tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-176195082024-03-07T09:00:30.333-05:00The Vigorous NorthA Field Guide to Inner-City Wilderness Areas.C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.comBlogger454125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-56999774724247273502016-03-31T07:21:00.000-04:002016-04-07T16:14:40.542-04:00Public housing for the future<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr8Hhu4JtGiTgoTrzFUsTP8lVq-j_B4irjn-1TGMLbUhCRs8LQy6BobPqSKnK1gGSJPBnT56RtPRnCX63Du7ak1IIRtkOXAremQJBHFMSrmeFgnQ4X4a4-G8PRwhGzjOa1fxVL/s1600/WP_20160330_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr8Hhu4JtGiTgoTrzFUsTP8lVq-j_B4irjn-1TGMLbUhCRs8LQy6BobPqSKnK1gGSJPBnT56RtPRnCX63Du7ak1IIRtkOXAremQJBHFMSrmeFgnQ4X4a4-G8PRwhGzjOa1fxVL/s640/WP_20160330_001.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<p>
Four years ago I joined the board of commissioners for the Portland
Housing Authority with a chip on my shoulder about the fact that it
hadn’t built any new apartments for the city since the Reagan
administration. So I'm pretty proud about this: we’ve torn out a parking
lot on Oxford Street, and in its place we're building 45 new apartments
with public housing offices and a Head Start classroom on the ground
floor.</p><p>
This is going to be Maine's greenest building
when it's finished. It's aiming for "passive house" certification and we're
putting solar panels on the roof. It will have a courtyard that treats runoff under
the patio. Most significantly, it’s Portland’s
first-ever affordable apartment building that prioritizes housing for
car-free households, with no parking on-site, within walking distance of bus routes, supermarkets, and thousands of jobs. We saved hundreds of
thousands of dollars by not building the parking garage that city zoning
typically requires, and that's allowed us to build more apartments instead. It’s already won a national competition for innovation
in lowering the cost of housing.</p>
<p>Public housing doesn't get the appreciation it deserves. It's facile for liberals to blame it for the tragedies of structural racism in our cities; meanwhile, the right attacks it for its unapologetic Great Society socialism. And as a result we've had decades of bipartisan budget cuts for federal housing programs.</p>
<p>But public housing neighborhoods give millions of people the ability to live amidst the opportunities of our increasingly unaffordable inner cities. Without these neighborhoods, our cities would be even more dramatically segregated and impoverished places.</p>
<p>And if, instead of dismissing it, we can build even more public housing – a lot more, as the Portland Housing Authority hopes to do in the years to come – then the city will be more diverse, more successful and more egalitarian. It will be more like the city we want it to be.
</p>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-4173256480271103572016-01-06T12:18:00.001-05:002016-01-07T14:22:17.469-05:00Design iterations of the Chrysler building<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj0DQRmOg7FsI_DV6hTEGM04iMlKp-mmLxue0Q_VLaP6sPn1sdT9TP8_0sLX1XQjirsnn_7tuZsia5i3eY4ojdonVFGu0uUCTqFn4mWlcnfU_JCC1cP40WE715YgzU2xIcvEeA/s1600/nypl.digitalcollections.b5b54270-a066-0130-466b-58d385a7b928.001.w.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" style="width: 100%" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjj0DQRmOg7FsI_DV6hTEGM04iMlKp-mmLxue0Q_VLaP6sPn1sdT9TP8_0sLX1XQjirsnn_7tuZsia5i3eY4ojdonVFGu0uUCTqFn4mWlcnfU_JCC1cP40WE715YgzU2xIcvEeA/s640/nypl.digitalcollections.b5b54270-a066-0130-466b-58d385a7b928.001.w.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<p>A scanned page from a 1929 edition of <i>Progressive Architecture</i> shows William Van Alen's iterative development of the iconic Chrysler Building's crown and spire, which was famously constructed in secret in order to outreach a downtown rival. The spire went up to claim the "world's tallest building" title in November 1929, at the dawn of the Great Depression.</p>
<p>I found this, at random, <a href="http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/">from the New York Public Library's amazing digital collections</a>, which include hundreds of thousands of scanned items. This particular item comes from The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Art & Architecture Collection, The New York Public Library. (1929-08) <a href="http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/b5b54270-a066-0130-466b-58d385a7b928">[direct link]</a>.</p>
<p>Update: thanks to Neil Kelley in the comments, here's a GIF version:</p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6t0y-LbUpV7X4dC95fkJs0ergYTDNE969Z0xV0DNyKsSpK9nyvH6fYJN_F2re-B2cjYlmCeQuCm2NSm_5_hkzR-ZqH9NBmSX_nCk-7VNv2TaeA0RPBBVMupTz83IMmEwd7H5w/s1600/ChryslerGIF.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6t0y-LbUpV7X4dC95fkJs0ergYTDNE969Z0xV0DNyKsSpK9nyvH6fYJN_F2re-B2cjYlmCeQuCm2NSm_5_hkzR-ZqH9NBmSX_nCk-7VNv2TaeA0RPBBVMupTz83IMmEwd7H5w/s1600/ChryslerGIF.gif" /></a></div>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-69926379035216203822015-02-24T21:54:00.002-05:002015-02-24T21:55:44.941-05:00The aesthetics of clean energyMy old employer, Maine Audubon, is a fairly conservative and patrician organization. It's not a strong leader on climate issues: its conservation programs are a lot more preoccupied with piping plovers (cute birds that just happen to live on the same beaches as the organization's plutocrat "major donors") than with ending Maine's self-destructive addiction to fossil fuels.<br />
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So I was encouraged and a little surprised to see, on a recent visit a few months ago, a large new array of solar panels planted in the meadows of Maine Audubon's headquarters.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVDGxNL_lepY0R2HFyo8K5F7xS1nSZUk_R1fQJo1vEFb8_90DeUpIczkIBMtUYRP8y1MLVbhF01u_Nyd3Um0pjHLRCeoBeOq7f3OOSYoQDPVysOfeYEuG3zpThNjkdZkefHBs/s1600/WP_20141122_001.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVDGxNL_lepY0R2HFyo8K5F7xS1nSZUk_R1fQJo1vEFb8_90DeUpIczkIBMtUYRP8y1MLVbhF01u_Nyd3Um0pjHLRCeoBeOq7f3OOSYoQDPVysOfeYEuG3zpThNjkdZkefHBs/s1600/WP_20141122_001.jpg" style="width: 100%;" /></a></div>
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Knowing what I know of Maine Audubon's constituency and its neighbors in the blue-blooded suburb of Falmouth, I presume that this new addition to the meadows of Gilsland Farm didn't come without some controversy. Lots of Maine Audubon's members (and a number of its staff) frankly express opinions that wind farms and solar installations are ugly. They wouldn't disagree that climate change exists, or that we need to do something about it – they'd just prefer that clean energy be built someplace else, where they don't have to look at it.<br />
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Maine's community of environmentalists is strongly aligned with the back-to-the-land movement. And in the back-to-the-land narrative, rural Maine was a new frontier where a new, sustainable and allegedly self-sufficient society could be built far away from the problems of the cities. <br />
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There's a fatal flaw in this narrative, though. Rural back-to-the-landers were, and still are, cripplingly addicted to oil and private automobiles. As a rule, they don't like to be reminded of this contradiction.<br />
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I think that this is the key to what so many rural "environmentalists" find distasteful about wind farms and large-scale solar installations. What upsets them is the reminder, amidst pastoral landscapes, that we are living through a climate catastrophe.<br />
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But for those of us who will live with the consequences of that catastrophe, the reminder is overdue – and these small token efforts to avert it are welcome. <br />
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Related: <a href="http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2007/12/exporting-pollution-to-dixie.html" target="_blank">Exporting pollution to Dixie</a>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-48764782792034703142014-07-21T05:30:00.000-04:002014-07-21T05:30:02.026-04:00Silicon Valley's gentrification exportAirbnb, the DIY hotel service that was born in the crucible of the Bay Area's dystopan income divides and astronomical rents, is now spreading its way across the nation. Middle-class households now have the privilege to literally rent out their own beds in order to clear escalating rents in the nation's more fashionable/expensive vacation destinations. <br />
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Nick Schroeder, who recently took over the editorship of the Portland Phoenix, has <a href="http://portland.thephoenix.com/news/159058-selling-our-shares/" target="_blank">a great feature story about the mixed blessings of the Airbnb phenomenon in this week's issue</a>. He describes how Airbnb can help struggling artists make the rent. But he also points out that unaffordable rents are mainly the product of Portland's (or New York's, or San Francisco's) housing shortages — a problem that Airbnb is only making worse, as landlords convert erstwhile apartments where families used to live into informal, unlicensed hotels for well-heeled vacationers.<br />
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Meanwhile, in <a href="http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/airbnb-legal-portland-affordable-housing" target="_blank">Next City</a>, a possible solution is brewing in the other Portland, where they're considering an ordinance that would require the licensure and taxation of Airbnb rentals, with tax revenues going towards affordable housing funds.<br />
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Such a policy could, in theory, let struggling renters continue to rent out bedrooms when they need to — while also giving the city the means to ensure that there will be fewer struggling renters in the big picture. C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-27677541156951886152014-05-14T22:30:00.000-04:002014-05-14T22:31:06.112-04:00Art laundry<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie5MPCA1Fn39yAnTiEPUUxfu15V6RtcFHNDrWTMJ8rQ7uUPUducOKDMfTUP1seRMJLAS6B5C5OckNdCrVnUOpFcXipVjxJaxyoWg4g0kyKgWy3nHxhTve7pRSKtnMiwFiWpL7o/s1600/washing_postcard.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie5MPCA1Fn39yAnTiEPUUxfu15V6RtcFHNDrWTMJ8rQ7uUPUducOKDMfTUP1seRMJLAS6B5C5OckNdCrVnUOpFcXipVjxJaxyoWg4g0kyKgWy3nHxhTve7pRSKtnMiwFiWpL7o/s1600/washing_postcard.jpg" height="440" width="640" /></a></div>
<i>Postcard, c. 1900, from the Detroit Publishing Company collection. Courtesy of collection Marc Walter / published in <a href="http://www.taschen.com/pages/en/catalogue/photography/all/05772/facts.an_american_odyssey.htm" target="_blank">An American Odyssey</a> (TASCHEN, 2014). </i><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJd2SzkN_lm47Pzj1tLlb9YmrBu3Oq5fmaWQxLoYNRb2Gm2XiXtec30kxoV71t7uG3qqPzQhCZesElK_OLQ7QXDzSGEGcvFAY3IOjRHgYUIY4-GjVhJDplplBDaoE8JObJ4eZX/s1600/3136150393_2d538913a7_z.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJd2SzkN_lm47Pzj1tLlb9YmrBu3Oq5fmaWQxLoYNRb2Gm2XiXtec30kxoV71t7uG3qqPzQhCZesElK_OLQ7QXDzSGEGcvFAY3IOjRHgYUIY4-GjVhJDplplBDaoE8JObJ4eZX/s1600/3136150393_2d538913a7_z.jpg" height="480" width="640" /></a></div>
