Rebuilding downtown
There’s been a lot of focus on downtown Pittsburgh lately, most of it negative. A parking tax increase and the looming departure of several large retailers has caused a lot of worry, and for good reason.
This past Sunday’s issue of the Post-Gazette had a great piece about the city’s problems, and possible solutions. Several involved community figures (none of which were associated with the city government, notably) were asked for their opinions on what they felt it would take to revive downtown.
There were quite a few ideas I was in agreement with. One thing that made particular sense to me was to reduce the emphasis on landing behemoth retail stores, such as the now-departing Lazarus-Macy’s and the troubled Lord and Taylor:
Downtown should capitalize on what it does best: entertainment and commerce. Forget about subsidized big-box retail Downtown!
It’s true. I think it’s very hard to attract people downtown anymore just on the merits of several big retail stores. As this city’s population becomes more and more suburban, the shopping experiencence is becoming one of malls, shopping centers, big-box retail, and acres and acres of free parking. Downtown just can’t afford the space required for those type of enterprises, nor should it try to. It’s sterile, boring, and depressing.
Minneapolis built an entertainment center, dubbed Block E along these premises, and although I haven’t been following the news about it that much, I don’t think it’s significantly impacted how people view downtown. I don’t think your typical suburbanite cares about going downtown to eat at an Applebee’s when there are about a hundred similar chain restaurants in the sprawl that surrounds them. And don’t even get me started about the Hard Rock Café. I hear there’s one opening up in Fargo pretty soon.
What will bring a downtown area back is a focus on the unique and a focus on a larger permanent population. In Pittsburgh (and in many major downtowns), the downtown area has become exclusively dedicated to business. After 5 o’clock, on most days, it’s a dead place. Restaurants close early, bars are lightly populated, and sidewalks are empty.
Jane Jacobs, in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, constantly talks about the need to keep the street life active at all hours of the day. This was years ago. Not much has changed. It’s still necessary. A healthy base of residents downtown will ensure human activity long after the last office has closed up shop for the night.
But this isn’t going to happen with the current development plan. Far too many buildings lie vacant and what does get developed is financially out-of-reach for many young adults, which should be the target audience for this kind of venture. I know that if wifey and I could afford it, we’d be down there.
Pat Clark, a founding member of the Ground Zero Action Network said it best:
Stop focusing on building $500,000 luxury condos Downtown. The best target market to repopulate Downtown quickly is young people, homesteaders who aren’t bothered by vacant night-time streets but would actually be attracted to a bohemian-style district — if only there were affordable housing in the upper floors of Downtown properties!
Clark also brings up a great point about the type of shops that used to be found downtown versus what is there now:
Five years ago, a big part of the reason that we had a lively retail environment Downtown was that its stores served two important customer bases: Downtown workers as well as the working- and middle-class shoppers who relied on public transit. The Nordstrom/Lord & Taylor retail mirage aimed to upscale the district, shooting for attracting the affluent shopper at the direct expense of the more value-minded traditional shopper. Now the empty storefronts serve neither…
After arriving in Pittsburgh in September and exploring the downtown area, I was particularly struck by the number of storefronts that seemed like they used to cater to those solidly in the middle-to-lower classes. And this seemed like such a great thing.
Downtown was, at one time, a vibrant and varying place that was a destination for everyone and for different reasons. Minneapolis does not have a downtown like that. I’d be willing to bet not many cities do. And Pittsburgh’s is going to be completely gone very soon if things don’t change.
Inspired thoughts
A couple of weeks ago, I finally finished Lewis Mumford’s book, A City in History. Like I said before, this was a book that I started a long time ago, and, over many lunch breaks and bus rides, I managed to eventually finish.
I’m starting to assemble my thoughts on the book, and put it in context with what’s going on in the world today. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of stuff in the book that remains valid today.
As I understood it, one of Mumford’s main points in the book was the ill effects that capitalism eventually laid upon the city. Specialization reduced the citizen to the part of a small cog in a big machine, and the form of the city that resulted from this type of mindset left the individual out of the equation. Mass production and mass consumerism led to a society that was (and still is!) destroying itself by trying to keep alive a culture that values continuous growth over all else. Wal-Mart’s and McDonalds’ of the world, take note. Mumford writes:
“…even in cultures far less committed to quantitative growth than our own, there comes a point where the tumorous organ will destroy the organ at whose expense it has reached such swollen dimensions.”
