Category Archives: Rational Urbanism

A few months ago one of my readers from Chicago was planning to be in the Northeast for a few days and contacted me to ask what I might recommend he do in Springfield to get to know the place. He and his family ended up stopping by the house and we had a wonderful chat and spent a few hours at the Quadrangle. It was a wonderful feeling for me to spend time with people who were as familiar with my thoughts as I am and who had clearly gotten to know my neighborhood from my blog and had felt as though they wanted to visit the place because of the words that I had written. 

Just last week that reader, Mark Dawson, wrote a letter to the Strong Towns blog which they published. It was a marvelous articulation of many of the thoughts and concerns which I have and sometimes voice here at Rational Urbanism. The editors at Strong Towns commented that they wanted his words be used as a springboard for a conversation about how their readers and members feel about the current state of the world, their country, their community, and their lives. Selfishly, I’ve decided to use it to add to my work here on my own blog. 

I would ask you to read Mark’s work before moving on to mine if that is at all possible as my words are directly in response to his.

I am profoundly and deeply conflicted. I find myself in the most fulfilling relationship I have ever had, more economically prosperous than I have ever been, and moving forward with more ambitious long term plans than I ever have before while at the same time a huge transformation is occurring in my community including a combination of developments both long sought and altogether unexpected at every scale possible. On the other hand many people very close to me are experiencing existential crises: colleagues, family, and friends are struggling with psychological, physical, romantic, interpersonal, professional, and economic maladies from which they may never fully recover.

(A bike lane, on Main Street in Springfield, Massachusetts. No. Really.)

(Just an average arrivals and departures board at a real train station. In Springfield. No. Really.)

While any hope I had about the United States experiencing a soft landing from its imperial activities were destroyed like so many Afghan villages or Iraqi children in our belligerent response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the expansion of our destructive behavior in Libya and Syria spurred on by Nobel Peace Prize laureates and supposed chief diplomats (and would be “presidentas”) has merely confirmed to me that democracies often do not get the leaders they need, but they may in fact get the ones they deserve.

In other words my cabin on board the Titanic is really ship-shape. 

Years ago I saw a horrific scene on a news program (or in the few minutes of The Faces of Death movies I have seen) which showed a man whose main and backup parachutes had become entangled. The camera followed him toward the ground until his final destination was obscured by a trailer of some sort. I noticed that he was desperately trying to disentangle the chutes all the way down, even beyond the point where doing so could possibly change the ultimate outcome. It was clear that he had determined to focus on the minutiae of the intertwined ropes rather than on the hard ground swiftly rising to meet him. 

That became, for me, a metaphor for my life. As with death in the poetry of Borges or García Lorca, I know that it moves towards me unceasingly and untiringly; but I also have what time I have to occupy as I see fit; and I will choose which ropes I will work to disentangle. 

The primary difference between my demise and the ultimate discontinuity of the way of life of this civilization is that my timeline is relatively well known and extremely limited. I hope to live for at least another 10 years, but it’s hard to imagine being around in another 35 or 40. By contrast my abridged copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begins many lifetimes before 476 A.D.. The denouement of American civilization could be a century hence.

What to do, then, in this Long Emergency of catabolic collapse? This epoch could turn out to be even more revolutionary than the time of Voltaire, but I would say that the Enlightenment era certainly throws down a marker for us. What was Candide’s response to the upheaval he witnessed all around him? To tend his own garden. 

That, in the literal and figurative sense, is my response as well. I have just come in from watering our raised beds, our fruit trees, our grape vines, and our flowers with rain water I captured in my Rube Goldberg rainwater retention and distribution system. I’ve had fun creating it, engineering it, and re-engineering it as it has alternately worked and failed to work. Ditto my bean can solar heater. 

In my neighborhood I try to act as an urbanist philosopher gadfly. My anti-parking views are now notorious enough to be obliquely referenced by others in public venues and for many to know of whom and what they speak and some of my “crack pot” views have become received wisdom in much less than a decade; the primary driver may have been an overall change in the zeitgeist of professions like planning and traffic engineering but my importuning at the local level has helped eliminate the “but we can’t do that here” barrier. 

(Dueling a.m. prostitutes as seen from my window. No. Really.)