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<i>Central Park Gates, by Jean Claude and Christo, 2005. <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/cityprojectca/3136150393/in/photolist-5M8Afv-5MdsQG-5MjTQ8-5M9awV-5Mk3An-5M9n4z-5M9h7n-5MdEbj-5Maujp-5MeiPY-5Mf5Ro-5M9fwD-5MkidZ-5McRqd-5Mke2D-5McNim-5M9oD6-5MncyN-7aKQCq-5MdX79-5MhQbY-5MkkU8-5Mppdh-5M8VzF-5MdVj7-5MjKBc-5MaUhi-5Meyh9-5Memgy-5MdYMm-5M9WPx-5MdGd8-5MjJsH-5M9NNB-5Ma9Av-5Md8j5-5McSTf-5McXr7-5MaG8p-5MdHVm-5MhWek-5MpfyA-5M8F5a-5Mpk5Y-5MnekN-5MjGFt-5MapjM-5Me1zC-5MesLE-5Mpvhw/" target="_blank">Photo courtesy of The City Project</a>.</i>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-24538496128280886212014-05-06T07:30:00.000-04:002014-05-06T07:30:03.639-04:00We don't sit in trees any more<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrCLUf_Wh0-rpnhG33hJZLUCXJuOXumdb_R3sSK0uEVTPAMvzFpZuZHmJfODa7D0ekl3PPDOkvhjeGLUlW3WtL_biayAZz_qm-18S5Mu3PYbtfcmTm54vtoFVDTYrwSPqeEbaM/s1600/Calvino_BaronInTheTrees.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjrCLUf_Wh0-rpnhG33hJZLUCXJuOXumdb_R3sSK0uEVTPAMvzFpZuZHmJfODa7D0ekl3PPDOkvhjeGLUlW3WtL_biayAZz_qm-18S5Mu3PYbtfcmTm54vtoFVDTYrwSPqeEbaM/s1600/Calvino_BaronInTheTrees.jpg" height="320" width="191" /></a></div>
In Italo Calvino's <i>The Baron in the Trees</i>, the hero, an adolescent 18th-century nobleman, renounces the earthbound life one evening when his sister serves him a dinner of snails. He spends the rest of his life living in the treetops, from where he falls in love, embraces radical politics, and participates in the political and cultural revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment.<br />
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Calvino's novel was written in 1957 — a novel about rebellion in a not-particularly-rebellious era. But a generation later, in April 1970, college students and politicians organized a "nationwide environmental teach-in" held mostly on college campuses. It would later become known as the first "Earth Day."<br />
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Historian Jared Farmer recounts one of the first Earth Day protests in his book <i>Trees in Paradise</i>, which I learned about recently <a href="http://huntingtonblogs.org/2014/04/farmer/" target="_blank">on the Huntington Library's blog</a>. A synopsis there recounts how "At Moorpark College, in Ventura County, 50 students laid their bodies down in front of bulldozers to protest the widening of a tree-lined road... By the time 10 students were arraigned in juvenile court on April 22, the first Earth Day, the trees were gone."
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<blockquote>
“What had been lost? Ancient redwoods? Historic oaks? No. They aren’t even native plants. Most of the trees in question are Australian eucalypts planted in the 19th century as ornamentals.”</blockquote>
With the benefit of 44 years' worth of hindsight, most Golden State environmentalists of 2014 would probably not risk arrest over some Australian eucalyptus trees. Today, they're generally considered an <a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2013/06/12/eucalyptus-california-icon-fire-hazard-and-invasive-species/" target="_blank">invasive</a> species that sucks away scarce groundwater and fuels dangerous wildfires with their oily foliage and shedding bark.<br />
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<a href="http://www.juliabutterfly.com/uploads/1/4/7/2/14725038/6459332_orig.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.juliabutterfly.com/uploads/1/4/7/2/14725038/6459332_orig.jpg" height="400" width="258" /></a></div>
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<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image: <a href="http://www.juliabutterfly.com/">www.juliabutterfly.com</a></span></i></div>
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But trees — especially giant Californian trees — remained a powerful synecdoche for environmentalism. Tree protests reached a peak in the late 1990s when the charismatic Julia Butterfly Hill, with support from Humboldt County Earth First! activists, spent two years sitting in a 600 year-old redwood that she named Luna.<br />
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The immediate consequence of Hill's endurance tree-sit was the permanent protection of her tree and a 200 foot buffer zone from a logging operations.<br />
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But more generally, Hill's activism attracted national attention to the regional battles between loggers and environmentalists over the fate of the Pacific coast's old-growth forests. Thanks to stronger enforcement of the Endangered Species Act, West Coast logging was already in steep decline by the late 1990s. The activism of treesitting brought the additional accountability of publicity to logging operations.<br />
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In the years since Hill climbed down from Luna, living in trees in order to save trees has become rarer and rarer — in part because it has become less necessary. In the interest of avoiding controversy, logging businesses have committed to more sustainable forms of forestry, and conservation organizations have been able to protect most of what remains of the west's old growth trees. More ambiguously, more timber harvesting has moved overseas, away from the critical eyes of Californian idealists.<br />
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Today, treesitting feels like a bit of a 1990s anachronism. We're taught, as ecologists, to think about the complexity of global ecosystems. The idea of devoting months' or years' worth of activism to save a small grove of trees can seem like a lark in the context of the world's more pressing, global crises.<br />
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But under the apocalyptic threats of losing everything, <i>any</i> form of activism will feel inadequate. Before we throw up our hands, it's worth noting that Julia Butterfly Hill and her tree-sitting colleagues actually accomplished most of their goals, and leveraged influence far beyond their ambitions. It's the Butterfly effect: given enough time, repeated small actions will eventually generate big changes.C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-29839418006281645842014-04-03T07:40:00.000-04:002014-04-04T15:18:05.296-04:00Watch Charles and Ray Eames pitch Eero Saarinen's "Mobile Lounges"Jess and I took a vacation to the Grand Canyon last week, which was fantastic — but as spectacular as it the thing that actually inspired me to post on this neglected blog was a bleak bit of airport architecture we encountered on our way home.<br />
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Our flight got diverted through Washington D.C.'s Dulles airport, and on the way through we were herded into one of these bizarre vehicles (which you might recognize if you've been there yourself) for a ride to the next terminal. They kind of resemble an open-plan double-wide trailer stacked atop a tank chassis:<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/TransportationWashingtonDullesAirport.jpg/640px-TransportationWashingtonDullesAirport.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/TransportationWashingtonDullesAirport.jpg/640px-TransportationWashingtonDullesAirport.jpg" /></a>(image from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TransportationWashingtonDullesAirport.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>)</div>
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Being in Washington, my initial guess was that these were the unwieldy product of some pork-barrel military industrial contract. But I was mistaken — these weird buggies are actually the vestigial remnants from an unfulfilled future of jet travel.<br />
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In 1958, the architect Eero Saarinen was commissioned to design Dulles, which would be one of the first major airports built from scratch to serve jet aircraft. Foreseeing the long walks and sprawling terminals of our modern era, Saarinen suggested that it would be better to employ a kind of satellite parking system for planes, with passengers shuttled from a compact, comfortable terminal onto the tarmac via these mobile boarding platforms, which he called "mobile lounges".<br />
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I could go into more detail about the details and rationale behind this idea, but luckily for us Saarinen commissioned this wonderful short film from his friends Charles and Ray Eames as part of his campaign to sell the authorities on his design, so I'll just let them explain it:
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<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="493" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/4139559" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="640"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/4139559">Untitled</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user1582798">CHRISTINA LAETZ</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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The mobile lounges are like a horizontally-oriented elevator: a door opens, you walk in, you wait a while, another door opens and you exit somewhere else. Airport travel was more glamorous back then, though: on our short ride between the modern Dulles terminals, the mobile lounge was pretty dingy and crowded — certainly nothing like the luxury buses depicted in the Eames' cartoon.<br />
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Saarinen's concept enjoyed a brief popularity in the early 1960s — mobile lounges were also adopted at Montreal's Dorval airport and Charles de Gaulle in Paris — but like the Betamax video player, they were an innovation that never quite caught on.C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-79377788790588939972014-01-20T23:08:00.001-05:002014-01-20T23:13:01.993-05:00The Grand Canyon of WestbrookThe Grand Canyon of Westbrook is a large volume of negative space out behind the Travelodge (the landmark visible in the photo below, on the Canyon's north rim). I've been past it hundreds of times in my lifetime, but unless you walk out the railroad tracks to stand on the edge, it's easy to miss. The shopping centers and four-lane arterial roads that surround it do a remarkable job of obscuring the city's biggest hole in the ground. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg278zyl1ZLTkEPAwYXTGGPNXSiNQlG2rGULplswHrLVx-JqCH0b3gKNpsaFb1RvZmPcSG4BTmL_AuEUqEzDWVt6OdNVBEGukMvPot1DqzY5B1xqhOllHO7zKpl0RhJIQSR6t3T/s1600/IMG_4834.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg278zyl1ZLTkEPAwYXTGGPNXSiNQlG2rGULplswHrLVx-JqCH0b3gKNpsaFb1RvZmPcSG4BTmL_AuEUqEzDWVt6OdNVBEGukMvPot1DqzY5B1xqhOllHO7zKpl0RhJIQSR6t3T/s640/IMG_4834.JPG" /></a><br />
<a href="http://www.maine.gov/dacf/mgs/pubs/online/bedrock/bd-portland-west-sidebar.pdf">Some online research</a> reveals that the rock of the quarry is gneiss, rock that originally formed as marine clay and slate about 450 million years ago. It was the Ordovician Period, and the mud that would eventually become coastal Maine was accumulating in a shallow subtropical sea surrounding a chain of volcanic islands in the southern hemisphere.
