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Wednesday, April 11th, 2012

Are Some Buildings Too Ugly to Survive?

The New York Times turned its attention this week to the debate over the preservation of brutalist buildings. In particular, they look at the debate over demolishing a government center on Goshen, NY.

As part of this, they published a Room for Debate segment called “Are Some Buildings Too Ugly to Survive?” I was delighted to be one of the people asked to weigh in on this matter so I hope you’ll check it out.

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

Manhatta

That great site How to Be a Retronaut pointed me at this great 1921 silent film of New York City by Paul Strand. It’s called “Manhatta” and provides a unique look at NYC at the early part of the 20th century. If the video doesn’t display, click here.

Also on the Retronaut recently was this 1925 “infographic” from Popular Science Monthly about how we may live and travel in 1950, and how this new world might solve congestion problems…..

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

MiniLook Kiev

Here’s another stunningly “Wow!” tilt-shift, this one from Kiev. It’s called “MiniLook Kiev” and this is definitely one to view in full screen high definition. If the video doesn’t display for you, click here. What I love about this is that, like “Little Big Berlin,” it captures the people, not just the buildings of Kiev.

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

On the Riverfront in Cincinnati

It’s about time one of the smaller Midwest cities got a cool timelapse. Here’s a short one of the Cincinnati riverfront. It’s done in an ultra-widescreen format that perfectly symbolizes a river itself. I recommend watching in full screen high definition. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

h/t UrbanCincy

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

The City of Samba

Here’s your latest city tilt shift video. This one is from Rio de Janeiro and is called “Tilt Shift Samba.” It includes various scenes from Carnival. If the video doesn’t display for you, click here. h/t Randy Simes.

In bonus Rio coverage, the NYT also did a long story on the operations center that enables all city services and conditions to be monitored from a single control room similar to a Network Operations Center. It’s worth a look.

Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

Louisville: A Tale of One City by Rollin Stanley

[ One of the Louisville sites I do still read religiously is Broken Sidewalk. Last month I saw there the article below which originally appeared on the blog of Rollin Stanley, Planning Director of Montgomery County, MD. If you'd like to know more about him, check out his blog, or read this piece from Greater Greater Washington called, The Quotable Rollin Stanley. This Louisville piece is very insightful and I am grateful he gave permission to repost it here - Aaron. ]

Downtown Louisville. (Branden Klayko)

[Note from Branden Klayko, Editor of Broken Sidewalk: Rollin Stanley is the Planning Director at the Montgomery County, Maryland Planning Department. I first met him nearly a decade ago shortly after he was named Executive Director of the St. Louis Planning and Urban Design Agency while I was in college. He understands how cities work implicitly and is an outspoken advocate of good urban design and transit-oriented development. Stanley writes the Director's Blog at Montgomery Planning on which this post was originally published.]

For Thanksgiving in 2011, my wife and I drove 900 miles to visit friends and family in St. Louis, Missouri. We drove an extra 50 miles to go the southern route via I-64 past Charleston, West Virginia and Lexington, Kentucky, before stopping over in Louisville for the evening. Despite the rain, it was a great opportunity to visit the city for the first time.

The cities of the Midwest are poised for resurgence. Filled with creative, energetic people and with a low cost of living, a new generation of artists, entrepreneurs and immigrants are seeking to establish themselves. In fact, recent surveys show cities like St. Louis are experiencing a more than 80 percent increase in young residents.

Initial impressions

First impressions are always important when you are pulling into a strange city after dark and in the rain. Louisville is no exception. The Google directions bringing us along the rain soaked I-64 along the Ohio River to our exit on South 9th Street didn’t show off the city’s best side. To a person unfamiliar with center core cities in the U.S., it could feel a bit like Chevy Chase traveling across America in the “Family Truckster” and reinforce the stereotypes held by many people about inner-city America.

The great scourge of industrial cities is the race to create as much parking as possible. Some civic leaders see demolition and paving as a sign of progress and Louisville along with Kansas City, is a prime example. William Whyte in his book City: Rediscovering the Center, says “If you tear down enough of your downtown for parking, pretty soon there won’t be any reason to go there and park.”

