None are more mythologized than the pair of stops at Charlotte Street by Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.

President Carter visited the area in 1977. His suggestion was to "See which areas can still be salvaged." Mere weeks later, televisions viewers watching a Yankees game were told a massive fire was in the same area (it was actually a mile and a half away in Melrose). That moment, paraphrased as "The Bronx is burning," became permanently branded on the borough's image. While the specific fire seen on television that night was not actually on Charlotte Street, it was an apt enough depiction of the arson that left nothing but debris of former homes in its wake. In 1980, local activists staged a People's Convention on the site of Carter's visit during the Democratic Convention to draw attention to broken promises. Later that year, Reagan stole their idea and visited the site to try emphasizing his opponent's failures.

Ultimately, planners and developers led by Ed Logue finally rebuilt Charlotte Street and the surrounding blocks. What they created looked like the image of the prototypical American suburb had literally been xeroxed right into the middle of the least likely inner city neighborhood. A small handful of streets were lined with cheerful little ranch houses. They have hardly changed today. Each has its own little fenced yard. You can hear the birds singing when you stroll down the sidewalk.

Imaginary Cities

I have seen many imaginary cities.
I live with a three-year-old.

Between bursts of "Daddy! DADDY! Look at my wall!" and "Daddy, I have surprise for you," I found time to read Darran Anderson's fascinating book Imaginary Cities.

Don't let the voluminous endnotes fool you; Imaginary Cities is not an academic book. It's more like the delirium of an academic. Just as imaginations are limitless, so is the potential material for this ambitious project. Anderson jumps from reference to reference, none ever fully described or explained. Rather than imposing a linear narrative, instead of situating works and expounding on their significance, Anderson drifts from one vision to the next. It is surprising, and somewhat daring on the part of both the author and the publisher Influx Press to print a book dedicated to material of such visual nature without a single image. The images are supplied by the reader's imagination. Reading this book can feel in turn dizzying, frustrating, exhilarating, incomplete, and ultimately inspiring.

Gotham City
The discussion of Batman's Gotham City is Imaginary Cities at its height. Consider the way Anderson introduces the story and locale that have been retold many times in the making of a modern mythology:

In a dank alleyway, far beneath the metropolitan skyscrapers, there exists a temporal loop. A rich couple, having taken an ill-advised shortcut from the theatre to reality, are shot dead over and over, each time in slightly different variations but always with the same outcome.
p. 374

Rendering by Ferris

source: http://architecturemuseum.blogspot.com

"Gotham is Ferris gone wrong,
or perhaps Ferris gone according to plan."

This is an excellent writing style. It is both clever and appealing to frame the constant retelling and adaptation of the story as a temporal loop. Yet this is a point where I wish Anderson had delved a little deeper. The variations differ because our cities have changed over time. The unchanging outcome becomes a fixed point for navigating a shifting world.

There is meaning in the dark spaces of Gotham City. Anderson recognizes they are more than mere backdrop, they are a fundamental part of the story:

"Batman is a critique of failed urban planning and empathy. Alleyways have dead-ends as traps for the unwary. Abandoned buildings are warrens for criminals. A dark sanctimonious fear of rookeries and today's housing estates, projects and slums as inhuman breeding grounds, prevails." (p. 377)

Again, following the variations through versions over time would show differences in what lurks in the dark as some of our boogiemen have come and gone.

Referring to architectural illustrator Hugh Ferris, Anderson suggests, "Gotham is Ferris gone wrong, or perhaps Ferris gone according to plan." (p. 379) Batman has traditionally been grounded in a dark Victorian esthetic overlaid precisely with a Ferris image of the metropolis. Personally, I find this darkness fascinating and appealing; that is the Gotham City I prefer. I am more drawn to scenes filmed on Lower Wacker in Chicago in "Batman Begins" (2005) than to the increasingly glass-clad Manhattan of "The Dark Knight Rises" (2012). Neither have the palpable anxiety of getting mugged on an urban street that "Batman" (1989) held in common with its audiences' own experiences during the 1980s. As street crime still continues to drop, cities increasingly gentrify with glossy new buildings, and the police militarize, Ferris may continue to fade in the image of Gotham City. This leaves the question of what fixed points remain from the Batman saga as landmarks for our collective consciousness.