I’m allocating my efforts in diminishing amounts as they recede from my living room. Springfield is sufficiently entangled in problems and crises to keep me as occupied as I choose to be for as long as I choose to be so occupied. Already my interests only grudgingly spread beyond my three proximate neighborhoods: Downtown; The South End; and Six Corners. Enough children are separated from parents just a block from my house, enough violence occurs, enough drug abuse, human trafficking, and poverty exist within sight of my front doorstep to keep me busy. Opportunities to promote local food production, a walkable neighborhood, reduce carbon emissions, and improve transit afford me a chance to make a difference right here if I elect to do so. 

(Poor guy lost control of his bottle and can cart. No. Really.)

The destiny of America and of industrial society is probably set, but that of my town and my region in my lifetime, and perhaps in that of my children is not; at least I choose not to believe it to be so…as I continue my own personal…descent.

What makes one an urbanist in one place may not make one an urbanist in another. The Superstar cities have hordes of trained professionals opining on their every bike lane and subway stop. Is the font on our trolley signage consistent with the hoppiness of our most famous I.P.A.? Will the arrival of Whole Foods drone delivery make gluten free beignets harder to find at the farmer’s market? 

In other places, like this one, there is almost no analysis of things that are happening from the urbanist perspective. I have no official qualifications as “an urbanist”. I’ve lived downtown for 30 years. I’ve immersed myself in Kunstler and Whyte, I’ve slogged through some Jane Jacobs. (Glad she existed, glad others find her to be insightful) I volunteered with a downtown organization for a few months when I finished college, I’ve worked with a downtown residents group as a liaison and an employee of a neighborhood association, I’ve served on a couple of boards, and, as the Internet has expanded, I’ve read as much as possible about trends in cities and urban life. In New York or San Francisco or Boston or Chicago that would make me one of thousands.

In Springfield I’m called an urbanist. I’ve even been called “a local historian”. It reminds me of when I became my daughters’ soccer coach because I was the only parent who understood the offside rule. 

Between Springfield and New Haven a new commuter rail service opened this week. It services an area with well over 2 million people but I didn’t see a single article on CityLab or Planetizen, my go to urbanist news web sites. These are some headlines they did have this week though:

In that vacuum, here, I can make a difference. Way back when I started this blog one of the topics I returned to week after week was parking, but not just parking in the general sense but rather a particular plan to raze a building at the 100% corner of the region, the intersection of State and Main streets, for a surface parking lot. That plan is still alive in the mind of one particular developer, but unlike 5 years ago the standard response to the plan is not “well, of course, the city could always use more parking” to “oh my god, can you imagine a parking lot at the very center of downtown”. 

I did that. The very same people who supported the need for parking are four square against it now. I wrote post after post with link upon link to published, peer reviewed papers, and I mocked in the strongest terms possible the backwardness of anyone who could still believe that what cities need to compete is more space dedicated to parking. I’ve heard, more and more, my own talking points repeated back to me: my own turns of phrase, my personal emphasis, even my own puns. I bumped in to a local architect downtown and we started talking about his time on the historical commission and about the goings on with MGM. As we started talking about the work he was doing he mentioned the townhouses just up the street from me. These townhouses:

I started to mention my theory about them and he stopped me and said “I know, just like the Painted Ladies of San Francisco”. The developers he was working with had read my blog. At least on that topic.

Do people in your community know that posted speed limits mean almost nothing, that drivers respond to the design of the road? Do they know how blank walls discourage pedestrians? Do they understand why airwalks are a bad idea? If they don’t, and you do, then YOU are an urbanist. When I explain why making a place more auto-centric actually makes parking more difficult because more people will have to drive I’m an urbanist. 

One of the privileges of living in a mediocre place is that it gives many more people of modest achievement opportunities to be more active, and more significant, in the development of their places. I’ve never strived to be the best at anything. Most things which require a lot of work actually aren’t worth doing; putting that effort elsewhere just might accomplish more, and more easily. I could have taken a half hour to carefully proofread Outer Darkness. Instead I wrote this. My wife will tell me if there’s a their where there’s supposed to be a they’re or a there, at some point I’ll notice an on where there should be an and, but in the mean time you’ll have understood the basic idea, and you’ll have learned just how much of an urbanist YOU really are. Or aren’t.