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450 million years is a long time. Enough time for seafloor mud to harden into slate, then for that slate to fold onto itself and plunge miles deep into the earth while brand-new Appalachian Mountains rise to the height of Himalayas near the equator, plus enough time for those Himalayan-sized mountains to wear away to White Mountain-sized nubs.</div>
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450 million years is nine million times longer than the amount of time it took Blue Rock Industries to make this hole. But now that we're thinking in terms of hundreds of millions of years, in terms of rocks that drifted halfway across the globe and sank four miles under long-gone mountains and resurfaced here, it doesn't seem like such a big hole any longer, in the grand scheme of things, does it?<br />
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Just a very temporary divot on a landscape even more temporarily known as "Westbrook," "Maine."<br />
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<br />C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-20286833445010998732013-12-10T22:26:00.003-05:002013-12-17T21:30:18.823-05:00BorderlandsI took a walk this weekend out to Westbrook, the city adjoining Portland to our west. Westbrook's Main Street is less than five miles from downtown Portland, but these are small cities and along the borderlands between them there's a still mostly empty landscape of meadows and depopulated infrastructures. <br />
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From the edge of Portland I followed the old Cumberland and Oxford Canal, which for a few years in the mid-nineteenth century used to ferry lumber from 20 miles inland to the ocean. It's mostly silted up now, but its towpath is still in use along the edges of the Fore River marshes as a walking trail.<br />
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The canal's on the left; the Fore River's on the right. The high-voltage power lines on the right lead eastward towards a substation near the bus terminal, where the power gets stepped down to lower voltages and fed into local delivery lines along city streets. Westward, the same lines lead to higher-voltage lines on the New England bulk power transmission grid. Not far from the junction is the metropolitan area's largest power plant, which burns fracked natural gas delivered from Pennsylvania and Texas via the state's primary north-south gas pipeline.<br />
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Under the power lines are the railroad tracks of the old Portland and Ogdensburg line, which put the canal out of business as an overland connection between Portland and Montreal. Over 150 years later the railroad is still less abandoned than the canal is, but only this short section between Portland and Westbrook is at all active. Give it a few more decades and there might not be much difference any longer.<br />
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These days virtually all of the cargo between Portland and Quebec is crude oil that goes through in two underground pipelines. Those pipelines also run through these marshes at the head of the Fore River.<br />
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And speaking of abandoned infrastructures: on the other side of the marsh I bushwhacked northwards through the woods for a while and found the city's "technology park" (previously written about <a href="http://rightsofway.blogspot.com/2010/11/rocketing-into-1990s-portlands.html">here</a>). The city finally wrote a seven-figure check to cut down the woods and build a short cul-de-sac here this past summer. And now, just look at all the jobs:<br />
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From there I picked up the right-of-way of the oil pipeline back towards the railroad tracks near the Turnpike. Until the Turnpike, the infrastructural routes I'd encountered all trended east-west, from the coast into the mountains. The Turnpike is oriented north to south. Our 19th-century infrastructure treated Portland as a hub of trade to which rural hinterlands could be connected; our 20th-century infrastructure generally treats Portland as the hinterland that needs to be connected to Boston.<br />
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There are some decent and uncluttered tags under the Turnpike overpasses here. <br />
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A few yards further and I had crossed over into Westbrook, where the silos of a big quarry and asphalt plant loomed over the tracks. It was there that I found the most impressive of all the day's abandoned earthworks — the Grand Canyon of Westbrook. I'll save it for the next post later this week.
C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-59890174584521820852013-11-10T17:30:00.001-05:002013-11-11T10:33:15.649-05:00There it is, take it.Out in Los Angeles they've been celebrating the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the audacious engineering project that drained the Owens Valley and transformed the San Fernando Valley from a landscape of orchards into a landscape of tract homes and gas stations.<br />
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It just so happens that this week I've also been plowing through the final chapters of John McPhee's <i>Annals of the Former World</i>, his consolidated narrative of a lifetime's worth of writing on North American geology. So far, my favorite part of that book has been the section on Wyoming, in which McPhee tails USGS geologist John Love on field excursions across the state. The chapters weave the sixty-million-year history of the Rocky Mountains with the hundred-year timescale of Love's family, from his mother's arrival, via stagecoach, in a gunslinging Old West of the early twentieth century to Love's atomic age discovery of uranium in the Rocky Mountain foothills.<br />
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"Love said that a part of his job was to find anything from oil to agates, and then, in effect, say 'Fly at it, folks,' to the people of the United States."</blockquote>
The geologic history of Wyoming spans relatively little time in the grand scheme of Earth's history. In the last sixty million years or so, roughly one percent of Earth's lifetime, the Rocky Mountains rose up, then sank under accumulations of sand and volcanic debris tens of thousands of feet deep, then, relatively recently, rose up again and shook off the sand in freshets of new mountain streams. <br />
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And then a new geological force arrives. Ranchers arrive in Wyoming, and their sons help open up its landscapes to strip mines and oil wells. The state digs beneath the ranchers' thin Holocene topsoil to get at the more lucrative geology of the Mesozoic era. Open-pit uranium mines, oil and gas wells, and mountain-eating coal draglines rearrange the Rocky Mountain landscape and usher in the new Anthropocene era.<br />
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Photo: Jim Bridger coal mine, from the <a href="http://billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/wyoming/federal-safety-authority-cites-more-than-two-dozen-violations-at/article_9a10e57a-47ca-5264-9150-8c1d9ec2a325.html">Casper Star-Tribune</a>.<br />
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"Fly at it, folks." Love was talking about the bounty of Wyoming's mineral resources, but it's exactly the same sentiment expressed by William Mulholland, chief of the Los Angeles Bureau of Water Works, when he opened the sluice gates of the new Aqueduct a hundred years ago and famously said, "there it is. Take it."<br />
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In the same momentous twentieth century of human history that rearranged Wyoming, Mulholland's power broker friends find cheap oil under Venice and the Baldwin Hills, and then they give the growing city a reason to burn it by moving the Owens River over mountains and irrigating the massive suburbs of the San Fernando Valley. Gravel erosion from the Santa Monica Mountains, which had washed out into the Pacific for millennia and built the vast coastal plain of the Los Angeles basin, suddenly gets trapped behind foothill dams and begins to bury the mountain canyons. The basin itself acquires new sedimentary layers of asphalt and concrete. The sooty remnants of Carboniferous swamps fly into the troposphere through millions of exhaust pipes.<br />
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Geologic time and human history converge here, in the spectacular landscapes of the American west. But remember: geologic history is full of cataclysms.<br />
<br />C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-48719718765953380062013-10-16T23:34:00.002-04:002013-10-16T23:34:42.526-04:00Cobweb domesFrom Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire. on a day trip back to the subalpine spruce-fir forest <a href="http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2006_01_01_archive.html">near where this blog began</a>:<br />
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<br />C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-13425268077421244712013-05-30T00:09:00.002-04:002013-08-07T15:07:44.233-04:00The folk art of national identityGrowing up in Maine, the Canadian flag was a common sight — especially in the summertime, when the nearby town of Old Orchard Beach turned into a Québécois Saint-Tropez.<br />
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So I was surprised to learn that the Canadian national icon — its maple leaf flag — is a relatively recent invention, and <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/history/EPISCONTENTSE1EP16CH1PA2LE.html" target="_blank">the subject of bitter debate when it was proposed in the Canadian parliament in 1964</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Canadian_Red_Ensign_1921-1957.svg/120px-Canadian_Red_Ensign_1921-1957.svg.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Canadian_Red_Ensign_1921-1957.svg/120px-Canadian_Red_Ensign_1921-1957.svg.png" /></a>Canada's old flag featured the Union Jack symbol, which was a a snub to French Quebec. In the mid-1960s, when the Québécois separatist movement began to organize, Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson proposed a new national flag that could shore up the nation's unity and give it its own post-colonial identity.<br />
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This may not actually have been a productive political gambit. "Quebec does not give a tinkers dam about the new flag," said Liberal politician Pierre Trudeau (Trudeau himself would go on to become a Canadian icon in his own right as one of the nation's most successful and beloved Prime Ministers, mainly for moving the country beyond its British roots and championing a bilingual, multiethnic Canadian identity). <br />