A Journey Should End in Poetry

Are iconic places at passenger terminals obsolete as an organizing element? I was surprised that seemed to be the consensus of leading architects on a panel recently. With smart devices, it is increasingly difficult to ever become lost. The scale of modern life has grown beyond the perception of a singular focal point.

I don't buy it.

People still want to feel like they've arrived, and a specific image best captures that moment. The term "selfie" may be new, but the compulsion to take a photo in front of the Flatiron Building, the Eiffel Tower, and every other salient landmark is as old as the point-and-shoot camera.

Great passenger terminals are among the most compelling forms of art that civilization has ever produced. These massive structures transcend their primary utilitarian purpose of moving masses of people to become some of our most memorable civic spaces. It is the iconic point of arrival that makes them memorable.

Of course, many terminals do not rise above their mundane functions. Some become inhumane from a meanness of design or subsequent neglect. When terminals do achieve greatness, they create an intersection of architecture and poetry. They embody the place where memorable journeys begin and end, where people depart and are reunited.

No place epitomizes this more than Grand Central Terminal, where the clock is the heart of New York City. As Billy Collins expressed it in his poem "Grand Central," the city "turns around the golden clock." The poem has been featured by the MTA's Poetry in Motion program:

Looking at Landscapes of Work

Twenty years ago, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time by J. B. Jackson was published. I didn't read the book for the first time until a few years later, but it has become a text that I always enjoy returning to reread. It still feels relevant in a way few books do after a couple decades have passed.

The year Jackson's book came out, I was living in France. I was raised as the son of a Steelworker in a small, industrial city in Oregon; spending a year of high school as a foreign exchange student was a rare opportunity for exposure to European culture and urban life. Like so many other Americans who have stayed in Europe, I felt the allure of dense urban neighborhoods. Like many others, most of my experience was also focused on historic city cores, middle-class neighborhoods, and scenic countrysides. I had such down-to-earth experiences as shopping at Carrefour, and I had some working-class friends at the school I attended. But I was not living in an HLM and I saw relatively little of the cités industrielles. Certainly what impressed itself most heavily on me was the contrast between the walkable, transit-rich, middle-class places I encountered and the sprawling, largely industrial, working-class landscape where I had grown up.

The idea of emulating European urban neighborhoods certainly merged with the American ideal of social mobility. My parents worked hard to provide me with opportunities; I was supposed to work hard to achieve a higher standard of living than they had. So as a planner, that naturally seemed to translate into improving neighborhoods along the lines of the desirable European middle-class models I had seen. Of course, aspiring to remake American cities more like European precedents has been a prevalent trend in urban planning since long before I was inspired to become a planner. It remains a strong strain to this day, particularly when it comes to the growing push for better streets, with Copenhagen serving as such a strong model for bicycle infrastructure that "Copenhagenize" has become a term. 

Jackson provides a different perspective. Rather than looking to Europe for a model of what American cities could become, he looks at our domestic landscape to understand how it actually works. He concerns himself with the places where workers earn their livings. It is a poignant reminder of the diverse needs of complex economies and the inherent dignity of work.

For most planners, myself included, Jackson can be a challenging read when he begins an essay by saying:

I am very pro-automobile, pro-car and pro-truck, and I can't imagine what existence would be without them. But I have learned to be discreet in my enthusiasm: disapproval from environmentalists and other right-thinking elements in the population is something I could not possibly survive. (p. 167, "Looking into Automobiles") 

Robert Moses and Buses at the Beach

The Orchard Beach Criterium
The blue columns of the bus terminal are visible in the background

Last weekend, my family stopped by Orchard Beach after brunch out on City Island. We spent a little time watching the Orchard Beach Criterium bike races, and then my son and I walked over to look at the bus terminal. The Orchard Beach bus terminal is a place I like to visit from time to time, because it isn't supposed to exist. Anybody who has ever heard of Robert Moses knows that he banned buses from his beaches to discriminate against the poor, right?