45 years ago a kid named Richard Johnson moved from this area to what I can still recall to this day was an address which ended “Oregon Side, Weiser Idaho”. It’s a memorable address. To me, the Oregon Side of Weiser, Idaho should probably be Weiser, Oregon, right? I’m sure it made sense to a letter carrier in 1974. Richard and I corresponded once or twice, as kids do, and then we lost touch. 

As I contemplated my posts from last week and the back and forth it promulgated I spent a few hours contemplating and meditating about experiences I had as a child, as a teen, and as a young adult with respect not just to “place”, but to this place, as neighbors, friends, and family dispersed from Springfield heading south, west, or to the suburbs. 

A short while after Richard left for Oregon, or Idaho, one of my two best friends in school, Mark Fortner, moved to the Carolinas, I can’t recall which one. Perhaps the northern side of the southern one or vice versa. By high school my other elementary school friend had moved to the suburbs. By the time I reached high school my brother had moved to Oregon with his wife and kids, and my sister was living all over the place, but mostly down south, with her husband who was in the Navy. (As an aside, in the decade after I was born Springfield had its Air Force Base shut and its largest federal facility, the armory, closed. What seems now an ever expanding American military’s one and only attempt at fiscal restraint! It just happened to decimate this area. Thanks, ‘Murica)

Of the 8 kids on my street I knew growing up: two moved to Florida, one moved to Utah, one to Kansas, and another to Washington state, two live in the suburbs, and there’s one of whose location I am not aware. This list isn’t unique, we are a mobile culture and I’m certain every one of my readers can make a list of friends and family who have moved away from them, or perhaps a list of people you have left behind having moved. Regardless of the universality of the experience, these were in fact my experiences and they marked me.

Another enormously important element of my youth which has clearly defined my understanding of my place was my religion. My parents had converted to Mormonism right about the time I was born so it was the only faith I had known. It created a duality within me: my ancestors arrived in Massachusetts on the Mayflower in 1620, but MY New Jerusalem was located 2,000 miles away in the desert southwest. 

Going to church every week I came into contact with Mormon missionaries: 19 and 20 year old young men mostly from Utah, or Idaho who were there to make converts to the church, but also to remind young men in the church that they should be preparing to serve as missionaries as well. To further encourage that mindset older teens were given the opportunity to proselytize with them for a few hours here and there and even for weeks at a time during the summer. 

From a distance these young men had always spoken glowingly and positively about the “mission field” in which they were called to serve, in Mormon parlance it was called the Connecticut, Hartford Mission. Its territory stretched from upstate New York and Vermont through western Connecticut and Massachusetts. When I began to spend time with these “Elders” up close it was clear that they h a t e d New England. Some weren’t used to the cold, few were accustomed to poverty, and none of them seemed to had ever seen a Black person or a Puerto Rican before. You see, missionaries aren’t very successful in wealthy places, rich people really don’t see any need to change. The poor on the other hand are much more fertile soil for “the message of the gospel”. As kids “back home” they lived where they lived and spent time with people like themselves, but out here they spent most of their time in places they never would have even known existed, to the degree they did, in their own hometowns.

That said, they made no bones about what they saw as the inferiority of New England to Idaho, or Utah. From a Mormon standpoint that makes sense of course, but from a larger cultural standpoint it borders on the ridiculous. As someone as steeped in the lore of my ancestors as I was in Mormon dogma I could only take so much. I started to hit back at jabs taken at my community. Apart from reminding them that both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were New Englanders, I reminded these universally patriotic conservative Americans that the struggle for independence began here. I asked them to name a single writer from the Mountain West to place in a list with Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Dickinson, or Frost. Where were the great inventions of Utah? What the great industries of Idaho? If worse came to worse I mentioned how hypocritical their remarks from the pulpit about “loving Massachusetts and its people” were.

I found, when I went to Utah, that Massachusetts, followed closely by New York, held special feelings of antipathy within Mormons. I found at the base of this hatred a profound inferiority complex akin to the American hatred of France. They loved to call Brigham Young the “Harvard of the West”; I don’t ever recall anyone at UMass striving to be called the “Utah State of the East”, or M.I.T. the “University of Utah of New England”. The average New Englander doesn’t think any more about Utah than they do about South Dakota.

