Creative Destruction

"The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises..."

- Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto

"New York, you're perfect
Don't please don't change a thing

Your mild billionaire mayor's
Now convinced he's a king

So the boring collect
I mean all disrespect

In the neighborhood bars
I'd once dreamt I would drink."

- LCD Soundsystem, "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down"

We live in a nation that no longer makes things, and maybe that's why we're so foggy-headed when it comes to discussions of wealth, class, or even of basic entrepreneurial instinct. How can we hope to understand wealth when "luxury" is pitched to us as a shoddily-built McMansion, and twenty years' worth of retirement savings can disappear in a stock market crash? What does it mean to speak of labor when work is a mind-numbing interval in a cubicle?

Maybe this economic existentialism is also why it's so popular to talk about the "creative economy" these days. Creative industries hold the last vestiges of America's tangible economic output - our last chance to make anything for ourselves.

Like many other cities, my hometown of Portland, Maine is gung-ho about its "creative economy," even though they haven't even finished building the "Biotechnology Park" left over from the last economic development fad.

On the surface, this seems like a positive thing - who wouldn't want more creativity? After chasing smokestacks for decades, City Hall is bringing a long-overdue focus on the small businesses and vibrant neighborhoods that really make our cities welcoming and attractive.

And yet (if the fad comment hasn't already tipped you off) it's beginning to feel like a lot of bullshit to me.

The germ of my ambivalence came from a real estate development proposal in my neighborhood. A billionaire hedge fund manager (and the husband of our congresswoman) owns a pied-à-terre apartment a few blocks away from us, and wants to transform several of the area's working-class tenement buildings that are in his portfolio into a newly renovated cluster of live-work spaces for quote-necessitated-because-I-don't-really-trust-a-billionaire-hedge-fund-manager's-use-of-the-word-unquote "artists".

So. I have some issues with said hedge fund manager's imposition of his aesthetic values on the landscape of our neighborhood, and on the creative output of local artists vis-a-vis the terms of their rental agreements. That's one thing and it might be entirely unjustified.

But I feel more nervous - and more certainly justified in this unease - about how the hedge funded artist colony is going to affect the larger creative environment of the city at large.

His proposed development is located on one of the last working-class neighborhoods of the city. It was part of Portland's Little Italy, and it's one of the few immigrant neighborhoods that wasn't demolished during the urban renewal purges of the 1960s and 1970s.

Photo by @MRobbinsPhoto, via Unseen Portland

At one end of the street is the city's friendliest dive bar; at the other end is a day labor agency. It happens to be a pretty great place for artists to live and work right now, as it is. But it's also a great place where teachers, hotel workers, office cleaners, and dozens of other working-class families can still afford to live, within walking distance of downtown's jobs and services. Why would we want to kick those people out?

Simultaneously (and potentially relatedly), a number of the city's economic development professionals and business leaders have recruited ArtSpace, a nonprofit developer of affordable buildings for artists, to investigate the possibility of their developing a project in Portland (possibly on Hampshire Street, and possibly elsewhere).

It may seem counter-intuitive, but even if we did create a walled garden for artists here - and it matters little whether it's built by a hedge fund manager or a nonprofit institution - the experiences of numerous other cities and neighborhoods before us forebodes that the wealth it brings in pursuit of "creative" entertainments will jeopardize the neighborhood's affordability and diversity, and thus undermine the fertile conditions that generate the very creativity we value.

Look at New York City: wealth drove out artists first from SoHo into the Lower East Side, then into Williamsburg, and now deep into Bed-Stuy. If the southeastward exile continues, in thirty more years all the artists will be drowned in the waters of Jamaica Bay.

Forty years ago, Donald Judd tried to escape it by moving from Manhattan to live among ranchers in a miniscule town in west Texas. Today, even that miniscule town is itself losing its identity with the influx of more and more wealth.

The Marfa Prada, a half-joking commentary on "Judd-effect gentrification", on the plains outside of Marfa, Texas. Photo via eartharchitecture.org.

And I saw it happen firsthand in Portland, Oregon, at the turn of this century:

In 1999, I set off to go to college in Portland, Oregon — then known only as a rainy mid-sized city with scenic parks. In the five years I spent out there, I saw the city morph into a self-satisfied model of progressive hedonism. But, as I found after graduation in 2003, and as thousands of other young people have found since then, it’s awfully hard to land a decent job there, and it’s getting harder all the time to find an affordable place to live. (source)

A creative economy requires creative people, and creative people seek out the frisson of affordable, diverse city neighborhoods, where it's easy to discover and interact with new ideas and with people who possess a diversity of cultural and economic backgrounds.

Creative people also require capital: they need affordable places where they can live and create things. But creativity, after all, is fun to be around: it attracts wealth, which ends up competing for the same resources that the creative people need. Thus, to paraphrase Marx, the accumulation of creative capital sows the seeds of its own destruction.

Sure, you can create protected islands of creativity amidst the sterile ruins of luxury condos and fusion restaurants. That's what the hedge fund manager and Artspace want to do, and I suppose that in some circumstances that might be the best option. But how creative can such a place really be, in its isolation? And aren't we declaring defeat prematurely by pursuing that option so soon, while our neighborhoods are still fairly egalitarian and diverse and functional just the way they are?

More importantly, is the exile of creative people from the neighborhoods they make great inevitable? Is the "creative economy" just the post-industrial manifestation of Marx's inevitable creative destruction?

