Satellite Magazine issue 4

no.4

nyc

$11

Editor and art director: Sarah Wesseler Contributing editor: Steven Garbas Copyeditor: Karen McClellan Contributing designers: Justine Rudnicki Denise SantillanMoreno Cover image: Walk with Soames

by Saul Leiter c. 1958 satellitemagazine.ca info@satellitemagazine.ca @satellitecities

The first time I visited Buffalo, New York, I was there to photograph the great buildings of the city’s late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expansion for the Society of Architectural Historians: monumental buildings designed by Louis Sullivan, Fellheimer & Wagner, and, later, Frank Lloyd Wright. Many of these architects were the period’s leading designers, outsiders from Chicago and New York City hired to announce the arrival of this forward-looking city at the connection of Lake Erie and the Erie Canal.

These remarkable buildings, and the grain elevators that made them possible, have been thoroughly documented and praised, but they are also a far cry from the vernacular architecture I typically study. When I returned to Buffalo for the second, third, and—now—sixth times, I became fascinated by another building type: the Buffalo telescope house.

Like the famous buildings I first photographed, these residences were also products of the city’s rapid development and designed—at least initially— by outsider designers and architects. Often started as wood-frame workers’ cottages, the buildings were typically produced from designs in pattern books or other standardized development tools by German and Polish immigrants or the companies that employed them.

But they did not stay as designed for long. The combination of small residences, narrow but deep lots, growing families, and limited resources led to a distinctive expansion pattern: buildings that were enlarged through rear additions that incrementally reduce in scale. The result: houses that seemingly could be collapsed into themselves, like a telescope or spyglass.

The old joke is that every time the family had another child, it would tack another room on the end of the house. When the extensions weren’t bedrooms, they were kitchens, workrooms, and even separate apartments.

Of course, telescope houses aren’t only located on Buffalo’s East Side, or even in Buffalo. Such houses are a building tradition dating back at least to the early 1800s, but they are so concentrated on the city’s East Side that they are the predominant building type on many blocks. The houses are so normalized in these neighborhoods that more than a few residents had to pause to reflect on the special character of their homes when I first asked what it’s like to live in a house with smaller and smaller rooms.

While Buffalo is undergoing a concentrated resurgence, the common maladies of Northeastern and Midwestern American cities, including deindustrialization, white flight, and limited social services, continue to linger on the East Side. The city was even recently shocked to hear that a major regional lender was being investigated by the State of New York for contemporary redlining activities that may have barred lending in East Side neighborhoods.

These problems are plainly visible in the built environment. Once-dense streets are full of derelict lots, and small fields now surreally flank many of the deep houses. The resulting wide-open views make the special design of Buffalo’s telescope houses visible, but they also reveal the tenuous condition of many of the buildings—and the neighborhoods as a whole. How they and their occupants will weather the city’s future is unclear. n

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by sarah wesseler

For several dayS last November, protests over the government’s failure to provide consistent electricity shut down Fort-Liberté, a small coastal city in northeast Haiti.

Video footage of the events shows an atmosphere alternately festive and frightening. At times, throngs of men, women, and children paraded through the streets, dancing and chanting to music created by marching drummers and blaring loudspeakers. But macabre visuals and intermittent violence provided a jarring contrast to the peaceful processions.

A burned-out car propped on its side kept vehicles from passing through the town’s main entrance, while a coffin and human skull next to an uprooted children’s swing set blocked a road near the town square. Rowdier demonstrators threw rocks at passing cars, hurled Molotov cocktails at the local United Nations office, and destroyed the equipment connecting buildings to the local electrical plant.

The week ended in injury and death. National police forces called in to restore calm fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowd, wounding protesters and killing a young child.

To the extent that most North Americans think about Haiti at all, they think about tragedy and failure: failure to stop the widespread—and preventable—death and destruction that accompanied the 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake and the cholera epidemic that broke out later that year; failure to build a stable political system and modern infrastructure; failure to lift its people out of poverty.

While these problems are all too real, the image of the nation that emerges is, of course, far from complete. Haiti has a rich history and culture, and blame for its ills lies with a wide range of actors. Born from a successful slave rebellion that pitted kidnapped Africans against the French army, it was the world’s first black republic. For decades after its 1804 founding, however, racism and fears of slave revolts spreading to neighboring countries— the United States, for example—made it a pariah in the international community.

In 1825, under threat of invasion and re-enslavement, the Haitian government agreed to give France the modern equivalent of billions of dollars (a figure far out of proportion to the young nation’s assets) in reparations for the property that colonists lost

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during the rebellion: i.e., the Haitians themselves.

It took the government over a century to pay off the massive debt, leaving it with little to invest in its own people or infrastructure.

In the twentieth century, decades of trauma, much of it initiated or enabled by foreign powers—U.S. occupation, political coups, the dictatorships of Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier—led many who could flee the country to do so, eviscerating the professional class.

Today, Haiti has the lowest GDP and life expectancy in the Western hemisphere. It lags far behind its neighbors in education, healthcare, sanitation, infrastructure, and governance. “If Americans want to understand Haiti, they should know that Haiti needs everything—drinking water, electricity, everything,” a man named Clercues Altedor who I met in Fort-Liberté’s central market told me. “That’s the only thing you need to keep in your mind, that we need everything. We’ve got nothing.”

He then launched into a plea for help in obtaining surgery for his daughter.

If the problems are clear, however, the solutions have proven less so. In the past few decades, the country has become a magnet for international aid workers and celebrity activists, earning it the nickname “Republic of NGOs.” The phenomenon has its origins in the Duvalier era. Although foreign governments—primarily the U.S.—knew that much of the aid money they sent was simply stolen by the ruling class, they were afraid that cutting it off entirely could destabilize the country. Increasingly, they simply avoided the state altogether, funneling cash through independent organizations.

Today, everything from tiny, unofficial aid groups to giant NGOs crisscross the country working on projects related to infrastructure, education, sanitation, health, and more—with greater or lesser degrees of sophistication and success. Many have little or no communication with Haitian authorities, who, in turn, may not possess the resources necessary to give them any meaningful guidance or oversight.

Haitians and foreigners alike bemoan this system. “Donor assistance to NGOs comes in the form of small projects to support individual clinics or schools that are too often poorly coordinated, incoherent, and make no effort at harmonization with national development priorities,” claimed a 2010 OXFAM report. Meanwhile, “State institutions have

Fort-Liberté town entrance. no money to provide services, hampering their ability to develop their own capacity and thus ensuring that any service they do provide is of low quality.”

The failure of many high-profile international campaigns aimed at rebuilding Port-au-Prince after the 2010 earthquake created a fresh source of bitterness.

I grew curious about the landscape of help in Haiti last year, when I traveled there with a small nonprofit co-founded by a friend. While in FortLiberté, I asked anyone who would talk to me about what the town’s needs were and who was working to address them.

I arrived on January 27, 2014, just a few days after the year’s first round of protests over electricity.

By this time, the only traces of the turmoil that remained were the charred scraps of tires and trash that had been set on fire in the intersections. People on the street went calmly about their business. “The authorities haven’t said what they’ve decided yet,” Farness Peter, a middle-aged motorbike taxi driver,

said as he waited for customers near the town’s entrance. “We’ll be patient, waiting to hear what the authorities will say.”

Ask anyone who lives there to describe this city of 30,000 near the Dominican border, and you’re likely to hear that it’s tranquil and friendly. Despite the recent troubles, it has a reputation as an oasis compared to Haiti’s largest cities, Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haitien. “Fort-Liberté is the most peaceful place I’ve ever visited,” said Doudy (pronounced dutesy) Charles, who fled the earthquake-ravaged capital for Fort-Liberté in 2010. A lanky, affable thirty-one-year-old, he now works part-time for my friend’s group, Empower and Advance, while pursuing a college degree. “The people are really fantastic. Anywhere you go people greet you.”

Despite being shared by SUVs, donkey-drawn carts, motorbikes, horses, pedestrians, dogs, and chickens, the streets are relatively quiet. In the afternoons, chattering kids in brightly colored uniforms and neat braids spill out from schools;

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Woman in Fort-LibertĂŠ. Credit Lusana Schutz.

copper-colored hair, a sign of child malnutrition, is less common than it was only a few years ago.

Shoppers crowd the town’s sprawling central market, where flies swarm thickly on the produce and huge slabs of raw meat on display. Men sit in small groups on the street, drinking Prestige beer and playing dominoes, old kompa hits playing on radios perched behind them.

One of the nation’s oldest settlements, Fort-Liberté was founded by Spanish colonists in the sixteenth century, then fell under French control. Haiti’s Declaration of Independence was signed there in 1803.

The area has changed dramatically in the past few decades. In the mid-’70s, “there was really nothing there. There was no market . . . it was all thatch roofs and naked kids in the streets,” said Annette Crislip, an American who visits the town regularly.

In recent years, a new road has made traveling to the nearby Dominican border a matter of minutes rather than hours. Many of the town’s streets have been paved. Residents pooled money to buy two ambulances. The first municipal sewer system opened last year after a major construction effort.

Cell phones and Facebook accounts are common.

An open-air dance club named Dolphin’s boasts the most surreally elaborate light show I’ve ever seen.

Poverty is still the norm, however, as a quick walk in any direction makes all too clear. As the capital of the nation’s northeastern province (the country’s poorest), Fort-Liberté is home to a number of government offices and international organizations, located in handsome buildings surrounded by tall fences. Venture outside the town center, however, and the structures quickly become smaller and more ramshackle. Locals say that the standard cinder block houses are better constructed than their now-notoriously unsafe Port-au-Prince counterparts, but some residents don’t have the luxury even of bare concrete walls and floors. Precarious-looking wattle-and-daub huts dot the back streets, and one family near my hotel—which sits practically empty for most of the year—seemed to be living in a makeshift tent propped up on a roof.

As in the rest of the country, steady paychecks are hard to come by. In the past, large-scale sisal production employed many in the region, but by the late 1970s the widespread adoption of artificial

fibers had decimated the industry. A port once provided good jobs in the town, but talks of opening a new one have stalled.

Some locals earn their living through fishing, carpentry, and other trades, or make ends meet through informal employment and subsistence farming. Others seek jobs in the many local schools, another fairly recent addition—and a vital one, given that almost half of the town’s population is under the age of eighteen. As a teacher, “you won’t get a lot of money to have a great life,” Charles told me. “But you can survive. Only survive.”

The tall yellow arch marking the entrance to the town is flanked by a billboard advertising jobs at nearby Carocol, an industrial park that opened in 2012. A pet project of the Clintons, who honeymooned in Haiti in the 1970s, it was intended to jump-start an export-focused, textile-based economy that would eventually provide good jobs throughout the country. “Haiti is open for business!” ran the popular refrain.

So far, things haven’t worked out exactly as hoped. As a recent New York Times article put it, the “signature American-led redevelopment project . . . which was supposed to create as many as 60,000 jobs—had created 2,590 at the end of 2013. Workers’ rights advocates reported last fall that garment factories at Caracol and elsewhere routinely violate Haitian minimum-wage laws and pay most workers too little to live on.”

After the 2010 earthquake, more than half a million Port-au-Prince residents fled the devastated capital for other parts of Haiti. Like Doudy Charles, many of those who ended up in Fort-Liberté stayed.

The number of foreigners (who local children follow around with good-natured shouts of “blanco!” regardless of the person’s ethnic origins) also shot up temporarily in the earthquake’s aftermath.

Although Fort-Liberté was hundreds of miles from the epicenter, volunteers flew in to help those who had come from the capital.

One of those was Ayesha Khan, an emergency physician at Stanford and co-founder of Empower and Advance. “The earthquake brought more visibility to Haiti in general, and more of an influx of money,” she told me one afternoon in the hotel, a quietly wry look in her eyes. “And so here we are.”

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Healthcare has long been a major challenge in the country. “[As] for the health in Haiti . . . I can say Haiti has problems everywhere. And everything you touch is a problem,” Charles said.

In Fort-Liberté, a small hospital and health clinic have opened in recent years. However, many people don’t have the money to pay for medicine, relying instead on traditional remedies such as herbal teas. For anything other than routine complaints, those who can afford the fare pay a motorcycle taxi to take them an hour away to a larger hospital in Cap-Haitien.

While working in Haiti and elsewhere, Khan became increasingly concerned by the fact that one of the most common models of providing care in the developing world—raising money to fly for-

eign medical workers from country to country— was fundamentally unsustainable. Together with my friend Brad Penoff, she decided to trial a community healthcare worker program in Fort-Liberté, where she had developed strong ties over repeat visits. The program’s goal: improve access to care while creating good local jobs. After getting it off the ground, they hoped to drop out of the picture as much as possible, letting Haitians take things from there.

To reduce the need for Khan and the other doctors involved with the program to travel to Haiti, they developed an eight-month training regime based on electronic instruction modules and video check-ins. She developed the medical curriculum together with colleagues at Stanford, while Penoff, a Google engineer, created a tablet-based

Doudy Charles, center, with (left to right) Empower & Advance graduates Jean Tom, Wildiane Felix, Jocise Pierre, and Kerlandy Jean-Louis. Credit Ali Davis.

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interface that allowed students to make their way through the lessons largely on their own. The instruction focused on the most common complaints reported in the local emergency room.

On the trip I joined, a group of American and Canadian pharmacists, nurses, and doctors (all volunteers) taught hands-on skills like placing splints.

The program plan called for the next class of students to learn these procedures from alumni instead.

The first four community health workers—all promising recent high school graduates from poor families who had few other employment prospects­— completed the course last spring and was certified to practice by the regional Ministry of Health. They are now based at a clinic in Perches, a small town within the Fort-Liberté hospital’s catchment area, where their reputation for providing quality care has spread. “Wildiane, on[e] of the CHWs [community health workers] went to Grand Basin a town next to Perches to see a dentist in the hospital there,” Charles posted on the group’s Facebook page last October. “There is a patient that showed up and the other people asked him where is he from and he said in Perches. Soon after that there is a guy that said to him: they [sic] is a new clinic up there in Perches, thanks to CHWs that work [there] l had a wound that heals now. Wildiane heard that, stayed quiet and feels proud of the project.”

Empower and Advance’s model relies on an increasingly popular aid strategy known as task shifting, in which a limited set of critical functions are transferred from professionals to trained laypeople.

The method has been applied in fields from education to construction, strengthening communities’ internal resources while making up in part, at least, for the severe shortage of specialists of all kinds in many parts of the world.

In medicine, the idea of training community health workers to provide care for their neighbors, while far from new, has become more popular in recent years. “I see task shifting as the vanguard for the renaissance of primary health care,” wrote Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), in 2008.

The strategy is not without detractors, however.

Many community health worker programs have failed in the past; others have been criticized for

providing poor care, overburdening workers, taking jobs from health professionals with more training, and a multitude of other ills.

A broad-ranging historical review of community health worker programs published by the WHO in 2007 found mixed results and a need for further study. Overall, however, the authors concluded that, when thoughtfully designed and well managed, they can play an extremely important role in a region’s overall healthcare system. “CHW programmes are not a [sic] cheap or easy,” they wrote, “but remain a good investment, since the alternative in reality is no care at all for the poor living in geographically peripheral areas.”

A West Virginian with a soft twang, Annette Crislip has been deeply involved with Haiti since graduating from high school. Now a full-time volunteer for a faith-based American nonprofit called Friends of Fort Liberté, she has visited the town often for almost four decades.

Friends of Fort Liberté started as an informal partnership between American architect J.D. King, Crislip’s late husband, and Andre Jean, pastor of Jerusalem Baptist Church. Over the years, the influential pastor and his late wife Justine helped to steer the group’s direction as it designed and constructed new churches, a school, an orphanage, a farmhouse, and a clinic. The organization runs a scholarship program, allowing over five hundred local children from poor families to attend school. It’s now rebuilding the orphanage and working to get a farm project off the ground. “We’re like a situation comedy with spin-offs,” Crislip told me.

Changing ideas about charity and international aid have made Crislip and her fellow volunteers increasingly concerned about the unforeseen consequences of their actions, however. Books like When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself, which argues that many Christian missions rely on flawed assumptions and create dependency in those they’re trying to assist, have influenced their recent conversations. She thinks that Friends of Fort Liberté will continue to evolve in response to this and other challenges. “We understand that in the next ten years we’ve got a huge transition,” she told me.

Like Penoff and Khan, she also hopes to see

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locals take over more of the work that has been done by outsiders. “People like Doudy . . . they are the ones that will make it happen if they get a chance,” she said. “If they have some chance to do something besides just try to survive.”

Fort-Liberté’s tiny tourism industry caters almost exclusively to volunteers and NGO workers, although locals hope that the town’s scenic bay and historic fort will one day attract others. The only other guest at our hotel in January was Rafael Rodriguez-Leal, who had lived there for the past year while working for the United Nations. He quickly befriended our group and made valuable introductions around the town.

As a civil affairs officer, he spends much of his time trying to understand and improve conditions on the ground. “I’m responsible for making liaisons between the civil affairs section and local authorities, including mayors, municipal councils, civil society organizations, universities, and these types of actors that have a social or political interest in the country,” he told me. His group also partners with local organizations to build infrastructure like police stations and women’s shelters, and is providing extensive logistical support for this year’s elections.

The UN’s troubled history in Haiti provides a complex background for this work. Although the organization has never officially claimed responsibility, the overwhelming consensus is that the cholera outbreak that has killed more than 8,000 people in the past four years was introduced by a Nepalese peacekeeping delegation whose poorly maintained latrines leaked into a nearby river. Haitian and international groups alike have criticized the UN for its failure to own up to the disaster. “The organization’s ongoing unwillingness to hold itself accountable to the victims of cholera violates existing obligations under international law,” two Yale Law scholars wrote in The Atlantic in 2013. “Moreover, by failing to lead by example, the UN is undercutting its core aims of promoting international peace, law, and human rights.”

The UN established its Stabilization Mission in Haiti, better known by the acronym MINUSTAH, in the wake of unrest surrounding the 2004 exile of then-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (who either fled the country or was pushed out by the in-

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ternational community, depending on who’s telling the story). After the earthquake, the Security Council decided to scale up the program to support the country’s recovery. According to its website, the 7,000-strong international force­— the vast majority of whom are military and police troops, plus a few hundred civilians and volunteers—now focuses on “its original mandate to restore a secure and stable environment, to promote the political process, to strengthen Haiti’s Government institutions and rule-of-law-structures, as well as to promote and to protect human rights.”

