Sunday Morning Reading

Francine Stock's excellent Regional Modernism reports that St. Louis is not the only city taking aim at the work of New Orleans modernist Charles Colbert. Colbert's hometown wants to level the playing field: the Recovery School District wants to demolish Colbert's Phyllis Wheatley Elementary School (1955) as well as Curtis & Davis's Thomy Lafron Elementary School (1954), also a modern landmark.

The New York Times reports on one man's grassroots effort to save Admiral Row in Brooklyn, a row of stately 19th century houses once occupied by the Navy Yard's highest-ranking officers. Architect Scott Witter's crusade involves a curious home-grown museum, Brooklyn's Other Museum of Brooklyn, which has found one of the best uses for blue painter's tape that I've seen.

Can St. Louis Lure Small Businesses?

This week New Geography published an interesting article by Steve Null entitled "New York City Closes Shop". The article reports that under the anti-small business policies of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, over 83,000 small businesses have been forced to close since 2001. That astounding figure represents just the recent effort to "crack down" on commerce that predecessors Rudy Giuliani, David Dinkins and Ed Koch all enforced as well.

Has this trend pushed small business out of the Big Apple? If so, what can smaller cities do to lure some of the entrepreneurs that might end up looking for a more encouraging urban business environment?

While Chicago has been a beneficiary of New York's terrible policies, St. Louis could lure some of the business. St. Louis has an abundance of historic commercial districts, where old buildings offer cheap rents and low purchase prices. Small business owners can afford to rent a small space in New York and maybe an entire building in Chicago. In St. Louis, they can buy a building -- or two. The low cost of living is a base incentive.

The 8200 block of North Broadway in the Baden neighborhood, 2006.
However, St. Louis needs more than a low cost of living and old buildings to draw businesses from larger cities. We need better urban planning policies to promote commercial districts by retaining storefront buildings and keeping out fast food, drug stores and other uses that break up urban streetscapes needed to draw shoppers. We need public sector investment in infrastructure like sidewalks, alleys and lighting. The business license fees and sales tax rates in the city are too high, especially on food and drink. Most of all, we need to break down the ward-by-ward differences in business and license policy with strict citywide standards that make sense to people from the outside world.

I'm not suggesting that a wave of would-be New Yorkers are coming. In fact, many of the small business owners we need to attract are those who chose Clayton, St. Charles or Belleville -- or Memphis, Cleveland or Kansas City -- over the city proper. The bottom line is that we have to create a city that not only has sensible small business policy but actively encourages small business to keep our neighborhood commercial districts thriving.

I would be very interested in comments from city small business owners.

From Done Deal to Dead Deal?

Next American City has an article by Katherine Mella entitled "Atlantic Yards: A Crash Course" that provides a great overview of Forest City Ratner's controversial Brooklyn mega-project centered around a new sports arena.

The supposedly "done deal" project was pushed through at the state rather than local level to head off opposition. Aggressive agents made over-market-value offers to secure control of key property around desired public land (underused Metropolitan Transit Authority rail yards). Atlantic Yards bolstered political support by lining up labor leaders, clergy and others who typically might oppose a large project and mass use of eminent domain. To woo the urbanist community, Forest City Ratner hired superstar architect Frank Gehry to design the complex. Residents who would be pushed out by the project have always had an uphill struggle.

There are many parallels to the NorthSide project. However, one thing about Atlantic Yards that we have not seen with NorthSide is a political swing in favor of opposition. Mella's article concludes by noting that Atlantic Yards has lost much of its initial advantages:

Being able to borrow money and raise capital in this fiscal climate has placed the project at a severe disadvantage. And with a less than exciting main attraction, resolute local opposition, and legal and financial hurdles, it is hard to say if Ratner's Atlantic Yards will ever -- or even ought to -- come to fruition.

I suppose the perils of large-scale development have never been as clear as now. Atlantic Yards may have killed itself through sheer folly of its ambitious scope and clumsy execution. The development team behind NorthSide should take heed.

Big, Bad Buildings

Who's afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about giantism that we just don't know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale -- and ultimately it is a gamble -- demands an extraordinary payoff. The Trade Center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.

- Ada Louise Huxtable, "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Buildings?", New York Times, May 29, 1966

World Trade Center Attack, Five Years Later

If you want to know what I wrote about the World Trade Center five years ago, and two years ago, go to this page at Omnitectural Forum.

Five years later, the event of the towers' destruction still seems pivotal to me, but I no longer feel that American society treats it as an urgent political event. In fact, I fear that its anniversary is really an unremarkable and mostly overlooked day.

Then again, what else can be said or written? We have had five years to change the world in which the event happened to one in which is would be improbable -- and we have not done so. Our media has become even less reliable, our government more corrupt, and our world remains in turmoil. Yet there is great hope in that the unmitigated flow of political and technological power that shaped 9/11 is proving unsustainable, and the ways to resist the social impacts of that flow are more within our grasp than ever.

I hope that if in five years 9/11 is an uneventful day, it is because I am comfortable with the society in which I live and not because it's the same mess on a different day.