Fourth Street Live. (Rollin Stanley)

Sure enough, downtown Louisville has plenty of examples intended to prove this proverb. They have the waterfront development and “Fourth Street Live,” the Cordish downtown entertainment district similar to Kansas City. These developments are intended to draw people back downtown, the place they left kind of because, well, lots of stuff was torn down for parking lots.

And guess what? Nobody parks on those surface parking lots because they are too far away from Fourth Street Live for anyone to park there. And if someone did, they would not feel safe walking across all the vacant lots to get to the entertainment center.

Fourth Street Live mirrors similar downtown developments by the Baltimore-based developer Cordish. While it has many of the chains we are familiar with around the country, there are standouts like the Maker’s Mark Bourbon House and places with great names like “Howl at the Moon.” However, this two-block stretch of South 4th Street is disconnected from the river by several government buildings and the too often repeated downtown convention center.

This aerial of the Louisville Central Business District south of the river highlights the vast areas taken up by surface parking (red) and single-use garages (purple). And then there is the big chunk in the middle, taken up by the convention center, another streetscape paralyzer. (Montage by Erik Weber)

The Louisville parking landscaping really hampers the potential to create depth to the downtown. As you move south away from the river along 4th Avenue, going over one or two blocks to the east or west you arrive at a sea of surface parking. Those parking lots spawn the decline of adjacent properties, the very places the surface parking was intended to help. The lots are vacant at night, so the places next to them begin to decline.

Challenges

Louisville is clearly a place of contrast, just like so many other cities in the Midwest. Pockets of success separated by surface parking lots and questionable decisions about frontages, highlight some of the toughest challenges with the core of the city. The challenge of creating “depth” to the success, linking the positive nodes, is so difficult when growth is first limited, then competing with the unlimited sprawl of the burbs.

The neon sign is a historic resource that captures the history of urban decline. While the sign should be in a museum, the use is a sad reminder of how far the resurgence of Louisville has to go. One block away from some great businesses on South 4th Street, the beginning of the “surface parking district” extends many blocks to the east.

Louisville has some tremendous assets. But it has lost tremendous assets as well.

1. Louisville torn down a lot of stuff.

Downtown Louisville is an old architect’s dream, what remains is shaped like a T square. There are lots of buildings that parallel the waterfront, some good and some bad, and then there is the South 4th Street corridor stretching at right angles back from the river, forming the spine of activity, the “straight edge” of the T square. I love South 4th Street, but only the area south of the convention center.

So many cities tried to revitalize their downtowns by bringing in convention centers. While convention centers bring people into hotels and to patronize local business, almost all create sterile street frontages that mimic big box stores.

From any angle the Kentucky International Convention Center is not a friend of the streetscape of the downtown. It forms a physical barrier between the successful nodes of Louisville Live and the riverfront. It is just like a big box store or a mall. People stay inside, the walls are large, blank spaces, and it produces little pedestrian traffic, the key to the success of any inner city.

Government buildings are also a challenge, creating long expanses of inactivity that work against creating a vibrant neighborhood. They are like parks after dark. Nobody wants to walk past them. I learned a great lesson from an urban pioneer by the name of Joe Edwards in St. Louis. He singlehandedly revitalized the “loop” neighborhood, including bringing trolley lines back to the commercial district.

As Joe rehabbed commercial buildings, he would work to lease space to a variety of retailers. Too many restaurants would mean little happening during the day. Too many shops would leave the street vacant past after 9 p.m. So he would mix the uses, creating variety along the street. Both the convention centers and government buildings work against this principle.

This shot taken on S. 4th Street moving farther away from the central core, shows how many cities tore down buildings like those on the left, and replaced them with long blank frontages of nothing, like on the right. While retail is struggling on the left, there are small pockets of success which will spread to fill the gaps between them. Who knows, maybe the building on the right will be torn down in a few decades and be replaced with buildings with active frontages like those on the right. That would be irony.

2. Historic assets

Much of downtown Louisville is gone forever. There are pockets of underutilized historic resources where only the ground floor is being used. This is a real shame. These small pockets offer the potential for affordable redevelopment through the use of historic tax credits and other financing tools. With all the creative forces in the city, one has to believe there is a solid constituency for these spaces with rents being offset through the tax credit restoration.