We’re getting ever closer to that point. Employers, ever conscious of their bottom line, continue to pay less for more work. Financially-strapped workers flock to the big-box retailers, drawn to the impossibly low prices that can only come from the massive economies of scale that can be leveraged by the retail giants. This massive buying power is imposed upon manufacturers, who search high and low to find ways to deliver their product at a cheaper price than the next guy. Jobs are exported to third-world countries and are run as slave labor operations. What stays here usually does so at the cost of livable wages, health insurance, and quality of life. And so the cycle continues.
What is wrong with setting limits? Does this culture of laissez-faire capitalism preclude all social responsibility? In an ideal society, a decent way of life for everyone should trump the almighty dollar. Can’t we step back, draw a line in the sand, and hold ourselves to it?
Or will we continue to consume ourselves, simply because it’s all we know how to do?
From the ground up
Maybe it’s because I’m getting older, or maybe it’s just because things are so bad in the country, but after seeing The Weather Underground, a documentary film about the radical left-wing group, The Weathermen, and watching the great, independently produced television ads deriding President Bush’s policies, I’m ready to take it to the street.
Not pipe bombs and window-breaking, mind you, but I want to be more involved. There was a line from the movie last night that went something like “If you’re just living your white, suburban life, too afraid to do anything about the violence in the world, you’re responsible for the violence whether you realize it or not.”
It’s amazing to think of the differences between the time of a group like the Weathermen and today. On one hand, there’s the revolutionary spirit of old that seems to be missing today. But on the other hand, there’s this great tool — the Internet — that allows a form of organization that was never available back then.
I know that this idea is nearly as old as the Internet itself and has been pretty well absorbed by the mainstream, but I still marvel at the possibilities that are still out there. We just need to act.
My thoughts exactly
I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. Mostly I’ve been trying to finish Lewis Mumford’s massive book The City in History. It’s something I started way back in Minneapolis but never had the time to finish. But now that I have a long bus ride to and from work every day, it’s going quite well.
It’s a book that picks up steam as it goes on. Near the end, Mumford really lays into capitalism and its ill effects on society in general and the city, specifically. I can’t say there’s a lot that I disagree with. When I get done with it, I plan on putting up a few of my favorite quotes from the book for posterity.
But I just couldn’t let this one get by. It’s from an article in the New York Times discussing public art in the city’s subway stops. Having just experienced the city for the first time, and being from the underpopulated Midwest myself, I understand her completely.
“I grew up in Kansas and fell in love with the subways on the first day of my adult life in New York. After years of untold subway time spent watching, listening, reading I would say that large, active systems of mass transit are the main difference between the red and the blue states of the 2000 electoral map (California excepted). People who travel only by private car most of America can too easily stick to their own kind and cling to their prejudices and misconceptions without the threat of contradictory experiences.”
Eerie beauty
The similarity between these two pieces of media is not surprising, but it is striking, nonetheless. One is a satellite composite image of the Earth at night that makes a good case for light pollution restrictions, while the other is a Java applet that geographically plots the US ZIP codes. Although it is obvious that the amount of light pollution will directly correlate to the density of the population (and hence to the density of the ZIP code distribution), it’s still fun to compare the two maps.
I found the distribution of the data to be most interesting in the sparsely populated areas in the west, where it roughly followed the interstate highway system. Contrast it to the densely populated east, where large-scale settlement predated the major interstates. It’s amazing, and sad, how millions of tons of concrete (billions, even) can dictate the direction of a society.
This is not progress
Everything about this story of officials in Shanghai banning bikes on major city roads smells rotten. It’s unfortunate that the “growing affluence” experienced by the Chinese has to bring them down the ugly American path of increased personal mobility at the expense of the society and the environment.
Does the increasing dominance of the automobile and the corresponding decrease in the quality of city life in the last 50 years in America provide no lesson to anyone else? To have the experience of history on one’s side and still make the same mistakes is plain ignorance.
There’s so much more left to be said. This isn’t the last time that I’ll speak of this.
