From Streetcars To Spaceships

How cheaply and how quickly can an abandoned lot be made into a park?

I've been thinking about this for years and puttering away at it now and again in the real world. If you have access to an asphalt-covered lot, especially one that you don't actually have rights to, how much could you do and how cheaply to make it beautiful? I think that there are some non-obvious answers, especially if you have access to a vehicle and a couple of friends. Since moving next to an abandoned area of over five square blocks I've actually been doing some slowly more ambitious jiggerings of the dynamic and maybe one day I'll write about that here but for now let's consider one thought experiment.

Let's say you've got access to a double-sized lot that is covered with parking spaces and (pretty much) ignored by the owner. We'll assume a temperate climate for now. We'll assume that the temperature never goes below 45 degrees Farenheit in the time that you're working.

So let's say that in one day you go with friends and pick up a few hundred used bricks somewhere. Perhaps you found them on freecycle. This is your starting gun since it can take months to get that cheap load of bricks. That night or soon thereafter, you all go to Home Despot and buy 80 cinder blocks and various other supplies.

You bring them all to your chosen lot.

There you mix some concrete.

You pour a broad line of concrete in a wide circle about a foot and a half wide, about an inch tall, and about 11 feet in diameter.

Along the inner line of this circle you put the cinder blocks so they will be held to the asphalt by the hardened concrete. Around four inches outside that circle of cinder blocks you put a ring of bricks. Inside the ring of cinder blocks you fasten about five or six granite "Belgian blocks".

Five of six cinder blocks are fastened to the asphalt with concrete in "random" locations in the lot. Each of these cinder blocks is bordered by one to three Belgian blocks placed a couple inches away but aligned with the cinder block to create protected nooks and crannies for plants to grow in.

In each corner of the lot you use the remaining cinder blocks and concrete to create one brick high boundary walls about a foot and a half from the actual lot line.

Then everybody goes home and leaves the concrete to cure.

The next time you can all get together you all go back and pour about an inch of rough gravel or sand into each cinder block, into the space between the cinder blocks and bricks, and for about a foot outside the bricks and inside the cinder blocks. Onto all the cinder blocks you spray "moss smoothies".

Pour soil over the whole shebang, every brick and cinder block, until they're barely visible. This will settle quite a bit.

Into this loose soil you shove hundreds of various beans obtained by the simple expedient of buying bags of beans at the supermarket. Each bean should be about two inches down and you should end up with about ten various beans per square foot.

Into this soil you also put hundreds of drought-resistant "plugs" of sedum, alyssum, and other very tough plants that propagate themselves and can stand up to plenty of abuse.

Over ALL of this, you then spread a thin layer of fine gravel. Fine enough to be the type used in fish tanks. This will allow things to "rest up a bit" and get settled and keep soil from blowing away or be forced to the side too much by things like dog pee.

Before leaving that day, water this all copiously.

Think of what this would all look like within a month. It would be elegant, welcoming, and have the beginnnings of a local ecosystem. Among other things, some kind of plants or other will "volunteer" and start growing there without your having had to put them there. All those bean vines will be encouraging the soil to stay healthy and tying it all together, literally.

The last step, just to add the final touch to bring people in, is to occasionally scatter inexpensive pretty things around the space. On the lots near me I scatter handfuls of semi-precious stones like cornelian, hematite, and clear quartz. Bought by the pound from the right stores, they're only about eight dollars a pound. Shells work well, too. Just be sure to not put them all out on one day or in one place. You will be amazed at the sense of magic it gives somebody to find something like a tiger's eye lurking under a bean vine.