What most people know about Robert Moses are the stories Robert Caro wrote. Caro referred to Orchard Beach throughout The Powerbroker, his sprawling book about Moses, including nearly three pages describing the beach's development. He never mentions the bus terminal. Instead, he wrote:

During the 1930’s, Robert Moses reshaped the face of the greatest city in the New World… He laid great swaths of concrete across it. He made it grayer, not only with his highways but with parking fields, like the one on Randall’s Island that held 4,000 cars, the one at Orchard Beach that held 8,000 and the one at Jacob Riis Park that held 9,000, that together covered with asphalt a full square mile of the 319 in the city. (p. 508)

That’s true enough. Orchard Beach has a huge parking lot. It's a vast expanse of asphalt (not concrete…) that is unbroken by any form of landscaping. Caro's allegations are quite clear, though; Moses built beaches for affluent residents with cars while prohibiting transit to discourage the poor from going. This story comes back over and over again throughout the book. A couple of examples:

…he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low-too low for buses to pass. (p. 318) 

…enough of his Henry Hudson Parkway bridges were going to have a maximum headroom of thirteen feet and a headroom at the curb of eleven feet so that usage of the parkway by buses-which were exactly thirteen feet high-would be impractical. (p. 546)

His allegations about Jones Beach and the connecting parkways are famous. Yet none of it is really true. What is surprising is how prevalent these tall tales have remained with so many glaring problems. For example, buses are not "exactly thirteen feet high," and nobody with even a passing familiarity with vertical clearances for buses could take this writing seriously. The clearance at the Holland Tunnel, to cite one example, is 11'6". Buses have used the Holland Tunnel continuously for many decades.

Observing real life, rather than Caro's tales, it is alway fascinating to look at the transit facilities Moses actually created at his beaches. The bus terminal at Orchard Beach was visibly deteriorating from decades of weather and insufficient maintenance, yet the design was still clear. The facility was laid out to create a sense of arrival and departure while efficiently and economically moving throngs of beach goers. The little terminal was under renovation, finally getting some attention to extend its useful life to greet future generations to the drama of Orchard Beach.

Trailer Park Education

The New York Times recently ran an article about New York City's desire to stop using trailers for classroom space. It noted:

"As of a 2012 count, about 5 million students across the United States were being housed in 280,000 trailers..."

I wish I could say I was shocked, but our nation has allowed these deplorable conditions for decades. The anti-government rhetoric that took root in the 1980s changed the way we look at public education. The poor conditions the Times noted were the conditions of much of my own public education. It was not until I spent more time looking at older school buildings and reading historical documents that I came to understand just how much we have devalued our schools.

We no longer treat schools as the civic heart of our communities. We are not paying and honoring teachers as community leaders who inspire our future leaders. The buildings where we send our children have abandoned the use of architecture to communicate the importance of knowledge. You're lucky if the roof doesn't leak.

There is nothing new about this. Decades ago, my high school classrooms had multiple buckets to catch the water that leaked through every time it rained (and it rained very often in Oregon). When I was in middle school, I took some of my classes in one of those trailers. It was dubbed "the relocatable," although it was never relocated anywhere. It stood in the same place for over 20 years after I attended the school.

That trailer was scrapped in recent years. Students no longer try to learn in that decrepit shack, but the situation has hardly improved. Rather than building a new school or a permanent extension, they merely bought a new trailer a few years ago and plopped it down on another side of the school.

This stands in stark contrast to the way America once viewed our schools. Most people can probably think of at least one grand, old school that represented a major public investment in a solid building with proud architecture. The citizens who built those schools buildings had much less comfortable lives than we have today, yet they made the sacrifice to ensure the school was solid and looked important.

As an example, consider the early years of Albany, Oregon, when it was growing quickly and promoting itself. The early civic leaders viewed public education as a key to their boosterism. An 1888 book published to attract new businesses emphasized how well they paid the teachers. It compared how many months of school they provided each year and promised they were making progress for more. The school building was a key feature.

From Jobs to Junk

There may be no more depressing reminders of the structural imbalances in our economy than buildings like this:

This is a stark, physical reminder of the consumer economy run awry. Formerly an industrial building, it now houses a self-storage business. Instead of using our valuable urban real estate to employ residents to make the things we use, it is instead a repository for the over accumulation of a consumer economy that continues to buy things it rarely uses.

Work Below, Glide Above

Most people today have difficulty understanding the motivations behind elevated highways, especially along waterfronts. With luxury housing rising to take in the views, there is generally no hint left of the work that formerly dominated the waterfront, forming the demand and context for the highways. These unattractive structures, and the dark, foreboding spaces they seem to create below, can appear to be nothing other than wanton acts of brutality against the city. That is, unless there is some historical perspective.

The leisure spaces of the waterfront today bear no resemblance to the intense workspaces of the past. Docks with their stevedores and drayage once spilled out into wide, nondescript marginal streets. Vendors crowded along the street between the dock workers and the landlocked stretches of the city. It was an immense hustle and bustle out in the open air and the workers were all subject to the capriciousness of the sky.