Not true for Mormon kids in Massachusetts though.

This weighed on me. I felt strongly connected to my place, whatever the reason. I think that there was something about others criticizing it so freely, and abandoning it so readily that made me cling to it all the more. Somehow, in ways other people seemed to easily avoid, who I was was tied up with the place where I had been born and raised. When the center cannot hold things fall apart, and so I’ve lived at the center of my region from the moment I moved back here after college. I’ve never denied being a contrarian. Perhaps the ultimate move of a contrarian is to not just to stay where others insist you leave, but to place yourself at the heart of the storm, the center of the madness. My parents were like rocks. They never moved from the home where they lived when I was born. I never once heard them voice any thoughts of leaving Massachusetts, Springfield, or 97 Brentwood Street. 

Wise or not, rational or not, I take it very personally when people leave this place having once lived here. In Mormon theology there is really only on true “Hell”: Outer Darkness. To be condemned to it one must have known the truth of the LDS faith and rejected it. If I could, I suppose I might condemn those who abandon this place to weeping, wailing, and the gnashing of teeth.

Six years on it might be easy to lose sight of the original purpose behind the creation of this website: to address topics related to cities that aren’t Superstar cities in ways that don’t just adhere to the narrative of urban pathology, to separate mistaken perspectives from real challenges so as to confront them. I began to question some of what I’ve been writing, wondering if it wasn’t simply becoming too contrary when I realized that it is precisely what I write which is contrary to the received wisdom which is most important.

Websites, blogs, and news coverage of the bookends of American cities, from San Francisco and Boston on one end, to Detroit and Oakland on the other leave out so many communities in the middle, believing they are saying much about a great many places, all the while saying nothing meaningful about most of them. 

This week a truly accomplished city blogger wrote the following:

I have no doubt that from his perch in the Great Northwest this makes perfect sense. If we woke up tomorrow with 20 more square miles of San Francisco, Seattle, or Portland, those blocks would be filled in the blink of an eye with fantastically successful, walkable urbanism and even more Millenials and retiring Baby Boomers would fall all over themselves to be ensconced in the best of North American urban lifestyles. 

But here, in western New England, it’s just pure ridiculousness. It’s not just downtown Springfield either. There are a handful of Main Streets in this region with “to die for” urbanism and architecture within a metro area that is in the top half of ALL urban metros in the United States for income and prosperity. They sit in what is arguably the world’s #1 economic corridor and contain housing stock which is second to none. But demand is, at best, somewhat slack. There are “too many cities”. Springfield, Hartford, Worcester, Bridgeport, New Haven, Providence, Portland, to say nothing of the third tier cities like Waterbury, Chicopee, New Britain and dozens of similar places…and that’s just New England!

The blogpost, in the context of refuting a recent suburban triumphalism, is not from a perspective which I dislike, but it’s useless to me. His point is that while only 17 of 53 metro areas have core neighborhoods growing at a faster rate than their suburbs, and that IS down from a high of 25 just a few years ago, it’s up from 7 in prior decades. In other words, Boston, D.C., Atlanta, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, and the like are still doing well. Maybe I don’t speak for everyone in Akron, Syracuse, Youngstown, Gary, and Scranton, but…who the hell cares?! That is supposed to mean something HERE?

THESE PLACES are a hard sell. Things could turn around, things can improve, but the evidence for just HOW difficult this path is going to be can be gleaned from our biggest supporters. Take Gracen “A New Place for Me” Johnson and her poetic pieces about the beauty of Fredericton; many spectacular elegies to the mesmeric quaintness of a struggling little maritime city. She lives in Toronto now. I don’t fault her for that, but, in truth, it makes it WORSE, not better, that she instructs us all on how wonderful a place Fredericton is for years, and tells us how lucky anyone would be to be linked to that place. And then leaves.

“I can’t believe she broke up with you. You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re so thoughtful and caring. Any girl would be lucky to have you as a boyfriend.”

“You wanna hang out?”

“Ummmm. I think we’re better off as friends.”

