City Comforts, the blog

Question

Many people think George Bush extremely foolish for refusing to talk to leaders whose policies he doesn't like. Syria is an example. And I agree with that view: Bush has got it all wrong.. As the Godfather said, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." It seems to me that one should especially talk to people you detest (and btw I think you can simultaneously be in physical conflict with them at the same time.)

But some people condemn Dennis Kucinich because is willing to appear on the FOX network . (Kucinich and FOX come down on different sides of almost every issue.) I don't get the distinction. Talking with an adversary, especially talking to their followers (e.g. the FOX audience), seems like a particularly important thing to do.

Why not talk? It doesn't mean that you like them or respect them or support them. All you are doing is acknowledging that they exist, which is incontrovertible.

Is a toll of $6 each way high-enough to cut back traffic?

$6 tolls proposed, each way, for new 520 Bridge.

I think such a toll will substantially cut the number of users, cutting revenue and making the bridge financing more tenuous.

There could be $6 tolls each way on a new Evergreen Point Bridge within 11 years if regional voters approve a highway-improvement package that rebuilds the aging span, according to a new financing plan for the replacement. The figure, announced Tuesday, was developed by the Regional Transportation Investment District, a three-county entity that is considering the $14.5 billion road improvement package for the November ballot....The new plan estimates $6 tolls, about the same as expected by 2018 on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, except that Evergreen Point tolls would be charged each way. Narrows bridge tolls are expected to be one-way only.

It's a conundrum for bridge planners. They can't build the bridge without a high toll. Yet a high toll will, I believe, discourage traffic so much that even a high toll will not generate enough revenue to pay for it. It's a descending spiral. Then they raise the toll and traffic drops even more. Soon they have to go back to the State's General Fund to pay off the bonds.

UPDATE from The P-I:

Note: This story has been altered. The original version misstated that proposed tolls for the Evergreen Point Bridge could be $6 each way. It's actually $6 round trip.

My question still stands, though not as severely.

Think about the consensus that Bush has been able to foster

Bush's Amazing Achievement

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

This is Seattle (though the "crime" is under state law)

Seattle man sentenced in hate-crime case.

A Seattle man accused of spewing racist remarks at two Crown Hill delicatessen employees Feb. 20 was sentenced Thursday to nine months in jail

I can see tresspass for refusing to leave and/or some degree of assault. But nine months for being a verbal jerk sounds out-of-line; in fact I am not sure if there should be a crime of "misuse of language" at all.

(I should note that the story is VERY poorly written and seems to say both that he was sentenced and also that he will go to trial June 9. So who knows what is really happening. Maybe the prosecutor is asking for nine months.)

Developers plan to build a hotel instead of housing in historic Alaska Building

You say "So what? It's their property. Are we all communists?"

Not so fast. Read deeper:  "In exchange for more downtown housing, Seattle politicians agreed two years ago to take a lower price for the historic Alaska Building than it might have fetched."

Again, they explicitly accepted a below-market price for the property because they thought...well what did they think? They couldn't have thought that the developer had promised to do only housing — or else they would have had a deed restriction or what have you. In all sincerity people change their minds or forget. One of the reasons we put things down in writing is to remind both sides of a deal what the deal was all about.

Some people refer to the City Council as the "clowncil." The name makes more sense every day. Don't send children to do the work of adults.

Is it true that no one wants to walk?

Alex Tabarrok very briefly reviews a new book No one makes you shop at Wal-Mart and offers an example of the book's approach, which Tabarrok likes in part but dislikes. Here's a passage he doesn't like:

Faced with the observation that few children walk to school anymore, we commonly hear that this tendency represents our preferences: that "people won't walk" anymore. But this is oversimplified.� What we are seeing is one equilibrium among many, and perhaps not the best one.� There is an equilibrium in which no one wants their children to walk along empty streets, and so no children walk, but there is another equilibrium in which many children enjoy walking with groups of other children, and parents feel safe about their children because there is safety in numbers on the busy sidewalks. ...Too many cities have concluded that empty sidewalks are a result of our preferences...but once a city takes it as a given that most children will be driven to school, there is no need for the city to even build sidewalks in new subdivisions, and there is more temptation to build fewer, bigger schools rather than more, smaller, easily accessible schools.� With these decisions, the empty-sidewalks equilibrium becomes even more entrenched: we are trapped in an outcome that was the result of individual choices, but that may not represent our true preferences.