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Fortunately, though, the rest of Canada did care about the flag. They mailed in thousands of suggestions in pen-and-ink drawings and watercolor paintings. Beavers, maple leaves, fleurs-de-lis, or the old Union Jack were common themes. <a href="http://scaa.usask.ca/gallery/flagdisplay/design.htm" target="_blank">Some of the public's suggestions have been digitized on this website from the University of Saskatchewan</a>, and they're pretty amazing examples of Canadian folk art at a time when the adjective "Canadian" was actually beginning to mean something. Each one is a snapshot of a nation that's still trying to figure itself out.<br />
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<a href="http://scaa.usask.ca/gallery/flagdisplay/images/web/panel8-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="96" src="http://scaa.usask.ca/gallery/flagdisplay/images/web/panel8-5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
A British-French mashup.<br />
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From Manitoba, April 1963:<br />
<i>"The top green strip portrays in the background the Rocky
Mountains of the West and the Laurentians of the East....The second
strip of yellow gold depicts the growing grain for which Canada is
famous...The third strip describes untold numbers of rivers and
thousands of lakes...the Atlantic, the Pacific and the Arctic....The
coats of arms of the ten provinces which make up Canada are in the shape
of an arc and depicts its beginning and origin. Even the shape of the
arc has a meaning - freedom, better life and individualism for all those
who want to make Canada their new country."</i><br />
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I feel like lots of designs resemble hockey jerseys. From Alberta, 1964:<br />
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<i>"Through the Maple Leaf, this flag represents
Canada as always being in "the peerpetual light." A light shining over
one Canada. People's choice #1."</i><br />
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<i> </i>From Ontario, 22 May 1964:<br />
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<i>"If we must have a new flag, it should be one to be proud of, that
will bring unity to this wonderful country of ours....The ten maple
leaves, for ten provinces. The Canadian Beaver, and waves are for 'from
sea to sea.'"</i><br />
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<i> </i>Quite a few didn't get the memo about how the Union Jack is faux pas in Quebec (submission from New Brunswick, 30 November 1964). <br />
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Canada rejected this one, but Idaho picked it out of the garbage and adopted it as its own state flag in 1967.<br />
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In the end, Canada avoided old-world heraldry altogether and went with a clean and strikingly modern design. Neither French nor English, the new Canadian flag was one of several mid-century innovations that helped the nation clear out its colonial baggage and define itself on its own terms.<br />
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<i>Hat tip <a href="http://burritojustice.com/2013/04/12/dont-fuck-with-beavers/" target="_blank">to Burrito Justice for finding these and writing about them in his post about funny animals as national symbols. </a></i>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-8996908998295304382013-05-01T23:46:00.000-04:002013-05-02T08:44:06.748-04:00Fossil fuels bike tourLate last fall, builders wrapped the construction of the new Veterans' Memorial Bridge, which spans the Fore River in the western reaches of Portland harbor. The project included a beautiful new bike path between Portland and South Portland, and this evening I went out to ride it for the first time this spring.<br />
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The old bridge (recently dismantled) used to run through the center of the photo above, immediately parallel to the railroad bridge at left. Its former course is now an empty lot with some remnant orange construction fencing. The coastline here is full of concrete riprap and odd tidepools formed from 20th-century construction debris. <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTlWzRqgUkM4vyhq8EENeZXU9D4Ea2mJr_xblP6MQS9j6znC_cY2ozCJNyyZrM6-0qxbxCg8fvIBmH4-Yc9a2UVW9MZ8Ir2XqMMka3Z-mWEIRQhpEMwSkXw0n1WJ0dYWquSz1s/s1600/IMG_4601.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTlWzRqgUkM4vyhq8EENeZXU9D4Ea2mJr_xblP6MQS9j6znC_cY2ozCJNyyZrM6-0qxbxCg8fvIBmH4-Yc9a2UVW9MZ8Ir2XqMMka3Z-mWEIRQhpEMwSkXw0n1WJ0dYWquSz1s/s1600/IMG_4601.JPG" /></a><br />
Nearby on the Portland side of the bridge is Merrill's marine terminal, which transfers miscellaneous cargoes between ships and the railroad. There's usually a large pile of coal here, but not much of it remained this afternoon. Maine has no coal-burning power plants, but <a href="http://www.plantengineering.com/single-article/innovative-energy-management-strategies-help-a-maine-paper-mill-stay-competitive/004af2f6192deab19a3a02d39129c45a.html" target="_blank">at least one of its large paper mills still burns coal to fire its boilers</a>.<br />
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I dig the interpretive signage.<br />
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Calcium carbonate, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate" target="_blank">according to Wikipedia</a>,
is mainly used in construction "as an ingredient of cement or as the
starting material for the preparation of builder's lime by burning in a
kiln." But these tank cars are more likely headed to one of Maine's
paper mills, which are increasingly specializing in value-added coated
paper products. Ground calcium carbonate can be used as a filler to
substitute for wood fiber, and can also replace <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaolinite" target="_blank">kaolin</a> in glossy paper production.<br />
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A few years ago, some local philanthropists decided that they needed to beautify the oil tanks with art, and hired a Venezuelan-born artist to design the patterns. I admit I kind of like it, even though I blanch at how much money they spent on it. <br />
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And I'm put off by the a strange impulse to cover the oil tanks in expensive sanctioned art. I'd like to hope that it brings more attention to the oil tanks and makes passing motorists think about their dependence on the global petrochemical industry. But I think most of the wealthy donors are hoping that the paint job will obscure the dirty truth.<br />
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On a bike, though, you don't just see the tanks — you smell them, too. A volatile organic bouquet of benzene and sulphates.<br />
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A bundle of pipes lead from these tanks to a wharf on the waterfront, where a fuel barge was docked this evening. Similar barges often can be seen refueling tanker ships in the harbor with bunker fuels — the <a href="http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-bunker-fuel.htm" target="_blank">cheapest and filthiest of oil products</a>, so dirty that they generally can only be burned at sea, outside of state and national jurisdictions. A string of oil-containment booms snake out from the wharf's pilings. <br />
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For all the fossil fuels on display here, the ability to see them on foot, or on a bike, is a positive development. The new bridge replaces one that had been built in the mid-1950s and designed as a freeway spur. It had one narrow, crumbling
sidewalk that dead-ended at a freeway interchange.<br />
<br />
Thanks to extensive local activism, the new bridge
includes a well-lit bike path, and a lower speed limit and narrower lanes. The freeway
interchange on the South Portland side has been narrowed to a
bottleneck where it meets the bridge, in order to force car traffic to
yield to bikes and pedestrians. <br />
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<br />
I like to think how we forced motorists to sacrifice a second or two on their
drives across the harbor in order to make the bridge a friendlier place for those of us who prefer not to burn oil. Though I suppose this also means that a few motorists
will live longer by not dying in car accidents, only to burn more oil in their old age. C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-64595992934681810972013-04-30T07:00:00.000-04:002013-05-02T08:44:47.837-04:00The Social Life of Small Urban SpacesMy hometown of Portland is currently considering a proposal to privatize two-thirds of a downtown park called Congress Square — a not-particularly-successful product of late-1970s urban renewal.<br />
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There's a broad consensus that the park's current design is a failure. Surrounded on two sides by the blank walls of adjacent buildings, and with odd proportions that make most of the park inaccessible to the activity of surrounding streets, the only people who linger here tend to be panhandlers and loudmouthed street preachers.
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<br />
The neighboring hotel's new owners, a real estate investment trust called Rockbridge Capital, are extensively renovating the building and would like to have a better neighbor. Even before they came along, there had been some rumblings about renovating Congress Square, and even of selling off a portion of it. But their real and specific offer has accelerated the debate.
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It's hard for me — and for many other Portlanders — to hear out a pitch to turn over public space to a 1% outfit that calls itself "Rockbridge Capital." And it's disappointing that it was the hotel's owners — not citizens — that were allowed to set the terms of this debate about what the park's future should be.
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<br />
Yet in spite of those handicaps, I find myself receptive to their most recent proposal for the park, which, though smaller, would be more far more welcoming and engaged as a public space than the status quo is.<br />
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Opponents will still object to losing publicly-owned real estate, but the quality of a park's design is far more important than the quantity of its square footage. The current Congress Square suffers from the same basic design problem as your typical suburban McMansion: it's too big, for no good reason.
