In Which Kelly Pokes Gentle Fun At Alan

Alan traveled across the country to see something he could have seen in Toronto. That's me, folks: ahead of the curve! In front of the cutting edge!!!

(I'm sure this wasn't an epiphany on Alan's part.)

(UPDATE: And now I see that it's Alan's birthday. May his day be free of Libertarians and weirdos from Niagara Falls filling his comment threads with goofy prattle! Of course, never was a more futile birthday wish offered....)

Teetering

It's been a while since I linked James Howard Kunstler, so do check out his October Eyesore of the Month. This is the funniest building I've ever seen.

When "Gotcha" journalism goes awry

So I'm watching Channel 2 news tonight, and they do a story on Buffalo's waterfront development. It seems that Mayor Byron Brown has just returned from some kind of retail convention thing in Las Vegas where has was reportedly schmoozing retail company execs about the current development of Buffalo's waterfront. One company mentioned was IKEA.

So Channel 2 actually called IKEA, whereupon a rep for the company says that IKEA currently has no plans to open in Buffalo or anyplace else in Upstate NY, mainly because of population issues. (Which makes sense. Nothing wrong with IKEA's thinking here, although it's a bummer when some company says no to our city.)

Having that answer in hand from the IKEA rep, a Channel 2 reporter then confronts Mayor Brown by saying something like, "You said you were talking to IKEA about expanding in Buffalo, but we called them, and they say they have no interest! Can you explain that?" The question was clearly phrased with the underlying assumption that Mayor Brown had been BS-ing everyone last week when he mentioned possibly talking to IKEA.

Well, of course, he did nothing of the sort; conventions like the one he intended aren't where one goes to ink final copies of deals, but rather to just make contacts with people and put the proverbial bugs in their ears. Brown never said that he was entering formal negotiations with IKEA or anything else of the kind. Channel 2's attempt at a "Gotcha" moment was just plain lame.

(On the topic of IKEA, though, I wonder if that company were to announce a waterfront store if it would then draw the same kind of "anti-big box retail" sentiment that Bass Pro seems to be drawing. Especially since I've never yet seen an IKEA that was not of the "suburban big box" variety -- a single-use building containing just the IKEA store, surrounded by a giant surface parking lot.)

Denver International Airport??!!

Via MeFi I see FavoriteArchitecture.org, which purports to be "America's favorite architecture", in which 150 buildings are listed in a ranking determined by some kind of public polling methodology.

There are some very notable buildings here, but some are headscatchers -- a hotel in Vegas, Denver International Airport, and so on. One wonders if the World Trade Center would have made the list had it not been destroyed, since I've yet to read anything highly complimentary of that building's architecture.

And in the entire list, not one building from Buffalo. Harumph.

Parking, parking, parking!

In this post from yesterday, I discussed my belief that parking garages need not be disastrous ugly buildings that destroy cityscapes. In comments, "Bill" responds:

The problem is not the ugliness, per se-- it is really more that the street life disappears around parking structures. There is no pedestrian activity, and a big block of space becomes the urban equivalent of a desert. Worse, actually-- the lack of activity can make these areas more dangerous. We have plenty of parking-- and plenty of arid desert in downtown Buffalo.

But again, my point is that this doesn't have to be the way it is around parking garages. It just doesn't. I'm not suggesting building a prettier parking garage that is still just a parking garage. Here's what I'm thinking of:



That's Eaton Centre in Toronto, facing south on Yonge Street. (Photo filched from this Toronto blog.)

See all that street facade, there? You can make out the actual parking structure lurking behind that, and in the middle of the photo you can also see the entrance to the garage where the cars go in. But flanking that garage entrance, and in front of the parking garage itself, is a regular old streetscape, with stores and, therefore, pedestrian activity. If the new waterfront/Central Wharf project is going to have its own parking -- and it will have to, nobody's going to walk all the way from the parking at HSBC Arena or farther into downtown to this thing, no matter how much parking exists in downtown already -- that's the way to build it.