Admittedly, the track record from places like New York isn't great. But I think there are two reasons to be optimistic.

I often think of Houston, where I lived for a year, as one of the most creative places I've lived (it certainly had Portland, Oregon beat). Sure, miles and miles of the city were dead zones of strip malls and cul de sacs. But for every time someone bulldozed a historic edifice to build a Wal Mart, someone else was doing something amazing in a vacant rice factory or shotgun house they bought for dirt cheap. That city thrived on constant change. From the outside, the city might look monstrous, constantly consuming itself and spreading out larger and larger. But on the ground, there was always something new.

If we lose Hampshire Street to a bunch of navel-gazing painters who are condemned to mediocrity because they never meet anyone or anything that challenges their assumptions, then I'll be sad, not least because that's my very own neighborhood that will become a more boring place.

But we live in a city, and cities are meant to change. Creative destruction, after all, is still creative. If one neighborhood becomes boring, another will become interesting. House shows will spring up in unexpected places; empty warehouses or abandoned big-box stores will become artists' squats. If we, as a city, embrace change (and Portland, to own the truth, has some issues with this, a few hang-ups with its nostalgia for the status-quo), then creativity has a way of surviving.

Still, I'd still rather let it thrive. And that brings me to a second reason to have some hope, because here we have a billionaire who wants to do right by downtrodden artists, and it seems churlish to complain about his methods when the impulse carries so much possibility.

If I ever had the chance to meet my billionaire neighbor, this is what I would tell him.

Portland's neighborhoods aren't ruined yet - they're still by and large egalitarian, and affordable, and authentically creative. Even better, a lot of the wealth that might threaten those neighborhoods' creativity is possessed by people who actively want to support a creative environment.

You and the other creative economy boosters want to do the right thing by carving out a refuge for artists - but you haven't yet considered the consequences of how that kind of project could exile dozens of other people who may not make art per se but are nevertheless vital to maintaining the conditions of a creative city.

May I suggest instead diverting your considerable resources toward finding ideas and investments that make the city more equitable and affordable to all people, not just for "artists"? If we can accomplish that, then the entire city stands a better chance of fostering the ideal conditions that generate more and more creative places.

Instead of relying on an institution to build us one Artspace, we could build hundred of Artspaces for ourselves, on our own terms, to our own standards. Sounds good - am I right?

Postscript: I've started writing a biweekly column in a small local paper, the Portland Daily Sun, and I wrote on this subject last week. But 800 words wasn't enough to fit in all the nuances of my mixed feelings about the "creative economy" business, hence this elaboration.

From Skid Row to Starbucks

The alleged etymological origins of the term "skid row" are in the Pacific Northwest, in districts where lumbermen "skidded" logs down towards mills and ships lining the waterfront, and where disreputable trades served lumbermen who were eager to spend their earnings on vices after long and sober months in the woods.

One of the most famous skid rows is in the neighborhood around Seattle's Pioneer Square, centered around Henry Yesler's sawmill. The neighborhood followed a familiar skid row trajectory: first, the waterfront industry moved away. Then, urban renewal projects manifested the city's disrespect for the neighborhood by demolishing lots of buildings and leaving the rest to wither in the shadows of ugly, soot-soaked freeway viaducts. Under the traffic, intentionally hidden from view, strip clubs, drug vendors, and homeless agencies flourished.

And then, when developers realized how close these skid rows were to downtown, and how cheap the real estate still was, the skid rows quickly flipped into yuppie pleasure districts, from New York's Bowery to San Francisco's Tenderloin District. And Pioneer Square attained the ideal embodiment of this post-industrial destiny when Starbucks built its complex of corporate headquarters offices in the neighborhood.

By the time crews started excavating for the 4-level underground parking garage, they confirmed that the old age of logging was dead and buried. Literally.

Photo by Scott Durham, of centraldistrictnews.com

Instead of digging down into post-glacial gravel, backhoes found a morass of rotting timber instead: the discarded slash from the old mills, the century-old pilings of old wharves and railroads, and the miscellaneous debris that nineteenth-century land developers had tossed into the city's marshy waterfront to transform wetlands into dry quays above sea level.

This item came to my attention via hugeasscity, which noted that the city's plan to renovate the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct (the concrete urban renewal scar visible in the background of the photo above) calls for putting the freeway underground. Which sounds like a neat-o plan for a Tomorrowland version of Seattle, until you consider that the whole gleaming, modern Seattle waterfront district is actually built atop an unstable, sinking pile of wood. Plus an active fault line.

In the end, it doesn't matter how many lattes and condos you sell above ground: the roots of the city will always be in Skid Row.

PS- the bike tour to Walden post I'd promised yesterday is still coming - check back tomorrow! I'm going on a blogging tear this week to make up for lost time.

Factory Nostalgia

Photo courtesy of tabism.com

Near the turn of the last century, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote his famous "frontier thesis": the idea that the frontier was what made Americans exceptional and unique - "the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history."

As many colonialist and racist problems as there are with Turner's frontier fetish, the idea still resonated. And that's probably because so many ordinary people behaved as though they agreed with Turner, whether or not they'd actually heard of him. For the entire subsequent century, Americans flooded into new frontiers of their own making: into suburban communities, into "ranch" homes on half-acre lots, into the nation's newly-dedicated national parks and forests.

America didn't start celebrating the wild frontier in earnest until it was already gone.

And now, at the turn of another century, we finally have something new - and newly lost - about which we can wax nostalgic: our industries.