Now let's itemize out our shopping list to see just how much this would all cost. I need to get to bed so I'll come back later and fill in the prices.
80 cinder blocks ($1.40 x 80) $120
200 bricks (used)
40 Belgian blocks ($2.60 x 40) $104
6 bags of cement
6 bags of sand for concrete
3 landscaper's flats of mixed plugs (3 x $50) $150
10 bags of beans ($1.20 X 10) $12
20 bags of soil ($2.30 x 20) $46
30 bags of rough gravel or sand
5 bags of fine gravel
semi-precious stones $40
transport costs $100
random tools,etc. $60

Anybody care to tell me that this will cost more than a large party?

Shame about all those highway deaths.

Funny, we've got all these studies about our dangerous roads, especially crowded highways, because of texting, alcohol and drugs, fatigue, and so on. I read the articles and they suggest remedies. More laws. More cops. More signage. More checkpoints. Wider highways. Cutting down all the trees to clear the sightlines. Driver training. Sorry, but I look at those and think "what the hell are they doing in cars in the first place?" Mass transit addresses all of these, ya know.

I've taken plenty of forms of mass transit so f*cked up that I could barely see. Tired, drunk, distracted. Never seen any of that affect the safety of the vehicle yet.

All of this, I might add, applies just fine to cabs and jitneys. How many cabs could we subsidize to what degree to keep drunk drivers off the roads and have it cut net costs for a given city?

Do I sound snotty? Yeah, I guess that I do. But as far as I can see, this is yet another case of "normal" Americans who live in a way that results in vast processions of deaths, cripplings, torturous pain, and billions upon billions of dollars of costs but even when confronted with all of this they can talk about it for years and shake their heads disapprovingly and suggest yet more spending and never once even consider that maybe instead of more subsidies and more police state tactics, maybe the rational answer is TO STOP DOING THIS THING THAT KEEPS KILLING PEOPLE.

Why is this so hard to understand?

Old 1920's shorts used to treat it as a given that the drunk guy in the Betty Boop or Keystone Kops or whatever film would then shamble off and get on a trolley. A simple, safe (compared to cars) trolley that would then deliver said drunk person to a location a few blocks from their door. This was just obvious common sense with technology we had by 1915. If you think that we can't cost-effectively do it now well, I don't even know what to say.

Oh, right. Yes, I do.

Go play in traffic.

-Rustin

The real New York, in one tidy package.

So, I'm in the middle of using up yet another day of my life formatting the newest edition of the Native's Guide to New York. This is just rebreaking lines for the copies to send out to book stores, which means that I'll be doing this all over again in a few weeks one last time before slapping on an ISBN and finally bringing the "serious" editions to press. That having been said, I cannot begin to say how sick I am of those little pages of text. Once you've read and revised anything this many times, it's like tearing out your own fingernails to work on the damn thing.

But it does remind me of something that I'm going to write up for the next serious revision. If you're ever going to be in New York for a day with a couple of friends and want a real cross section of authentic New York food, forget every place you've ever heard of and get on the 1 train. Take it to 231st and get off. Right under the tracks is a classic New York diner, though these days they sell Mexican, too. A block over to the west is a huge Italian deli that can give you all you need in the way of pizza, heros, and the like. (And they sell a full selection of Manhattan Special. WIN!) Along that strip and on Broadway in the few blocks north you can get Dominican, New York Chinese, and pretty much the whole set. You want to hit a greasy, dark, Irish neighborhood bar? You're good. You want to shop for African crafts? No sweat. You want some gorgeous 1800's churches? Easy peasy. You've even got Riverdale from Archie Comics starting about five blocks away. Feel free to take the Number 10 bus north past the highway stretch and you'll get all the kosher pizza and real New York deli you can handle.

If you want to see places you've heard of and that they talk about on the television shows, then fine, go to Rockefeller Center and the Statue of Liberty and the frackin' World Trade Center site.

But especially if you've got enough folks with you to be able to hit a dozen places in one shot and buy food in all of them, especially if you've only got one day, if you want to see the real New York as New Yorkers live it, screw Manhattan, get up to the Bronx, walk around one little area you've never heard of, and you've all that you need.

You're welcome.