MINUSTAH was controversial in Haiti even before the cholera outbreak. Protests have broken out around the country in response to allegations of sexual misconduct, much of it involving minors, by peacekeeping troops.

The program’s long tenure has also been questioned. “There has been no serious armed conflict in Haiti since 2006—which can be taken as evidence either of MINUSTAH’s effectiveness or of its irrelevance,” wrote The Economist in 2012. “Even if the troops do contribute to security, critics of the force note that a single year of its $800m budget might be enough to revamp the country’s decrepit water infrastructure. That might well have prevented cholera from spreading in the first place.”

Responding to these and similar criticisms, last fall the UN Security Council authorized a withdrawal that will halve the number of military personnel on the ground within the year. The Haitian government requested that UN military and police levels remain roughly the same during the lead-up to December’s elections, with levels dropping significantly afterward.

While complaints about outside interference are not uncommon in Fort-Liberté, a number of locals I spoke with also said that their neighbors could be doing more to improve their own fates.

Doudy Charles told me that the townspeople would benefit from being more proactive and creative. Although they often talk about starting new farms and other businesses, he said, “no one ever raises one of his fingers to do it.”

Despite Fort-Liberté’s poverty, he pointed out, substantial amounts of money pass through the city due to the many government and NGO offices

Judson Michel in front of Radio Gamma. located there, as well as its close proximity to the Dominican border, where Haitians from throughout the region go to buy and sell goods. However, partially because of a lack of enterprise, he claimed, little of that money remains with locals.

“Haiti, and especially Fort-Liberté, is dependent on the Dominican Republic for food and that kind of thing,” he told me. “I think the best thing to increase things in Fort-Liberté is to start doing our own food, because we have the same soil—we have water here, we have many things here. We have everything. But the Dominican Republic does these things, and we go buy the things from them. So the best thing is to do our own planting, our own tomatoes, our own things we should need everyday. That is the way to increase better jobs, I think. It’s a good way for the future.”

Charles is not naive about the obstacles involved. He’s all too familiar with stories like that of a would-be farmer who told me about contracting tuberculosis but not being able to stop working in

the fields despite a sensation of being stabbed repeatedly in the chest: poor irrigation in the area means crop yields so small that he has difficulty surviving even when toiling constantly.

However, despite the all-too-real problems of insufficient capital and infrastructure, Charles and others continue to advocate for self-starters. “People need to be more creative here,” he told me. “If you don’t do something, don’t expect people will do it for you.” A few popular new local businesses—bakery, funeral parlor, small entertainment center— demonstrate that it is possible, if not easy, to be entrepreneurial in Fort-Liberté.

He broadcasts these and other thoughts on his weekly show on Radio Gamma, itself a local success story. Housed in a small building on a residential street, it was for a time the town’s only radio station. Due to political problems, “from 1991 to 1995, there was no radio station in Fort-Liberté,” founder Judson Michel, a middle-aged man with a calm, confident demeanor, told me. “Every state in Haiti

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Fort-Liberté market. had a radio station; only the northeast didn’t have one. My brother is an electrician, so I bought my own equipment to make a radio station in order to fill the void. And the people in Fort-Liberté really liked it.”

Radio remains the dominant means of accessing information in Fort-Liberté, as in much of Haiti.

Although Internet use is growing, the nation’s telecommunications infrastructure is extremely underdeveloped by international standards.

Radio Gamma’s programming, which is funded by ad sales, falls into three categories: information, education, and entertainment. With respect to the former, “most people are attracted by political news and want to know what the government does,” Michel said. As for education, “this radio station teaches people how to have good manners in the society, teaches them how to be someone that plays their role for themselves and for the community. We teach them their rights and what they have to do.”

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Michel reaches out to locals like Charles to host shows on the station, and sometimes accepts requests to join his lineup. Etienne Juvenal, the Cuba-trained doctor at the local clinic, uses his slot to teach basic health facts. “The majority of the problems that we see in the clinic are preventable,” he told me. “But the problem is that the population, at least a lot of people, aren’t educated. They don’t know how to prevent them.” Because Haiti’s schools lack a standardized curriculum, many children never learn basic facts about nutrition, sanitation, and other critical subjects. “To improve the health situation in this community, education is the most important thing.”

Junior Mesamours, a minister who earns a living as a translator, has a show called “The Haiti of Tomorrow.” “Haiti can realize its potential,” he said, “but the first thing will be consciousness . . . Unfortunately too many people, especially Haitians, are OK with the way we are. Or if they pretend they are not, they don’t do much to really

change it. The second thing will be the effort of changing the mentality: a mentality of defeat, a mentality of pessimism, a mentality of ‘someone else needs to do it.’”

In April 2014, Haitian president Michel Martelly signed a contract to connect four local communities to electricity generated at the Carocol industrial park, responding to the demands of the January 2014 protests. However, Fort-Liberté and a few other cities that had been promised power were left off of the list. Protests broke out in the nearby border town of Ouanaminthe. Roadblocks stopped traffic (and trade) to the Dominican Republic for several days. Protesters threw broken bottles and smeared feces on public authorities’ offices.

Officials suspect that much of the violence that has broken out in the region has been fueled by opposition politicians paying out-of-towners to stir up chaos at strategic times. Regardless, the protests tap into deep popular frustration in cities that remain without power for most of each day. “People is fighting for their due,” Charles wrote me recently. “[It’s] the role of our government to ensure that. If they cannot, people has to stand up. Cause no one can’t live without electricity in this century.”

The Haitian government’s failure to provide basic public services is often blamed on corruption or incompetence. Like most, however, the story is more complicated than it appears. A long history of political instability and chronic underfunding of government agencies has created a cycle in which Haitians, considering the state useless at best, don’t pay the taxes and bills critical to meeting their own needs. Opaque and often inaccurate invoicing only adds to the problem. This chicken-and-egg dynamic exacerbates tensions in Fort-Liberté as well as the rest of the country.

Further complicating the situation, Rafael Rodriguez-Leal told me that he believes there are very good reasons to oppose the proposed Carocol plan—for one, the fact that it would make FortLiberté dependent on fossil fuels.

“Haiti has an opportunity to develop at a sustainable rate,” he told me. “They’re not burning that much carbon to generate electricity, because people are used to just six hours a day of electricity, and they’ve managed. That’s what we’re trying to do in

other parts of the world, right? Cut. So we shouldn’t expect them to do the same things we’ve done, and then end up having to cut on carbon generation.”

He and his colleagues are advocating for the use of renewables—and helping find ways to finance and install them—instead. “Once they get into that pattern of burning more fossil fuels at the plant, they’re not going to stop.”

After the city’s energy meters were smashed during the November 2014 riots, residents suffered through three months without any electricity. Peak-hour power was finally restored during the week of March 19, coinciding with the annual festival of Saint Joseph, Fort-Liberté’s patron saint.

Government officials continue to promise more and better power soon. Haiti’s newly appointed prime minister attended the March celebration, giving a speech promising to work toward round-the-clock electricity—and exhorting residents to pay their bills.

Protests have continued, however. Mid-April 2015 witnessed another round of demonstrations in Fort-Liberté and Ouanaminthe. The latter resulted in the death of MINUSTAH soldier Rodrigo Andres Sanhueza Soto, a 35-year-old Chilean father of two who was shot in the head as he sat in the back of a Jeep during a routine errand.

U.S.-based scholars and journalists who write about Haiti often emphasize the two nations’ intertwined histories. Although most Americans know virtually nothing about Haiti, the world’s top superpower would not have evolved in the way it did had things worked out differently on this small, impoverished Caribbean island.

As the threat of climate change looms ever larger, it’s easy to twist this line of thought, imagining that a future U.S. could look more like today’s Haiti than we might like to think, facing widespread challenges with energy, water, food, and other vital resources. Lessons learned in Fort-Liberté and other struggling cities in the developing world may one day prove critical in our own neighborhoods. n

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P. A. Gross, Bird’s-Eye View of Toronto, Illustrated Toronto (1877)

1898

pre-1500s The Lenape people have lived in the New York City area for thousands of years.

1524 Giovanni da Verrazzano is the first European to see the New York Harbor.

1625 Dutch settlers found New Amsterdam on the southern tip of Manhattan Island.

1783 The signing of the Treaty of Paris ends the American Revolution. British troops leave New York. The city will briefly serve as the new nation’s capital.

1799 The New York State Legislature passes the “Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery.”

Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island are consolidated to form one city, making it the world’s second largest (after London), with a population of 3,350,000.

1901 Almost 75 percent of the population lives in tenements.

The passage of a tenement law aims to improve conditions in new developments.

1810 1674

new york city timeline

The English take the colony from the Dutch. Its new name: New York.

New York is the nation’s largest city.

The first subway line opens.

1811 Manhattan’s street grid is adopted.

1916

1851

New York City passes the country’s first zoning law in order to prevent tall buildings from blocking light and air below.

1712 & 1741 African slaves are harshly punished after rebellions.

1776 The British capture New York during the Revolutionary War.

1904

The New York Times is founded.

1859 The first section of Central Park opens to the public.

1917 The opening of the Catskill Aqueduct provides the growing city with a reliable water supply.

1920s

1968

1993

The Harlem Renaissance brings new recognition to the city’s African American artists.

Student protests shut down Columbia University.

Rudolph Guiliani becomes New York’s first Republican mayor in decades.

1929 The New York Stock Exchange crashes, triggering the Great Depression.

1929 The Museum of Modern Art opens.

1931 The new Empire State Building is the world’s tallest.

1934 The first public housing project opens.

1936 Rikers Island, the city’s primary jail complex, opens.

1939 The city’s first airport, LaGuardia, opens.

1940s The city is recognized as the world’s cultural capital.

1940s Many New Yorkers leave the city for its new suburbs.

1946 The United Nations agrees to locate its headquarters in New York.

1948

1969 A police raid on gay bar The Stonewell Inn catalyzes the gay rights movement.

1970s The city finds itself broke, is bailed out by the federal government.

1970s The Bronx burns.

Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill opens.

1981 1963 The demolition of historic Penn Station sparks the modern historic preservation movement.

1964 Riots break out in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant after the shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer.

The courts rule that the government must provide shelter for the homeless.

1980s Crack cocaine drives up the murder rate.

1990 Census figures show that whites are a minority.

2001 A terrorist attack brings down the World Trade Center.

2,753 people die in New York.

2001 Billionaire Michael Bloomberg is elected mayor, an office he holds through 2013.

2012 Hurricane Sandy shuts down some parts of the city for days, devastates others.

2013 Bill de Blasio wins the mayoral race by promising to address inequality.

2015 New York City’s five boroughs are home to more than 8.4 million people.

1873 lithograph, public domain. Restored by Adam Cuerden.

n a h t e r o

n a t t a h n a m a

nt i n

ew i v er

t

wi

om t h

i

an

tt o g

1860 Mitchell Map of New York City, New York. Public domain.

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subway stops, but there’s no additional capacity being built on the lines. And building additional capacity would be an extremely expensive proposition that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s not proposing because of the extremely high capital costs involved.

And we have the additional problem that despite the long-term sustainability plan, these areas outside of Manhattan (like Williamsburg in Brooklyn, famously gentrified over the last decade) have enormous deficiencies in subway service. The platforms are overflowing during peak hours. There’s a lack of school space. There wasn’t serious planning for providing public spaces in Williamsburg and many of the other neighborhoods. Their chief form of recreation is bars that open at night. So there are a lot of downsides to high density.

And the other hidden factor is that so much of the new residential development is financed by global investors—investment trusts, equity funds—and is being built as investment properties. So it’s not unusual to see some of them that are one third or one half vacant. And what kind of city does that produce?

What happened to the benefits of density?

So New York City’s not only Manhattan. It’s not only the city of New York, the municipal entity, but it’s the metropolitan region. And you can’t really understand NYC without looking at the whole.

What do you think Bill de Blasio has brought to this picture?

Well, Bill de Blasio has not posed these issues as being significant. There certainly has been a lot of hope that de Blasio, who ran and won on a platform

of a tale of two cities, would address the inequalities.

And he did issue his plan for housing and development in NYC. I did a piece on it that was published in The Indypendent, and I called it “The tale of two housing plans.” The main element in the plan is new development, and it’s new market-rate development, with an affordable housing component.

It more or less follows the models that the Bloomberg administration advanced, which is rezoning and promoting infrastructure development, to the extent that it was feasible, in areas that were identified as being transit-oriented or favorable to development. And de Blasio more or less followed that, except that instead of making inclusionary housing optional, he has talked about making it mandatory in these developing areas.

But the dominant, the main strategy in the de Blasio housing plan is development. It links affordable housing to new market-rate housing development.

And that’s the part that a lot of people are very concerned with. I am talking on the phone at least several times a week with neighborhood groups, community groups, who are saying no to new development even if it has a thirty percent affordable housing component, because as under Bloomberg people understand that if it’s thirty percent affordable, it’s still seventy percent luxury market-rate housing, and that has the effect of jacking up the rents and house prices that force people out, or will push people out. So they don’t want that. And then there’s also the suspicion that the affordable housing won’t be truly affordable to people within the neighborhoods. So there’s a lot of suspicion about what these development plans are going to look like. n

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fragments of endless possibilities

Groomed to become a rabbi like his father, a prominent member of Pittsburgh’s Orthodox Jewish community, Saul Leiter instead moved to New York in the mid-1940s to pursue his love of art. In 1952 he moved into a row house on Manhattan’s East 10th Street, where he remained until his death in 2013.

Although he worked in relative obscurity for much of his life, Leiter is now considered one of the great New York photographers. Most of his images were taken during daily walks around his neighborhood, the East Village. “He was asked by Comme des Garcons to do a catalog of dress shirts, and they gave him carte blanche to go anywhere in the world,” former assistant Tony Cenicola told the New York Times in 2013. “He decided he wanted to work on the blocks around his house. That’s what he liked.”

realtors, the media, and others began calling it the East Village to differentiate it from the broader Lower East Side it had traditionally been considered part of.

The area’s cultural momentum remained strong in the ’70s and ’80s. Future pop icons from Richard Hell to RuPaul and Madonna lived and worked there, and a youthful, party-oriented gallery scene turned Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring into art stars.

Over the years, the neighborhood has witnessed countless struggles between real estate interests wanting to capitalize on its reputation for gritty glamour and low- to moderate-income residents trying to maintain their homes and communities.

The latter group has won the occasional battle, but the general trend has been toward gentrification and homogenization.

The East Village extends east to west approximately from Broadway to the East River and north to south from Houston to 14th Street. A tony residential district when it was first developed in the 1830s, it soon fell out of fashion as Manhattan expanded northward. From the 1850s onward it housed successive waves of poor immigrants in tenement slums: Germans through much of the 1800s, followed by Eastern Europeans in the early 1900s and Puerto Ricans in the postwar era.

From the 1950s on, the area’s cheap rents and extraordinary diversity made it a magnet for artists of a particular sort: “disaffected middle-class individuals who, in effect, mediated the cultural divide between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures,” as sociologist Christopher Mele wrote in Selling the Lower East Side: Culture, Real Estate, and Resistance in New York City. In the 1950s, abstract expressionists like Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, and Franz Kline could be found there, along with Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac.

In the 1960s, the neighborhood was the epicenter of New York counterculture. During this period,

Although Leiter spent a lifetime documenting the East Village, most of his photos barely hint at these histories. He knew many of the artists living and working nearby, but he rarely inserted himself into scenes.

“Saul was a pretty quiet, modest guy,” said gallerist Howard Greenberg. “He didn’t run with the crowd.”

He loved local landmarks like the Strand bookstore and Ukranian restaurant Veselka, but was relatively ambivalent to the gentrification taking place during the last years of his life. “His mode of operating was more about just appreciating the aesthetics around him,” said his assistant Margit Erb. “He wasn’t a political person.”

Self-deprecating and good-naturedly cranky, Leiter frequently shot down attempts to tie his work to broader issues. “I didn’t photograph people as an example of New York urban something or other,” he told the blog Photography Interviews in 2009. “I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed.

They are fragments of endless possibilities.” n

Title spread: Red Umbrella, c. 1955 | Right: Reflection, c. 1958 All images copyright Saul Leiter Foundation and courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.

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Street Scene with Cars, 1950s

Snow, c. 1960

Through Boards, 1957

Street Scene, c. 1958

Harlem, 1960

Haircut, 1956

broadway revisited:

text &

by ryan

notes on a poetics of infrastructure

images

madson

Broadway is perhaps New York City’s most iconic thoroughfare, making good on the “bright lights, big city” allure of Manhattan over large stretches of its thirteen-mile run across the length of the island from Battery Park at the southern tip to Broadway Bridge just above 220th Street.

The list of its attractions and notable buildings is long and diverse, a flâneur’s—or shopper’s—delight: Trinity Church; Zuccotti Park (home of Occupy Wall Street); St. Paul’s Chapel; City Hall and mayor’s office; the Strand bookshop; Union Square; the Flatiron Building and Madison Square; Macy’s flagship store; Times Square and the Theater District; Columbus Circle and Central Park; Lincoln Center; and thousands of restaurants, shops, and services.

For much of its span through Lower Manhattan, Midtown, and the Upper West Side, Broadway is, appropriately, a bustling and popular street filled with every sort of urban commercial land use and activity. So much so that, like many locals, when I lived in New York I would avoid the busiest blocks of the street, especially the retail blocks in SoHo and the overcrowded convergence at Times Square, “the Crossroads of the World.”

Recently, however, the street has taken on a vastly different character, with improved accessibility and new amenities in some of the most visited parts of the city. Beginning in 2009, improvements to Broadway between Lincoln Center in the Upper West Side to Union Square and 14th Street downtown have been made in tandem with other public space initiatives, especially in Manhattan and along the waterfronts of Brooklyn and Queens, as part of former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (2002–2013) broader strategy to transform the face of the city.1 In a minor but far-reaching urban design effort led by the city’s Department of Transportation and Department of Construction and Design (NYC DOT and DDC), a gradual conversion of several blocks of Broadway into pedestrian promenades and plazas with limited vehicular access has transformed its appearance and function.

The initial phase of streetscape and traffic conversions at Times Square and Herald Square (adjacent to Macy’s), conceived as temporary traffic experiments, was called “Green Light for Midtown”— a reference to the goal of improving traffic flow and pedestrian safety. Streets that had been described by 1 The Broadway transformations were one of many urban planning initiatives advanced under the Bloomberg mayoralty. A host of popular parks and cultural institutions (e.g., the High Line, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and the East River Esplanade; Barclay’s Center and the rehabilitated Lincoln Center) were completed during his 12 years in office.