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<br />
In their pitch to the City Council, the hotel's architect included a number of points from William H. Whyte's book <a href="http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9780970632418?p_ti" rel="powells-9780970632418" title="More info about this book at powells.com">"The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,"</a> a brilliant empirical study of what makes successful city parks work. <br />
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There's a great film version of "The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces" that illuminate Whyte's theories with detailed footage of New York's Seagram Plaza circa 1980. It's a lot of fun to watch, and not just because it offers a filmed version of the people-watching that attracts us to good parks. Whyte's photography also brilliantly illuminates how subtle elements of design — things most of us don't consciously notice — can have tremendous impact on how public spaces are used. It's like a <a href="http://99percentinvisible.org/">Roman Mars podcast</a> from 30 years ago.<br />
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If you're anything like me (and especially if you're one of my Portland neighbors thinking of weighing in on Congress Square), it's well worth an hour of your time:<br />
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<div align="center">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="375" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/21556697?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> </div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://vimeo.com/21556697">William H. Whyte - Social Life of Small Urban Places</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/robinvanemden">Robin van Emden</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</div>
C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-77636528750003033232013-03-14T15:17:00.004-04:002013-03-14T22:02:46.434-04:00Tampa Bay dériveI've been spending this week in Tampa, Florida for a new website that my employer is building. Before I'd left I'd asked lots of people for travel advice, but even people who'd been here before didn't have much to recommend. So, on my first day here, when we got out of work early for the day, I took a long walk with no particular destination in mind: what the psychogeographers would call a <a href="http://www.geog.leeds.ac.uk/people/a.evans/psychogeog.html" target="_blank">dérive</a>. <br />
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We're staying in a pastel-colored high-rise hotel near the convention center and hockey arena, a neighborhood where all the buildings have apparently been built in the past 20 years. <br />
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The district's newness led me to presume that it had been, until recently,
some kind of waterfront industrial area, or railroad depot, demolished during the
urban renewal fads of the 1960s and 1970s and only just now rebuilding.
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<br />
But as I walked north into the heart of downtown Tampa, I only found similar neighborhoods and buildings.
It seems as though almost all of Tampa had been torn down in the last 30 to 40 years, and replaced with a landscape like this: <br />
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As I continued northward into the center of the downtown, the street I was on became barricaded to car traffic, and a lush tropical
garden replaced the asphalt. It was here, after four blocks of walking near the end of the workday on a pleasant
Tuesday afternoon, that I encountered my first fellow pedestrian.
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The street I was on appeared to be the city's attempt to recreate the kinds of "festival marketplaces"
that had been faddish in the 1980s, like Baltimore's Inner Harbor or Boston's Quincy Market.
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A dated building with steel
bay windows faced the pedestrianized street with abandoned kiosks, empty arcades, and faded signs that referred to its address as "city center," as though recalling its glory days.<br />
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And then there was this "Municipal Building".<br />
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On the other side, nestled in the rear corner of the concrete fortress, I found one of the few old buildings in the city.
I detoured half a block to find that this was the old City Hall, still occupied by some of the city's more fortunate bureaucrats.<br />
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Changing course to the west, I cut diagonally through a tree-lined downtown square to Tampa Street,
where there was a small cluster of non-chain businesses somehow subsisting on the downtown's tiny trickle of foot traffic.<br />
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There, I found a used bookstore with an impressive collection of old and rare volumes.
I learned, from a circa 1979 Chamber of Commerce coffee table book, that Tampa had been a center of cigar manufacture
and a major railroad depot in the nineteenth century. There book also had several photos of an impressive
turn-of-the century grand hotel, just across the Hillsborough River from downtown,
which was still standing and had been incorporated into the University of Tampa campus.
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I struck out west toward the river to see the building for myself and rested a while by the river while a rowing team went by.
Turning around, back towards downtown, I was confronted with a less impressive view of two condo high-rises, buttressed with huge parking garages.
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The downtown skyline is twice as high as it otherwise would be, thanks to these garages, which squat underneath
virtually every high-rise.
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Tampans must spend hours driving on their indoor ramps, spiraling up to store their cars on the 7th and 8th
stories of their office buildings in the morning, then spiraling down again to drive home, then spiraling up again to park for the night in the high-rise parking decks below their condos.<br />
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All over the gulf coast there are houses on stilts, and these are giant versions of the same idea.
The streets here are not a place to conduct commerce or meet neighbors, they are a place of transience,
a means of evacuation, a place that's ready for sacrifice to the inevitable flood. <br />
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The real city begins sixty feet above the ground, behind security gates, with views of the distant bay.
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<br />C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com3Downtown Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA27.946796082207843 -82.4551391601562527.918743582207842 -82.495479660156249 27.974848582207844 -82.414798660156251tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-86018454593921561592013-02-28T23:00:00.002-05:002013-03-02T21:28:44.902-05:00The Chase Manhattan Bank of CholeraYou probably know that Aaron Burr murdered Alexander Hamilton in a duel. But I recently learned of Burr's surprising and grotesque role in some of New York City's worst plagues — including one we're still suffering through to this day.<br />
<br />
My dad recently gave me a fascinating (but not online, unfortunately) medical history of New York City's water supply by Dr. David E. Gerber, from which I learned this:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"In 1799, New York City passed on the responsibility of constructing and maintaining a waterworks to the newly charted Manhattan Company. The company, the brainchild of the improbable team of Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, received from the state legislature a mandate to supply New York City with 'pure and wholesome' water."</blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw8u_AWYjRCn0TQM3k0eb1X8J0RQjKu5mj6l2jKACFRyXEwQWLu_hYC2Y8mRoByeWCgReQ7EPirBSSxbUIvZ7k74GWdSsmGwASi4wcykSeHfj0GPOa_GPdQQgFLC3o0_juexOw/s1600/coenties_pipes.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw8u_AWYjRCn0TQM3k0eb1X8J0RQjKu5mj6l2jKACFRyXEwQWLu_hYC2Y8mRoByeWCgReQ7EPirBSSxbUIvZ7k74GWdSsmGwASi4wcykSeHfj0GPOa_GPdQQgFLC3o0_juexOw/s320/coenties_pipes.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Left: Manhattan Company log pipes excavated in 2004 near Coenties Slip<span style="font-size: x-small;">.</span> <span style="font-size: x-small;">V</span>ia <a href="http://www.newyorkcitywalk.com/html/images_Chase_.html" target="_blank">New York City Walk</a> (photographer unknown)</i></span><br />
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But the Manhattan Company was terrible at providing "pure and wholesome water." They employed cheap wooden pipes and instead of procuring fresh Bronx River water, as had been proposed by city officials, they dug wells on the outskirts of the growing city (near today's Greenwich Village) where the water supply quickly became polluted with the city's sewage, or dried up altogether from overuse.<br />
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So in spite of a $2 million charter from New York's state government, the growing city continuted to suffer from polluted water. In 1832, the very first year that cholera arrived in New York City (from Asia, via overseas trade), <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/15/science/15chol.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0&_r=0" target="_blank">3,515 New Yorkers died</a>.<br />
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There was a reason why the Manhattan Company was so negligently, fatally incompetent at its purpose: it was run by some of the city's earliest investment bankers, including the murderer Aaron Burr. <br />
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At Burr's initiative, the Manhattan Company's charter was amended shortly before it took
effect to allow the new company to spend its excess capital "in any way
not inconsistent with the Constitution and laws of the United States." <br />
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The Legislature and Burr's business partner, Alexander Hamilton, seemed to believe that this would allow for additional, future waterworks. But Burr almost immediately exercised this clause to capitalize a new bank, using the money intended for waterworks to give out loans to New York merchants.<br />
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The <a href="http://boweryboys.libsyn.com/" target="_blank">Bowery Boys</a>, the New York history podcasters, have <a href="http://boweryboys.libsyn.com/-143-water-for-new-york-croton-aqueduct" target="_blank">an episode on the Croton Aqueduct</a> that tells some of this same story, and they put it this way:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"There was a banking monopoly where you had the US Federal Bank [i.e., Alexander Hamilton's First Bank of the United States] and the Bank of New York, which was founded by Hamilton, Burr's rival and victim. Burr and his company got a $2 million contract from the state legislature to bring fresh water into New York City.<br />
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They decided to spend it thusly: $100,000 on waterworks and bringing fresh water into the city — so 1/20th of the total — and $1.9 million on creating a bank!"</blockquote>
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Providing "pure and wholesome water" was just a distracting sideline. In fact, the more the Manhattan Company spent on public waterworks (there were no water meters back then, thus no reliable user-fee system, thus no profit motive), the less they had to spend on high-interest loans to New York City's merchant class. <br />
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Hamilton evidently didn't like the competition from a new bank in town: he left the Manhattan Company shortly after Burr capitalized his new bank with 1.9 million New York State taxpayer dollars.<br />
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The citizens of New York suffered the Manhattan Company's filthy water until 1842, when the City of New York finally opened an aqueduct from the Croton River, which provided public drinking water that was genuinely pure and wholesome, <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/press_releases/04-47pr.shtml" target="_blank">and does so to this day</a>.<br />