Photo by flickr user Kyota.

In Japan, an increasing number of charter bus tours and cruises are taking tourists on “kojo-moe” (工場萌え), or "factory love" tours of the country's remaining industrial areas. At a time when an intransigent recession and cheaper competition from developing nations are taking their inevitable toll on Japanese industry, tourist groups are kindling their nostalgia for the country's mid-century industrial boom, and getting sentimental over the steel and concrete landscapes that built their nation.

Yokkaichi oil refinery. Photo by flickr user Kyota.

And why should kojo-moe be limited to the Japanese? Isn't our cultural fascination with Detroit and all of its magnificent industrial ruins essentially the same thing? All the Japanese have done is come up with a name for it. "Factory love," the nostalgia that the 21st century feels for the 20th.

You can find many, many more "factory love" photos tagged on Flickr, here.

Hedging for the End of Civilization, Part II

While we're talking about the collapse of the global economy, and civilization in general, I should also mention that there are a lot of people who do expect something along these lines to actually happen. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of them can be found talking about it on the internet.

For instance, there's Wendy, the Surviving the Apocalypse in the Suburbs blogger, who lives and writes from somewhere near me in southern Maine, and is trying to transition her family to a more "self-sufficient" lifestyle.

Architect Andres Duany thinks that peak oil and escalating food prices should convince real estate investors to build hobby farm collectives instead of golfing communities. For a million-dollar investment, your post-collapse future can look just like Tuscany! From "New Urbanism for the Apocalypse," by Greg Lindsay for Fast Company.

And there are high-rolling "New Urbanist" planners trying to convince real estate developers to bankroll bourgeoisie agrarian communes for an resource-scarce future.

And I'm especially fond of the Urban Self-Sufficientist in Atlanta. He raises rabbits and grows veggies in the backyard of his in-town bungalow, but the best posts are about practicing falconry in local parks in order to enjoy homemade, free-range squirrel stew.

It's interesting how these different people pursue "self-sufficiency" in different ways. Wendy, for instance, makes much of growing her own food, but she still lives in a suburb where she's forced to pay for two cars and their fuel in order to acquire basic necessities. How's she going to find enough refined oil to fill her cars' tanks after civilization collapses?

Meanwhile, the Urban Self-Sufficientist takes an opposite tack, living in the middle of an urban neighborhood. If gasoline disappears, he won't be too put out - but won't his neighbors start taking an unsavory interest in the fruits of his backyard farm?

And architect Duany talks up economic collapse even while he tries to get real estate investors to build his planned communities, which will presumably be financed by 30-year mortgages. At least he's talking with people who ought to be experts in economic failure.

So even people who are planning for disaster clearly have different expectations of what it's going to be like: different people hedge for the end of civilization in different ways. Some believe that through the wreckage we'll figure out some way to keep our cars; others believe that we'll figure out a way to maintain a financial system.

I have my doubts on these counts - you're going to put more faith in American car culture than in America itself? - but then again, I also don't think it's much worthwhile to plan for any kind of collapse. Even if it does happen, it's going to be unpredictable.

Besides, I'm not much interested in self-sufficiency for its own sake. I'd rather rely on my neighbors for some things - there are plenty of people who are better farmers than I am, for instance, and I'd rather let others do the things they do well rather than try to do everything half-assed by myself. Specialization of labor is one of the innovations that got humanity out of the stone age, and even if civilization did collapse, I would hope that we wouldn't need to leave that idea behind - that we'd still be able to rely on our neighbors, families, and friends to help each other out.

Still, I do enjoy how the idea of self-sufficiency leads people to think about the places and the resources that provide their necessities for living. It's a roundabout way of thinking about our day-to-day relationships and dependencies on the natural resources that sustain us, and for some (like the falconer in Atlanta) it's a way to bring a little wildness home with us, even if we live in the middle of the city.

Self-sufficiency will not be any fun if it's forced on us. But as long as it's an elective activity, these bloggers make it clear that it can be a rewarding pursuit.

The Colors of Abandonment

Greenfields: former agricultural lands laying in fallow. Greenfields proliferated during the early 20th century, as agribusiness consolidated and small farms were abandoned.

Brownfields: former industrial lands, frequently with pollution hazards. Brownfields proliferated during the late 20th century, as manufacturing businesses moved overseas and firms abandoned domestic factories.

Redfields: former middle-class neighborhoods, frequently characterized by strip malls, tract housing, and other properties that are now "in the red" and owned by absentee financial institutions. Redfields have proliferated in the first decade of the 21st century, in the wake of the real estate bubble, as the suburban middle class succumbs to crushing debt and poor access to economic opportunity.

Photo credits (from top): GeoFX on Flickr, Das_A on Flickr, and The Bollard.

Go to Detroit, Young Man, and Grow Up

Bizarrely, a boot company and the guy from "Jackass" have teamed up to debunk the hopeless, epicenter-of-the-recession "ruin porn" that dominates everyone's perception of the Motor City. It's pretty fantastic, so I'll buy into their viral marketing scheme by re-posting and recommending their film here:



Here's the link for the whole 3-part series. It visits some of the famous ruins of Detroit, but only in the context that people are reviving and doing exciting things for those ruins. In this telling, the empty prairies and abandoned buildings don't necessarily represent blight; they represent possibility. Like the frontier in Horace Greeley's day, Detroit offers amazing opportunities for people to reinvent themselves - and reinvent the city.