Certainly New York City, and especially Manhattan and portions of Brooklyn, has prospered over the past decade, and its many public spaces, including Broadway, are livelier—and safer—than ever before. That so many improvements to the city’s public spaces were initiated or completed in the midst of a global economic recession was no trivial achievement.

However, critics of the Bloomberg administration have pointed to the elitism inherent in many of these spatial transformations: in particular, the rezoning of large swaths of the city to accommodate residential towers for the well-to-do. The Manhattan-facing waterfronts of Queens and Brooklyn, for example, changed dramatically under Bloomberg. Critics contend that the revitalized city Bloomberg advocated for, with its new public spaces and cultural amenities and thoroughly gentrified core, was fundamentally a neoliberal playground for the well-to-do. Instead of focusing on quality-of-life benefits that parks and public spaces might provide for all New Yorkers, critics contend that he was overly focused on maintaining a competitive edge that would enhance the city’s “Alpha ++” global status.

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the city as “a chaotic jumble of pedestrians, cyclists, cars, trucks, and buses” would become safer and more organized and efficient.

Based on the outcome of this pilot project, in 2010 the city decided that the interventions would become permanent. Although the newly configured streetscapes have shown mixed results with respect to their initial goal, vehicular traffic efficiency, the social benefits have been enough to signal a success for NYC DOT and DDC. These and other interventions have transformed portions of Broadway into a social venue, supporting a range of amenities previously unthinkable within the limited right-of-way of the sidewalk. Among the highlights of the Broadway transformation: outdoor cafés and refreshment kiosks, seating areas with tables and umbrellas, bicycle lanes and kiosks for the city’s popular new bike-share program, farmers’ and craft markets, and hundreds of new potted plants. * This is arguably the first time in recent decades that New York City’s thoroughfares have been treated as a form of civic architecture rather than functional conduits for various forms of traffic.

One hundred years ago, at the dawn of the modern movement in architecture, the street was anathema throughout the Western world. It was considered the breeding ground of crime, noise, disease, and filth. From the mid-nineteenth century onward, urban streets were often viewed by ruling powers as platforms for civil unrest and revolution. Administrators like Baron Haussmann in the Paris of Napoleon III and the Beaux Arts school of designers that followed were responsible for functionally and formally altering the relationship of the street to the city. They provided grand axial structures that served to reorder the metropolis, making a display of state power while enhancing—and controlling—the movement of pedestrians and vehicles.

By the early twentieth century, architects and engineers were seeking alternative solutions in

rationalized circulation systems that emphasized efficiency and separation of movement, exemplified by the visionary experiments of architect-engineers such as Eugène Hénard, also in Paris. With mass acceptance of the automobile, urban roadways eventually became monofunctional and overscaled,

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usually with meager or no provisions for pedestrians and bicyclists. The idea of the streetscape as a vital public space for communication and social exchange— a tradition reaching back to the first cities and achieving cultural watersheds in classical Athens and Rome— was cast aside in favor of the functional roadway.

The extreme example, of course, is the modern limited-access expressway that tore through the fabric of many city centers. A utopian version of this road typology was envisioned by Le Corbusier as an integral part of his influential and epoch-making urban design proposals of the 1920s: Ville Contemporaine and the Radiant City. These were to be verdant cityscapes with residential towers and other buildings segregated by function and enabled by automobility.

Vehicular movement was elevated on expressways to allow continuous pedestrian activity along the parklike setting of the urban ground. The modern city would be reformed of the squalor and congestion of its recent industrial past to ensure healthy and productive lifestyles for citizens. This idealized and efficient city was analogous to a machine.

Infrastructure as civic project, as cultural and artistic practice, soon lost the progressive social mission of The Radiant City, but retained its naïve idealism about functional zoning and the freedom of the automobile. Engineers and bureaucrats across North America and Europe moved ahead with their watered-down vision of the modern city, creating piecemeal housing estates, generic “green spaces,” and suburban commercial strips while linking central business districts with other parts of the metropolis via a network of urban expressways. Many of the latter, including some in New York, are now viewed as grand failures because they facilitated automobility at the expense of everything else, including neighborhood vitality.

The result of these planning trends: troubled inner cities and social isolation in car-dependent suburbs. The legacy of New York’s ultimate technocrat, Robert Moses, is an infamous example. Moses continues to be a controversial figure. Although he has been widely (and, in this author’s view, correctly) criticized for his heavy-handed and blunt insertion of expressways into the urban fabric, some historians claim that modernization and systematization at the grand scale that he pursued was in fact appropriate, if not inevitable, for the twentieth century metropolis.

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Design of the street fell out of the purview of mainstream architecture and planning for decades, until the postmodernists and neo-traditionalists in the 1960s and ’70s embraced the street as an essential urban typology. For these architects, the street could be understood formally as the physical system that organizes and supports a collection of background buildings and provides the skeletal network upon which neighborhoods, districts, and regions are structured.2 * Well-known among urbanists, this history of the street continues to be relevant, even urgent, as we risk repeating yesterday’s mistakes. (As an aside, I would note that the profession of landscape architecture has all along, quietly and without fanfare, sought to improve the condition of our streets and residual public spaces, or at least perform damage control by planting street trees and introducing pocket parks and other small-scale urban amenities.)

In the present century, urban planners and design professionals seem to have embraced the need for a more holistic, human-centered, and multifunctional network of urban streets. Today, pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly corridors are widely accepted by urban planners and an increasing number of mainstream transportation engineers.

An example is the Complete Streets program sponsored by planning advocacy organization Smart Growth America. The National Complete Streets Coalition advocates for structural policy changes and amendments at the federal, state, and local levels to create streets that are “designed and operated to enable safe access for all users.”

Complete Streets policies are being adopted by a growing number of local and state governments. The proposed solutions rely on standards and technical requirements, which is not surprising, as the intended audience consists of engineers, city employees, and elected officials.

In design terms, a street can be understood conceptually in the “section.” A section is cut by an 2 See, for example, Aldo Rossi’s influential treatise on urban form, The Architecture of the City, or the volume titled On Streets, edited by Stanford Anderson and featuring essays by Diana Agrest, Kenneth Frampton, Joseph Rykwert, Anthony Vidler, and Peter Wolf, among others.

imaginary vertical plane across the public right-ofway, revealing the dimensions of vehicle travel lanes, parking lanes, sidewalks, and so forth. Complete Streets promotes design guidelines that attempt to fit as much as possible into the street section, where functions such as raised crosswalks or bicycle lanes are expressed in standard dimensions. A cynic might conclude that pedestrian and bicycle networks have become shorthand for sustainability, while these items are checklisted to increase eligibility for transportation grants. Although more users and modes are accommodated, the different uses and activities in the streetscape remain categorically and formulaically segregated. The net gains appear to be positive, but there is little room for ambiguity and flexibility in the street.

The ‘complete’ street is in effect “designed” by simply extruding the street’s sectional dimensions and uses along the length a given corridor. This technical approach fails to account for threshold conditions or indoor/outdoor relationships that might vary from building to building and other adjacencies, and it largely ignores the intermingling of uses and movement in spaces that may have vastly differing characteristics within the same corridor.3 Taking a “kit-of-parts” approach to urban design, Complete Streets pays lip service to user empowerment: offering the user what she wants, but only if it’s already identified in the streetscape design manual.

3 With regard to context, the Coalition states: “There is no singular design prescription for Complete Streets; each street is unique and responds to its community context. Roadways that are planned and designed using a Complete Streets approach may include: sidewalks, bike lanes (or wide paved shoulders), special bus lanes, comfortable and accessible public transportation stops, frequent and safe crossing opportunities, median islands, accessible pedestrian signals, curb extensions, narrower travel lanes, roundabouts, and more. A ‘complete’ street in a rural area will look quite different from a ‘complete’ street in a highly urban area, but both are designed to balance safety and convenience for everyone using the road.”

An example of a deregulated streetscape promoted by the Coalition is the woonerf, a Dutch concept that can be translated roughly as “living streets.” These primarily residential streets function without conventional traffic hierarchies and cues such as sidewalks and crosswalks, traffic signals, stop signs, and posted speed limits. All users, including drivers, are forced to proceed cautiously, and as a result these anarchic spaces are extremely safe. Complete Streets refers to the woonerf as a prototype for designing pedestrian-oriented streets in a North American context.

In this author’s view, the Complete Streets program does not add up to more than a sum of its parts.

It should not supplant a broader understanding of infrastructure, public space, and the city, where the street supports urban life at the human scale even as it organizes the cityscape at the neighborhood and metropolitan scale. From the viewpoint of urban design—that cross-disciplinary hodgepodge where architecture, landscape architecture, and planning overlap—the recent policy- and standards-based attempts to influence the design of urban streets, while no doubt well-intended, are at risk of squeezing the life out of new approaches to infrastructure. After all, an overreliance on technocratic solutions is how we got into the present mess of monofunctional urban roads in the first place. While sound policies and best practices must be part of the solution going forward, they should be just that: one piece of an approach that also incorporates contextual analysis, placemaking, and a design sensibility attuned to the human experience of the city.

The recent Broadway streetscapes, while not quite a case-in-point, provide evidence of the continued engineer-dominated approach to the design and construction of that most ubiquitous element of the public realm: the street. As previously mentioned, the goal of “Green Light for Midtown” was to reduce traffic congestion and increase pedestrian safety; quality-of-life proposals followed from the primary concerns of traffic engineering. The driver for the project was efficiency, foretold in the traffic models of what might happen when certain blocks of Broadway were closed to cars. Happily, the resulting pedestrian plazas, implemented with expediency and reversibility in mind, but also minimalist panache, have proven to be a hit with New York crowds, attracting a diversity of users and encouraging them to linger in some of Manhattan’s busiest areas.4 New policies, best practices, and revised standards should continue to be developed and promoted in

4 The New York City Department of Transportation declined to comment for this article.

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urban planning. The grands projets5 under the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg demonstrated that these topics are an important part of the political discourse, and that our public spaces deserve the best we can give them. However, concerns about efficiency, function, and safety, while important, must be reconciled with the forward-thinking and many-layered contributions of good urban design.

The agency of physical interventions to transform the public realm in ways both subtle and spectacular must be constantly emphasized—especially in a city that claims to be a leader in progressive urbanism.

The challenge now is to introduce long-term adjustments to the street network at the scale of the city, accommodating existing transportation needs while continuing to insist on multimodal solutions and design strategies in a site-specific manner. Our city planners and officials must look beyond the problem-solving motive of the technocrat and the political and fiscal difficulties of retrofitting our streets to a more profound understanding of public infrastructure, one that seeks to engage with society and individuals. Current hopes for the ecological resilience of cities will not be actualized until we can also achieve social resilience, which must include empathy and care for our everyday built environments— after all, people and cities are embedded in our revised concepts of nature.

In my view, it is the role of the architect to advocate for a human experience of infrastructure alongside functional and performative concerns. It is the responsibility of the architect as urban designer to introduce empathic, aesthetic, and programmatic elements to the streetscape and other public spaces, enhancing our ability to socialize and interact, to observe and understand our urban context, and to activate and enjoy the city. * 5 Grands projets is here used as a pejorative after the neoliberal success of the civic projects initiated in Paris in the 1980s and ’90s by François Mitterrand. These projects, which included Parc de la Villette, the Grande Arche de la Défense, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, were exemplary of a new wave of contemporary city-building and branding that focused on cultural amenities and public spaces as playgrounds not so much for the masses, but for the well-to-do.

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At the conceptual intersection of function and phenomenology—to include form, materiality, tactility, spatial affect, atmospheres, and other ideas attendant to the human experience of architecture—is what I call a poetics of infrastructure. Such a poetics already thrives in the ordinary and vernacular streetscapes of the city, as well as the stately boulevards of many capital cities. It can be felt in historic districts spared the destruction of urban renewal and freeway corridors, and in poorer residential neighborhoods (as well as the gentrifying areas of once-poor neighborhoods) that had been bypassed by the progress of the latter half of the twentieth century.

These quotidian urban places were admired half a century ago by architects such as the members of Team 10, a group of second-generation architectural avant-gardes (including Alison and Peter Smithson, Aldo van Eyck, and Giancarlo De Carlo) who countered the positivist ideals of orthodox modernism with proposals grounded in what they believed was a more nuanced social and experiential understanding of the city. Above all, the everyday life of the city was lovingly described by Jane Jacobs, the former Greenwich Villager who embraced New York City’s humble streetscapes and famously fought Robert Moses—and won—to keep many of them intact.

However, outside of a few renaissance moments in contemporary urbanism, such as Barcelona or Portland in the 1980s and ’90s, the field of urban planning has been slow to influence that of transportation engineering or wrest control of the streetscape from technocrats. Only in recent years have cities worldwide begun to rethink and reinvent their streets and other mobility infrastructures. For the past half-decade or so, New York City has been at one forefront of this process. * The design concept for the pilot project to transform portions of Broadway is straightforward and premised on its unique relationship to Manhattan’s street system.

Imposed by the Commissioners’ Plan of 1811, the Manhattan grid was a highly effective spatial instrument for organizing the rural expanses north of downtown, preparing the island for future development

Design and construction were funded by the city, with NYC DOT managing complex traffic planning considerations that required fine-tuning along the way. Daily operations and maintenance of the new streetscapes became the responsibility of local business organizations (referred to as Business Improvement Districts) located along the affected portions of the Broadway corridor, such as the Flatiron – 23rd Street Partnership.

The overall success of the pilot alleviated concerns about midtown gridlock and proved that it was possible to close numerous blocks to vehicular traffic and introduce new surface elements that would restructure the overall system. The city published an evaluation report shortly after the completion of the pilot based on travel speed data. Northbound trips in Midtown showed remarkable improvement (up to 17 percent), whereas southbound trips declined slightly. East and west trips showed moderate improvements. Injuries to motorists and passengers declined by 63 percent during the study period, while injuries to pedestrians were down by 35 percent. In a study of Times Square, 80 percent fewer

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pedestrians were found to be walking in the street, presumably because much of the surface area had been given over to pedestrian plazas. The volume of pedestrians on Broadway in Times and Herald squares also increased slightly. The majority of the city’s evaluation is focused on quantitative improvements, though qualityof-life factors are an important part of the narrative.

The Broadway streetscapes, designed collaboratively by city staff and their consultants, avoid the cozy neotraditionalism and Main Street trappings of the sort preferred by New Urbanists and other conservative city planners. The generously proportioned pedestrian spaces, the angular plazas outfitted with simple yet contemporary furnishings, and the disposition of buildings on irregular lots result in a unique urban ensemble.

Section and perspective views of Broadway prior to its transformation would appear out of place in the pages of classic urban design texts such as Great Streets, a fascinating survey of streets deemed to be the best in the world by author Allan Jacobs. His survey spans street-building from medieval Europe to nineteenth-century United States. Jacobs lists the qualities that make for an exemplary street: consistent and harmonious massing of buildings with interesting facades and plentiful windows; shade trees and other vegetation that define space and provide shade; frequent intersections; variety of sight lines and options for movement; places for leisure and relaxation; and, perhaps most importantly, ample spaces dedicated for pedestrians, alongside other modes of movement.

Jacobs observes streetscapes as an architect and considers the special qualities of form, spatial relationships, aesthetics, and function as inseparable—the latter being perhaps the least important attribute.

Broadway is brash, unapologetically modern, and not particularly commodious. It did not make the cut for Jacobs’s survey of great streets. It might, however, were the author to complete the same survey today. Broadway’s new plazas and other spaces are opportunistic retrofits that reflect the muscular built condition of Manhattan and a vital busy-ness tempered by the life of the city at various scales. They are at a far remove from the idealism and nostalgia that motivated the Main Street “pedestrian malls” of the 1970s and ’80s. They are provisional but also intensely urban.

If infrastructure in the twentieth century was considered artless, contemporary streetscapes such as Broadway have reinvented themselves with an essential ingredient of city life—human activity— alongside practical concerns about efficiency and performance. A poetics of infrastructure, however, awaits fully formed expression. * A more deliberate move in the direction of placemaking was signaled when the city commissioned Oslo- and New York-based architecture and urban design office Snøhetta to design the permanent streetscape at Times Square, bringing architectural detailing and durable materials to the floor and furnishings of the renovated spaces.6 Based on the proposals and project description, the new streetscape might become imbued with qualities that are functional yet highly visual and tactile.

Although Snøhetta’s interventions could be read as a conventional landscape design project, such an interpretation misses the significance of context.

The Times Square transformation represents an approach to the street as civic infrastructure. These blocks must still accommodate a mix of activities and types of circulation, including high volumes of foot traffic. Times Square is a vital streetscape composed

of interlocking surfaces, buildings and activities that defies simple categorization in urban design terms.

Its iconic buildings with their multistory digital displays create an outdoor room at the “Crossroads of the World.” The revised streetscape must take these factors into account and treat the space as a cohesive, high-functioning infrastructure even as it manifests a novel approach to urban design.

Over time and with heavy use, the interventions at Times Square—and, it is hoped, at Herald Square and elsewhere on Broadway—will begin to mingle with the ordinary streetscapes in adjacent parts of the city, resulting in a space that is defined by human interaction and the patina of everyday use as much as function and aesthetic intention. The simple plazas covered with precast pavers establish a minimal surface for events and programmatic flexibility. A small detail—the insertion of tiny steel discs into the pavers—is designed to capture light from the vibrant signs above and reflect the colors of Times Square upon the ground and passersby.

Snøhetta’s initial design impulse may indeed have been minimalist: the proposal is a seemingly straightforward landscape of precast concrete pavers and granite benches organized in response to the “bow-tie” geometry and circulatory patterns of the site. Once occupied, the space may evolve beyond minimalism to something more akin to surrealism as it subverts the conventions of the streetscape, not unlike the fantastic reimagining of the multifunctional hotel proposed for Times Square by OMA in the 1970s.

Allusions aside, the Broadway projects by NYC DOT and DDC and their consultants have the potential to inaugurate a poetics of infrastructure in the contemporary New York cityscape, creating enriching and meaningful spaces for everyone. n

6 Snøhetta describes the Times Square project thus: “The hugely successful pedestrian-only public spaces moved the DOT to permanently redefine Times Square with a three-fold purpose: to upgrade crucial utility infrastructure; provide event infrastructure for new and expanded public events; and make permanent the temporary improvements that the City piloted in 2009.”