-Rustin

Commercial to residential. Or mixed. It's the smart move.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. America is flooded with surplus commercial real estate. Rental demand is climbing and the available rental unit supply is not up to the job. Thus rental prices stay high (relative to the economy) while hundreds of millions of square feet of real estate sits vacant, not generating income and in some cases, so empty of people as to be at increasing risk of vandalism and theft. And real estate companies are in serious financial trouble. We also need to face that as people get poorer, they'll become more prone to exactly the kind of destructive behavior that any owner of an empty building should fear.

The obvious consequence will be more people living illegally in commercial spaces. Done illegally, landlords will look the other way because they're hungry for the revenue, but the conversions, such as will be done, will be rushed and unsafe and will cause problems ranging from fires to floods caused by amateur plumbing.

This being the case, smart municipalities should be exploring passing temporary variances to allow, and perhaps even assist the use of some commercial spaces as residential. Maybe even allow or even encourage the conversion of zoning with an option for those conversions to be permanent. Or, even better, allow more spaces to be zoned more flexibly, allowing mixed use to be not just within complexes but in side by side units.

Commercial space, in normal times, rents for more per square foot than residential. Many landlords also consider it far less of a headache. 

But these are not normal times.

It's time that we started doing a better job of thinking through how or society can best adapt to that.

Residential prices stall, commercial plummet. REAL loft living can't be far behind.

Here in Portland and all around America, residential rental prices continue to be crippling. The outrageous rises of the past twelve years haven't really retreated much at all. Meanwhile people are broker by the day and, with more and more people losing their homes and mortgages out of reach, the demand for rentals can be expected to go up. And while all of this happens, commercial real estate is, in a word, screwed. Overbuilt, overpromoted, deep in debt, and racked with cubic miles of empty space before the latest few months.

Seems to me like two things are as predictable as gravity at this point.

Far more people are going to start living illegally in commercial space. In truth I've already heard about two more in the past few weeks.

Smart owners of commercial real estate will agitate for some kind of temporary zoning variance, allowing them to rent their spaces for residential uses for some short period. Maybe five years. Less sophisticated ones will simply turn a blind eye to such conversions.

I'm also guessing that a few smart legislators will have the brilliant idea of New York style loft laws, allowing residential conversions but only on terms tailored to maximize political gain and socially engineer who gets that housing and for how much. Meanwhile, at least a few dimwitted government departments in various, probably authoritarian cities will go on rabid binges of enforcing fire and zoning codes. Probably after some disaster that hits the front pages or simply as yet another round of our continuing war on illegal immigrants.

It's going to be a good time to be a maker or retailer of do it yourself plumbing and room divider materials. And it's going to create an entire new generation of scofflaws. People, most of them creative, ambitious ones, who have made their peace with living lives that are fundamentally dependent on living in a way that is illegal. This will push them even further than the past decade has in the direction of seeing police officers, firemen, meter readers, and just about anybody else in uniform as an enemy until proven otherwise.

Anybody but me realize that every week that legislators put off variances or rezoning is a week we fall further into trouble?

-Rustin

Rest In Peace, Phil Reed

I was saddened earlier today to learn that former New York City Council member Phillip Reed had died. As council member for my old district in New York he took on an uncomfortable job, expected to represent two utterly different demographics with frequently clashing demands in a district that had been drawn, as far as I could tell, as a cynical measure in power plays and willful marginalization. In my experience he did his job with grace and with a sincere desire to find the best solution. As the New York Times profile makes evident, the all too common grinding idiocies of New York genuinely bothered him. In decades of public service, he consistently fought to not just "keep things going" but to make things better. The few times I met him I found him curious, willing to look beyond the obvious, and intelligent. He seemed unusually free of the usual politician's constant air of self-advancement, a state of affairs that I suspect hurt him considerably. I wish that I had gotten to know him better and I wish that he had been able to stay in the office that term limits shoved him out of.