A lot of what appeals to me in this video reminds me of the things I loved about Houston. Because in spite of its rapid growth and booming economy, Houston (like any other big city) also had a fair share of abandoned buildings, even entire neighborhoods overgrown in weeds, and those were the places I loved to explore.

It was also cheap to live there, partly because Houston has a sprawling geography and very few rules about what people do with their real estate - there is literally no zoning law there.

And so: one man I'd met bought the concrete shell of an old rice mill near the bayou, lived in a bus parked inside its empty walls, and made art cars. Our friends bought an abandoned apartment complex and the old pool hall next door to house a successful after-school program. And the summer we lived there, Art League of Houston commissioned this project for two abandoned houses that had been slated for demolition in the Montrose neighborhood (which is one of the city's most vibrant, by the way):


So in general, the most amazing parts of Houston were the places that had recently been abandoned, and were on the verge of re-creating themselves. I think that the same goes for most cities.

So I guess I disagree, somewhat, with the derogatory term "ruin porn." There are at least a few of us who are ogling Detroit's gorgeous, abandoned architecture and new prairies not out of scorn for the Government Motors bailouts, nor for the sake of wallowing in self-pity about this recession, but out of genuine sense of possibility. We are imagining ourselves making something new there, and being a part of the revival.

Beneath the corn, the husks of ancient Venice

This is a farm field near the small village of Altino, Italy, about two miles northeast of the Venice airport, and a mile from the northern edge of the Venetian lagoon:

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Look carefully at this aerial view and you can see lines of darker and lighter vegetation slicing across the crop rows. This week's issue of Science magazine features an article by Paolo Mozzi, an Italian geomorphologist who surveyed this same field with infrared cameras during the severe drought of 2007 to analyze subtle variations in plant hydration.

He was looking for crop marks, an archaeological technique that looks at variations in plant health on the surface as a way to discover ancient walls and building foundations that have since been buried beneath three feet of soil. At right is a sketch from Wikipedia that shows how it works: a stone wall just below the surface (on the left side of this sketch) limits the amount of topsoil and stunts the growth of the plants growing above, while an old ditch (on the right) helps the plants above it grow taller with extra topsoil.

Here's what Mozzi's infrared survey found:


This is the ancient Roman city of Altinum, a place that became an important strategic and commercial center thanks to its position at the edge of the Venetian lagoon and at the crossroads of the empire's Via Annia and Via Claudia Augusta. In the fifth century C.E., it and several other Roman cities nearby were conquered and burned by Attilla the Hun, and subsequent barbarian invasions from the north forced the Romans to retreat from the mainland cities to the marshy islands of the lagoon.

Altinum was abandoned completely by the 11th century, but its island refugee settlements grew in size and prosperity to eventually become the city of Venice.

The Roman historian Strabo wrote that "Altinum too is in a marsh... and hence subject to inundations"(see note below). The engineering behind the canals of Venice was pioneered in Altinum, where the Romans built a network of canals to drain the marshes and carry the water away from their buildings. One of the canals is clearly visible in the infrared image above, and, if you know where to look, it's also visible as a slightly darker band of green in the aerial view at the top of this post. When the Romans left, the canals filled in and the marshes took over once again, until the nineteenth century, when the land was reclaimed for farms.

This makes Altinum one of the few Roman cities that wasn't subsequently buried underneath more modern settlements. Instead, it sank into the marshes, only to be re-discovered a thousand years later as a shadow cast over an unwitting farmer's agricultural yield.


Note: Here's the translated source text from "The Geography of Strabo." Strabo calls Altinum similar to the nearby city of Ravenna, which sounds even more like modern Venice: he calls it "a city built entirely of wood [another possible translation is "built on piles"] and coursed by rivers, and it is provided with thoroughfares by means of bridges and ferries. At the tides the city receives no small portion of the sea, so that, since the filth is all washed out by these as well as the rivers, the city is relieved of foul air."

Picket Lines and Prairies

Above: An unmown pedestrian bridge in Windsor, Ontario.
Photo courtesy of wreckingball.org

In Windsor, Ontario (the city directly across the river from Detroit), 1,800 municipal workers have been on strike for several months now. Among other things, this means that no one is mowing the lawns in the city's parks, which are transforming from riverfront esplanades and soccer fields into wild prairies as the summer wears on.

The re-wilding of Windsor's parks has inspired some nice nature writing from Anne Jarvis, a columnist from the Windsor Star, and her readers:

At first, the flood of comments and letters on the strike by 1,800 city workers, including those who cut the grass in the usually manicured parks, expressed anger about the unsightly overgrowth.

Then the grass matured, the wildflowers began blooming and wildlife returned. And the letters began to change.

This one is almost poetic in its description:

"The long grass is now home to so many singing birds and insects and there is such a wide variety of colourful native plants in bloom. The wind can be heard as it blows through the grass ... Such a difference from the plain, flat and empty space it was before."

The park? The soccer pitches at the Ford Test Track [which is exactly what it sounds like: a former proving ground for Detroit's dying manufacturers] in the heart of the city.

"Today was the first time that I have ever considered that park to be beautiful," wrote the woman.

A colony of bobolinks and some eastern meadowlarks, declining species known and loved for their beautiful song, were discovered there last month. They surprised and delighted birdwatchers. A grassland species, they're rarely seen in the city because there isn't much grassland.

I found out about Windsor's strike and unintentional re-wilding project via the Broken City Lab, whose latest project has been to unofficially recognize the city's overgrown meadows with these signs, which they designed and installed themselves:

Above: Strike commentary from Windsor's Broken City Lab.