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development

photographs by cameron blaylock & poems by dolan morgan

During the nineteenth century, the area of Brooklyn now known as Crown Heights transformed from a large, slave-manned farm into an affluent horsecar suburb filled with freestanding mansions. The district remained a wealthy enclave until the 1920s, when a subway connecting the district to Manhattan opened and developers began buying up estates to build apartment houses.

From the 1940s on, the neighborhood attracted large numbers of African Americans and Caribbean Americans. By the turn of the century, it had become the epicenter of the United States’ Caribbean community.

Many of the stores, restaurants, and service providers catering to residents from Jamaica, Guyana, Haiti, and beyond are located on Nostrand Avenue, one of the neighborhood’s main commercial corridors. For decades, the stretch of Nostrand between Eastern Parkway and Fulton Street has been lined with roti shops, produce stores, storefront churches, hair-braiding salons, and clothing stores specializing in African styles and West Indian Day Parade costumes.

In recent years, however, the wave of gentrification that has been moving eastward through Brooklyn has arrived on Nostrand. As coffee shops, bars, and restaurants catering to a younger, whiter clientele open, many of the older establishments are closing.

Photographer Cameron Blaylock and writer Dolan Morgan spent several months thinking about the past, present, and future of Nostrand Avenue.

Blaylock documented the street’s Caribbean stores and restaurants with expired Polaroid film (none of the images shown here have been digitally manipulated). To accompany the photos, Morgan crafted poems using text found in century-old New York Times articles about the area, Yelp reviews of local businesses, Caribbean myths and fables, and recent articles on land loss. n

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At Night on Nostrand A WOMAN SHEDS HER SKIN AND FLIES over the hair salons as a ball of flame or a choir of boys in Grace Church. By morning, a deer steps into the tax offices atop a corner deli, becomes a man and trumpets his cow horn at the accountant: HUNTERS ARE COMING but if we shift out from behind the tree in our grand chemise and trembling pins of gold, we can stay another hour, we can brandish the madness of long summer evenings and gnash laughter in the heat. Oh yes I hear the glasses rattling, the doors opening, dresses falling.

Every year, there is an undertow that kills many swimmers along the coast, but fireflies are at my window, dogs are dreaming, and we’re opening every hydrant from oblivion to Eastern Parkway, we’re moving over through and along, over through and along, over through and along.

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Skipping Hand in Hand THROUGH EVERY WEST INDIAN GROCERY We shop for ghosts and find only ripe, green produce. Damn.

Market prices. Don’t ghosts know I untied all the knots and you removed the salt? That I jumped back over the river and you walked forward with hidden shoes? But it’s just fruit after fruit now, berry after berry, so much citrus and so little ghost. The future spreads out before us, amber and wide, but we’re rifling through leaves and used coffee grounds, shouting “The past has got to be here somewhere!” Hold my hand so I can feel it – apples, melon and skin, what will possess me – so this plant can burst from my mouth before we’re gone, before some dance is over.

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Ascalapha Odorata EVERY DOOR AND WINDOW is often a thin brown line between sky and river, face and form familiar. So pumping causes land to settle into too much dawn. Your hand crosses the length of my arm on Fulton Street, so much like yesterday, so much like today, and the sun takes its money back ONE WARM COLOR AT A TIME Sweet fruit, are you a moth, a witch, or a loved one saying some goodbye? Every door and window is a thin brown line between sky and river, but already the fields are dusted white with salt.

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architectural alternatives

Portuguese architect, curator, and writer Pedro Gadanho moved from Lisbon to New York in late 2011 after being named Curator for Contemporary Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. We asked for his thoughts on the city and its design community. * Coming from Europe, nowadays you have a sense of things happening there in multiple centers, and a network that crosses borders and frontiers. You get a sense of a very creative community in the field of architecture and other such artistic practices. You easily get in touch with people in different cities and understand what’s going on.

When I came to New York, it was kind of a surprise that although from the outside it seems like there is a lot going on—and there is, of course—it’s difficult to get into those circuits because sometimes they are pretty closed and specific. For example, you have the amazing programs that universities in the city organize—conferences and seminars and workshops and so on—but those are certainly for their specific publics.

I actually find that there is a lack of mid-range cultural institutions that could address some aspects of urban and architectural culture. I think the art world, let’s say, is much more visible, but in terms of architecture and urbanism I feel a certain disappointment. Besides the universities, MoMA does some programs; the Storefront for Art and Architecture is quite active; the Van Alen Institute is now starting new programs; and then you have the professional architecture bodies that organize other types of exhibitions and conferences. But for a city the size of New York I wouldn’t consider this that

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much. There is almost the same amount of architecture programs in Lisbon, which is a tiny city.

And maybe this also connects to a certain aspect of culture that I feel is strange here, which is that it’s very money-oriented, very commercial.

There is this very creative community, and there are lots of discussions in smaller institutions which are not so visible to the public. Universities certainly instigate a creative take on architecture, but then when architects come to the market, it will be very difficult for them to actually find work that can keep that sort of creative or alternative feel. People normally will have to survive by starting to engage with a corporate professional culture, which is the one actually building the city.

So in a certain way, where I feel there is an outburst of alternative practices in other sites, here it’s much more difficult to find those in the architecture arena. I do believe you can find them in music and arts and so on . . . [laughs] You’ve been exploring the city, so maybe you’re thinking, “What is this guy talking about? It’s really lively and there are a lot of things happening.” But this is my feeling, especially when I’m trying to keep informed and understand what kinds of things are happening.

There are architecture debates, but they are too localized. There’s a lot of discussion going on in academic circles, but not conversations that engage a wider audience. This is certainly what I’m trying to do at MoMA, following on the work of people such as Barry Bergdoll with exhibitions that address more public issues, like Rising Currents or Foreclosed.

Certainly MoMA has that kind of reach, and so it’s fantastic to be able to do this from such a place. But I’d love to have more dialogue with other institutions and see other kinds of things happening.

an interview with pedro gadanho

What do you see as the root of this perceived lack of discussion here? Do you think there’s just more popular interest in architecture in Europe?

There are discussions here, but they are very oriented toward certain issues. As I was saying, the economic pressure in the city makes it more difficult to have alternative creative practices that are not just driven by commercialization and try to push the boundaries of the profession. In a city in which the pressure to survive economically is so strong, at a certain point people have a real difficulty maintaining an independent discourse.

And in reverse, in Europe, maybe because there was an economic crisis and youth unemployment, people found themselves with a lot of time on their hands, and they started to produce other ideas and new sorts of interventions in the city. I’m talking, for instance, about the whole number of architecture collectives in Spain that deal with public space and propose work with the community and so on.

This is also happening in the States, obviously. Not maybe so much in New York, but in other cities. But I see the potential is there.

urbanisms, DIY urbanisms, whatever you want to call them: temporary bottom-up interventions in the city, whether led by community leaders or activists or architects working together with communities. There is a lot of that happening all around the United States. In Detroit, for instance, because the city has reached such a point of civic degradation, people feel the need to start taking issues into their own hands. Also in cities like San Francisco, people are using smart technologies to redefine urban space, perhaps because the city authorities are friendly to that sort of initiative.

This phenomenon is happening in an interesting way, here as in other places, and we’re trying to tackle it and understand what we can learn from it. And this emerging arena is precisely where I think there is something that is more sustainable in terms of architectural practice, because such design attitudes attempt to deal with scarce resources and try to make the most of them. This is what I would call sustainable. And they may not be the one percent, but there are a lot of potential clients for this out there. n

Is there a place now where you think people are more able to turn these ideas about alternative practices into sustainable careers?

I wouldn’t say there is a specific place. I just see more networks happening in other places. So referring back to Europe, nowadays you feel like you’re part of a network that includes people in London, in Paris, in Madrid and Barcelona, in Lisbon, in Brussels or Berlin or wherever.

I know there are groups working in interesting areas also here in the States, and some of these have inspired me to work with the idea of tactical

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by nick kolakowski

5Pointz lives

years, those walls became a safe haven for artists, who journeyed from all over the world with aerosol cans in hand—the name 5Pointz may have alluded to New York City’s boroughs coming together, but the space’s reputation went international. It was known as a place where you could come and render a photorealistic Biggie Smalls in glorious black and white, or Godzilla frying Tokyo with nuclear breath, or a giant hand pointing toward the sky, and nobody would deface your minor masterpiece with a competing tag. You just had to live with the knowledge that another artist would paint new work over it, someday.

The building also avoided devolving into a corporate billboard: no drone for Coke or Kanye West

In the first season of Mad Men, advertising executive Don Draper tells a roomful of clients that, in Greek, “nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound.”

It produces a twinge in the heart “far more powerful than memory alone,” he adds, an ache that—if used correctly—can bond a customer with a certain product.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for the New York City that existed a few decades ago. It was gritty and real and raw, people will tell you over a beer or three.

When they first moved here, they felt alive, free to be anything they wanted. To hear them describe it, the city now risks being locked within a tomblike facade of antiseptic glass.

painted an album cover or product logo on those crumbling walls. Some people have always dismissed the building as a graffiti-splattered eyesore (especially in the comments sections of the New York Post), but just as many saw it as a canvas for real art.

You can thank Wolkoff for establishing the conditions for 5Pointz to thrive, even if you disagree with his decision on the building’s ultimate fate; given his role as a developer, its destruction was inevitable once real estate prices began to rise. In terms of publicity, he just had the bad luck to raze the property at a time when the demolition of old structures to make way for shiny and expensive ones is viewed with particular malice by many city residents.

Others have never felt that peculiar ache when thinking about the New York City of their youth.

In their mind, it’s forever the time and place where some punk stabbed them on the subway, or a random bullet pierced their shoulder. “When I was a kid, we called Avenue A ‘Firebase A,’ and Avenue B was ‘Firebase B,’” an acquaintance told me about his childhood in Alphabet City forty years ago. “Just like the firebases in Vietnam? And believe me, we had a whole lot of fun trying to get from one to the other.” The city of yesteryear exists in their memories as a hive of grinding misery.

Those with nostalgia may see the razing of 5Pointz as yet another sign of the life bleeding from

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The old New York

a once-remarkable megacity, just as those with little sentimentality might applaud its destruction as progress. Across the boroughs, dozens of these fights over infrastructure take place every year, as money and immigration and a hundred other factors alter the metropolitan DNA. The ultra-gentrification of the city, musician David Byrne wrote in a recent op-ed for The Guardian, threatens to dim its imaginative spirit: “Aside from those of us who managed years ago to find our niche and some means of income, there is no room for fresh creative types. Middle-class people can barely afford to live here anymore, so forget about emerging artists, musicians, actors, dancers, writers, journalists and small business people.” Little

The Buddha statues in Afghanistan’s Bamiyan Valley endured for fifteen hundred years before the Taliban, armed with religious zealotry and a lot of explosives, pulverized them over the course of a few days in 2001. In 2013, a Romanian woman tried to protect her son by burning the artwork he allegedly stole from a Dutch museum—which included paintings by Picasso, Monet, and Lucian Freud.

If those world-famous works can disappear, aerosol art on the side of a wall in Queens stands no chance. When a group of Queens artists assembled in Long Island City’s Jeffrey Leder Gallery in April to show off new paintings—much of it inspired by the loss of 5Pointz—the most striking pieces portrayed the building after Wolkoff ’s men had

by little, “the resources that keep the city vibrant are being eliminated,” putting its status as a creative hub in danger.

You could choose to see 5Pointz as Byrne’s point writ large: could there be a better symbol than a graffiti art space bulldozed to make way for condos that—if other, similar towers in the neighborhood are any indication—will sell for a million dollars a bedroom?

finished their work and the winter snow had fallen: landscapes of cold white in which swatches of color struggled to appear.

A few days after November’s whitewashing, some defiant soul had written a small “5 Pointz Lives!” in black Sharpie on the freshly blank bricks. As the months ticked past, more tags appeared in random corners of the building, left by bandits who did their work in the middle of the night and disappeared again, defying the march of urban progress with a few quick paint sprays and pen strokes. It was like watching green shoots emerge from the blackened ground after a forest fire. For a short time, in the most limited of ways, 5Pointz had become a canvas again. n

Green shoots Here’s some cold comfort: sooner or later, all art fades away.

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New York’s hair salons and barber shops tend to be independently owned and highly reflective of their communities. As neighborhoods evolve, new shops open to cater to the tastes and expectations of shifting populations.

We spoke with stylists and barbers in rapidly gentrifying brownstone Brooklyn to learn more about who they serve and how recent changes have affected their business.

Photo credits, title spread: Satellite; Agnes Im; Portraits: Charles Aydlett

Carroll Gardens, a brownstone district within a few train stops of Manhattan, was home to a large workingclass Italian American community for much of the twentieth century, a fact reflected in the many pizzerias, bakeries, and social clubs still lining the streets. In recent years, however, the Italian population has declined significantly, and a number of high-end boutiques and restaurants have opened to serve the notably wealthier residents who have replaced them. The neighborhood is now one of the most expensive in the city.

Lana Deye, who has run a barber shop on Carroll Gardens’ Henry Street for almost three decades, told us about her experience there.

What’s the name of your salon?

The name is just Barber Shop. We like to be not flashy, simple; for everybody welcome.

How long have you been here?

Almost twenty-six years. Time is flying, so neighborhood change, people change, clientele change.

nice distance, but you can’t be sure, because all the people who used to have the buildings, they die and their kids they have different opinions about the rent, so . . . unfortunately. You hoping. We’re hoping for another twenty years. We’ll see what happens.

Where are you from originally?

I’m from Ukraine.

Who’s your clientele now?

Do you live in this neighborhood?

We have a little splash of Italian people left, but very few, basically; it’s almost very little left of them. And right now lots of French people coming to neighborhood, so you feel it, more kind of domination of French people. A few English people, and mostly people from all over America. They’re coming to New York to try themselves a new life and try to succeed. So they try this neighborhood, they love it, but not really everybody could stay here, because rent going crazy high.

And it’s very, very hard for small businesses, because people moving back and forth [much] of the year, and then you have to start over again. It’s like the second time you’ve been born, and you have no time to collect the customers again. As soon as you start to feel things going better, another wave change.

So it’s really, really tough. We wish neighborhood stay kind of more stable, but I don’t know any solution for that. Every year is getting more tougher and tougher.

No, unfortunately when I started to work here I didn’t think to find apartment, and then it just become impossible.

Has your rent gone up too?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. We tried to keep [haircut prices] affordable for people as long as possible, but it’s really getting harder now. I don’t know what it’s going to be now. We just did a new lease for three years. I don’t know what’s going to happen after that, really. We try to be nice to landlord and keep those

Do you live in Brooklyn?

I live in Brooklyn. I live in Midwood; it’s not bad there yet. But already I start to see my customer moving toward that part. It’s kind of . . . people coming, they improving neighborhood, and then rent getting crazy expensive, they moving somewhere else. And wherever they improve, the other people moving from Manhattan, [but] they don’t care about neighborhoody kind of stuff and keeping things together.

It’s getting more isolated, different. It’s not bad; it’s safe, it’s good, but it’s different neighborhood.

So we’ll see; you never know what’s going to be.

But every time it’s a wave. It used to be family people before. It used to be young professionals before. It used to be hipsters. And now I can’t even figure out what’s going on. You need time to figure out. Sometimes it’s really, really hard. So we’ll see.

You can have a glimpse of what it’s going to be in the wintertime. Because summer it’s hot weather, people are coming out from different neighborhoods; I still have customers who are coming here from New Jersey and the other neighborhoods. But when it’s winter it’s tougher, because in this neighborhood it’s very hard to find parking, and you feel it.

Anchored by a notoriously polluted canal, the Gowanus neighborhood was historically an industrial zone.

Many of the factory buildings have been converted into artists’ studios and bars in recent years, however, and Brooklyn’s first Whole Foods recently opened there. Rents are going up, thanks largely to the area’s close proximity to Carroll Gardens and Park Slope, and large new residential developments are in the works.

We spoke with the proprietor of Henry’s Unisex salon on West 9th Street, a few blocks from the canal.

What is your name?

William Fernandez, pero any people say Henry. My name Henry William. Any people say Henry, pero my name is William.

You’re from Cuba?

I come from Cuba, Spain, United States thirty-five years. I live across the street. I own the building.

And you’ve been here for thirty-five years?

No, before in Court [Street]. I’ve been doing the barber shop sixty-six years. I have seventy-eight [years].

But you’re from Cuba.

I come from Cuba. I’m political prisoner. Because the government no like me. Never go back Cuba.

Are there many different kinds of people? Do most of your customers live here?

I have many customer. I don’t have to work no more because I move to Florida. Maybe sell the business and go.

Soon?

Maybe sell, I don’t know. But then they say, “You no go!”

Your customers want you to stay.

Mm hmm.

This area . . .

Very good. No beautiful, but very good.

And the people are friendly and nice?

With Castro?

Eh, very good, very good.

Castro. No good. Very bad.

Are there many people from Cuba?

So you came here for political asylum.

Cuba, something, maybe fifty families. The other people are mostly in Florida and New Jersey.

Mm hmm. From Cuba to Spain to United States. I live in New York thirty-five years. I like it. I have a house in Miami.

Has Brooklyn changed a lot since you’ve been here?

I like Brooklyn. Brooklyn very good. Lot of changes.

Have your customers changed, or is it the same customers?

Any people. Any people come, I do it.

Where are the other people here from?

America, Mexico . . .

So everywhere.

[Gestures to people passing.] They come from Guatemala.

Very good neighborhood.

A predominately working-class African American neighborhood for much of the twentieth century, Prospect Heights has become increasingly become popular with white professionals in recent years. Housing prices have risen dramatically, and many upscale small businesses catering to the newcomers have opened.

Karina Tomaz manages Salon 718 on Vanderbilt Avenue, one of the main commercial strips in Prospect Heights.

The salon was started about two years ago; the owner, who lives nearby, runs another outpost in nearby Fort Greene, which has seen similar changes to Propsect Heights.

Karina says that most of her clientele is from the area, and that the salon prides itself on serving a wide variety of customers, taking “We cut Brooklyn” as its motto. “We have a very diverse clientele, because we do everything from ethnic hair, natural hair, curly hair . . . you know. We do everything.”