This week Rachel Quednau of Strongtowns wrote an excellent, heartfelt piece about how people in places like Akron should struggle against negativity and pessimism; avoiding the “psychology of decline”! Last I heard she’s moving to…Rochester? Cleveland? St. Louis? Detroit? 

Boston.

It’s like Ike: “Watch out for that military-industrial complex.”

Good call. Hey, wait, weren’t you a four star general before you became President? Seems like the kinda guy who could have DONE SOMETHING about the problem! Nope. 

“Yeah, ummm, the house is a little bit on fire but I’m gonna take my fire truck and head down to Florida for Spring Break. Good luck with that though.”

When I worked with my local civic association I called it the “no job is too difficult and unrewarding…for YOU to do.” 

“Have fun storming the castle!”

“I’m behind you all the way. Way behind you. At a really safe distance.”

This piece was just published about my very neighborhood. Note the blue dot; it shows you exactly where I sit as I write this post.

Read it. It’s pretty accurate. I’ve published entire photo essays on the bad behavior I can see from the very widows I am looking out as I write this piece. It’s a tough ask to expect a young person, a young couple, a young family, to commit to one of those places “rich in potential” but in no way guaranteed to succeed and yet, that is precisely what is needed for these places to succeed. 

We have the sidewalks, the parks, the museums, the bars, the restaurants, the colleges, the libraries, the transit, and, an incredible variety of EXTREMELY affordable housing, but the people who know this the most thoroughly STILL end up drawn to the certainty of the Superstar Cities. Everybody’s got a reason why YOU should stay, but THEY are gonna need to go. That’s the issue. That’s the problem. That’s the whole god damned point. Thanks for the “thoughts and prayers”, but we could use some actual help. The psychology of decline exists because those of us who have spent decades working to improve these places keep getting ditched by people who have “other priorities”. Thanks, Dick. Around here the chirping from the sidelines is loudest from the people whose abandonment OF the city is what has done the absolute most to harm the city. 

Thank you, thank you very much for your concern, but you want to maybe grab an oar there, buddy?

There are some game changers. Things are happening. I can see a chance for a real turnaround here, but that doesn’t come from the opening of a new coffee shop, or a neighbor putting in a granny flat, it comes from enormous shifts in connectivity and livability here due directly to governmental actions at the state level spurred on by trends that are as much out of our control as the ones which have caused this place to struggle for the last half century. So why even try? This is why.

One of the maps I’ve seen dividing the United States into separate regions puts Springfield into the category of “recovered” or “revitalized” Rust Belt city. The study whose data created the map is a year old, and came from data covering the years before that. The takeaway from the report was that location was by far the most important factor in determining which cities succeeded and which failed at revitalizing themselves. Proximity to larger, vibrant metropolitan areas created positive growth pressure in housing and employment which translated into economic vitality. Conversely, similar cities which are more isolated or are located near struggling larger metro areas struggled to create jobs and retain population.

Supporters of the communities which have experienced the most success, and critics of those which have experienced the most failure would point to policies, initiatives, budgetary priorities and claim that this or that alternative decision would have drastically altered the outcomes in question; the reality is that most of what determined success or failure had nothing to do with these things but “true believers” will claim that their pet policy led to success or that its imperfect implementation led to failure.

Springfield sits in a very unusual spot; on the outer edge of two enormous and enormously vibrant metro regions and right next door to yet another struggling one. Culturally and logistically connected to New York, politically connected to Boston and neighbor to Hartford, Springfield has most certainly not been the most robust example of a revitalized or revitalizing Rust Belt city. If the trends continue, which is to say if prosperity continues to spread from New York and Boston then both declining Hartford and stagnant Springfield are next in line for major transformations. 

The country’s newest commuter rail line, seeing its first day of service as I write this post, has the potential to be an absolute game changer in bringing Hartford and Springfield both closer to New York City, and closer to each other. Together the two geographically small metro areas are home to two million people, dozens of colleges, and a handful of major employers. The introduction of the service has pushed politicians from eastern Massachusetts to take seriously the idea of connecting Boston to Springfield by rail, the inland option to the shoreline corridor that’s always seemed surplus to requirements. Beyond that, the idea of connecting the Berkshires and Franklin county to this system could turn around the population declines of the two most rural counties in Massachusetts. 