While downtown Louisville has lost much of its historic fabric and lacks a cohesive historic commercial core, it has small pockets of great buildings which largely go unused. While the ground floor the buildings are leased, the upper floors go largely unused, missing a real opportunity to attract young urban pioneers.

The Louisville Slugger Museum is a destination that brings lots of people into an area of the downtown. It could act as a catalyst through restoration and small-scale modern new construction on the parking lots to the south.

The Louisville slugger museum would not be the same if that big bat was leaning against some run-of-the-mill, recently constructed building? Could the small strip of historic buildings nearby has the bones for a terrific neighborhood, where people walk dogs, eat breakfast at the local eatery on Saturday morning, alongside tourists visiting the Slugger Museum or the Muhammad Ali Center just to the north along the river.

Louisville is not alone. In Atlanta, where I did some consulting work about eight years ago, I was shocked that city officials were not using historic tax credits to help revitalize. In St. Louis, we created over 4,000 new units of loft housing in the core of downtown historic tax credits and the like. Building the local capacity in the developer, legal and government sectors to make these things happen is critical.

While it probably would have been great to have the entire historic building left, this is a fun example of how a cool feature has been created on S. 4th Street. And it masks the parking garage located behind, although it is not a bad parking garage.

3. One-Way Streets

Other than saying they serve horse meat, nothing kills a restaurant faster than locating on a one-way street. One-way streets serve one purpose and one purpose only: getting people in and out of the core area as fast as possible. A driver needs to travel 25 mph or less to make eye contact with a pedestrian. So if you are trying to create vibrant pedestrian streets, how does a one way street that pushes cars through as fast as possible work toward that goal?

There are few places on the planet where retail succeeds on a one-way street. And these places have density, something Louisville does not have. Is there really a need for four lane roads running one way in front of the Louisville Slugger Museum?

Show me a city without congestion and I bet it is not a place where people go and members of Gen X and Y live. We want people to slow down, look out the window at the retail environment and have street parking to liven up the sidewalk.

A historic postcard of the downtown Seelbach Hotel on S. 4th Street. It does not look too different today. A wonderful adventure into the past and a real asset to the core. If you stay, get a corner room looking up 4th Street.

Bright spots

In Louisville, I saw pockets of amazing creativity and resiliency. Take the grand old hotels. Louisville has some great ones like the Seelbach (we stayed here) and the Brown. I understand the wedding sequence from the Great Gatsby is modeled after the former. It has a great long wood bar with some real tradition.

And to contrast these great old hotels, there is the fabulous Museum Hotel over by the Slugger Museum. The restaurant/hotel is themed as an art museum and is one of the coolest concepts in North America. A terrific example of the creative energy in this city and the Midwest. Fun, unusual and full of energy, these are the spots that are the nucleus for change. This hotel and museum is the focal point to transform this neighborhood.

The 21c Museum Hotel on West Main St. is one of the great finds in the city. Apart from the red penguins adorning the exterior, the building appears nondescript, yet step inside to find an amazing experience combining food, lodging, and art. These are the experiences that make a city interesting and attracts the potential to build new opportunities for revitalization.

The scale of the streets is another asset. Most are narrow, and where the buildings remain, framed right up to the sidewalk, giving a real urban feel. There are good examples of architecture from many eras and this is really noticeable when you stand along the waterfront and look back towards the downtown. And where the city has invested in those streets, they have created some great urban furniture and property owners created some great small urban spaces.

There are some cool bike racks in the city. Sculpture that really enhances the public spaces. And look behind the lamp pole in the right photo to see one of the entry markers into this part of S. 4th Street. And then there is just some cool sculpture, mixed with the bins on garbage day.

Walking through any city, it is fun to look to discover hidden spaces that really open the potential of a commercial district, creating the intimate spaces that attract people to an area. With sidewalks, these are really the “public spaces” in an urban area that are most frequented.

Two examples of “public space” in the core of the city. The wide open plaza may cater to office workers on a nice warm lunch break, but remains vacant otherwise. The small intimate restaurant courtyard offers a different experience and probably gets more use. Neither space is public in the true sense of the word, but both function as such.