Dominican barbershops are common in many areas of New York, reflecting that nation’s heavy presence; more of the city’s foreign-born residents are from the Dominican Republic than anywhere else.

One such shop, Mingo, has been operating for twenty years on Washington Avenue, which straddles Prospect Heights and Crown Heights. Barber Wanddy Grullon agreed to have his picture taken in the cyan baseball jersey that all employees wear, although he declined to be interviewed due to his broken English and waiting customers.

Mingo himself had a few minutes to talk, although he wanted to know when we might bring him a check for his participation.

Over the bachata music blaring in the background, he told us that the barbershop served a wide range of customers—“black, Hispanic, Mexican, Panama”—from around the area.

Soon a client walked in, and he was back at work. n

Credit: Dakine Kane via Creative Commons license

an interview with devin balkind

SANDY, OCCUPY, INFORMATION, & Resilience

Manhattan during the post-Sandy blackout. Credit: Dan Nguyen via Creative Commons license.

Hurricane sandy swept through the East Coast in October 2012, killing dozens, destroying billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and property, and causing massive disruptions to life in New York City and the surrounding areas.

Although the concept of resilience has been at the fore of conversations about policy and the built environment ever since, what exactly the term means and how to achieve it in New York and beyond is still a matter of debate.

Devin Balkind has spent the last few years exploring the social, organizational, and technological dimensions of resilience as a volunteer with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy Sandy, and as the head of NYC:Prepared, which focuses on deploying opensource software solutions to strengthen community resilience. He spoke with us about tech, nonprofits, and local empowerment. *

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Can you talk about your work with Occupy Wall Street and how that led to what you’re doing now?

Occupy Wall Street was sort of a dry run for us. There were two sides to Occupy Wall Street: protesting, basically, and the production of Zuccotti Park. And a lot of people who came for one discovered that they were really into the other one, and vice versa.

So it became a pretty sophisticated ad hoc relief point for the homeless population, for the weary travel population, for people who would be considered crazy. It became a safe place to be crazy, a popular place for people who needed services. If I were designing a public health services scheme and wanted to increase my numbers of people served, which seems like a logical thing, I would organize or work with an occupation of whatever type in that moment. It was an unbelievable public health outreach and service provision opportunity.

Zuccotti Park during Occupy Wall Street. Credit: David Shankbone via Creative Commons license.

Ultimately the community of people who were providing those services couldn’t meet the demand, and things got mildly out of control. That was the government’s rationale for shutting down the park: there was significant police action, but that was justifiable because the place was dirty. But there was basically just too much need.

So fast forward a year and Sandy happened. A lot of the Occupy Wall Street people who had done the work of the kitchen, the conference call and meeting organizing, who dealt with shipping and inventory, they’d all developed further intimacy together, so it became quite natural that when Sandy happened they were the first people who went out and reported on the status of things. The Occupy Wall Street community could put something together pretty quickly.

So you were active in Occupy Sandy as well, and now you’re leading NYC:Prepared. How did

that transition happen, and why did you see the need to form your own nonprofit?

Before Occupy Wall Street I was trying to figure out how to open-source the nonprofit sector; that was my chosen mission. I found myself inspired by the opensource community, by the ability to get shit done in a collaborative manner that wasn’t based on ego. And before that I had done a relatively unsuccessful Internet startup that helped nonprofits raise money.

When Occupy Wall Street happened I felt compelled to see where my skills could take me if I contributed them to that effort. I did that full-time, producing software, products, and information products—really just helped facilitate things moving along. There was a lot of excitement and a lot of work to do around that.

And then after a few months Zuccotti Park gets evacuated. Between the park and Sandy, I had time to revisit the nonprofit idea, build out an organization,

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and begin working on some projects that help nonprofits coordinate with each other. When Sandy hit I was in the middle of doing some nonprofit coordination work, and was able to kind of shift that into Sandy work. I had a head start. And now that Sandy’s over, I’m able to play as a fellow nonprofit.

Basically I like to think of what I do as, how do you turn information into knowledge through data?

A strong relief effort, a resilient community, needs a general public who understands how to use a certain set of information management tools, whether that’s Twitter or Facebook, WordPress, or spreadsheets. Forms and Google spreadsheets can go a long way for just keeping up to date about what different groups are doing.

It’s really about moving away from the human relationships between people at nonprofits and toward more systematized processes that allow a lot more information to pass through with a lot fewer bottlenecks. Because that’s what we saw in the beginning of Occupy Sandy. The system as it is operates relationship-to-relationship—“I know a guy at the Red Cross,” etc. That’s not an appropriate way for things to be run. We don’t need the fact that someone’s not picking up their phone to be the reason that critical information isn’t available. If you have three different groups collecting information and they never really share that data, you just don’t have anything approaching a comprehensive solution.

So making the public aware of the tools, giving them templates that they can use, giving the nonprofits a way to provide information about where their facilities are, how to make formal requests through a standard process, is critical. And then giving the big agencies, the ones with the resources, the ability to process requests and collect information from the field so that they can assess how to allocate those resources. Basically just making it a relatively seamless process.

The tools are there; what our initiative does is basically put together the templates and training materials to get people using them.

So you think the answer is better coordination at all levels?

When it comes to what’s the magic behind actually getting a coordinated response, the answer is sim-

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ply data standards. When I talk about the template for needs assessments or the template for making requests, what I really mean is getting as many relief agencies as possible to follow a certain set of data standards. The fields in the form and how that data’s entered should be standard, so that you have one canvassing template that everyone’s using, and no one can say, “I don’t know how to add that information, I don’t know how to submit a request or manage my inventory, I can’t share it with you,” because it won’t make sense. We can say, “Here’s literally the place you can go to get the template, and after you gather the information you can send it to this address.”

People resist systemization because they think it will take control away from them. And to some extent they’re right. But the specific set of things that they’re doing right now, only a subset of them will change if data standards are adopted, if systemization happens, if proper processes and procedures are utilized.

How do you see your work fitting into larger conversations about resilience that are going on now?

It’s always like, resilience for whom, you know? Rich people don’t have to really worry about disasters. They move, they go somewhere else, they figure it out.

One of the things that I think it’s important to remember is that billions of dollars are made available over time after an event like Sandy. So a lot of resilience comes down to whose agenda gets funded because of it.

Historically we’ve seen that rich and connected people, rich and connected organizations, determine what gets funded. The poor saps who exist as the clients of these connected organizations, they’re going to receive a small fraction of what they’re due, and their vision for the community is going to be ignored, generally speaking. As soon as the money starts flowing, the rich, established organizations are ready to go through the processes to collect it, and the community groups don’t have a chance. There’s a transition into kind of a classic grant-giving period, and people who are actually doing the work in the neighborhoods don’t have time to fill out the grant applications. So you watch as people burn out, don’t have the money to keep

Occupy Sandy. Credit: Michael Fleshman via Creative Commons license.

going, don’t know how to get the grant. To me that’s not a resilient situation.

There’s a lot of talk about community engagement now, but what that tends to mean in practice is, “Let’s organize a workshop.” So you get the rich, well-connected organization framing the situation.

What Occupy Sandy would have naturally gone towards would have been a more community-oriented, community-based agenda. Most of the time these agendas don’t form, especially in low-income communities. So what does that look like? That’s something that we haven’t seen.

The other thing that takes place over and over again is really sloppily produced government programs.

A lot of questions are unanswered, or unanswerable.

When your house gets damaged, there are certain windows that you have to do things within to be eligible for government assistance, but they often aren’t clear.

And then if you do spend money you’re not sure what you’ll get reimbursed for. Sometimes the government just doesn’t figure this stuff out, or sometimes they don’t communicate it. It makes it very difficult for the folks who like to play it right. It’s a real game of roulette.

I haven’t been affected by disaster, but I would very much like to think that if I were I would know

what help the government would provide, when I could do things to receive a reimbursement. Otherwise if my house is destroyed I’m stuck spending money on a rental and not knowing when I can do anything. But that’s what happens, and that’s completely terrible and unnecessary.

And this gets into how federal agencies communicate with each other. This is like, “OK, the federal government can’t communicate effectively within its own structures—what a surprise.” People’s expectations are so low at this point that it’s hard to build any momentum to agitate toward a solution.

Of course, the feds don’t know how to provide the information they need to make good decisions about when and how to rebuild.

[Former Mayor Bloomberg’s Hurricane Sandy relief program] Build it Back Program was just a complete disaster. I think they built their first home just a few months ago. They spent 8 million dollars on consultants. That didn’t work. It’s inappropriate.

But people’s expectations are very low.

So those to me are real resiliency problems.

When another storm hits and Sandy stuff is still in the backlog, things are only going to get more difficult. n

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Moodies Records, Bronx In the 1980s, the outer boroughs of New York City were littered with record stores specializing in the latest reggae and dancehall bubbling up out of the yards of Kingston. These storefronts were often also recording studios, labels, and makeshift conversational salons for the latest news and gossip from the island and beyond.

Today, there are only a few spots left in the city where one can find both an extensive supply of Jamaican vinyl and a regular rotating congregation of Jamaican expats.

Off the 225th Street subway stop in the Bronx, Moodies remains one of the last true bastions of this period, with stacks of seven-inch vinyl singles, along with bootleg mix CDs from sound systems from the Bronx to Jamaica, still lining the counters, walls, and floor.

Moodies recently moved six blocks away after thirty years in the same space. Above the old location lies a studio owned and operated by Lloyd “Bullwackies” Barnes, the legendary producer who was a foundational figure in establishing New York’s early Jamaican music scene through his unique production style and Wackies imprint. Hit Moodies on the right day and the owner might be willing to give you a personal tour of the recording space.

— Deadly Dragon Sound, Chinatown, Manhattan Made up of a group of local selectors, radio hosts, and vinyl collectors, Deadly Dragon has been a staple in New York City’s Jamaican music scene since the 1990s. Regularly featured at reggae and dancehall events around the city along with visiting Jamaican artists and local talent, Deadly

Dragon’s connection to the local community runs deep.

If vinyl collecting is your game, the cozy Deadly Dragon storefront offers up over 150,000 Jamaican records. Strike up a conversation with one of the selectors that regularly works at the shop to hear about the latest Jamaican music event in the city, or just let them drop a bit of history on you about New York’s long and significant relationship with Jamaican music.

Deadly Dragon also has an online store and a regular podcast featuring deep cuts from the group’s extensive record collections.

— Miss Lily’s/Melvin’s Juice Box, SoHo, Manhattan On the corner of Sullivan and Houston in the posh Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo lies an unlikely space for Jamaican culture. Something of a multifaceted collaboration, one corner features Miss Lily’s, a classy restaurant featuring creative takes on traditional Jamaican cuisine. Next door sits Miss Lily’s Variety and Melvin’s Juice Box, where Rastafarian culture and cuisine meet in one unique space. At Melvin’s Juice Box, an assortment of vegetable-heavy elixirs made on the spot promote healthy living.

Miss Lily’s Variety sells a wide selection of records and other accessories celebrating Jamaica’s rich culture. It’s also where you’ll find Radio Lily, an online radio station that broadcasts live from the store, featuring a regular rotation of artists, selectors, and MCs playing everything from classic reggae to the latest in dancehall. Drop in on Thursday from 6 to 8 pm for the Large Up Sessions, which regularly host impromptu guests from Jamaica

for interviews and live performances.

— Downtown Top Ranking/ Brand New Machine at The Delancey, Lower East Side, Manhattan For most of the past decade, Deadly Dragon Sound and the NYC-based dancehall collective Federation Sound have been throwing a free all-night party every Thursday in lower Manhattan.

In the basement room, Downtown Top Ranking offers up a wide array of classic dancehall and reggae from Deadly Dragon’s vast crates of vintage records. The strictly vinyl-only affair has also been known to feature a number of legendary expat Jamaican stars and local Jamaican artists from New York City’s fascinating but often overlooked ’80s and ’90s dancehall scene.

Upstairs, a Jamaican-heavy crowd dances well into the late hours to Federation Sound’s energetic selection of the latest dancehall hits coming from the island, mixed with classic cuts from the ’90s and 2000s. Much like Downtown Top Ranking, Brand New Machine regularly links up with visiting Jamaican artists making surprise guest appearances. Show up late, and be sure to wear your Clarks.

— VP Records, Queens The roots of VP Records go way back to 1950s Kingston, Jamaica, where Vincent “Randy” Chin, the son of an immigrant Chinese carpenter, spent his teenage years repairing jukeboxes. Chin collected the old used vinyl from the jukeboxes until he had enough records to start his own store in

downtown Kingston. Its success led to the opening of a recording studio called Studio 17 and a studio band that would cut records and record with some of the biggest names in reggae, including Bob Marley, Burning Spear, and Lee “Scratch” Perry. Amidst political turmoil, Chin moved the operation to New York City in 1979, where it has continued to thrive under the name VP Records.

Chin passed away in 2005, but his legacy continues. Today, the imprint is the largest independent distributor of reggae and dancehall in the world. A few blocks from the headquarters, VP Records maintains a retail shop stocked with its latest releases and selections from its extensive catalog.

— Amazura, Queens Just outside the Jamaica Station stop on the Long Island Rail Road is Amazura, one of New York City’s top venues for Caribbean music. The spacious club regularly holds weekend shows well into the morning, featuring dancehall artists from Jamaica and sound clashes from local sound systems such as Addies International.

The bill is not always the latest stars from the island, though.

Many of reggae and dancehall’s biggest names from the past now reside in New York and continue to regularly perform at venues like Amazura, with stacked lineups that look straight out of the genre’s golden digital era.

— Veggie Castle, Queens “Ital” refers to a Rastafarian diet that is supposed to increase one’s “Livity,” or life energy. You don’t have to be a believer in this Jamaica-based Afro-spiritual lifestyle, though, to

enjoy the unique vegetarian cooking that the diet offers up. Just head to the Ital outlet of Veggie Castle in Queens for a taste of Jamaica that’s also the perfect affordable, tasty, good-for-you meal.

— Pulse 48, East Flatbush, Brooklyn Pulse 48 lies on the edge of neighborhoods East Flatbush and Flatlands. The community centerturned-club is a twenty-minute walk from the nearest subway line, making it one of those rare places in New York that is nearly unreachable by public transportation.

Despite its faraway location, the venue hosts some of the biggestmusic stars of Jamaica and Trinidad almost every weekend at sold-out shows that often don’t end until seven in the morning.

As Brooklyn’s answer to Amazura, Pulse 48 has quickly become a top venue in NYC to see the Caribbean’s biggest stars. Good luck finding out about the shows, though. Pulse 48 doesn’t have a Twitter or Facebook page. Its shows are almost solely advertised by posters that are a prominent visual presence along streets of the borough’s biggest Caribbean neighborhoods: Crown Heights, Bed-Stuy, and Flatbush. ­­— Reggae on the Boardwalk, Coney Island, Brooklyn For fans of Jamaican music, summer in the city means the return of Reggae on the Boardwalk in Coney Island. Hosted by Carter Van Pelt of Columbia University’s WCKR 88.9 reggae show Eastern Standard Time, the seasonal gathering of Jamaican music fans, selectors, and local Jamaican expats goes down on the Coney Island boardwalk four times a

housing, history, & policy in the south bronx

text and images by andrea oppedisano

In Mott Haven, located directly across the river from East Harlem at the southern tip of the Bronx, the streets look much the same as they have for decades. Look closer, however, and there are signs that the area is on the cusp of change.

At the corner of Bruckner Boulevard at Lincoln Avenue, diners flow into upscale restaurant Charlie’s for Sunday Motown brunch. While the crowd’s not exactly what you’d expect in a typical brunch spot in, say, Dumbo, neither does it seem entirely reflective of the surrounding neighborhood, where half of all residents live below the poverty line.

The Clock Tower, a five-story red-brick landmark that has housed the restaurant since its 2012 debut, is in many ways emblematic of the changes slowly occurring in the South Bronx. A former piano factory, it now houses lofts and artists’ studios.

Nearby Third Avenue will soon be home to market-rate condominium buildings—a first in the South Bronx real estate landscape. They will almost certainly not be the last, however. According to Ariel Property Advisors, investment in the borough rose above $2.39 billion last year, a 39 percent increase from 2013.

A little further north, near a busy commercial corridor known as the Hub, British graffiti artist Banksy created a controversial work reading “Ghetto 4 Life” during his 2013 DIY New York “residency.”

Just a few blocks away you’ll find the Bronx Documentary Center, launched in 2011. The center hosted its second annual conference on gentrification in the Bronx in January. “The hipsters are coming! The hipsters are coming!” proclaimed the New York Daily News in its coverage of the inaugural event.

I asked the center’s founder, New York Times photojournalist Michael Kamber, if he thought the South Bronx today could be considered gentrified. “I don’t think it is,” he said. “Our reputation has protected us, acted like a firewall. People don’t come here. People come to exhibitions all the time and they say ‘I’ve lived in New York for fifteen years and I’ve never been to the Bronx. I’ve always been afraid of it.’”

Having lived through several waves of gentrification in different parts of the city—Soho in the ’70s, the Lower East Side in the ’90s, and Williamsburg in the early 2000s—he expects the changes to happen over time, and at a slower pace than has been seen in other boroughs. “You don’t wake up one day and there’s a French patisserie and the rents have tripled.

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It doesn’t work that way.”

Much of the social and physical collapse that made the Bronx synonymous with urban decay for decades can be traced back to government policies and economic restructuring.

As early as the 1930s, redlining by the Federal Housing Authority made mortgages difficult to obtain in the area. During the 1950s and ’60s, urban renewal programs transformed the borough. The Cross-Bronx Expressway ripped out neighborhoods along 175th Street; tenements were cleared to make way for tower-in-the-park-style public housing. The largest housing cooperative in the world was built for middle-income families in Baychester.

Between 1970 and 1977, over 10,000 blue-collar jobs fled the area as 300 companies shut their doors.

During the same decade, low-premium fire insurance was made available, effectively making rundown apartment buildings worth more dead than alive.

The whole nation bore witness to the Bronx burning during the TV coverage of the 1977 World Series.

Between 1950 and 1980, the population of the South Bronx plummeted by nearly 270,000.

It took a combined effort among residents, neighborhood organizations, churches, and community groups to begin the process of reinvestment.

Through sweat equity and creative use of government grants and initiatives, groups such as the People’s Development Corporation and Banana Kelly Community Improvement Association worked hard to reverse the flight of residents and jobs by rehabilitating existing housing units and building new ones, as well as providing services such as job training, English classes, day-care centers, and drug rehabilitation.