A building that is primarily parking garage doesn't have to just be parking garage, and it certainly doesn't have to be a big gray box. (And note that there's nothing mysterious about this: it's just simple urban design principle at work. Build to the street, and hide your parking.)

River of the Monks

I recently read Bill Bryson's latest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, in which Bryson recounts his experiences as a kid in 1950s America (Des Moines, IA, specifically). This was one of the more delightful reads I've enjoyed in a long time, full of the kind of loving naivete that marked, say, the funnier episodes of The Wonder Years or the less-serious parts of Stand By Me.

People [in the 50s] looked forward to the future, too, in ways they never would again. Soon, according to every magazine, we were going to have underwater cities off every coast, space colonies inside giant spheres of glass, atomic trains and airliners, personal jet packs, a gyrocopter in every driveway, cars that turned into boats or even submarines, moving sidewalks to whisk us effortlessly to schools and offices, dome-roofed automobiles that drove themselves along sleek superhighways allowing Mom, Dad, and the two boys (Chip and Bud or Skip and Scooter) to play a board game or wave to a neighbor in a passing gyrocopter or just sit back and enjoy some of those splendid words that existed in the fifties and are no longer heard: mimeograph, rotisserie, stenographer, icebox, dime store, rutabaga, Studebaker, panty raid, bobby socks, Sputnik, beatnik, canasta, Cinerama, Moose Lodge, pinochle, daddy-o.

(Well, a couple of those words are still around, aren't they? Just last week at The Store I had to help move our rotisserie, and believe me, that damn thing is heavy, so much so that when we have to move it, we then refer to it by its official name, "the f***ing rotisserie".)

This book was often laugh-out-loud funny, and it describes a world that is not only gone but that we also seem to admit is gone and thus try to preserve or recapture as best we can. Just last week in a Buffalo suburb, an injunction was sought by some preservationists in order to preserve a drive-in movie theater. The only mis-step in the book comes in a chapter toward the middle where Bryson delves into the dark underbelly of 1950s America (McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the dawn of the arms race, the seeds of Vietnam, race relations); it's a well-written chapter, but it doesn't really fit the rest of the book at all, and as such that chapter stands out like a sore thumb.

As usual with books like this, toward the end it takes on an elegiac tone about the passing of an age. Here's the final passage:

That's the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn't keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian decor, but thrillingly livened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic. Imagine having all of public life -- offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments -- conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to another. Imagine having a cafeteria with atomic toilets [you have to read the book to know what the hell Bryson's talking about here], a celebrated tea room that gave away gifts to young customers, a clothing store with a grand staircase and a mezzanine, a Kiddie Corral where you could read comics to your heart's content. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

What a wonderful world that would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won't see its like again, I'm afraid.

You see faint hints of that old world every now and then in American cities these days. Obviously things will never be like that again, but maybe as we move forward, we will draw inspiration from the best of that time? Who knows?

Anyway, this was a good book. I'm a big fan of Bill Bryson's writing.

Loops! Look at all the pretty loops!

One oddly endearing thing I always forget about when I go to Rochester, until I see it again, is the Inner Loop. This is an expressway that runs tightly around the city's downtown core, presumably built for easy commuter access to downtown. I've done a bit of Googling, and I find that like many such expressways, it's seen as a barrier between the downtown and the outlying neighborhoods, creating an artificial barrier to development or whatnot.

Parts of the Inner Loop are below the normal street level (I'm not sure what the actual term for this is), but if we're worried about the barrier to neighborhoods and streetscapes posed by their crossings of expressways, I'm reminded of a unique solution they did in Columbus, Ohio.

Expressways can be dividers in cities. But there's nothing that says they have to be.

UPDATE: More photos of the Columbus I-670 cap here, from the streetscape level. You literally never know you're crossing an expressway.