Downtown Louisville is a case study on urban America. It can become one of the cooler places in the Midwest. It has a lot of assets: the obvious creative spirit of so many residents, the great bourbon selections in so many establishments. But it will require baby steps, moving forward one small area at a time. Ignore the quick fix ideas that require more buildings to come down, closing a street, or sterilizing the street activity through long blank walls. If a bank or pharmacy wants in, make them open up the facades, no walls that don’t have doors every 50 or 60 feet.

Explore the myriad of incentives that make downtown projects economically viable and attractive to everyone. Work with property owners and find new ones who have the energy and vision to make these projects work.

And, please, get rid of the one-way streets.

This post originally appeared in the Montgomery County Planning Director Blog on December 9, 2011.

Thursday, January 26th, 2012

The Case for Quality of Space

Last November I was privileged to be able to speak at a community conversation event in Franklin, Indiana – a town of about 25,000 people south of Indianapolis that is an old county seat on the edge of suburban expansion – sponsored by Indiana Humanities and Ball State University’s Bowen Center for Public Affairs.

The topic of the evening was quality of space and what, if anything, Franklin should do in this area. There had recently been some big disputes over downtown redevelopment projects I believe.

I gave a talk that set the stage for this conversation. In it I make the case for why high quality of place is of importance to a community. I root it in a business case analysis based on globalization and structural changes in the economy, the impact of that on Indiana’s competitive positioning, and a real life example of the potential payoff. I then talk a little bit ways to actually make quality of space happen.

Before the video though, I should mention that I am for hire to speak at your event. For details, arenn@urbanophile.com. As you’ll see from this, I work to create something custom and compelling for your audience, not a canned talk. And I basically treat it as a mini-consulting engagement to drive more value for you.

The video is below, followed by an outline of the talk. I hope you enjoy. (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

I. The Case for Quality of Space

A. History of Globalization and Structural Economic Changes: Indiana has gone from competitively advantaged to competitively disadvantaged.

B. The Impact of Economic Change: Indiana has trailed the country in jobs and incomes

C. Implications of the Situation:

1. If nothing changes, expect more of the same poor results. This means real change, not just tweaks.
2. Indiana cannot be competitive purely on a cost basis ever again. Even domestically, there are cheaper locations like Texas, and overseas competitors are much cheaper. Cost control and quality regulations are still very important, but cost cannot be the sole basis of competition.
3. Indiana must compete today at least in part by creating a civic product people want to buy on its own merits, not just because it’s the cheapest thing on the market – because it isn’t.

D. But Doesn’t Franklin Already Have High Quality of Space/Place?: Yes. Yet consider:

1. Much of what makes the high quality of a community like Franklin is the people who live there and their shared history. Newcomers can’t judge a community by this yet.
2. Much of what makes our communities physically great was built a long time ago. The question is how we build on that legacy to meet the challenge of the 21st century.

II. The Benefits of Quality of Space: Columbus, Indiana Case Study

A. Why a Case Study of Columbus? It’s nearby for locals to check out themselves, it has a strong and comprehensive commitment to quality of space, and is closer to a typical blue collar community than say a Big Ten college town.

B. Columbus Economic Performance: Outperforms all non-Big Ten college town Indiana peers and also has outperformed the nation as a whole on jobs and income.

C. How Much Did Columbus Pay for Its Quality of Space Plan?

1. Columbus tax expenditures per person are higher than most peers. They did spend money on this. Not free.
2. But Columbus tax rates are among the lowest of its peers.
3. How is this? Columbus has the largest tax base.

D. Two Fallacies of Government

1. Democrat Fallacy: The only thing that determines government revenue is the tax rate.
2. Republican Fallacy: The only thing that determines tax bills is government spending.
3. Both claims are based on short term thinking. Need to evaluate the life cycle implications of policy choices. Columbus spent more but pays less now because they understand total cost of ownership.