For me, these should have been priorities in Boston for decades already; not for reasons of altruism, but just to rid itself of some parasitic dependents. 

So despite some really boneheaded people in the private sector and their attitudes toward auto-oriented development that place Springfield squarely in the 1970’s, the public sector has presented Springfield with one of the finest transportation hubs in the United States on its newest commuter rail line and, in two totally unconnected developments, a brand new rail car manufacturing facility, and a billion dollar resort casino including millions of dollars of improvements to public parks, sidewalks, pedestrian signals, bike lanes, and pavements. This enormous boost in investment, infrastructure, attention, and optimism may be the springboard that lifts the city out of its doldrums; certainly if this doesn’t do it then nothing will.

So, am I preaching urban Calvinism? Yes. The ultimate fate of your community is likely to be determined by powers much greater than any tactical urbanism, incremental development, or block by block strategy can hope to equal. But that was never the point, at least to me. Those things can, do, and will make your place better whether the fates dictate it be a winner or a loser in a broader perspective. 

I bought this house, planted flowers, repaired the façade, planted an apple tree, cut back the shrubs, painted the fence, and picked up trash before there were plans to implement the New Haven to Springfield rail line, before MGM set its sights on the South End, and before there were Transformative Development Districts. The two historic buildings across the street from my house were empty and Develop Springfield didn’t even exist. As far as I knew I was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I may still be. 

Anyone with the money, or access to credit, can live in a great neighborhood where all there is to do is enjoy the fruits of success. Watching a place transform, for better, for worse, fighting the good fight, winning some and losing some, is about as selfish an act as I can imagine. Savior or martyr it’s an interesting path to trod. 

There were two tomes I took to Brigham Young University every autumn: Clyde Smith’s New England and his Enchantment of New England photo books. The trees, the green grass, the rolling hills, and the mountains of my little corner of the world reminded me that there was life on this planet, even if very little of it existed in the desert southwest. I understand the allure of New England’s countryside from the Hilltowns and the Berkshires to Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. In urbanist circles the small cities and towns of the region act as a sort of template for achievable American walkability when Manhattan or the European model seem unreachable. 

It makes it that much harder then for a struggling industrial city in the post-industrial era to retain population. The alternative here isn’t all, or even mostly, suburban cul de sacs and generic townhouses swimming in asphalt. There are authentic small towns with traditions dating back to the colonial era, college towns brimming with youthful energy, genuine rural homesteads, and cottages on dozens of ponds and lake fronts. Add to that the fact that Boston and New York are a little over an hour, or just over two hours away and I suppose it’s hard for non-residents and residents alike to not come away with the sensation that Springfield is left wanting, not just in some way, but in every way. 

There isn’t anything we have which someplace nearby doesn’t have more, better, larger, more impressive, more famous, more quaint, easier to get to, better run, or more accessible. Mattoon Street meet Beacon Hill. Forest Park, say hello to Central Park. Basketball Hall of Fame, have you been to Cooperstown? 

What I find interesting is how this, I believe, has started to boomerang and have a really negative impact on the communities around Springfield which by and large not only take the city for granted, but actively loathe it. The last 30 years of almost complete stagnation here have finally begun to ripple through places which previously seemed impervious to our problems in the City of Firsts. The demographic reality seems to be that white Millennials who want a suburban lifestyle are moving south and west, and Puerto Ricans don’t feel any need to escape the city to get away from other Puerto Ricans and they’re the ones having children and staying put in, or even relocating to Springfield. District after district in the suburbs and ex-urbs are laying off teachers, closing schools, and trying to plug budget gaps.

The surge that’s taken place in the last few years here in Springfield’s densest neighborhoods has been remarkable. It’s hard to point in a direction where hundreds of thousands, or even millions aren’t being spent to build new schools, renovate apartment buildings and townhouses, rebuild parks, and create new institutions. The paradox is that housewives, teachers, town managers, realtors, and shop owners miles away, who will tell you that they literally go out of their way to avoid the city physically and probably spend even greater energy to wall off their minds from any concerns whatsoever related to Springfield, may have more at stake in these efforts than the residents of the city itself actually do. 