Today, the South Bronx is in far better shape: the population has increased, crime rates have fallen, and demand for land has grown. Although it is still one of the poorest congressional districts in the county, outsiders have begun to notice what many have called a renaissance.

There is a downside to this narrative, however: the South Bronx’s destigmatization is slowly leading to gentrification.

The term gentrification was coined by sociologist Ruth Glass in 1964 to describe the displacement of working-class residents by the middle class intel-

Above: The Clock Tower building at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and Bruckner Boulevard symbolizes the changes in the South Bronx.

Title spread: The Beethoven Pianos warehouse facility at 2403 Third Avenue, zoned MX for a mix of light industrial and residential uses.

ligentsia in the London borough of Islington. The term since has come to be associated with a variety of phenomena: the influx of private real estate investment, rising residential and commercial rents, shifting demographics, and, as Sharon Zukin describes in her book Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places, the loss of community.

Critics of the Bloomberg administration contend that the former mayor’s policies sped this process throughout the city. Although he set and achieved affordable housing goals, his administration’s priority—encouraging real estate investment—was clear. Under the directorship of Amanda Burden, the New York City Department of City Planning rezoned nearly 37 percent of the land in the five boroughs, opening the door to investors.

As the case with many growing cities, zoning rules in New York City are largely out of date—particularly given projections of the population rising by approximately a million over the next few decades. Under this pretext, Burden’s team brought forward 132 rezonings around the city. In some cases, zoning was used to preserve a particular type of built form (building height and massing), but for the most part the changes focused on permitting the construction of bigger and taller structures, signaling a green light for developers.

The signal was well received. Between 2000 and 2010, 40,000 new buildings containing 170,000 housing units were constructed. However, although the rezonings encouraged the creation of affordable housing units, there were no mandates. Predictably,

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The United States’ largest subsidized housing program, Section 8 allows tenants to pay about 30 percent of their income for rent, with the remainder covered by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

In New York City, Section 8 vouchers are administered by two public housing authorities,

Although they were scattered across all five boroughs, low-income neighborhoods

The Housing Choice Voucher Program, better known as Section 8, is a federally funded initiative that supplements rent payments for very low-income households in either market-rate or subsidized units. Created in 1974, it was designed to allow families to choose housing in the neighborhoods best suited to their needs, thereby preventing excessive concentration of poverty.

Shaping the skyline in many neighborhoods, public housing is New York’s most prominent example of government investment in low-income residences.

Developed in response to tenement slum conditions that inspired Joseph Riis’s famous 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives, monolithic modernist high-rise towers in the park shot up throughout the city between the 1930s and 1970s. Built using federal, state, and municipal funds, these structures took inspiration from Le Corbusier’s notion that urban problems could be remedied by giving people access to green space, light, and air.

section 8

public housing

According to New York University’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy, four main categories of public subsidy programs have been used to develop or rehabilitate privately owned units in the city.

These include HUD financing and insurance programs; HUD project-based rental assistance; the New York City and New York State Mitchell-Lama programs; and Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.

The 1960s marked a shift in the U.S. government’s public housing strategies. Instead of building and managing housing projects, agencies at all levels began looking for ways to encourage private developers to do so. This led to the creation of subsidy programs that now account for approximately 8 percent of New York’s total rental housing stock.

subsidies

Rent-controlled apartments are a dying breed, primarily because controls only apply to apartments whose tenants have been living there continuously since before July 1, 1971. If a rent-controlled apartment becomes vacant, it either becomes rent

Rent regulation accounts for the majority of the city’s affordable rental housing stock. According to the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, which is conducted by the Census Bureau every three years, as of 2010 there were roughly 38,000 rent-controlled apartments, compared to over one million rent-stabilized apartments. However, unlike the public housing or subsidy programs, eligibility is not limited to households who earn low, moderate, or middle incomes.

rent regulation

a quick look at affordable housing strategies and programs in new york city

Quintessentially New York brownstones on East 134th Street and Willis Avenue. the vast majority of new developments contained only expensive market-rate units.

New York regularly shows up on top of rankings of the United States’ most expensive cities, and housing costs make up the bulk of the expense. Housing is a perennial obsession here in a way that it is not

in other places. Almost any topic of conversation can all too easily lead to talk of rent and mortgages, hot new neighborhoods and the overheating that follows in quick succession.

As of 2012, almost 55 percent of all rental households in the city were rent burdened, meaning that over 30 percent of their income went to housing.

The situation has grown notably worse in recent decades. The average income for New York renter households grew only 3 percent from 1975 to 1999, while the average rent rose by 33 percent. Lowincome households have fared particularly badly.

Today, 80 percent of this group is rent burdened, and fully 50 percent is classified as severely rent burdened, meaning that they spend at least half of their income on rent and utilities.

Like everyone else in the city, government officials are all too aware of the problem. “New York City’s shortage of affordable housing has reached a crisis point,” a plan released by the de Blasio administration four months after his inauguration warned.

The document, “Housing New York: A Five-Borough, Ten-Year Plan,” set as its overarching goal the construction or preservation of 200,000 units of affordable housing over a decade.

The plan seeks to achieve this largely through a mechanism known as inclusionary zoning— essentially, requiring developers to set aside a certain percentage of units in a given development for households earning less than a given fraction of the area median income, or AMI. The AMI is in itself a controversial metric, as it lumps together residents of all five boroughs as well as suburban Putnam County, one of the wealthiest areas in the United States. Clearly, “affordable” means very different things to an ad executive in Manhattan, a dentist in Putnam County, and an unemployed single mother in Brooklyn; averaging these numbers is arguably not the best way to understand, let alone meet, any of their needs.

Inclusionary zoning is attractive to policymakers for a number of reasons. First, developers pay for it, so it has no direct cost for the city government—a particularly critical fact at a time when federal support for housing continues to plummet. Second, it is touted as an economic integrator, bringing high- and low-income households together to live on the same hallways.

However, as the recent controversy over “poor doors” demonstrates, developers have found creative ways to prevent mixing of the classes. Critics also contend that low-income tenants of these developments are likely to find little in the way of stores, restaurants, or other services to meet their needs in the surrounding area, as the influx of a large number of

wealthy new residents will tip the balance of amenities in existing neighborhoods.

Many also note that the city’s hard and soft infrastructure—sewers, transit, schools, and all the other things that make urban living possible—is overtaxed even today, and that not enough is being done to consider the impact of rezonings of any kind, inclusionary or not, on the functioning of critical services in the years to come.

In 2009, the Bloomberg administration rezoned a thirty-block section of the South Bronx adjacent to Mott Haven, citing a desire to create more housing in the area and, as the Department of City Planning’s proposal put it, “encourage high-profile redevelopment which would create a highly visible symbol of the Bronx’s resurgence.”

The redevelopment proposal was informed in consultation with SoBRO. According to SoBRO president Philip Morrow, the changes that will likely result from this and other zoning changes should be very much welcomed, especially since the area has a strong leg to stand on: over the past decade, 90 percent of the residential units built in the South Bronx have been affordable.

He stressed, though, that two things need to happen in order for the Bronx to keep its housing stock affordable and its character authentic. First, new housing should be targeted to both low- and middle-income households; this, he said, will help create more economically integrated communities.

Second, the government must promote and facilitate homeownership.

A stroll through SoHo, Williamsburg, or other gentrification success stories of the past few decades demonstrates that the most likely outcome of unchecked private real estate activity in a city with a relatively strong economy and global cultural cache is the homogenous luxury enclave.

The South Bronx is still anything but. Today, light industrial operations thrive; small businesses flourish; people from many walks of life find a place to call home without constant fear of displacement.

Whether this diversity and vitality can be maintained in the face of overwhelming pressure to cede urban land to the highest bidder, however, remains to be seen. n

elasticity

I am descending a long concrete staircase.

Backwards. Arm-in-arm with a woman I met half an hour ago. The steps are crowded by creeping shrubs and slick with rain.

Twenty thousand years ago, present-day Brooklyn was covered by the Wisconsin Ice Sheet. As it retreated, the 1,000-foot-thick glacier left behind ridges of bedrock, soil, and clay, and scoured depressions into the earth. Five hundred and eightyfive acres of this knob-and-kettle terrain were transformed into Prospect Park in the 1860s by landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, better known for their work on an even larger rectangle of real estate in Manhattan a decade earlier.

Prospect Park was created to serve as a green respite in the world’s first commuter suburb. This staircase leads to the Concert Grove, one of many features designed to blend natural beauty with the recreational facilities sought by a swelling population.

My partner and I carefully feel each step with our toes before dropping downward. We reach the bottom, unlink our arms, pivot 180 degrees in sync and face forward, hands extended toward the sky. Eight other new acquaintances clap and cheer. We are art.

Sheltered under a black umbrella, our curator for the evening, Todd Shalom, lights a cigarette.

“Don’t worry,” he tells his associate, Ben Weber, “we have liability.”

Shalom, the founder and director of a Brooklynbased collective called Elastic City, started organizing participatory art walks in 2004. After growing up in suburban New York and graduating from Boston University with a business degree, he decamped to San Francisco to attend art school and write poems.

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The walks were a way to take his words off the page, to break down the barriers between artist and audience, to attain the heightened awareness of travel without leaving the city. After experimenting with soundscape installations, moving to Buenos Aires, and having a flash of heady clarity while suffering from altitude sickness in Peru, he decided to simplify his work. Shalom stopped fiddling around with ultrasonic sensors and computer coding, returned to New York and launched Elastic City, whose programming consists of a series of walks led by commissioned artists. “I got really frustrated with technology,” he says.

“I wanted to see what I could do just with my body and a group of people outside.”

Following some gentle directions from Shalom, we line up single file behind a woman holding an umbrella that looks like half a soccer ball. She pirouettes along a maple- and oak-lined cobblestone path and we follow, mimicking her movements as accurately as possible. We enter a large open-air, octagonal pavilion, where a dozen men are doing capoeira.

Weber divides our group into two. Half of us compose a Twister-like sculpture with our bodies: crouching, arching, ankles braced against one another for balance. Our form mirrors the cast iron columns and oriental cupola of the pavilion. We remain still for a minute. The others then “edit” our poses, repositioning arms and legs until they are satisfied with the new configuration. Outstretched limbs and angled torsos reflect the capoeira swoops and lunges on the far side of the structure.

It is my first trip to Prospect Park, which is across the street from the apartment building that my grandparents and mother settled in after

by dan rubenstein

immigrating to the United States from Poland in the early 1960s. I am standing on one foot, eyes closed, hand on a stranger’s shoulder. Buffered by the borough’s only remaining indigenous forest, listening to the rain and the muffled sounds of traffic, I can hear Shalom’s voice in my head: “The intention is to show someone a new perspective of their environment. We want to encourage an ongoing poetic exchange with the places that people live in and visit.”

I do not like the spotlight. Karaoke and dancing make me nauseous. So I feel a little uncomfortable on display in Prospect Park. Which is how Shalom expects people to react. A lot of us are intimidated by participation. But when you’re on a walk, he says, you’re already moving. The participation is built-in.

It’s almost a trick. If all the world’s a stage, was walking the first performance art?

Although tourists regularly sign up for Elastic City excursions, these are not conventional tours, which to Shalom typically “re-tell somebody’s or some group’s past experience through data and facts.” Instead, the walks—or “ways,” as he likes to call them—are a pliable canvas, striving for “a more embodied experience in the present moment.” They kindle contemplation and a loose choreography among strangers. They encourage participants to see the familiar with fresh eyes.

Elastic City’s ways speak to the French concept of the flâneur (one who studies the city by strolling randomly) and the Situationist dérive (an unplanned drift through an urban landscape).

These ideas were influential but not the foundation for Shalom.

Flâneurs, who represent a response to the alienation of cities and capitalism, wrote the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, have gained hipster status. They are the stars of psychogeography, a freespirited investigation of the city. But they can also be seen, as urban planner/artist Neil Freeman once said to Shalom, as “clichés in urbanism.”

On this wet June evening, I have joined Elastic City’s Signature Walk, a “greatest hits” compilation of physical, aural, and textual play. Other walks have focused on sound, sun, shadows, or specific locations in New York, both outdoors (the “privatized space” around the exterior of the Lincoln Center, Coney Island) and inside (Grand Central Station, the Museum of Modern Art).

We leave the pavilion and head to Ocean Avenue, a busy road that forms the southwestern border of Prospect Park. Shalom instructs us to look for an interesting object and, when ready, to place it on the sidewalk. “If you need it,” he says, “we have hand sanitizer.”

I snap an ear of orange fungus off a nearby stump. My collaborators come back with a doubleheaded mushroom, green and brown leaves, the eraser-end of a broken pencil, a candy wrapper, a bottle cap, and an orange peel. One by one, we position our finds on the ground. “OK,” says Shalom, “now everybody can move one item, and it doesn’t have to be the thing you contributed.” After an hour together, nobody is shy about imposing his or her personal aesthetic. At a glance, our one-square-foot tableau, some objects stacked, others on their own, looks like a random assemblage. Only a closer study reveals styling and intent. n

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Everything in its right place?

photography by shayok mukhopadhyay text by andrew wade

Willets Point, Queens has stood in the shadows for decades, forfeiting glamour for grit. The 1939 World’s Fair molded it as a behind-the-scenes workshop—an industrial zone of production—captured by F. Scott Fitzgerald as a “Valley of Ashes” in The Great Gatsby. It later morphed into a sixty-two-acre plot of cheap auto repair shops, propping up a car-soaked culture and economy. This nook of land wrapped by Flushing Creek and resting in the shadow of Citi Field, home of the New York Mets, has long been a servant of the wider city. When New York asks, Willets Point provides, and the pressures of the twentyfirst century are more demanding than ever.

New York expects the arrival of one million new residents by 2040. This stark reality overlays a shortage of affordable housing as the market rushes to meet demands of higher-income groups by devouring that most precious of city resources: land. After successfully campaigning on his “Tale of Two Cities” platform, which brought the affliction of deepening socioeconomic inequality to the fore of public consciousness, Mayor Bill de Blasio presented his housing plan in May 2014. It stands on a staggering goal: the creation or maintenance of 200,000 affordable housing units over the next ten years.

New York’s affordable housing deficit is coupled with neoliberal development pressures on a city at the crux of global trade and finance. As New York continues to attract wealth and investment from around the world, neighborhoods affordable to middle- and low-income residents are pushed further away from Manhattan Island. It is in this moment that the “Valley of Ashes” has emerged as a site ripe for redevelopment.

Oft unrepresented in polished renderings of the “new” Willets Point, however, is a sense of what has been there for decades. Severed from much of New York’s infrastructure, including the sewer system, Willets Point reads on the surface as a blighted landscape. A closer look reveals nearly 130 active businesses whose spatial proximity helps them thrive. Most auto repair shops here provide a specialized service: tires, transmissions, drive shafts, detailing, etc. While this industry is vital to the city, it is judged in relation to the opportunity cost of alternate land uses.

Queens Development Group will soon proceed with a three-billion-dollar plan to redevelop the site with retail, entertainment, public open space, and 2,500 new housing units. The plan offers three million dollars toward relocating existing businesses to a new site, and many of them, together known as The Sunrise Cooperative, will move to Hunts Point in the Bronx.

Such redevelopment proposals are often simplified—quantified into land areas, floor areas, estimated expenditures, and net profits. This reach for formulas belies the underlying complexities of redevelopment. In judging the possible futures of Willets Point against its present and past, we must take stock of New York’s most vital asset: its people.

In a stirring photo essay, Shayok Mukhopadhyay does just this, capturing the character of Willets Point and rendering this place in its full complexity amid change.

Left: Azzam Bazrouk, an occasional actor and model, used to come to Willets Point on Saturdays to sell clothes. March 3, 2012.

Previous page: Jorge (aka Colombia) restores old tires in the shadow of Citi Field, Willets Point. January 17, 2013.

Left: Melair and Alejandra, daughters of a muffler-shop owner.

June 28, 2013.

Below left: Jorge earns commissions by bringing customers to various shops.

April 28, 2012.

Right: Gustavo, who frequently switched jobs, moving from one shop to another.

February 7, 2013.

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Left: Paul Cohen, the proprietor of Roosevelt Auto Wrecking, one of the few businesses that own the land under them.

March 26, 2013.

Right: Picacho, an enthusiastic participant in the soccer games in the lot of what used to be a junkyard.

August 4, 2012.

Below: Lorraine Hernandez, who lived in a van in Willets Point, would rather not be photographed in front of it.

She chose this backdrop instead.

May 28, 2012.

(On January 29, 2013, Mukhopadhyay was told that she’d been found dead a week before, lying between two cars, possibly from exposure to cold.

She had cancer, but apparently that wasn’t the cause of death.) n

blues man of the dirt

He stared directly into my eyes, his round face sprouting a protuberance of harsh grey stubble.

He did not overplay his hand of wise old man, as some in his position may have been tempted to do. “Do you like girls or do you like fat-ass boys?”

The question seemed sure to presuppose the answer. I felt that nothing I could say could be a corrective to the aggression being shot at me, and was sure to only deepen the threat, menace, and absurdity of the moment.

In truth, the only possible answer to the interrogation lay in the hands of the one who had asked the question. Ted laughed, uproariously, drunkenly, lasciviously. He was ever the master of the out-of-control ribaldry that followed him like a crowd of bacchants.

Ted’s great strength lay in his ability to dissolve extreme discomfort into laughter. He never failed to say the most absurd thing possible, willfully juxtaposing folkloric profundities with hideous double entendre.

As a thirteen-year-old white boy aspiring to be a blues guitarist, seeking out Ted Williams, aka Delta Blues, aka Floyd Lee, was an obvious move. Those were the good old days: if you set up to play on a Manhattan sidewalk, it would only be a matter of minutes before you gathered a nice crowd of middle-aged ex-hippies, crackheads, and elderly German Jewish ladies who still wore their gray hair long. There were

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a number of excellent blues musicians playing on the street at that time, three of them masters. Besides Ted, there was Carolina Slim (my teacher) and Satan, who mostly played uptown in Harlem with his young partner Adam.

At times Ted would call me his son and claim to have taught me all I know, making up stories about me—that my father was a rabbi, or that I would sneak out of the house at night to learn from him.. Perhaps there is some truth to Ted’s stories; I can’t say for sure.