At least in this instance, I think the analysis is correct. If there are no or few sidewalks and you create a hostile environment for walking well then few will walk leading to the belief/myth that no one wants to walk. I hear such an perspective all the time when people say that a proposed building need not have a pedestrian orientation along a particular street because "No one walks on that street." Obviously an examination of places where people do walk suggests that such a belief — "People won't walk." — is not accurate. People will walk when it is comfortable. People won't walk when it is not comfortable.

Of course the "People won't walk" attitude yields an unfriendly street-front (usually a blank wall) which will guarantee that indeed no one will walk along that frontage. (Consider Disney Hall in LA.)

Very hard to believe

Seattle Praised for Traffic Efficiency.

Perchance to dream of commuting to work in Stockholm

On the Stockholm Subway

The Stockholm Tunnelbana has three lines encompassing 110km of track and 100 stations of which 64km and 55 stations are underground. Several of the deep underground stations are cut into solid rock which were left with cave-like ceilings. The builders carved fascinating artistic objects out of the rock. One like the base of a gigantic Greek column (Station Radhuset) resembles the excavated remains of some lost city of Atlantis encased in an ancient lava flow. The Station Kungstradgarden has torsos and lion heads emerging from the rock. Modern murals and statues are liberally used in many other stations.

It's simultaneously frustrating ("Why can't we Americans...?") and inspiring ("Surely we Americans can ...") to see how sublimely things can be done in other places. Follow the links to find even more astonishing photos.

•••

via ACD's Sound & Fury, which calls it very very right on this one.

That would be an interesting article for the NYT Travel section

Terry Teachout is on vacation in the Mid-west (Ok, he's on a research trip) and tells us:

I'll be driving out to Frank Lloyd Wright's Muirhead Farmhouse to spend the night. I expect to have much to say about this experience later in the week. In the meantime, permit me to point out that Muirhead Farmhouse is one of five Wright houses available for short-term rental.

These are the others:

• Haynes House, Fort Wayne, Indiana
• Penfield House, Willoughby, Ohio
• Seth Peterson Cottage, Mirror Lake, Wisconsin
• Schwartz House, Two Rivers, Wisconsin

In addition, the first Usonian house, the Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, is available for monthly rental.

That would be a fun tour...maybe in late August when you can stop at county fairs. Of course maybe it's too hot then..so maybe October?

(Links in the original post.)

•••

OK. So I start to take this post seriously. No, not to do an article for the NYT but merely to go and stay at these cabins. "Experience Wright's genius." My sister and her family live in Chicago and so maybe next time I am back there we'll make a party of it and do a little "architecting." Maybe I'll take my clubs — there is some very good golf in the Mid-west. So I check out the Seth Peterson Cottage. And here is what I find:

Unless I am mis-reading the sketch (and I have done so before) it seems to be an idiotic and uncomfortable floor plan. Guests have to go through the bedroom to get to the bathroom. That breaks the most basic rule of "zoning" interior spaces to create a continuum of "public" to very private spaces. Maybe Wright himself would respond by saying that I don't understand "art" or that I am hung-up on bourgeois notions of privacy. Sheesh.

The coup de grace for an independent Dow-Jones?

From what I read, the Bancroft family is so divided internally (and it's not clear whether the disagreements are roted in money or love or something else) that Murdoch's offer of one seat on the board (should his bid for Dow-Jones succeed) might be just the thing to send the family into complete civil war. Murdoch would of course position himself as the savior and white knight for one side (or perhaps more sides).

Chairman Rupert Murdoch sent a 1200-word letter to Bancroft family members over the weekend in an effort to convince them to accept his $5 billion offer for Dow Jones & Co. Inc. ...In the letter, which was sent Saturday and distributed to family members on Monday morning, Mr. Murdoch offered to add a Bancroft family member to News Corp.'s 15-member board if the deal goes through.

See it now

Venice:

In the past half-century, Venice has experienced an exodus of residents. Its population, which stood at 184,000 in 1950, is now a third of that. Recurring flooding and rising tides have left many palazzos decrepit and uninhabitable. At night parts of the historical center are as deserted as an abandoned movie set.

Show your work!