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So New York eventually addressed its sanitation problems and cured its epidemics of cholera and yellow fever.<br />
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Unfortunately, Aaron Burr was only an early vector in New York City's raging plague of assholes who collect millions of dollars from the government in order to enrich themselves in the global banking casino.<br />
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In 1955, Aaron Burr's Bank of the Manhattan Company merged with the Chase National Bank to become Chase Manhattan. And in 2000, Chase Manhattan bought out the investment firm JP Morgan to become JP Morgan Chase, on whose website you can today <a href="http://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/About-JPMC/document/shorthistory.pdf" target="_blank">download a short history that tells part of this very same story</a>. This document includes some pictures of old wooden pipes and a quaintly threatening engraving (below) of their company's founding chief executive ballistically perforating the Founding Father on our $10 bill.<br />
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However, somehow JP Morgan Chase's PR department neglected to mention the part about all the cholera — hopefully they'll appreciate this addendum.<br />
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<br />C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-5297262091622899782012-12-03T18:29:00.000-05:002012-12-03T18:29:42.668-05:00Making the Geologic NowI'm taking off on the bus for New York early tomorrow morning to visit some friends and stop by the launch party for <a href="http://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/" target="_blank"><i>Making the Geologic Now</i></a>, the new book edited by Jaime Kruse and Elizabeth Elsworth of the <a href="http://fopnews.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Friends of the Pleistocene</a> and <a href="http://smudgestudio.org/">smudge studio</a>. <br />
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The book includes an essay on the <a href="http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2007/03/bayside-glacier.html" target="_blank">Bayside Glacier</a> contributed by yours truly. I'm really proud to be part of this project, among many writers and bloggers whom I've long admired. I've had a chance to see parts of it already, and it looks fantastic. <br />
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After tomorrow's launch party, you'll be able to <a href="http://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/" target="_blank">download a free e-book at Punctum Books’ website</a>, or browse an interactive web version at <a href="http://geologicnow.com/">www.geologicnow.com</a>. Pre-orders of the print version, which should ship in December, will also be available soon <a href="http://punctumbooks.com/titles/making-the-geologic-now/" target="_blank">through Punctum’s website</a>. <br />
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<i>Image: the Sable Oaks glacier, a municipal snow dump located in the flight path of the Portland International Jetport. </i>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-22948951069219049052012-11-27T22:39:00.000-05:002012-11-27T22:49:31.683-05:00Cities & Memory<br />
From Italo Calvino's <a href="http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9780156453806?p_ti" rel="powells-9780156453806" title="More info about this book at powells.com"><i>Invisible Cities</i></a>:<br />
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In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old post cards that show it as it used to be: the same identical square with a hen in the place of the bus station, a bandstand in the place of the overpass, two young ladies with white parasols in the place of the munitions factory.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ_T4i2nXwcOAUxe63E1rog4W1963_zOR8xQ2sRsLz_GlYlrrGZGjTfgqBv-bXPpVy4TdPrXDRnfnTmmTqfZ3Yix7HI9Ozcp270waLhUr0_T6UCZzqLWoBOGVEO2-dIZCOshI8/s1600/266MePortland2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="406" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ_T4i2nXwcOAUxe63E1rog4W1963_zOR8xQ2sRsLz_GlYlrrGZGjTfgqBv-bXPpVy4TdPrXDRnfnTmmTqfZ3Yix7HI9Ozcp270waLhUr0_T6UCZzqLWoBOGVEO2-dIZCOshI8/s640/266MePortland2.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQWcVq4h17PZlcc9h-LlRl84u9fqOsighYzHfZU99PY9MzLxkC13azSVRfH87HAxvhOH28hAUFdsi6NTa7CKdwEXQRRtNLiGZAbiEyz7WWg6vQ8UzGu4NFhn6jpMARlUfd3n0/s1600/fort+allen+cruiseship.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="Photo courtesy of the Friends of the Eastern Promenade" border="0" height="369" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnQWcVq4h17PZlcc9h-LlRl84u9fqOsighYzHfZU99PY9MzLxkC13azSVRfH87HAxvhOH28hAUFdsi6NTa7CKdwEXQRRtNLiGZAbiEyz7WWg6vQ8UzGu4NFhn6jpMARlUfd3n0/s640/fort+allen+cruiseship.jpg" title="" width="640" /></a></div>
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If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits: admitting that the magnificence and prosperity of the metropolis
Maurilia, when compared to the old, provincial Maurilia, cannot
compensate for a certain lost grace,<br />
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<a href="http://www.portlanddailyphoto.com/" target="_blank"><img alt="Photo by Corey Templeton" border="0" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuQ0Odt9Axj6O_i3pHhS7v_8l-HbIABUmq4eUUIkkSDhuMLEFwM1RUTvYbHgeYLhKegBq2GU8UsYOjV0goPCpRP6TtBRDUNkufqFsM0DX7wNhGLMxpMHkygC1JBHPzJZc-078N/s640/monumentsquareportlandm.jpg" title="" width="640" /></a></div>
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which, however, can be appreciated only now in the old post cards, whereas before, when that provincial Maurilia was before one's eyes, one saw absolutely nothing graceful and would see it even less today, if Maurilia had remained unchanged; and in any case the metropolis has the added attraction that, through what it has become, one can look back with nostalgia at what it was.<br />
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<a href="http://www.portlanddailyphoto.com/2010/06/urban-general-store.html" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWWzeFUNetn4FzGxx5oBIcY56Rqo0Fo9SDUDtzDPvi6SoHo6RV6An-kQmgIV_Y6gBPwrE38LxuIJYs8VnGRJvCVUcK7FmolfXzL_-AP_8aQP2f6NoNb_4UMGzT8bMWCGZOHI2hw/s400/portland+maine+spring+2010+urban+general+store.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place.<br />
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<a href="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/24898769" target="_blank"><img border="0" height="442" src="http://mw2.google.com/mw-panoramio/photos/medium/24898769.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. <br />
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<i>Photo credits:</i><br />
<i>Historic postcards from <a href="http://mainememory.net/">MaineMemory.net</a>.</i><br />
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<i>Present-day photos courtesy of (from top to bottom): <a href="http://easternpromenade.org/" target="_blank">Friends of the Eastern Promenade</a>, Corey Templeton via the <a href="http://www.archboston.org/community/showthread.php?t=944&page=33" target="_blank">archboston.org forums</a>, Corey Templeton via the <a href="http://www.portlanddailyphoto.com/2010_06_01_archive.html" target="_blank">Portland Maine Daily Photo blog</a>, and Panaramio user <a href="http://www.panoramio.com/photo/24898769" target="_blank">sacoo</a>.</i><br />
<br />C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-7289143404570130052012-11-11T14:57:00.002-05:002012-11-11T14:58:08.824-05:00The Must-Have Christmas Toy of 2012: The Tickle-Me Bionic CockroachA pair of grad students in Michigan has started a line of educational toys designed to teach kids the basics of neuroscience by letting them hack roaches and rewire their nervous systems. These 21st-century Lincoln Logs are going by the trade name <a href="http://backyardbrains.com/">Backyard Brains</a>.
<p>Their first kit, the <a href="http://backyardbrains.com/SpikerBox.aspx">SpikerBox</a>, encourages kids to cut off a roach's leg ("don't worry, they can grow back," the instructions reassure us) and hook up each end to electrodes in order to listen to the neurons fire, or "spike," in response to stimulus. A <a href="http://wiki.backyardbrains.com/Experiment%3A_Principles_of_NeuroProsthetics">more advanced experiment</a> with the same kit encourages kids to feed similar electrical impulses back into another roach leg to reanimate it post-amputation.</p>
<p>These guys should look into product tie-ins for the new <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cqI6hPra7c">"Frankenweenie"</a> movie.</p>
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<a href="http://backyardbrains.com/images/RoboRoach_Class.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="210" width="550" src="http://backyardbrains.com/images/RoboRoach_Class.jpg" /></a></div>
<p>But their most ambitious kit (currently in beta) is the "RoboRoach," pictured above. With this toy, kids are encouraged to glue fine electrodes into a roach's amputated antennae, pierce its carapace with a ground wire, and glue a circuitboard onto its back. Apparently all of this can be accomplished with your typical 8th-grade level neurosurgery skills. Here's the instruction video:</p>
<iframe width="550" height="309" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/5Rp4V3Sj5jE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
<p>Once the wiring is complete, you'll have hours of fun sending artificial antennae stimuli into the roach's nervous system, forcing it to turn left or right by remote control. </p>
<p>The Backyard Brains kits are more humane than your typical bio lab dissection — so why they feel so creepy to me? Maybe I'm just feeling the cultural warnings of <a href="http://www.literature.org/authors/shelley-mary/frankenstein/preface.html">Mary Shelley's famous nightmare</a>. These toys anticipate a future in which the kids who play with them will hack into human nervous systems. But they're also one more sign that "nature" is completely bound up with — and increasingly subject to — the progress of our technology.</p>
C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-18122334137281615112012-11-07T23:09:00.000-05:002012-11-07T23:35:41.659-05:00Science Fiction is the New RealismEarlier this summer, the <i>New Yorker</i> published its first-ever <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/toc/2012/06/04/toc_20120528" target="_blank">"Sci-Fi" special issue</a>, with a cover image of <a href="https://twitter.com/danielclowes/status/207123255486713857" target="_blank">a spaceman, a robot, and an alien crashing through the wall of a stodgy literary party</a>. <br />
<br />
Inside, there were non-fiction essays by people like <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury">Ray Bradbury</a> and Ursula Le Guin. But my favorite parts were the sci-fi stories by putatively "non-genre" writers like Jonathan Lethem, Jennifer Egan, and Junot Diaz. Diaz's story, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2012/06/04/120604fi_fiction_diaz" target="_blank">"Monstro,"</a> was my favorite — set in a near-future, globally-heated, income-stratified Dominican Republic, where a creepy zombie infection across the border in Haiti is just getting started (apparently Diaz <a href="http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/10/geeks-guide-junot-diaz/" target="_blank">is working on extending the story into a novel</a>). <br />
<br />
But the thing that struck me most about the "sci-fi" stories was how grounded and plausible they seemed — in spite of their use of sci-fi tropes like cyborgs and zombie infections. Another story by Jennifer Egan tells of a beautiful woman spy with cybernetic implants that relay her senses to the CIA (in a demonstration of "the medium is the message," the story was published in 144-character segments on Twitter). Though it was set in the near future, and in spite of the Twitter gimmick, the story seemed completely plausible — we already have <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-need-a-rule-book-for-drones/2012/10/26/957312ae-1f8d-11e2-9cd5-b55c38388962_story.html" target="_blank">robot agents</a> fighting overseas, while <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/06/04/120604fa_fact_bradbury">Google is building cyborg prototypes</a> for networked, computer-enhanced vision.