The city is improving. The city has reversed its decline. The city is growing. The city has retained Mass Mutual. The city has a major new street car manufacturing facility. The city will be home to the brand new MGM resort. We will be better off. Will the city become strong enough once again to be at the heart of a revitalized region? That clearly remains to be seen. For decades people took advantage of the employment opportunities provided by the region’s largest employers and the business opportunities provided by the region’s largest population center without any thought for whether or how the city would continue to be there for them to exploit. They might want to think about it now.

Just some precious nuggets of wisdom I was fortunate enough to overhear in the discussion regarding the future of a certain downtown parcel. Seriously.

1)Although some people say that downtown has enough parking, on some nights “the only people downtown are the ones citing visitors for parking illegally.”

This is the Russian nesting doll of pro-parking lot intellectual jujitsu: It combines the solid reasoning of Yogi Berra’s “nobody goes there, it’s too crowded” with a criticism of the gestapo like qualities of municipal parking enforcement (jack-booted meter maids) and the city’s anti-business mindset all the while expressing the All-American belief that only when we can drive and park everywhere all the time without government interference will we be truly free!

2) The removal of an historic building is actually preferable because it makes the other historic buildings in proximity to it more visible and, one might extrapolate, more valuable because it makes them even more rare and therefore benefits historic preservation overall.

This could revolutionize human behavior! The Prado should destroy one Velázquez every year until, you know, the ones that are left are really valuable. Think of endangered species; what if we endanger all the species? Parents could start culling their children to maximize the love and attention they give to each child. This is addition by subtraction, the town with the fewest historic buildings is the most historic place of all! Think jazz. You need gaps in the historic fiber of the city to really see the history that remains.

3)It’s possible for a structure to lose its historic significance over time and therefore documentation of historicity must be updated and contemporary to a proceeding or it has no value.

 I mean, what has the so called Freedom Trail done lately? When was the last time Williamsburg even colonialed? Did you know that some of the pyramids don’t even have dead pharaohs in them anymore?  Historic places need to be judged on what they’ve done this year, this month, today. Too many protected places are just sitting back and making the rest of us do all the “being historic” . And why isn’t there a White History month? Sorry, wrong stupid argument.

4)As a corollary to the wisdom of the prior axiom, gainsaying any statement of fact establishing historicity is, of itself, proof that a building has no historic value whatsoever. Also if one isn’t paying attention when a list of historic attributes is read aloud in a hearing those attributes cease to exist; this also holds for members of commissions whose sole purpose is the protection of a community’s historic attributes.

Adults don’t put their hands over their ears and yell “la la la la”, that would be childish. Just assert that what was said wasn’t said, what was read wasn’t read, and that the documents you’ve been given don’t exist. 

5)There is a number, X, greater than zero whose value is equivalent to zero when establishing the number of active tenants in a building for purposes of claiming that a building has 0 tenants.

I’m not really a math person. Perhaps this is post modernist mathematics? Observer theory: If a tattoo parlor is open in my building but the building isn’t at the public hearing, is it really a tenant? Dude. You just blew my mind.

6)A building can only be considered to have great architectural value if it has Corinthian columns. 

So many of these other truths are deep and philosophical, but this one gets down to the nitty gritty of what it means to truly be historic. Fact: all history is Greco-Roman. Fact: All things Greco-Roman are historic. Fact: We can streamline all findings of historic significance by taking the time and effort to systematize our understanding of the classical orders. No more “blah blah blah” about people, events, or even dates. The statement remains operative even if a particular building has applied pilasters of the Ionic order, obviously, but what remains ambiguous is whether Doric, Ionic, bud, and/or bell shaped capitals on columns establish significance and/or if applied pilasters with Corinthian capitals are sufficient. Ground breaking.

Last weekend was all about the outdoors and food. The annual pancake breakfast celebrating the founding of Springfield in 1636 got us up and out the door before 8 a.m. in order to beat the rain. It was great to see the usual cast of characters, from the mayor to an eccentric local we call Superman Guy because of his affinity for wandering the city streets in costume; as we were walking by the two of them shook hands! Unfortunately I was too slow to catch that moment of magic. We had our pancakes, talked with friends, and wandered up and down Main Street for an hour.