III. Bringing Quality of Space to Life

A. Four Planks in a Quality of Space Program

1. First Class Public Buildings: We used to build them this way, so doing it today is following an old tradition, not doing something different.
2. Focus on Value per Dollar: It’s not always about more money. A bit part of it is making sure the money you do spend gets the full value per dollar.
3. Find Low Cost, Fast, High Impact Items
4. Build on Unique Qualities: In Franklin’s case, Franklin College

B. Closing Caveats

1. Quality of space is a long term game. You don’t see immediate results from a trail. Columbus took 60 years to get where it is today. Indy’s downtown sports strategy started 40 years ago, but it is just now getting to host the Superbowl.
2. Make sure that whatever you do is specific to your community. Don’t let somebody else sell you an off the shelf solution that merely copies what others are doing.

Wednesday, January 11th, 2012

Murmansk in Motion

Here’s one that just goes to prove you don’t have to be a tier one uber-famous global city to have a really awesome time lapse video. Here’s one of Murmansk, Russia. (If the video doesn’t display, click here).

And as a reminder, at reader request, I added a special tag for all my posts with cool city videos in them, so if you are interested in checking out the archives, click here.

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Indy to Repurpose Stadium Seats at Bus Stops

[ You may remember an older post of mine about how an independent urbanist group in Indianapolis called People for Urban Progress undertook a super-cool recycling operation for the roof the of the now demolished Hoosier Dome. Well, they've done it again. PUP has partnered with Indianapolis Fabrications and Ecolaborative to re-purpose the seating from the now closed Bush Stadium minor league ballpark for bus stop seating and other purposes. This might seem inferior for places that have honest to goodness bus shelters. But in Indianapolis there is very little in the way of furnishings at bus stops, so this is an upgrade. Kevin Kaster of Urban Indy provides this update. If you are interested in seeing more pictures and learning more about what PUP is up to, check out their Facebook page - Aaron. ]

The first Bush Stadium seats have been installed at the corner of Alabama and Vermont Streets. The official unveiling was took place at 10:00, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the event. I chatted with Michael and Jessica Bricker from People for Urban Progress, as well as Bryan Luellen, Annette Darrow, Jessica Mitchell’, and Samantha Cross from IndyGo in the hopes of finding out some more information about the project.

Urban Indy: How did this opportunity happen?

Michael Bricker: Ryan Fitzpatrick and his brother Kevin (from organization called Ecolaborative) were working with the Bush Stadium reuse people and came up to us with the idea for salvaging the seats. We also had an intern named Ryan Gallagher, whose college thesis was based on increasing bus ridership, and he believed that increasing amenities would help towards that goal. Basically, our organization was the facilitator that brought these two ideas together.

UI: Which bus stops are next in line?

MB: College and Alabama is the pilot. There are 4 other bus stops proposed. They will be at 10th and College, 86th and the Monon, Broad Ripple and Carrollton, and Fall Creek and Meridian. After that, other organizations can sponsor their own bus stops through the PUP Stop program.

UI: Is there funding in place for maintenance?

Bryan Luellen: IndyGo will maintain them. It is possible that they might become part of the adopt-a-stop program. But the seats are pretty sturdy, and they are designed to be outside, so they will not need much maintenance.

UI: Has anyone else done this?

MB: Not that we know of. Other stadium seats may be in the private domain, but these are the first to be re-purposed for public use that we know of.

UI: How did you get the city to buy off on the project?

MB: It was pretty easy, actually. We worked with Develop Indy and the developer of the Stadium. Develop Indy helped us quickly secure access to the stadium and the seats. We have to get them out of the stadium by March 2nd.

BL: Also, IndyGo pursued a license from the city to place the bench in a public Right-of-Way.

Indianapolis Transit Expansion Proposal

This week Indianapolis business leaders also unveiled a $1.3B proposal for a major transit expansion, including doubling the footprint of the local bus system and building a commuter rail line. This faces many hurdles in getting through the state legislature and then a referendum. We’ll see if this fares any better than most transit proposals in similar sized Midwestern cities, most of which have failed. Urban Indy has the story. Here’s a map of the proposed system:

Thanks so much to Kevin Kastner and Urban Indy for this contribution.

Wednesday, November 9th, 2011

A Year in New York

Here’s another in my series of very cool city videos from around the web. This is yet another NYC one called “A Year in New York.” (If the video doesn’t display for you, click here).

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