I wasn’t the only one Ted told fabulous stories about. At various points he claimed to be from Tennessee, from the Mississippi Delta, from South Carolina . . . . He also claimed to have been the second guitarist on Jimmy Reed’s classic records. This was certainly not the case, but Reed was his most salient influence. Later on, it was revealed that Ted’s real name was Floyd Lee. He had been living under an assumed identity to escape a murder rap back in the midwest, where he had lived decades before. He disappeared from New York for a while and it was said that he was in jail awaiting trial. Eventually the charges were dismissed because of the statute of limitations on his crime.

I knew him only as a drunkard. The one or two times I saw him sober, he was snarling and unfriendly, barely recognizing me.

by jeremiah lockwood

Ted’s accompanist and comic foil was his son, Ted Jr. In addition to their two guitars and Ted Sr.’s voice, Ted and Ted’s ensemble was rounded out by a drum machine run through a distortion pedal.

Theirs was a perfect musical expression, timbral direction like a subway car pulling up to the platform. What the drum machine detracted in terms of dictating form and timing was amply compensated for by the feeling of inevitability and cohesion in the overall presentation. Ted’s voice was marked by an unassailable urgency. His delivery was good bait, and the two of them would cast a hook into every ear that passed. The crowds that gathered on the street and in the subway tunnels were pulled in by Ted’s storytelling, his lies, and by the magnificent vulnerability that he projected, in classic blues fashion.

Ted Jr. was close to my father’s age, but he related to me as though I was his contemporary, as if he too was a child. Ted Jr.’s speech was a ceaseless thrill of profane hilarity: jokes about bodies, sex, drunken escapades, his anecdotes always on the verge of detachment from his dusty and austere reality. Both Ted and Ted Jr. had the enviable gift of making any environment, no matter how dingy and unpromising, into a stage, a place where they could be enthroned as their true, triumphant selves.

Ted Jr. and I walked through the Manhattan street fair in a hectic blur, all manic laughter with a forty-ounce bottle passing back and forth. It was exhilarating and surreal. Some acquaintances from my school walked by and saw us playing together on a side street. I couldn’t have been more proud if I’d been seated with kings.

Ted Jr. dropped out of sight over a decade ago.

As far I know, he started coaching basketball at a high school in the Bronx.

Ted Sr. has had various other accompanists over the years, including, for a while, a homeless drummer who always wheeled his drums around in a shopping cart, never letting them leave his sight. Later, Ted was taken up by a young Japanese guitarist who ended up taking him on a few trips to Japan. Apparently their tours included playing in the subway in Tokyo.

That would have been something to see.

It’s been a few years since I’ve seen Ted, and he did not look well at the time. I assume he is still with us or I would have heard through the subway grapevine. If you happen to come across him playing down there, please give him my regards. And please take a moment or two to bask in the presence of the last of the great blues men of New York City. n

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Everyone that’s fallen in love knows how difficult relationships can be. You know how to make it to the other side of an obstacle understanding each other a little bit more. You grow together.

And that’s what I’ve come to understand about my relationship with education as well. There are a lot of problems with the educational system and its politics. There are so many frustrations on any given day that make you feel like the last thing you can do is teach a lesson. But in the end, when everything is said and done, everybody has good memories of at least one teacher who helped them, who cared. Most of us have many—from college, high school, elementary even. I strive to be a good memory for my students, and I think a lot of teachers do.

Twice now, I’ve had the experience of really seeing the core of another teacher, that moxie that constitutes their whole moral approach to life.

As a first-year teacher, I knew nothing about relating to kids from the South Bronx. But as a brazen idealist, I thought I did. I wanted to believe that there was absolutely nothing that separated me from my students, including race---because, at our center, we’re all connected, right? I realized I was very wrong when a girl named Charisma yelled at me for being racist.

Around the same time, I met a guy who had been teaching at my school for five years. In fact, he’s featured on the previous page; he’s the guy surrounded by all the computers. He mentored me. I think he’d always been a little attracted to me, and he saw that I needed help. He’d come in and watch me teach, and then he’d give me Post-its with advice on them.

Flirtatiously, he’d leave them in places where I’d find them only after he left.

I took his advice because I respected him. When he told me to leave Charisma alone and let her come around on her own, I did. I was freaked out that someone would ever think that I, who had always been one of the most liberal people in my circles, was racist; he taught me to never take it personally, and to remember how irrational the thought patterns of a seventh grader might be. “Just be yourself,” he said.

“Don’t try to be their friend or mom. Just be someone

they can respect.” I took his advice, and eventually she did come around.

I saw the way he was with his kids: they respected him. I would go into his classroom and watch some of the techniques he used. He was good; really good, actually. He used humor to engage the students in reading. He once told his class that he thought the word “extinct” meant “smells very bad,” which sparked an engaging and spirited debate with a young lady who talked like a baby doll. She vehemently argued the true meaning of the word and got other people to chime in to convince him that he was wrong; for some reason, kids love correcting teachers. Feigned ignorance made way to a dialogue about semantics. He was an artist at making these moments happen.

He treated kids like equals. He talked to them about music. He even teased them for not knowing enough about hip-hop. He invited me over after a professional development session one Friday night.

We listened to music together; that’s when I realized how smart he was. He used to DJ on a hip-hop show in college, then moved to New York to work in the music industry. His mind is a library of music and movies, which has only made his students smarter.

One of his students had never heard of the Beatles.

He taught her about them; she recently posted on Facebook that she’s applying to colleges in England.

The two of us started arguing over pedagogical philosophies—him, a seasoned professional, and me, a total rube. I soon realized, of course, that he was right and I was wrong. He made me realize that there was a distinct difference between my students and me. I grew up in a suburb in Pennsylvania; they grew up hearing gunshots and watching their cousins die. He taught me to relate to my students with common interests, and to let them teach me how to understand them. He taught me how to analyze students’ behavior to find its true meaning. He taught me how to have patience. I learned to provide consequences and structure.

I discovered during my first year teaching that I was the type of person that wanted to continue to learn things about the world. Who better than a teacher to spend the rest of your life with, then?

Title page, clockwise from top left: Jeremy St. Romain, middle school technology teacher, the Bronx; Francesca Leibowitz, middle school English teacher, Brooklyn; Emma Fryer, middle school special education teacher, the Bronx; Josina Reaves, high school English teacher, Brooklyn.

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Belina David, high school fashion teacher, Manhattan.

I fell in love a lot that year. With my partner, and with teaching. I learned that teaching creates a beautiful space where you get to see what people are truly made of. Good teachers—the ones that put their soul into it—let bits of themselves slip into their practice. I’ve been lucky to see that happen time and again with my partner. Only now, I also get to call him my husband.

I got another chance to see great teaching in action this past year, when I worked with a co-teacher for the first time. I’d been friendly with Ms. A before, but when we were paired together, there was a mutual hesitation, a sense of “Oh, what if this doesn’t work out?”

Now that our first year teaching together has ended, I feel honored to have been matched with such a strong, good-hearted person. I watched an artist work as she created structure effortlessly for children who

really needed it. She provided daily inspiration to be the best teacher I could be. She pushed me to want to go out of my way to do the right thing for a kid.

This was never clearer than in her interactions with a student named Mario. Around the third marking period, my former roommate from classroom 426 told the staff in a morning meeting that Mario had been looked at by a football scout from a Catholic school. We all had the same thought: this could help straighten him out. If Mario could get a football scholarship and really work hard in school, he could possibly get into a good football college. Mario couldn’t be serious about anything in class, but he was serious about football.

However, getting a scholarship meant passing specialized high school exams. Mario had really slacked off in previous years. His grades were bad, and he couldn’t read on a seventh-grade level.

Every day at the end of school, Ms. A picked him

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Kate Louis, high school English teacher, Manhattan.

up and listened to him read out loud. She’d sit there eating her yogurt and listen to him stumble over words. She’d tell him to sound them out. When he came across a word he didn’t understand, she told him to look it up in a dictionary.

Sometimes Mario sat with us on Wednesdays during our after-school program. The program consisted of sixth graders who were researching science in the computer lab: the literal definition of Mario’s nightmare. He’d faithfully come looking for Ms. A after the final period was done. While I collected our after-school attendees, Ms. A set Mario up in the back of the room with the book that she’d purchased for him. She held onto it every day so that he didn’t lose it. In front of Mario sat a timer with twenty-five minutes set. Every time he lost concentration, he had to add five minutes to the clock. Seeing him become so devoted and responsible for increasing his own stamina touched me in a Hallmark kind of way.

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Ms. A would call his house periodically to touch base with Mario’s mom. “Yep, he’s been coming here reading, but he’s really gotta use the study guides at home to help him prepare for the specialized tests,” I’d hear her say while I putzed around the room.

Instead of reading, sometimes Ms. A would give Mario small quizzes in which he had to recall information that he’d studied the night before. Mario, ever the attention-seeker, would intentionally stumble over words that Ms. A had taught him how to pronounce. “How do you say that word again?” he’d say, always smiling, just to see if he could get a rise out of her. With an effective mix of “I’m your auntie” and “I’m your big sister” attitudes, Ms. A would always retort, “Uh heh heh, sound it out,” making me chuckle in the background.

On the day our eigth grade students graduated, Mario’s name was called. He walked across the stage

to hooting and hollering and a lot of whistling, most of it from our staff. We were so proud to see Mario graduate because everyone, especially Ms. A, had a hand in making sure that he did. I was right in the front row, making it easy to see the tears streaming silently down from his eyes.

Later that morning after the commencement had finished, I saw Mario and his dad. I congratulated him and hinted that I saw him get all teary-eyed, an accusation he vehemently denied. But I could tell that he was proud of himself, too, and that was more impressive than anything. It was like Ms. A’s faith in him and devotion to his education had given him hope and confidence in himself.

Mario asked if I knew where Ms. A was, and I told him I’d seen her earlier, but had lost track of where she’d gone. I caught up with her after all the parents had left and the teachers had all said their goodbyes.

She told me that she hadn’t gotten a chance to see Mario before he’d left. True to form, she went out of her way to make sure that he knew how proud of him he was, calling up his father to make sure she got a chance to congratulate him and Mario.

I still feel lucky to have gotten to know such a great teacher. She reminded me of my grandmother and mom. Mario and other students listened because he respected her, and she commanded that respect in the most elegant way.

Teachers are not what the media will have them be— burnt-out complainers. Every day, we act as caregivers, social workers, aunties, cousins, and pseudo-parents to some of these children. And, at the end of the day, we’re lucky to have the opportunity to cultivate a memory that will last for years to come. n

Peter Mancini, elementary school music teacher, Brooklyn.

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art world new york photographs by justin aversano interviews by lauren palmer

New York is the visual arts capital of the world. Attracted both by its legendary bohemian scenes and its unparalleled (at least in North America) professional infrastructure of museums, galleries, art schools, and nonprofits, artists and art-lovers from around the globe have flocked to the city for decades.

Photographer Jonathan Aversano and writer Lauren Palmer collaborated to offer a glimpse of some of the individuals who make up today’s New York art scene.

Cover spread: Willam H. Hunt, collector and curator.

Above: Michael Foley, gallery owner.

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Emma Stern (below) (www.emmatstern.com) is a recent graduate of Pratt Institute. Working as a gallery assistant has helped her better understand what her art is about and be able to explain it to potential customers; knowing how to value and price work wasn’t taught in her program.

Originally from New Jersey, she has lived for four years on the Bushwick–Bed-Stuy border.

Although it took a while to adjust to life in the city, she now enjoys it. “I think it’s important for every artist to spend some time here,” she says. “New York has the highest concentration of people interested in art.” She meets others interested in art at most parties, bars, and events she attends. She finds Brooklyn’s art scene particularly community-oriented, with many artists collaborating on projects and starting galleries.

Although she may not want to stay in the city forever, Emma is sure that it offers something unique to budding artists. “It has history on its side. There’s a mythology about New York . . . that draws people here.”

Artist’s assistant Paul Fiore (left) (www.paulfiore.com) is a recent graduate of the School of Visual Arts. Though temporarily living in Pennsylvania, he plans to move back to New York in the near future. He hopes to find a shared live/workspace with like-minded artists, big enough to support large-scale work. Having spent the first three years of school painting in his dorm room, he now wants to live somewhere where he can get away from his canvases.

But New York won’t be his home forever. Paul appreciates his time spent at an arts college and the connections he has made there, but doesn’t feel that artists need necessarily to live in the city to be successful—although he acknowledges that it helps. He sees New York as “an art hub, with world-class museums and galleries” and a place to network. However, he feels that artists in Montana, Pennsylvania, or anywhere else can now reach wider audiences through online portfolios.

Being part of an artist collective, however, holds a strong appeal, and New York is an ideal place to do it. Paul would like to work and curate shows with his friends—not start a formal gallery per se, but an environment with its own identity and program. n

Left: Lyle Rexer, critic and writer. Right: Billy Sullivan, artist.

let’s talk about a town

text & images by jennifer kinney

Let’s talk about a town. Any town. What is it made of? Desert, prairie, mountain, forest. Street light, parking meter, public bathroom, post office. Barroom, Bible study, potluck, senior prom. It is made of people, of course: young and old, men and women, newcomers and steadfasts. Does a town have a soul?

In his book 13 Ways to Kill Your Community, Doug Griffiths, member of the Legislative Assembly of

Alberta representing Battle River-Wainwright, insists that a community’s attitude—not its infrastructure, economy, or politics—is the sole determinant of its strength. He writes, “the only way ever to ensure the success of any community is for the community itself to decide it wants to be successful.”

When I called him up to ask how a community makes that decision, the dedicated advocate of small,

Title spread: Whittier, Alaska (where all images in this story were shot): a former military base turned town and home to fewer than two hundred people, more than half of whom live in Begich Towers (far left).

The only road to the town is a single-lane, 2.6-mile long tunnel that closes every night.

Below: Despite its apparent downsides, ever-enterprising Brenda calls Whittier “a land of opportunity.”

rural communities told me that not only do towns have attitudes, they have personalities as complex and dynamic as any individual. A town may be possessed of desires and dreams, plagued by personality disorder and psychosis.

Like the individual mind, the collective mind is shortsighted. Despite all ambitions to the contrary, communities shoot themselves in the communal foot time and again by making decisions that “may feel right, may seem minor and inconsequential, or may simply suit their short-term needs, but which sabotage their long-term goals for success,” writes Griffiths.

He saw this myopia play out in small towns throughout Alberta when he traveled the province as research for the report “Rural Alberta: The Land of Opportunity.” In town after town, audiences listened excitedly to his speech and then waited for some change to happen, from the outside in. They had missed his impassioned point: without changing their underlying attitudes, no one piece of legislation, no new policy, no outside intervention could create lasting change.

The 13 Ways to Kill Your Community were born of these frustrated realizations: that communities can be as shortsighted as teenagers, and that true change can only come from an internal shift in perspective. Griffiths drew on his experience as a teacher, when he found that telling kids what not to do wasn’t catching.

Instead he asked them, if they were going to ruin their lives, how might they do it most effectively? If they were going to get pregnant at fifteen, they might start by having unprotected sex that weekend, they said. If they were going to fail out of school, they might start by not handing in their next assignment. Suddenly those innocent little rebellions didn’t seem so innocent anymore.

Communities make these small but pivotal decisions too. Enough small opportunities taken, and a town prospers. Enough small opportunities missed, and a town stagnates. The 13 Ways are what Griffiths has identified as the most common and detrimental community behaviors, presented as a tongue-in-cheek guide for aspiring town wreckers. Like the book, which is coauthored by journalist Kelly Clemmer, the behaviors are straightforward (#1: Don’t Have Quality Water, #2: Don’t Attract Business, #6: Don’t Paint) and psychological (#12 Become Complacent, #8 Don’t Take Responsibility). In each chapter, Griffiths explains a town-killing don’t, and then reveals how it belies a deeper community attitude and what dedicated people can do about it.

“We look around at so many of our communities and say, ‘Well when is the government going to do it?

When is somebody else going to do it?’” Griffiths expounded over the phone, after describing the march of

Littered in military and marine debris, Whittier struggles with Griffiths’ sixth invective: Don’t Paint. the first pilgrims into Alberta, who built their homes and schools and settlements from scratch. “We can’t build our communities now when we have more wealth and more knowledge and more technology than ever before. It’s all about attitude,” he trumpeted.

And then, a minute later, “Sorry, I get very passionate. I don’t mean to sound preachy.”

Without a doubt, Griffiths is passionate. But despite finding his 13 Ways compelling, inspiring, and a perfect starting block for conversations about rural communities’ health and future, I struggled to wrap my mind around his core concept. Can community “attitude” truly be the primary engine of community health? Based on his book and our conversation, for Griffiths attitude is about how a community approaches the needs and desires of the town through collective decision-making. It is a compilation of the individual attitudes of every person involved in that town’s health and prosperity, except most of them don’t realize how influential their behaviors are. When a community won’t try something new just because it’s never been tried before, that’s attitude (#10: Reject Everything New). Just like in individuals, attitude is habitual: we practice feeling gratitude or patience, and through repetition, see our attitude change.

It sounds simple enough on the surface, but I struggled to scale the concept of attitude from the individual up to the collective. Perhaps other writers would call Griffith’s “attitude” a community’s “values” or “culture.”

Values sounds enduring and timeless; culture sounds amicably relative. To speak of a community’s attitude is to suggest that a community can just change its mind. It is to suggest that its shortcomings are the result of conscious, deliberately made decisions.

Attitude is also about the story that a community

tells itself and outsiders, directly and indirectly, to explain its past and its identity. When Griffiths encounters a small town for the first time, he starts by looking for evidence of its attitude in everyday life. He drives into town and tells himself, “I want to live here.”

First he needs a house, so he goes and looks at the residential area. Next, he has children, so he finds the school and the hospital. He needs a job, so he seeks out business opportunities on Main Street, where the paint jobs and the attractiveness of the town center might give a clue to its health. He’d walk into businesses, like an undercover community member, and tell the owners, “I’m considering moving to your town.” Some would speak excitedly about the new jobs opening up and invite him to join their congregation, but others would give him the stink eye and tell him that he was crazy for wanting to live there. Without ever stepping foot in a city hall, Griffiths would have learned a lot about that town’s story.