From there we visited the new and improved Gardening the Community base location and got a tour of the greenhouse, the grounds, and the fields from an immensely likable, if not omniscient, young man. These are the people who deliver our CSA share on bikes every Wednesday. Great food. Great community building. They’re adding to the weekly delivery and the farmers market a small on-site store which will be open on some of the other days of the week. We went home and began planting our seedlings and the flowers LuLu had decided on for her bed.

On Sunday we drove out to the hinterlands of Copper Hill Farm and weeded our fields of garlic. LuLu helped some. Wandered around with the dog some. Harassed the chickens some. And pestered Greg (the farmer) some. It took her a while to warm to it, but by the end we had to pretend to be driving away to get her to hop in the car. In the end, Liz got manual labor for Mother’s Day and we didn’t abandon her child in the wilds of Connecticut.

All great stuff for an urban apocalypticist like me: Community building and food production. But a little nasty weather during the week nixed our Tuesday visit to the Forest Park Farmers Market for milk and other items, which meant this weekend we needed to go to the supermarket. It had been a while since my last Big Y excursion, my wife is the one who does most of the food shopping in the winter and to purchase what can’t be acquired via or garden/CSA/farm activities. Things had changed somewhat since my last visit. There were wider aisles than I could recall and lots and lots of stuff labeled as local. At one point I wandered down an aisle and found a box containing, it seems, a polyresin fountain depicting a dog humping a bucket.

At the same time I was listening to, I kid you not, a rendition of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana done in Frank Sinatra crooner style being played over the store’s p.a. system. Not being able to distinguish the urban from the rural is one thing, a polyresin Dali sculpture with accompanying soundtrack is another.

Paradoxically, this surrealism brought me back to the real world. Johnny Sanphillippo is correct: We do “have the infrastructure we have”. Even in one of the oldest regions of the country, in terms of European colonization, which had dozens of traditional town centers before the metastatic post World War II automobile oriented development Ponzi scheme, and which has grown almost not at all since, there are miles of ridiculous stroad ways with dozens and dozens of big box stores, mega supermarkets, strip malls, and apartment complexes. And plenty of suburban homes where a plastic resin fountain of a dog humping a bucket would look quite at home. Not only are these areas never going to be reconfigured to be re-urbanized to align with more efficient land use, but we are going to build more and more of more of them until we absolutely cannot do it anymore. It will only be years after that, perhaps, that most of us may realize that the era of Happy Motoring (Trademark Jim Kunstler) is not coming back.

I’ve known this for a while. A long while. A decade or more. But recently, when I wrote about fighting against the encroachment of auto-oriented crap into my city and my neighborhood, Johnny Sanphillippo commented, well, this:

Very reasonable. Very rational. I understand. And I agree. But it is of extremely limited significance to me. Perhaps an analogy will make the reason clear. 

The opioid crisis sweeping the United States is an inevitable outcome of an empire in decline, not in the precise composition of the chemicals people are using to destroy themselves (in post Soviet Russia it was vodka) but in the way in which a society sheds the vulnerable in the process of coming apart. I do not think that there is anything I can do to stop this crisis. The poor, the ill, and the weak are going to suffer as things begin to unravel. But I can try to protect my family, my friends, and my neighbors and perhaps make a difference in my immediate vicinity. When the history books are written 400 hundred years from now about the fall of the United States no historian will register that this or that individual didn’t die of a heroin overdose in the spring of 2018; it won’t make any difference to the overall narrative. 

But I don’t care about the overall narrative, I care about my place and my people in my community right here and right now. 

America will suffer for creating an infrastructure of daily life which cannot function without the car. Nothing I can do will stop that. I know. If anyone wants to keep reminding me of that fact they may continue to do so, but I don’t care about “America” as a vast continental entity, whose enormity I can scarcely comprehend, I care about one infinitesimally small fraction of it being marginally better than it would otherwise be without my efforts. Perhaps. Perhaps I will have no impact whatsoever. So be it.

Documenting what “is” is important. Attempting to nudge it one way or another is a fool’s errand for the society at large, but retaining a handful of walkable blocks in one specific place and preserving a few acres of farmland nearby is not; and it is what I choose to do at the same time I make incremental improvements to my own preparations for whatever lies ahead.