<br />
<br />
And my favorite thing about "Monstro" were the details — not quite apocalyptic, but getting there — that made it feel like our everyday discomfort amidst income stratification and constant disaster. The story's horror builds in the background noise of a world in crisis with heat waves and third-world epidemics. Problems whose distance and relentlessness just don't merit that much attention (at first) from the protagonist narrator — not while he's chasing girls in the air-conditioned neighborhoods where the upper class lives.
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<br />
All of which — the background static of freakish disasters on the 24-hour news cycle, combined with first-world indifference — feels a bit too familiar to call it "sci-fi," doesn't it?
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<br />
I've also recently started reading the novels and essays of William Gibson, who's also has an essay in this same issue of the <i>New Yorker</i>. His books get shelved in the sci-fi section, even though most of them are pretty solidly rooted in contemporary Internet culture. It's not that Gibson is writing in a fantasy genre; the problem is that most contemporary literature feels like a genre that's stuck in the past, in a world without internet forums or cellphones. <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2012/11/ursula_le_guin_s_the_unreal_and_the_real_collected_stories_reviewed.html" target="_blank">As critic Choire Sicha bitingly observes in <i>Slate</i>:</a><br />
<blockquote>
"The literary novel is, make no mistake, as much a pileup of inherited conventions as the worst werewolf cash-in. There are now thousands of young, MFA-toting writers, so many of them aping the weak generation of literary male novelists now in their 50s: pallid and insufferable teachers and idols, in light of the strong and inventive generation before them." <br />
– from Choire Sicha's review of <i>The Unreal and the Real</i>, a new two-volume collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin</blockquote>
Gibson's on Twitter as <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/greatdismal" target="_blank">@greatdismal</a>, which is where I first learned of him over a year ago. Appropriately enough, he's inspired at least one fake imitator account — a fictional cyberpunk version of the cyberpunk fiction author. I mention it here because that fake account recently summed up (admittedly with some out-of-character exaggeration) how science-fictional the reality of the last few days have been:<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Unclassifiable mega-storm decimates swaths of Boston-Atlanta Metro. Axis. NJ residents vote by fax. World transfixed by S. Korean pop video.<br />
— Authentic Wm. Gibson (@AuthenticWmGibs) <a data-datetime="2012-11-05T01:50:38+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/AuthenticWmGibs/status/265269861721202689">November 5, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>
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The world we live in — with rich-world obesity epidemics, prefabricated cities rising in Asia, global heating, social media and its attendant transformation of our identities, financial crises, and everything else — has turned out to be far stranger than the old sci-fi stories of white Texan mavericks who landed rockets on Mars.<br />
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The weirdness of the future isn't a genre anymore: it's real life.<br />
<br />
<br /><a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9780425252994?p_cv' rel='powells-9780425252994'><img src='http://www.powells.com/bookcovers/9780425252994.jpg' style='border: 1px solid #4C290D; float: left; margin: 4px 6px 4px 0px;' title='More info about this book at powells.com (new window)'></a>
Recommendations from authors mentioned in this post: <br />
<i><a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9780425252994?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9780425252994'>Distrust That Particular Flavor</a></i>, essays by William Gibson (2012)
<br/><br/>
<i><a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9780307477477?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9780307477477'>A Visit from the Goon Squad</a></i> by Jennifer Egan (2010)
<br /><br/>
<i><a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9781618730343?p_ti' title='More info about this book at powells.com' rel='powells-9781618730343'>The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories Volume One: Where on Earth</a></i> by Ursula Le Guin (2012).C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-1050209426702435242012-10-29T18:58:00.001-04:002012-10-29T20:16:36.433-04:00Buried Wetlands Rise from the Grave<p>This evening, Hurricane Sandy's storm surge will combine with astronomical high tides to give eastern seaboard cities an exciting preview of sea level rise. Forecasters are predicting storm surges up to 10 feet above the average high water mark — especially in western Long Island Sound and New York Harbor, where the storm is funneling massive volumes of seawater into the right-angled corner formed by New Jersey and Connecticut.</P>
<p>As <a href="http://grist.org/cities/sewer-discretion-is-advised-explorers-find-hidden-wonders-in-urban-waterways/">I wrote last week in Grist</a>, most big cities have buried their wetlands and creeks underground. But big storms and flood events like this one have a way of making those hidden waterways reassert themselves, as underground sewers and stormwater channels fill up beyond their design capacity and overflow into the streets above. </P>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSm1XY5sHbpaKVIgr7M1Ymut3WdNTOaJk5AHGAr0TGB9XAyTF_DaRJcv9L32tLyOzzDnZkQWDBP3FHzxo2RKYJrFM2V_h7D49n_AtTlREYV_aA3gaD39UpEv4WCeGEJ_pyH-Fj/s1600/IMG_4207.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear:right; float:right; margin-left:1em; margin-bottom:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgSm1XY5sHbpaKVIgr7M1Ymut3WdNTOaJk5AHGAr0TGB9XAyTF_DaRJcv9L32tLyOzzDnZkQWDBP3FHzxo2RKYJrFM2V_h7D49n_AtTlREYV_aA3gaD39UpEv4WCeGEJ_pyH-Fj/s400/IMG_4207.JPG" /></a></div><p>That can happen in unexpected places. Here in Portland it wasn't even particularly stormy today, and there was only light rain. But the astronomical high tide did push water up to the surface of Somerset Street, four blocks away from Back Cove (note the empty tree wells — similar events killed the street trees planted here in 2006 due to salt water in the roots).</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, heavy rains may <a href="http://web.mit.edu/4.243j/www/wplp/p-ccp-mcwatershed.html">once again</a> cause problems <A href="http://daringtolook.com/wplp/images/blog/mill_creek_watershed.png">in the sewer-bound Mill Creek</a>.</P>
<p>And in New York City's Boerum Hill and Park Slope neighborhoods, the old marshes of the Gowanus Canal may once again take over the streets. This overlay of the Brooklyn section of the 1782 <a href="http://www.portrevolt.com/images/gallery/v/historical_maps/new_york/british_headquarters_map_new_york_1782.html">British Headquarters Map</a> shows (roughly) how far the old marshes of the Gowanus used to extend across central Brooklyn:</p>
<iframe src="http://makeithappenhere.com/maps/gowanus.html" width="600px" height="420px" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-58575242115291322362012-10-24T08:30:00.000-04:002012-10-24T08:30:57.071-04:00On Grist.org: "Sewer Discretion is Advised"I've just published <a href="http://grist.org/cities/sewer-discretion-is-advised-explorers-find-hidden-wonders-in-urban-waterways/" target="_blank">a new film review on the environmental news site grist.org about two new documentaries that profile the new watersheds</a>. Here's an excerpt:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Most urban streams and creeks are hidden from sight — in huge sewer
tunnels under streets and expressways, in concrete ditches behind
razor-wire fences, and sometimes even in pipes under the manicured lawns
and gardens of city parks.<br /><br />
These are hardly the kinds of places you’d see on the cover of an
L.L. Bean catalog — although you might find a few L.L. Bean catalogs in
these concrete creeks.<br /><br />
But a growing network of urban explorers, who sometimes call
themselves “drainers,” are sneaking into the storm sewers and aqueducts
to rediscover these long-hidden waterways. They’re finding lush forest
groves among the concrete ditches and waterfalls and grand vaulted
grottoes in underground sewers. <a href="http://sleepycity.net/tags/sewers">Their photography and field notes</a>
remind residents that the rivers and streams that nursed their cities’
early growth still survive below the pavement, and are still worthy of
appreciation — maybe even restoration. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span id="more-137115"></span><br />
Now, not one, but two new documentary films follow this small
subculture of urban river enthusiasts, and celebrate the outsized impact
of their civilly disobedient urban river expeditions.</blockquote>
<a href="http://grist.org/cities/sewer-discretion-is-advised-explorers-find-hidden-wonders-in-urban-waterways/" target="_blank">Read the rest at grist.org</a>. C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-86614869186835485202012-09-18T12:40:00.002-04:002012-09-18T13:22:26.233-04:00How an Icon of Journalism Became a Hollowed-Out BillboardWhen it was built at the southern end of Longacre Square in 1903, the new headquarters of the <i>New York Times</i> became a landmark of midtown Manhattan, and helped publisher Adolph Ochs convince the city to rename the famous intersection in front of the building as Times Square.<br />
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID104-TimesBuilding.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID104-TimesBuilding.jpg" width="259" /></a></td>
<td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4052/4662956690_180246da87.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://farm5.staticflickr.com/4052/4662956690_180246da87.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One Times Square in 1904 (<a href="http://www.nyc-architecture.com/MID/MID104.htm" target="_blank">source</a>).</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One Times Square in 2010.<br />
Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/brostad/4662956690/in/photostream/" target="_blank">Bernt Rostad/Flickr</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