In 13 Ways, Griffiths uses examples from “Omegatown,” a fictional town that is an amalgamation of all the communities he has visited and observed in his work. He writes about a mayor who blocked the construction of a new gas station because he owned the only one in town (#2: Don’t Attract Business). He writes about his own experience as a young man, when his father and all the forces in his small ranching town told him to get the hell out of the farming life, only to be surprised when Griffiths indeed wanted to leave and never come back (#3: Ignore Your Youth).

New families are relocating to Whittier for its cheap rent, good school, and plentiful jobs with the city, harbor, and tunnel.

It was difficult for his father and for communities that have driven away their youth with a negative attitude to accept that they played a role in weakening their community. Indeed, it is difficult for each of us to accept the consequences of our actions, and perhaps it is even harder to do so on a community scale, when there are so many other people and factors to blame. When he gives his 13 Ways speech, Griffiths says most people either laugh—he’s giving a detailed guide to destroying a town, after all; it’s meant to be funny—or they point fingers. Only a very few people sit back with their arms crossed and glare, knowing full well that they are guilty of exactly the town-wrecking sins that Griffiths is describing.

I picked up his book while living in the small town of Whittier, Alaska, where I spent a winter trying to understand the origins of that community’s attitude, values, culture, and story. Observing the community in the present and looking back to its founding I found the same stubborn, darkly humored attitude in a 1974 newspaper as I did at a 2014 city council meeting when a resident stood up in disgust and declared, “This town shoots itself in the face, not the foot.” He was upset that the city council had just declined to renew the city manager’s contract for the second time in two years.

Another community member, nearly shaking with anger, declared that the council had failed to provide the city manager with the tools he needed to succeed, and that by firing him, they had once again thrown a roadblock in the way of progress. The council members sat meekly but unrepentantly at the front of the room.

They had struggled to get along with the city manager.

They had done what they thought was right.

Like many small communities, Whittier is run by an elected, unpaid city council and a hired, paid city manager—and, like many small communities, Whittier goes through a city manager every few years. Perhaps, as the community member implied at the meeting, this is evidence of #13: Don’t Take Responsibility, or #7: Don’t Cooperate, or even #10: Reject Everything New. This uncooperative attitude is part of a pattern begun at Whittier’s very founding, when a group of civilians incorporated the town, then promptly turned around and began suing each other for the right to govern it. Amidst the intercommunity turmoil, the town watched valuable grants expire and long-term projects languish. Land that was deeded to the city in 1984 still sits undeveloped, while a road that was meant to reach it has struggled to extend less than one mile in seven years. An enormous abandoned building has sat above the town for fifty-four years.

If communities have minds with attitudes, then they also have bodies with skeletons. Whittier was built as

The town’s biggest obstacle to growth: providing post-high-school youth with opportunities and incentives to stay. a U.S. Army base. That military infrastructure still haunts and organizes the town today. The majority of the two hundred residents live in one of two large condominiums, and the only road access to town is through a singlelane tunnel that opens and closes hourly and shuts for the night. The tunnel was built for trains in 1941 and converted to a highway tunnel in 2000. That year, traffic into Whittier was predicted to soar. Population and revenue were expected to follow. Instead, tourism increased but the population declined. With commuting into Whittier for work now feasible, people who formerly

lived in town moved to the other side of the tunnel.

The infrastructure and the collective mind remember. Whittier’s stubbornness is more than a whim of its current population, but a character trait that has been cultivated by every generation of residents that has braved the town’s contradictory blend of isolation and claustrophobia. At one point a former mayor threw his hands up at my questions about the town’s future.

“Whittier will continue to exist as it has always existed,” he said, “in spite of itself.” Most everyone shops in Anchorage, except for the basics they can buy in town,

so check #5: Shop Elsewhere. Many of the old-timers will tell you that they preferred life in Whittier before the tunnel permitted cars, when they could get in or out on the train just a few times a week, so check #8: Live in the Past. From an outsider’s perspective, Whittier may look like an experiment that isn’t working. Its attitude is frequently one of obstinacy and complacence. It has gotten a reputation for attracting hermits, oddballs, and fugitives hiding from lives better left on the other side of the tunnel. One city council member called a yearly “Beautify Whittier”

campaign “like trying to put a pig in a prom dress.”

If Griffiths walked into town in February and told a business owner he was thinking of moving in, more likely than not, they’d tell him to turn around and catch the next tunnel out.

But that’s not the whole story. After they told him the downsides, residents would say that, differences aside, everyone takes care of each other. No one goes hungry; no one goes homeless. The school, with fewer than forty students between kindergarten and senior year, is innovative and award winning. On Christmas

Two scrappers dismantle the Ushagat, a boat left long neglected in Whittier’s harbor, the backbone of its economy.

the only restaurant hosts a free dinner and one of the volunteer firefighters rides the fire truck dressed as Santa Claus. All that swagger about being a terrible place to live—“It’s always shittier in Whittier,” they say—is half true and half a story that the community keeps telling itself and outsiders, more loudly than it tells the story of how compassionate the town is, how beautiful and peaceful and forgiving it can be.

If Whittier were an individual, then, we might say that it lacks confidence in its strengths and assets, which are many, and emphasizes its weaknesses, which are also considerable. We might call Whittier’s personality self-deprecating. “Just like people have problems, personality challenges, communities can have very similar ones,” Griffiths told me. “A person can have an addictive personality. I’ve seen communities that have the same sort of psychosis. Some people have chronic depression. Communities can have chronic depression.”

In fact, Griffiths’ next book—working title, The Psychosis of Community—is about this very idea. If we can identify a community’s personality disorder—manic, abusive, etc.—and what caused it, “then you can treat it and then you can move on,” he said.

Except, individuals with personality disorders don’t just treat it and then move on. They live with and manage those challenges their entire lives. Changing the attitude of everyone in town can’t change Whittier’s history of pollution, or the fact that you have to go through a tunnel to get there, or its attractiveness to people who have something to hide. Isn’t telling a community that all it needs to do to be successful is to believe in its own success a little like telling a disadvantaged person that all she needs to do to prosper is pull herself up by the boot straps with faith and hard work? Doesn’t that ignore the realities of economics, race, politics, infrastructure, and history that may stand in her way?

Attitude is past decisions, too, and the traumas and upheavals those decisions caused. If we want to change our communities we must be brave enough to look deeply at the causes for its despair. We must be able to look at its living body—an environment with unique characteristics and limitations—and the infrastructure we have dressed it in, replete with built-in biases. We must recognize that it has a soul—yes, a soul—in the memory of how people have treated each other there, whether they supported or abused or ignored each other. Success will mean different things to every community based on that inheritance. So will failure. It is no coincidence that one of the thirteen surefire ways to kill a community is #4: Deceive Yourself About Your Real Needs and Values.

Griffiths encourages communities to become honest with themselves by holding SWOT meetings,

in which influential community members are invited to talk informally about their town’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats, and then to open that conversation up to the wider community. Griffiths emphasized that the most influential people are not always the people in power, and indeed that city council members, mayors, school superintendents, and the like will have a harder time separating their official role from their personal interest in the community. Invite a small, diverse group, he recommended, between seven and twelve people. Hold multiple meetings if necessary.

Meet informally. Once assembled, Griffiths recommends taking one of two approaches. Either ask the group to define the community’s values or ask them to make two lists, one of what’s good in the community and the other what’s bad, and to sort them from smallest strength to largest strength and smallest problem to largest problem.

In 13 Ways he describes a town that took on the latter challenge. Citizens posted the list of town strengths in public places alongside the list of town weaknesses. Once it was spelled out so clearly, community members began consulting the list and tackling the small problems, like an easy public painting project. With small success came satisfaction; more people tackled problems on the list, and they continued to get crossed off. That town can now add “proactive” and “cohesive” to its list of strengths.

As for the town of Whittier, there is hope and evidence that the town is undergoing change. A young resident, born and raised, has returned and is serving on the city council, which took pains to hire its new city manager in an open, inclusive process. Young families are moving in; the school’s numbers are growing. Beyond the concrete markers of success, how do we know that an attitude is changing? Youth are key predictors. Are the young people staying or returning? Are they starting new businesses, settling down? Are new community members moving in, putting down roots, and investing in its future? Does the community believe it has a future, and most tellingly, does it believe that the ability to influence the future is in the community’s hands? To hear Griffiths tell it, towns must be honest, inclusive, and self-reflective in order to know what they are made of. Once they know, they can make better long-term decisions for residents present and future.

If Whittier rewrote its own story, it might describe itself as tenacious or inventive instead of defending the town from outside negativity. It might begin to broadcast its advantages more loudly than its faults, and discover unforeseen advantages in the process. The work to be and stay healthy doesn’t stop there, but if the goal is not to kill your community, it’s a good place to start. n

cardboard books in argentina’s long crisis by michael mccanne

In Buenos Aires, the sound of a country falling into the abyss is the sound of ten thousand people sorting through trash. Every night, after the garbage is put out on the street, an army of scavengers picks through each pile, looking for anything that can be recycled. The most desirable item is cardboard, and thus the scavengers are called cartoneros (from carton, the Spanish word for cardboard). At night the cartoneros move through the city, hauling enormous cloth bags, moving efficiently from one clump of garbage to the next. Sometimes whole families work together to fill up large carts before taking them to the recycling centers outside the city that pay by the kilo for cardboard and other salvaged materials. In the expensive new cafés that have recovered the city since the 2001 economic crisis, people sit and eat while trucks piled high with cartoneros and their iconic white bags rush past.

Sometimes they watch this spectacle like a strange anachronism passing through, and sometimes the trucks speed by unnoticed into an empty night.

In 2003 two artists and a writer (Fernanda Laguna, Javier Barilaro, and Washington Cocurto, respectively) founded the micro press Eloísa Cartonera with the idea that they could use recycled cardboard to make books. The skyrocketing price of paper after the economic crisis, and its subsequent value as a recyclable material, created the cartonero phenomenon and also forced many independent publishing houses and magazines out of business. Artists and writers found themselves without jobs or places to publish their work; Cocurto and Barilaro both lost their jobs when the press they were working for went under. With Laguna, they took over a small storefront and began printing books and binding them in cardboard, which they bought directly from the cartoneros at a price above the recycling plants’ rates.

The books were made in the simplest manner: photocopied and stapled, the cardboard covers painted in bright temperas. Through Cocurto’s connections they published work from leading contemporary writers like César Aira, Ricardo Piglia, Reinaldo Arenas, many of whom donated their work free of charge. As the project grew, cartoneros got involved, becoming active members of the project and helping to increase production. Eloísa’s catalogue expanded to include lesser-known South American writers with more experimental styles such as Fabián Casas

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and Washington Cocurto himself. The Swiss embassy donated the old German Multilit 1250 offset press that sits in the workshop, allowing them to print their own interiors, and after a year the brightly colored cardboard bound books were a recognizable imprint across Buenos Aires. Now they are in almost every independent bookstore in the city, sitting almost defiantly among the glossy covers of the established Spanish-language publishing world, a reminder of the economic crisis’s lingering effects.

In the back of Eloísa Cartonera’s little storefront workshop, a fridge stands in semi-darkness; scrawled across its door in Sharpie are the words ”Amo las horas obscuras de mi existencia”—I love the dark hours of my existence, from Rilke. Toward the front sits an offset printer, and to the side are piles of paper and cardboard. On one wall, shelves overflow with multicolored books made of cardboard, hand bound with glue and staples. Names painted with curly script in bright yellow, pink, and blue cover the windows, filtering the light like flecked stained glass. The workshop is on a side street in the La Boca neighborhood, which sprawls from the old part of Buenos Aires down to the port, its tin and wood houses slumping into themselves among the muddy inlets of the Rio de la Plata.

More than ten years on, Argentina is still struggling with the 2001 economic crisis, in which a decade of structural adjustment by the IMF and the austerity policies of Carlos Menem (president from 1989 to 1999) imploded in the course of a few weeks.

Menem’s policies included fixing the exchange rate to the U.S. dollar and privatizing almost all public sectors of society: telephones, water, electricity, and petroleum. These measures had allowed Argentina’s middle and upper classes to enjoy first-world luxuries throughout the 1990s while the economy decayed from inside. They only had to turn their eyes away from the poverty spreading through the rural provinces to pretend the neoliberal fantasy was real.

In 1999 a recession hit most of Latin America, and the Argentine economy, overextended by foreign debt and hyperinflation, started to contract. Behind closed doors, the government tried desperately to stem the disaster while the country’s economic infrastructure shuddered and started to give way. Foreign firms and capital fled the country, and people began hoarding currency. In November 2001 Menem’s successor, Fernando de la Rúa, issued a decree limiting

individual cash withdrawals from banks to a set amount per month—the hated corralito. Over the following weeks the situation exploded: people poured into the streets, blockading intersections and attacking banks; the peso dropped overnight from its fixed exchange rate to a third of its former value; and Argentines woke up to find their saving accounts had nearly evaporated. By January, Argentina had fallen into an economic chasm. Unemployment was widespread, and people turned to any means of subsistence they could find. The country once lauded as a poster child of neoliberal development was transformed in a matter of weeks by shortage, blockades, and riot.

Argentines did not turn inward to survive this crisis; they reached out to their neighbors and coworkers. On the corners of every neighborhood, people discussed what to do about the situation, forming popular assemblies around bonfires. These gatherings

interlinked to create large informal networks connecting nearly every neighborhood. They organized pot-banging protests called cacerolazos that drove out de la RĂşa and three successive governments during the last weeks of 2001, and they linked up with rural assemblies, which organized freeway blockades and occupations. In the factories that stood shuttered and abandoned, workers started production again, running things collectively without bosses or owners. In every corner of the country people responded to the crisis by combining their energy and creativity to survive and take control of their situation.

Of the three who founded EloĂ­sa Cartonera in 2003, only Washington Cocurto remains, and new workers make up the current cooperative, including former cartoneros and South Americans from outside Argentina. Maria Gomez was a student who came to study the project and ended up staying on;

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she now does layout for the book interiors and works with the second-hand printing press. Alejandro Miranda and Juan Guillermo Gomez came from Chile and Col0mbia respectively, drawn to the radical promise of Argentina’s post-crisis society. Osa—a nickname meaning female bear—was a cartonera but now makes books and reigns over the shop and neighborhood like a benevolent queen. Her husband still collects cardboard and occasionally delivers batches to the workshop.

The cooperative members work constantly, six days a week: cutting cardboard, folding and stapling books, and painting covers. The cardboard boxes bear the markings of all types of trade and products, from all parts of the world. After the covers for the books are cut from the boxes, the scraps are piled on the sidewalk outside the shop and cartoneros take them away. Kids from the neighborhood come to paint covers and sometimes their mothers bring plates of food to share. People come and go, and volunteers, journalists, and academics are nearly always present. Occasional tourists wander in and look over the wall of books. In the summer, the worktables are moved out onto the sidewalk and covered by paint pots, brushes, and cardboard. Sometimes people take breaks to prepare maté (the ubiquitous Argentine tea drunk from a calabash gourd) or read one of the latest releases, leafing through books whose covers are still drying. Maria plays with the offset press, lovingly tuning it and trying different settings to achieve different techniques. Arguments break out and are resolved; the radio plays cumbia constantly, incessantly.

On paper, the Argentine economy was already recovering from the crisis by 2003, paying off its IMF loans and stabilizing the peso, but since that time the country has slipped back into dangerous economic territory. The successive governments borrowed heavily, and the country is now running a massive budget deficit. Inflation has increased rapidly, and the Argen-

tine peso has dropped to a nine-to-one exchange rate with the dollar. In a move reminiscent of the 2001 crisis, the current president, Christina Kirchner, restricted the amount of dollars the average citizen can purchase. Argentina’s precarious middle classes are being squeezed, and the country seems on the brink of another economic catastrophe.

In the face of collapse, it’s arguable how much impact Eloísa Cartonera has on the conditions of cartoneros in Buenos Aires. They are only able to buy cardboard from two or three families at a time, and they work so much on keeping their cooperative afloat that they have little time for anything else. But the project serves as both an example of cooperative production and a social node for community and literature. It is an example that has not gone unnoticed.

An organic and independent movement of cartonerias has sprung up across South and Central America, and there are now over twenty autonomous cartonerias, in Paraguay, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Mexico, and Ecuador. Each one has its own unique social and economic situation, but Eloísa set the model.

In 2009, Eloísa became a legal cooperative under Argentina’s laws to normalize the various businesses that workers occupied during the crisis, and in 2012 it received a Prince Claus award for culture and development (from the Netherlands). They have said they want to acquire a farm to augment their urban project and publish the complete stories of Rudolfo Walsh, an Argentine writer killed in 1976 by the military dictatorship. Perhaps the money from the Claus prize will help them reach these goals. They are still struggling to navigate Argentine society more than ten years since the financial collapse, and it has not been a simple path, but in this little workshop, out of the dark hours of economic crisis, artists, writers, and cartoneros have found their lives intertwined and created a space for their work and dreams to coexist. n

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photos & text by hera chan

walk-in salon, shanghai

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“Look at her, she’s not from around here,” the manicurist replied in Mandarin to the faux fancy lady who had come in to fix a nail chip on her index finger—me.

“Are people over in Canada and the United States racist toward Chinese immigrants there?” I didn’t know how to begin explaining race relations in my home base.

After a month of working in Shanghai, my last day comes back now in scenes. Interior, nail salon, night. During the time it took the polish to dry a crusted chocolate brown, a neighborhood mother dropped off a carton of milk, knowing that the family that operated the salon had just run out.

A teenage girl came to get just a few hairs removed from the top of her brows to have that flat-brow look, “just like a Korean pop star.” The manicurist’s 11-year-old son cracked open a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and brutally hurled phrases no one taught me in Saturday Chinese school.

Around the Lao Xi Men subway station in the Huangpu District is one of the last old neighborhoods left in Shanghai. Thirty years ago, the skyline as we see it today did not exist; today, Shanghai has more skyscrapers than most other cities in the world.

The city’s rapid development has created a form of gentrification very different from the kind I’m familiar with in Canada. The government’s objective of a totalizing modern infrastructure in urban centers such as Shanghai has led to the destruction of older neighborhoods such as that around Lao Xi Men. However, many of the residents that are forced to move are provided government-subsidized housing in apartments near their original location—a sizable payoff— and better access to social care.

The painting of the everyday seen in these snapshots shows a life that will no longer be lived in Shanghai in less than ten years.

A community’s character is closely tied to its infrastructure.

With a morphing urban landscape, we can only watch as people invent new forms of community in nail salons and beyond. n

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