Phillip Reed, thank you from all of us.

Interesting take on NY implications of Lehman's fall.

The New York Observer has a good piece of the sort they specialize in on the likely impact on the New York area real estate market of the Lehman Brothers and Merrill-Lynch crashes. Even if you have never been east of the Mississippi and/or have never owned anything more valuable than a signed Dead Kennedy's CD, you might want to read this. It's a good, earthy counterpoint to all the vague "the sky is falling" and equally vague "everything is just fine - really" pieces that are currently all over the internet. And it's a good take on how things are going in big money circles in general these days. To quote the piece:

About $13.8 billion in investment sales closed or went to contract in the first six months of 2008, compared to over $34 billion in the first six months of 2007…

What do ya think, folks? Are we in trouble yet?

-Rustin

A Healthy City is Always Characterized By Exuberant Individualism.

The New York Times has not one but two pieces about the current actions of the ever-more repellant city government to replace hundreds of newsstands, each different, many of them long-since optimized for their particular circumstances, with standardized metal boxes deigned less to work as shops than as frames for corporate advertising. To get a better sense of what is lost, go to this site for a sample.

I loved the New York I grew up in. I loved it with a passion that I ache to remember. And, as much as anything else, that city was characterized by the individualistic expression of the love of books, magazines, and anything else that could be made with ink and paper. Many of my hundreds of early science fiction and design books were bought from the various street vendors, almost all of them grizzled vets, who sometimes knew their stock with jawdropping attentiveness and chose and arranged what they sold in ways that made it quite plain what their conclusions were, damnit. I bought from the guys who used to sit along Broadway in the seventies and eighties. I bought from the tables in west midtown, the parts of the Times Square area that weren't sordid enough to get mentioned in most articles but were most certainly a vital and reliable part of the streetscape. Hard though it may be to believe to look at it now, but occasionally I could buy from guys laying out their wares right on Fifth Avenue, which wasn't so crowded and certainly not so exclusive back when I was a kid.

All of this makes me loathe the anonymous, standardized mall accretions that are now being forced upon newsstand vendors. But, more importantly, it helps me focus on what should be instead of what is.

New York is clearly being eviscerated and having many of it's most vital pieces of public life replaced with pod people and plasticized corporate dreck. But out here in Portland, while bookselling may not be much in evidence on our streets (yet) food carts are thriving and spreading. Crafts people line Alberta any chance they get. Individuality is doing just fine here and will as long as we stay vigilant. Because we certainly know that the Portland Business Association, with which our new mayor seems to get cozier by the day, would like to reduce Portland to the same kind of deadened, corporation-optimized, devitalized outdoor mall that so many other cities are being turned into. The simple prohibition on sitting on the sidewalk and the associated ban on most street vendors and musicians that the PBA fought for and got are just the kind of thing that emasculates a creative community and turns a community into a simulation of one, complete with "art" that's made in China and vendors who are paid badly, don't care about what they're selling, and have the truculent, dismissive manner such circumstances reliably create.

I moved back out here fully planning to sell my posters and pocket guides from a blanket at the edges of Saturday Market, with occasional trips up to Seattle and down to Eugene to do the same there. I see no legitimate reason yet why I am prohibited from doing so.

We must not let our city be reduced, like so much of New York, to a theme park and sanitized playground for the affluent and fastidious. Nor will should we let this city suffer the fate of Providence, where a vast monstrosity of a mall has been dropped like a VOC-spewing meteorite, into the middle of downtown, blocking the rights of way and killing much of the local business community.

Portland has thrived in the past few decades by sticking to the road less taken. It's worked very well indeed. We shouldn't let that falter now.

-Rustin

Is there still a Williamsburg?