I love how these signs tweak peoples' perceptions of these places: suddenly, it's not an overgrown lawn or a symbol of municipal neglect: it's a wildlife refuge!

As the Summer Without Lawnmowers wears on, people in Windsor are growing fond of the new wildflower meadows and flocks of bobolinks. In the same Windsor Star column, Jarvis reports that the City has resolved to leave a couple hundred acres of parkland unmown, even after the strike eventually ends.

Alpha Site: the Navy's nuclear Grand Central, in the suburbs of San Francisco

Here's a ground-level photo of yesterday's mystery site on the eastern fringes of Concord, California, from flickr user topherus:


Looking at the map, I noticed that these rails all led to the US Naval Station Port Chicago, about three miles away on the shore of Suisun Bay (the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta). A quick search uncovered this globalsecurity.org blurb about the base:

The Detachment’s primary purpose is the loading and unloading of large quantities of weapons and equipment from cargo and pre-positioning ships. This differs substantially from most other naval weapons stations and detachments, where weapons are loaded aboard combatants, amphibious vessels or replenishment ships one at a time or in very small groups. Base infrastructure is uniquely suited for bulk quantity operations with one floating crane, seven shore cranes, 1 superstacker, one Rough Terrain Container Handler, 342 forklifts, 101 miles of railroad track, and 79 miles of roadway. During wartime conditions, Detachment Concord has the capability to load 4,500 tons of munitions per day.

This is how frightened we used to be of the Communists: imagine building all this in order to send hundreds of bomb-packed boxcars to explode over Siberia on a daily basis, because the Russians were also planning to send hundreds of bomb-packed boxcars to explode over California on a daily basis. Stuff like this gives me some comfort in knowing that our global society isn't quite as batshit crazy as we were during the Cold War.

The base's inland portions, including those pictured above and in yesterday's post, are massive weapons bunkers, designed to transfer boxcars full of explosives into storage, and then onto waiting Navy ships. The area is currently in the process of being decommissioned, and in the course of planning for redevelopment, newly-declassified details are emerging. One "community representative" at a recent meeting learned from the Navy’s “Historic Radiological Assessment” team that nuclear missiles were stored in these bunkers, and moved through these railyards on a fairly regular basis. The "Halfway to Concord" blogger reports:

The area of these bunkers can be seen from Willow Pass Road as your approach Highway 4 looking South East, there is a set of bunkers set aside surrounded by a double wire fence with telephone poles surrounding it with floodlights on them. It was called in various documents: the Alpha Site or in RAB records as Site 22 Bunker Group 2...

The period of atomic weapon storage was ended “long ago”, but the implication elsewhere is that they removed more than 25 years ago and maybe into the late 70’s...

In the main ‘Bunker City’ area [pictured above] opposite the Dana Estates there were 6 bunkers that housed ammunition for the Phalanx Weapon System that used depleted Uranium bullets. This material is about 1/3 denser than lead, which is why it makes for a better bullet for this weapon system.

The author also notes that, in the city's redevelopment plan, much of the base would be sold off to housing developers to house 33,000 new residents. The area of these bunkers, the Grand Central station of Cold War naval warheads, would become the site of "low density ‘Estate’ style housing," which is Californian for "McMansions."

Other than the fact that Contra Costa County has averaged about 100 foreclosures a day for the past year, building new, radioactive trophy houses is probably a fantastic idea! Hey, Californians: here's some inspiration from ye olde East Coast.

PS- Kudos for commenter Jake D. in the previous post for guessing correctly what these were.

The High Line in 2009

The High Line, which I wrote about at the end of 2007, opened to the public this week as a newly-landscaped public park. It looks pretty great:

Photo by joevare on flickr.

But it's interesting how the context of the High Line has changed since its current incarnation went under construction two years ago. Back then, Manhattan was in the middle of a real estate boom for the ultra-wealthy. The overgrown High Line was a romantic idiosyncrasy - a few acres of overgrown, abandoned meadowland that held itself aloof from the city's real estate obsessions.

The High Line was initially pitched as a new park by a few activists who wanted to preserve this beautiful bit of wilderness in their neighborhood. Here's what it looked like back then:

Photo: Jason Levine

The idea may have come from the grassroots, but the High Line became a reality at the hands of developers and politicians who wanted an amenity for the wealthier, less wild neighborhood they envisioned in place of the industry and empty lots of the old Meatpacking District.

Construction began near ground zero of the real estate boom. Workers scraped away all of the High Line's wild growth and replaced it with new soil beds and plantings according to architectural plans designed to mimic the abandoned landscapes they were replacing. Meanwhile, a new forest of ultra-luxe high rises began to rise in the surrounding neighborhood, fertilized by the new high-concept park.

Then, of course, the housing market fell to earth - which, for Manhattan's real-estate space cadets, was a very, very long way to fall. Suddenly, the old High Line's overgrown abandonment wasn't a such a novelty: we began seeing the same triumphs of nature in suburban backyards and half-finished construction sites all over the country.

They're still building new high-rises around the newly-opened High Line, but it's a lot less certain, now, about who's going to pay millions of dollars to live in the skyscraper with the car elevator (it lets lucky residents park their cars on the same floor where they sleep*).

Photo by meganificent on flickr.