By the mid-20th century, though, the Times had sold the building, and a new owner dismantled the intricate granite and terra-cotta facade to replace the exterior walls with plain concrete panels. In 1996, shortly after the City Council passed new laws that expelled porn theaters from the area, the building got sold again, to <a href="http://sherwoodoutdoor.com/" target="_blank">Sherwood Outdoor</a>, an advertising firm. By then, the building's signage was covering most of the exterior windows, leaving the offices inside rather dark and dreary.<br />
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Rather than spend money to renovate, the new owners <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Times_Square#From_building_to_billboard" target="_blank">decided to simply abandon the building's interior above the 3rd floor</a>, and use the top part of the building exclusively as a billboard (the lower 3 floors are still used, periodically, as retail space — it's currently a Walgreens drug store). <br />
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So for the past 15 years, the iconic building that was the namesake of Times Square itself, and a major headquarters of journalism, has become a hollowed-out shell, a mere scaffold for electronic signs.<br />
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At the Crossroads of the World, the value of advertising has trumped the value of journalism, and of work in general. <br />
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<div style='width: 150px; text-align: left; border: 2px solid #4C290D; padding: 5px; background: #ffffff; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; text-transform: none; line-height: 15px; float: right;'><a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/biblio/9781567923643?p_wgt' style='color: #3E7795; text-decoration: none;' title='More info about this book at Powells.com' rel='powells-9781567923643'><b>One Times Square: A Century of Change at the Crossroads of the World</b><br /><img src='http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/imageDB.cgi?isbn=9781567923643&t=60' border='0' style='border: 1px solid #4C290D; float: right; margin: 5px 0px 6px 6px;' width='60'></a>by Joe Mckendry<br clear='all'><a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/?p_wgt'><img src='http://www.powells.com/images/logo_brown80.png' border='0' style='border: none; margin-top: 10px;' width='80' height='35' hspace='0' vspace='0' title='Powells.com' alt='Powells.com'></a></div><br />Postscript: Illustrator Joe Mckendry has made <a href="http://joemckendry.com/Joe_McKendry_Illustration___Architectural_%2805%29.html" target="_blank">a gorgeous before-and-after elevation drawing of the building's eastern facade in 1904 and in 2010</a>, for his book <a href='http://www.powells.com/partner/33016/?p_wgt'><i>One Times Square</i></a>.C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-57102199915144624622012-09-10T14:48:00.000-04:002012-09-11T08:24:27.389-04:00The Indian Burial Ground in the BasementI was walking the dog this weekend along Hammond Street, a quiet residential block squeezed on the hillside between busy Washington Avenue and the industrial district of lower East Bayside here in Portland. They're building two new apartment buildings on a lot at the end of the street, and have started digging out the foundations.<br />
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Fascinatingly, the basement excavation has revealed a cross-section of the hillside, which is full of shells. Mostly longneck clams, with a few oysters here and there:<br />
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The dense layers of shells are sandwiched between clayey marine soils that are typical of our neighborhood, and they follow the slope of the hillside, such that the same layers are visible twice in the excavation: once against the vertical wall on the uphill side, and once again on the floor:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGEVLlSrsHmg_KIW8ZfhRkQ-3f7LIH7twWkn7kkke7JiuvuQldeVCcKlJGft8Cr5b63jm5JGhsF2oSNqugkRjb5fWBhRZoHDvDouPtx0fkQNFQMud3DosTMaHwh7LvUa6nvJM6/s1600/IMG_2548.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiGEVLlSrsHmg_KIW8ZfhRkQ-3f7LIH7twWkn7kkke7JiuvuQldeVCcKlJGft8Cr5b63jm5JGhsF2oSNqugkRjb5fWBhRZoHDvDouPtx0fkQNFQMud3DosTMaHwh7LvUa6nvJM6/s400/IMG_2548.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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I'm pretty confident that this is a Native American shell <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden" target="_blank">midden</a> — a trash heap from seafood feasts of centuries past. Though it's <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=63+hammond+street,+portland+me&hl=en&ll=43.668617,-70.255058&spn=0.007978,0.013754&sll=43.667414,-70.254502&sspn=0.007776,0.013175&t=h&gl=us&hnear=63+Hammond+St,+Portland,+Maine+04101&z=16" target="_blank">several blocks and a freeway crossing away from the ocean today</a>, this hillside used to drop straight down into the tidal flats of Back Cove, as you can see in this 1837 map of Portland. The red dot shows the site of this construction site, smack dab on the old shoreline:<br />
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<a href="http://makeithappenhere.com/images/bayside.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://makeithappenhere.com/images/bayside.gif" /></a></div>
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<br />
Back Cove is a tidal basin — exactly the kind of place where longneck clams thrive, although <a href="http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2008/09/portland-combined-sewer-overflow.html" target="_blank">you wouldn't want to eat them these days</a>. Other parts of the shore around Back Cove were probably marshy and difficult to access from land, but this location, next to a steep hillside, probably offered more direct access to the flats for humans, and for clams, there was relative proximity to the nutrient-rich tidal flows at the Cove's outlet. <br />
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I've been kind of stumped by how the shell heaps are interspersed with layers of clayey soil. This photo shows the horizontal cross-section of two layers (on the future basement floor in the foreground) as well as the sloping vertical cross-section (on the street-facing wall, in the center of the photo). At the left edge of the photo is Anderson Street, which was once the shoreline. How did all that clay get in between? <br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilwXlfF7j66XTkFOe6hPPUBTZI28Lz8yjh3pSdY2s9Z5r0_zAAfkx9wBkeZA98yKBgokeCgzvcT4TlxqylaWhygSwC0hLymca8IUXTqzioqCY-vWCgIAcVher6ftF6IrkRz8Bv/s1600/IMG_2538.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilwXlfF7j66XTkFOe6hPPUBTZI28Lz8yjh3pSdY2s9Z5r0_zAAfkx9wBkeZA98yKBgokeCgzvcT4TlxqylaWhygSwC0hLymca8IUXTqzioqCY-vWCgIAcVher6ftF6IrkRz8Bv/s400/IMG_2538.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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Stranger still is how some of the shell layers seem to overlap with each other:</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXPoL_DjtohMJb9eIs07adAevOFTO5RO_eU7XrSwt9r8l7bEMH-QlwKKAxPvZT_D8R60JO3tvpN0OpdkgQ3L4Do88uQuTUM0VY09Snv616C2d565i8yH0y2ZJ-NsAFd-Kkc2zJ/s1600/IMG_2543.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgXPoL_DjtohMJb9eIs07adAevOFTO5RO_eU7XrSwt9r8l7bEMH-QlwKKAxPvZT_D8R60JO3tvpN0OpdkgQ3L4Do88uQuTUM0VY09Snv616C2d565i8yH0y2ZJ-NsAFd-Kkc2zJ/s400/IMG_2543.JPG" width="400" /></a></div>
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My guess is that the steep slopes of the hillside probably set off occasional landslides, which would periodically bury a heap of shells under a thick layer of mud washed down from the higher ground above.<br />
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Any archaeologists care to comment?<br />
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Related post: <a href="http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2008/04/longfellows-garbage.html" target="_blank">Longfellow's Garbage</a><br />
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<i>Update: Howard Reiche e-mailed me this this morning (Sept. 11):</i><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.mainememory.net/media/images/135/75/57497.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://www.mainememory.net/media/images/135/75/57497.JPG" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Knudsen home, which <br />stood on the site until this <br />summer. From the <a href="http://www.mainememory.net/artifact/57406" target="_blank">City of <br />Portland's 1924 tax records</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Good for you. That was my grandfather’s (Knud Knudsen) house where he raised 13 children after immigrating from Denmark. We have a family photo of my mother, Laura Christine (Knudsen) Reiche, feeding the ducks in the water which came to the foot of their garden which I walked in many times..<br /> Hammond St. was named after the Hammond rope walk which was originally at that site. Possibly the “layers of clay” mystery had something to do with the construction or changing of the rope walk. </blockquote>
C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17619508.post-39003344937104865812012-08-28T17:21:00.003-04:002012-08-28T17:22:09.374-04:00The PizzashedPBS has commissioned an amazing-looking documentary series called <a href="http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/about/">America Revealed</a> (partially based on the popular BBC series "Britain from Above," from which I learned about the <a href="http://www.vigorousnorth.com/2009/01/teatime-deluge-how-british-soap-opera.html">Teatime Deluge</a>).
In this segment, they attach a GPS device to Dominos Pizza delivery guys in Manhattan to animate the patterns of pizza delivery on a Friday night.<br />
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And then the camera zooms out, revealing the routes of the pizza shops' daily deliveries from a distribution center in northern Connecticut.<br />
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And then the camera zooms out more, to show the routes of satellite-embedded, refrigerated trucks moving across the continent, bringing dough, toppings, cheese, and tomato sauce from farms and food processing facilities to the distribution centers.<br />
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Behold, the American pizzashed:<br />
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Watch <a href="http://video.pbs.org/video/2220841879" style="color: #4eb2fe !important; font-weight: normal !important; height: 13px; text-decoration: none !important;" target="_blank">Pizza Delivery</a> on PBS. See more from <a href="http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/" style="color: #4eb2fe !important; font-weight: normal !important; height: 13px; text-decoration: none !important;" target="_blank">America Revealed.</a></div>
C Nealhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07865122912479524567noreply@blogger.com0