Back when the G.I.s of World War II were still drifting back into civilian life in the late forties a bunch of smart fuckups, like a Columbia University football player named Kerouac, started hanging out in New York City. Going to jazz clubs, writing awkward but ambitious scraps of poetry. Drinking a hell of a lot and hanging out with young theater types like my mother. These men were the Beats. They created great work in amidst their drinking and screwing and thieving and lying. And little by little their wanderings got broader and their fame started to oppress them and, usually, their work got worse. Most of them died young of stupid destructive things like alcoholism and freezing on the train tracks, strung out on drugs. The kind of deaths that only seem romantic to those of you who have never had to share your home with a heroin addict and check your pants pockets each morning to make sure that nothing has been stolen.

But by the early fifties the Beats had inspired a hell of a lot of men and women from places like, say, St Joseph, Missouri. Men like my father who had maybe done a hitch or two in the army, hadn't grown up anywhere cool or hip, had stayed in school and gotten their degrees and were holding solid, respectable jobs. They started wearing lots of dark clothing, letting their hair get longer than was considered respectable, and went to poetry readings in dark basements in questionable neighborhoods. They dressed and talked and read the same things they believed the Beats did. These people came to be known as Beatniks and were thought of, with a certain validity, as latecomers to the party, people without the fierce creativity or commitment to living outside the system of the Beats but wanting that anti-establishment cool to rub off on them as they wore their black turtlenecks and snapped their fingers in approval - far too hip to do anything as crass as applauding. But only until midnight or so when they went home to be in bed early enough to be up at 8:00 and at work by 9:00.

Well, I can tell you that my mother, who was studying dance and listening to jazz by 1946, was, by 1985, about as esthetically leading edge as a Coke commercial while my father, the onetime gawky kid from Poverty Knob who was still wearing polyester plaid shirts from Montgomery Ward, was in Sri Lanka arguing about academic culture and sending me cards with a return address poste restante from wherever he next expected to able to pick up mail. Maybe.

Sometimes the kids from nowhere we dismiss as posers turn out to be the edgiest ones of all. Even the most inspiring.

I first started spending time in Williamsburg round about 1989 when I would drop by the loft a girl I knew shared in a barely habitable loft building. I still remember the cracked skylights, the paint-spattered splintery floors and nominal heat, and how absolutely abandoned the streets around there seemed. And while it took me quite a few years to get comfortable there, like the Lower East Side, eventually it came to be more of a home to me than the places I picked up my mail and paid rent ever could be.

But that Williamsburg is gone. Utterly. None of us will ever again be offered a cup of tea on a cold day by Amanda at Clovis Books. The crowd of clubgoers ordering burritos at one in the morning in the Mexican grocery a block from the L train is a thing of the past. Walking on a summer evening and discovering some temporary three thousand foot art space from the sound reaching the street just doesn't happen anymore. I miss those things and a hundred others. Almost as much as I miss the simple sensation of walking around on those nights juiced up just by the awareness that all of that was going on and there to be taken advantage of.

But maybe the posers and solid corporate citizens who have overrun what used to be our world aren't entirely useless. I haven't seen a good painting there in years but some of the industrial and graphic design out there is still damn good. Lucky Cat may not be what it was but when I grabbed a beer there a few months ago it still looked like a good place to spend a Saturday night and you can still head a few blocks down Grand and get late night Japanese food right off Bedford. JUNK has raised their prices enough to not be such a casual yes anymore but their selection is still massive and their dozens of semi-anarchic shadowy corners still conceal many a treasure.

What I'm trying to say is that while the vibrant, demanding, creatively fecund neighborhood that so many of us loved has undoubtedly been murdered by high real estate prices, Guilianiism, and the relentless blanding that media attention always creates, let's not be too quick to dismiss what is still there as a complete loss. If somebody who has never been to New York before says that they want to go off and see Williamsburg with the inevitably annoying glee of the newcomer, reign in your reflexive cool derision, explain Beacon's Closet, tell them to try the falafel near the subway entrance, and admit to yourself and them that there actually is still a good time to be had a stop or two past First Avenue.