In the new economy, the High Line feels a lot weirder. It was meant to be a futuristic preserve for New York's past - especially its overgrown lots and abandoned industrial infrastructure. Now that the park is open, though, the ultra-slick High Line feels a bit out of place. Instead of evoking New York City's past, the High Line looks more like an expensive simulation of conditions in inner-city Detroit, or of a foreclosed backyard, or of any of the thousands of newly-defunct car dealerships nationwide. Those conditions were rare in New York City two years ago, but now that they're fairly commonplace in society's consciousness, the High Line seems more artificial and contrived.

This sounds harsher than I mean it too: lots of park landscapes are artificial and contrived, and also successful. I'm actually very much looking forward to visiting this new park, and I'm excited that so many New Yorkers had the vision to recognize and preserve this bit of wilderness in the middle of the city.

My point is that even though every sapling, rusted rail, and clump of wildflowers is in its place according to the architectural plans, the High Line Park that opened this week is quite different from the High Line Park that was designed two or three years ago. Our experiences in society shape our experiences of nature, and society is changing a lot right now.

I hope that there will be many more parks like the High Line, and I expect that one of many silver linings of this recession is that there will be. What better place to think about our society's changing relationships with nature than on an overgrown ruin of the old economy?


* Re: the car-elevator condo: I don't understand how people willing to pay for a drive-in elevator - in order to minimize their exposure to public places - are expected to benefit from their proximity to a park like the High Line. It seems as though they'd be just as happy - if not happier - living next to a heavily-guarded prison. Or in one: after all, in the real estate market for multi-billionaire captains of finance, prison cells are probably one of the fastest-growing segments.

Detroit, Land of Opportunity, The New New World

Corine Vermuelen-Smith is a photographer who makes me want to move to Detroit:

Her photographs show a city that's reverting back into a frontier: a wide-open landscape of open prairies and land that's free for the taking.


The once-mighty tribes of the Big Three are shadows of what they once were, and their ruins are scattered everywhere. What remains of them is confined to government reservations. Their downfall wasn't smallpox or colonial crusades, but cheap credit and complicity in the SUV trade.

Above: empty-lot farm on Pierce Street.

The Detroit that remains looks like a ruin to most perspectives. But in the images of Vermeulen-Smith (who happens to be from the Netherlands), it looks a lot like a New World. Yeoman farmers reclaim abandoned lots to grow crops, and Detroit's homeless fashion tidy homes in the wilderness to live strikingly similarly as our national demigods, the western pioneers.


The recession is a new American revolution. From these ruins of the old economy grow a new manifest destiny, and it should lend hope for us all that this one will be more frugal, resourceful, and honest than the one we had expected.

The Beach of Shredded Auto Parts

On Portland's western waterfront, between the Casco Bay and Veterans Bridges, lie the remains of a railyard that was abandoned sometime in the late 20th century. Along the collapsing granite seawall on one section is a mound of reddish soil, which, upon further inspection, isn't soil at all, but a finely-ground mixture of old rubber hoses, wire casings, nuts, washers, bits of fiberglass, and plastic.



These look like the remnants of scrapped automobiles that were sent through giant shredders at junkyards, then shipped by rail to this location. But the railyard went out of business, and the barge that was supposed to take them to some distant landfill never came.

So the temporary waterfront landfill became a permanent beach of shredded auto parts. Decades of oceanfront weather eroded the junk even further: now, the rubber is brittle to the touch and the metals are entirely rusted.

The junk has undoubtedly been leaching all sorts of toxic meatals into the adjacent Fore River Estuary for all these years: cadmium, lead, copper, zinc, and other poisons common to our automobiles. Yet, miraculously, a few scrubby juniper and aspen trees have managed to take root on the mound of shredded cars:

Return to Inwood Hill Park

Last weekend, a friend of mine recruited me to come down to NYC to lead a nature walk for some sixth-graders from Washington Heights. So I brought them to my old park-rangering haunt, Inwood Hill Park, for my first visit back there in almost three years (n.b.: my experience as an Urban Park Ranger at Inwood is more or less how this blog was born).

We walked up the hill through the old-growth woods in the Clove, climbed through the Indian caves, and we saw:

• the red-tailed hawk
• several cardinals
• a downy woodpecker
• lots of house sparrows and squirrels

It's hard to tell what the kids thought of it. They were very well behaved, but then, they were also attending a Saturday-morning educational program on their own free will. They definitely liked the caves, though, and they seemed to think that the cardinals were neat. I wish we could have seen the hawk attack a pigeon or something: then the kids definitely would have loved nature, forever.

Anyhow, the park is much as I remember it, although it feels much smaller without any leaves on the trees. There was one very exciting change, though. A crescent-shaped piece of the playing field next to the "salt marsh" (pictured above) has been fenced off, with signs announcing the following:

RESTORATION IN PROGRESS: This area is being passively restored to native salt marsh. Sensitive vegetation, including Salt Marsh Cordgrass (spartina alternafolia), is in the process of regenerating.

This is pretty exciting. Before it was filled in with gravel and debris from the subway excavations, this entire field had been an expansive, ecologically-rich salt marsh. Large oyster-shell middens in the park's woods attest that the marsh helped support, among other things, one of the Hudson estuary's more productive oyster beds in the adjacent Spuyten Duyvil Creek. In the decades since, the adjacent mudflat (which park personnel optimistically refer to as the "tidal marsh") hosted the last remnants of the old marsh around its fringes, but even these sad shreds were sorely abused with picnic garbage, combined-sewer overflows, and park workers who hacked the marsh plants down with machetes for unclear "safety" purposes.