The New York docks in the days of the square rigger.

New York Public Library

The Gentrification Will Be Televised

Some influential writers about cities have been talking about how TV shows contributed to the revitalization of cities. Over and over again, three specific shows seem to be credited with sparking a return to the city: Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City. The thing is, the city has always appeared as the setting for TV shows. When people embrace this narrative that is so factually incorrect, it serves as a window into the way they have perceived the city and approach it in their work to remake it. They are implicitly saying that what counts are places that attract the "creative class," and the experiences of working-class and minority urban residents simply don't matter.

Let's quickly dispel the myth that the city ever actually disappeared as a TV setting. I should note I am not the only person to observe the disconnect between the historical record and the return-to-the-city myth; David King had a blog post not too long ago. There were so many long-running shows, the narrative seems really quite puzzling at first. Here's a quick, partial list of older shows set in cities:

• The Odd Couple, 1970 - 1975
• The Mary Tyler Moore Show, 1970 - 1977
• Sanford and Son, 1972 - 1977
• The Bob Newhart Show, 1972 - 1978
• Barney Miller, 1975 - 1982
• The Jeffersons, 1975 - 1985
• Laverne & Shirley, 1976 - 1983
• WKRP in Cincinnati, 1978 - 1982
• Taxi, 1978 - 1983
• Diff'rent Strokes, 1978 - 1985
• Cheers, 1982 - 1993
• Night Court, 1984 - 1992
• The Cosby Show, 1984 - 1992
• Head of the Class, 1986 - 1992
• Perfect Strangers, 1986 - 1993
• Full House, 1987 - 1995
• Family Matters, 1989 - 1997

The shows that supposedly marked the return to the city don't come in until around the time of the end of this list:

• Seinfeld, 1989 - 1998
• Friends, 1994 - 2004
• Sex and the City, 1998 - 2004

Since there were shows set in cities running constantly for decades, what is it about Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City that is driving these perceptions? In a word: gentrification.

Before delving into more explanation, I think it would be helpful to simply watch the intros for Laverne & Shirley and Friends:

These were both shows about young singles living in the city, but the way their youthful characters experience the city has some stark differences. Laverne & Shirley shows its characters at work - in decidedly blue collar jobs. Friends, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City were about the city as a place of privileged leisure for the "creative class."

Those Old-School Traffic Engineers

It has become popular to indict traffic engineers of yesteryear as men so determined to move cars more quickly they disregarded the safety of pedestrians just trying to get across the street alive. This criticism that they were anti-pedestrian is an uncharitable view. It ignores the historical record, unfairly excluding their deliberate attempts to improve pedestrian safety. So in the words of Al Smith: Let's look at the record.

To illustrate this, we don't have to look any further than the language commonly used to criticize the engineers who designed one-way streets decades ago. Consider this example, which is typical of comments made by many observers of streets (who are well intentioned and otherwise often well-informed):

The city's avenues were converted to one-way for one reason only: to give the city's driving elite priority over its walking majority.

Building Ruins

It is our job as city builders to secure the funding necessary to build.  We cannot be frivolous, of course, but we must make the case for investment in infrastructure and architecture that lifts the soul.  Spending just enough to get by will be money wasted.  We will ultimately spend more as we return over and over again for repairs and minor functional improvements, and perhaps even an occasional beautification effort to address the worst of the ugliness, but we will never be satisfied.  There is no substitute for investing in quality.

We must be bold.  If we begin with the pessimism of limited funds, we will fail to produce the plans we need to carry us into the future.  Great plans will find investors, while weak incrementalism will only perpetuate stagnation.

If we are headed for ruin, let us at least leave ruins worth visiting.  Consider the great landmarks of civilization; some may be criticized for contributing to the financial collapse of those who built them, although I think that dubious.  There were invariably other, more critical structural problems that brought each institution to its demise.  The savings from forgoing their landmarks may have extended their life a little, but probably never could have saved them.  More significantly, the durability of landmarks has been a source of cultural and economic richness that accrues for generations beyond the measure of any discounted financial analysis.

As city builders, we owe a responsibility to the present and the future to produce quality landmarks. If we end in failure, let's make it the failure of ruins.

 Herman van Swanevelt (1603/1604–1655), via Wikimedia Commons