It's funny how often "safety" gives pencilneck bureaucrats the fiat to act like dicks.

In recent years, the edges of the filled-in playing field have been sinking, as the decades-old landfill settles and as tides from the adjacent mudflats gradually rise higher. When I worked there in 2006, there were two big London Plane trees on this location. During the course of the summer, their leaves dried up and fell, as the trees' roots parched themselves on increasingly briny groundwater. Instead of adding new landfill and planting new trees, the Parks Department has decided to let it sink: a decision that will be a lot cheaper and do a lot more good to the Spuyten Duyvil's water quality.

The Garden

Tonight at Portland's SPACE Gallery they'll be screening "The Garden," a documentary about Los Angeles's South Central Farm.

The Farm enjoyed a vibrant 12-year history as a diverse ecosystem of central American crop plants raised on small plots by about 350 local families. It also served, temporarily, as one of the largest green spaces for South Central Los Angeles, an area with a high proportion of minorities and elevated levels of air pollution (in the 1980s, the City of Los Angeles temporarily owned the site with the intention to build a new garbage incinerator, but environmental justice protests sank the proposal).

Ultimately, though, southern California's red-hot real estate market scorched the farm. Bulldozers ripped through the site in 2006, but not before some high-profile protest songs by Joan Baez, and a two-week tree sit by a group that included Daryl Hannah (yeah, that Daryl Hannah: tabloid story here, Daryl's first-person account here).

The forty-acre farm site is now a barren, empty lot, surrounded by razor wire. Just as soon as the real estate lawyers beat the farmers' pro bono legal team into submission, the site will sprout a new Forever 21 distribution center and warehouse.

For more info:
The Garden movie website
South Central Farmers: official web site

The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit

With overpaid executives begging Congress to keep a shrinking, 1920s-era industry limping along for another few months (just in case Hummers come back in style), it seems like a good time to showcase one of my favorite websites: The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit.

This Studebaker plant built autos between 1910 and 1928, and burned to the ground in 2005. The Studebaker corporation produced its first electric autos in 1902, and its first gasoline autos in 1904. Its car manufacturing business was defunct by 1964:



Packard Motors produced its first automobiles in 1899, and closed its last plants in 1956:



East of downtown, the former industrial Rivertown neighborhood is one of many accidental restoration sites where wild prairie ecosystems are re-infiltrating the city center. Looming in the background is "The Renaissance Center," the ironically-named GM headquarters complex, aloof from its surroundings, destined to become Detroit's next fabulous ruin.

Inner-city wilderness areas in the news

Some recommended reading:

Robert Sullivan (the same guy who wrote Rats) has an article in New York Magazine about Fresh Kills Landfill, where piles of garbage "about the height of Mexico’s Great Pyramid of Cholula" are currently being repurposed to become one of New York City's largest parks. Here's a post I'd written about Fresh Kills Park last summer.

In an age when our remaining inner-city wildnernesses are usually abandoned industrial or military sites, the new park's designers are hoping to set a new standard in park design: "They would not build a new park on top of an old dump. Instead, they would make the old dump a part of the new park, by acknowledging it, reclaiming it, recycling it on behalf of a modern metropolis."


The future of Fresh Kills: cross-country skiing on half a century's accumulation of garbage. Rendering courtesy of Field Operations.

Sullivan's article is also rich with garbage trivia: the Sanitation Dept. processes 312 gallons of liquid dump excretions from Fresh Kills every minute. "Henry David Thoreau, living in Staten Island while trying to get freelance writing work in Manhattan, used to walk onto the marsh island in Fresh Kills to dig arrowheads, 'the surest crop.'” And the urban archaeological artifacts buried there include "a million dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin accidentally lost in a garbage scow (1948); eight capsules of radium accidentally taken from a doctor’s office (1949); a leg, possibly from a gangland-style hit (1974)."

Read the whole story here, or find out more about Fresh Kills Park from the official City website.

Elsewhere, the Times Escapes section ran a story last week on inner-city hiking trails with city skyline views. The article included trail recommendations in DC, Pittsburgh, Philly, NYC, Hartford, Boston, and Portland. All good places to walk off your Thanksgiving meals.

Worth Watching

"On July 2, 2002, Jean and Harlow Cagwin watched as their home, the last remnant of their 118-acre cattle farm in Lockport, Illinois, was torn down clearing the way for a new housing development. Several years later, Ed and Amanda Grabenhofer and their four children moved into the new Willow Walk subdivision, their house just yards from where the Cagwin's home once stood."

Photographer Scott Strazzante documented both of these families, living on the same land, over a 14-year period.

Watch this multimedia slideshow on MediaStorm.

Comeuppance: the decline and fall of Ford and General Motors

"Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini

Since 1990, Ford and General Motors have protested new fuel-efficiency standards in Washington, because improving gas mileage might make their SUV-dependent business models less profitable. Today's NY Times business section has a great story about how we can essentially thank Ford and GM for $4/gallon gas.

These GM workers were photographed protesting fuel-efficiency standards in 2002. They wanted to continue building the company's ridiculously profitable SUVs:

(Photo by Joe Polimeni, via the AP)

I like the sign that says "America Means Choice." Because now, Americans are choosing not to buy any of their piece-of-shit vehicles.

GM is shuttering several of its truck factories. Another great story in today's NY Times talks about how much it sucks to cough up a Benjamin every time you need to fill your gas tank.

Even Starbucks is worth twice as much as GM these days. Sometimes capitalism works just the way it's supposed to.

The Militarization of Maine's Working Waterfronts

Mainers take a lot of pride in the state's remaining working waterfronts, our in-town piers and wharves where marine industries haven't yet given way to upscale condos and quaint shoppes. People like me appreciate the working waterfront because it ties us culturally to a seafaring heritage and a tightly-knit relationship with the marine wilderness. The ragtag warehouses and stink of fish may not be pretty to everyone, but working waterfronts are a visible reminder that we still derive a good portion of our food and our livelihoods from the wild ocean.

But obviously, the working waterfronts are only a shadow of what they used to be. What's happened to Maine's shipbuilding industry has been particularly interesting and telling as a barometer of the rest of the state's waterfronts.

Maine's shipbuilding traditions have military roots from the Colonial era, when "king pine" trees (old-growth white pines) were marked and felled to build ship masts for the Royal Navy. Maine's Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was established in 1800 to build the new Union's naval fleet.

Nevertheless, Maine's shipbuilding industry flourished with the civilian, commercial trade in the 19th century. This 1901 article from the New York Times tells us that

"The Maine shipyards have on the stocks or under contract, including vessels launched since Jan. 1, 1901, 2 ships, 35 schooners, 8 barges, 5 steamers, and numerous small craft, and in all New England there are now under construction 131 vessels, with an aggregate tonnage of over 100,000. This does not include Government vessels... with a total displacement of over 50,000 tons.

"This is an era of mammoth fore-and-afters. In 1900 2 six-masters were built, one at Camden and one at Bath, including the Oakley C. Curtis... and the Rebecca Palmer. ... It is likely that Maine will produce a seven-master before the year is out."

At the turn of the century, then, New England shipbuilders were building lots of boats, and most of them, by tonnage and in raw numbers, were for civilian uses. The image above is the Rebecca Palmer five-masted ship mentioned in the article. The image is from the State Library of Queensland, Australia, and a Google search turns up genealogical references to service on the "Rebecca Palmer" from all over the world. It seems likely that Rebecca was a merchant ship, an industrial-era pioneer in global trade.

Today, though, Maine's shipbuilding industry is overwhelmingly reliant upon Navy contracts (and, depending on your perspective, pork-barrel spending brought home by Maine's swing-voting senators). The state's largest remaining shipyard, Bath Iron Works (pictured), built yachts, trawlers, and passenger steamships in its early days, but its last non-military contract was for two tankers in 1981. In 1995, General Dynamics bought the yard to officially claim Bath's working waterfront as a fixture in the military-industrial complex.

BIW is an impressive sight to see, and some part of me is glad that it's still there, even if it's spending my tax money for dubious reasons. Still, today's shipyards have nearly nothing to do with Maine's natural resources, unless you count the proximity of deep water. They have nothing to do with Maine's tall, straight trees, its fisheries, or its seafaring population. When these ships launch, their crews will rarely, if ever, have to worry about gales, currents, drinking water, or sustaining themselves with food from the sea. The militarization of Maine's shipyards has removed most of the shipyards' and the ships' distinctive relationships with nature.

And it's also removed the reasons why the shipyards should remain here, instead of anywhere else. BIW only remains here because of the inertia of history, the difficulty of moving huge cranes and laying off labor unions. Except for the inherent political difficulties, General Dynamics would probably just as soon move the whole operation to Mexico.

Forest Succession in Manhattan: The High Line

Photo: Jason Levine

On the West Side of Manhattan, an old elevated railway that's been abandoned for twenty-five years shows us how urban plants and trees can re-colonize and thrive in the middle of the nation's biggest city.

Succession typically works this way: after a large disturbance, like a fire or windstorm, fast-growing weeds and shrubs move in to stablize and reinvigorate the soil. These give way to fast-growing trees, which in turn get crowded out by slow-growing, shade-tolerant climax species.

The High Line ceased its railroad operations in 1980, and even though it started with no topsoil to speak of, the abandoned viaduct has come a long way towards growing a forest.

Even while the railroad was operating, meager scraps of dust and soot gathered amidst the railbed and began supporting mosses and a few hardy grasses. Over the years, more dust, leaves, and soot blew in. Each fall, the topsoil gained another layer of dead grass and leaves from pioneer weeds like goldenrod, Queen Anne's lace, and Ailanthus Altissima.

Given a few more years, the High Line might have begun to support larger trees, including birches and oaks. But the High Line's succession is taking place amidst the parallel succession of the Meatpacking District, where pioneer nightclub and art studio species are losing their habitat to multi-million dollar condos and Frank Gehry's masturbatory late-empire architecture. A few years ago, artists looked down on the green ribbon of the High Line and proposed a public park. Developers saw dollar signs, and so this is how the High Line looks today:

The High Line, scraped clean and ready for new landscaping, while secondary-growth condos and Gehry emerge from the weeds in Chelsea. Photo: NYVviaRachel on Flickr

When construction is finished, the new High Line park will have benches, new concrete paths, easy access from the street level, and drought-tolerant landscaping that mimics the wild weeds that inspired the park.

It might seem like an interruption and commodification of the wild successional process, but New York is nothing if not habitat for homo sapiens, and the new High Line fits in perfectly with New York's typical neighborhood succession: places once run-down and diverse inexorably become unaffordable and boring. At least until the next large disturbance, anyhow.

Visit NYCviaRachel's Flickr page for more High Line construction photos.