I am fascinated by accounts of real estate development. I have been reading with regularity the Dream Home Diaries Blog in the NYT. And I have figured out why my pleasure in reading sometimes turns into annoyance: The writers seem to be totally lacking in the ability to    show their work,

For example, the bloggers have just received a very preliminary design from their architect —  and this is after a build-up of at least 4 months — and showed it to their tentative contractor for his comments. And his first comment after a nano-second of review was that the design didn't even come close to meeting the zoning code of the jurisdiction because of too much "lot coverage." 

Now lot coverage is an extremely basic design constraint. It is hard for me to fathom how an even halfway-competent architect — and the firm they chose seems quite competent — could miss such a basic issue. My response, should I have heard that analysis from a contractor with local knowledge, would have been to get on the phone to the architect immediately to get a response. But our Dream Home bloggers simply accept the fact that their design is not buildable and the last we see of them is in the airport, waiting for a flight home and concluding that the town's

....building officials probably wouldn’t approve the plans because the house and pool took up too much of the lot.

But we get none of the intermediate conversation. Did they ask the architect for a response? What did the architect say? Did they fire the architect for such an absurd mistake? Or fire the contractor being a dangerous know-it-all? Who know. The bloggers tell us nothing. This defective design is a huge event and should have triggered phone calls back-and-forth and extensive commentary on the blog. But these folks seem to just accept the word of one man without any investigation. I can't believe that they have actually done so that's why I say to them "Show your work!"

Distance sometimes provides objectivity

By now everyone has probably heard about the ad (supposedly — I haven't seen it) posted by the City of Pasadena, California for a local politics & government reporter who is based in India. Guffaws all about. I am not so sure. So long as the reporter has unlimited phone and very high-speed web access, it might work well. In fact the stories might even be better as the reporter him or herself would be less likely (per Heisenberg) to influence the events.

Learning from the USA?

Bangladeshi writer seized by police who claim “It is an emergency; we can arrest anyone.”

Welcome aboard

Others are finally seeing the possibility: A Greener Viaduct?

First a little background:  Can you believe it's been 6 years, 2 months and 10 days since the 6.8 Nisqually Earthquake.  That's 2,262 days.

Engineering studies have shown that 25 more seconds of rattling and the Alaskan Way Viaduct likely would have collapsed.  And on the DOT's website they announce there is a 5% chance the structure could fail in the next 10 years.

So, what have we accomplished toward finding a solution in those 2,262 days?  Absolutely nothing of course.  And all the while 110,000 vehicles use the roadway each day.  I'm glad to know our political "leaders" value safety so highly.  What a joke.

So let's be realistic, we're obviously not going to have a solution for at least another 10 years.  Everyone keeps blowing hot air about how important it is to make Seattle a "world-class city" and "reconnect us to the waterfront", by "tearing this wall down".  Funny how we don't hear anything being mentioned about safety in those catchy little statements.  So do we actually think the problem is just that the viaduct is ugly?

Well if that's the case, instead of blowing $5 billion on a tunnel, I've got a cost-effective solution. 

Let's just grow ivy all over the viaduct.  A little pressure washing, a little paint, maybe some quaint streetlights with some colorful banners that simply say "Metronatural!" wouldn't hurt either.  But if you're down on the waterfront near Pier 59 I think you'll be pleasantly surprised if you look up and observe the ivy scaling up the concrete columns.  Just picture it everywhere!  It could be Seattle's trademark.  Space Needle.  Coffee.  Ivy-Covered Viaduct.

Maybe then people (Greg Nickels) might stop complaining about how big and ugly the structure is and actually start to focus on the issues that really matter.  You know, little issues like public safety.

Still?

Lunch with François-Henri Pinault.

In fancy French restaurants the woman never gets the menu with the prices.

"Almost There" — So they think.

The dream home bloggers have a design and they think that they are Almost There with the design stage of the project.

Alison, who is much better at picturing how floor plans will look in real life, was equally impressed. “Before we start tweaking this,” I said, “why don’t we show it to the builder to see if he thinks it is doable? If Johnny thinks it looks O.K., you guys can get to work on what could be the final plans.”

But an obviously-experienced reader comments:

The last line in this installment is the perfect lead-in to the next.  I suspect we will soon hear that Johnny took one look at these plans and threw a lot of cold water on them, namely, this thing is lovely but maybe double or more your original budget, and that’s before the inevitable cost escalations that you will experience.  That’s fine if you have the money and want to spend so much on the project, but this thing is a long way from a beach cottage.

How much more clear could the signals be?

Shoring up of Alaskan Way viaduct to begin in September. The Governor has made the decision to Repair.

While debate over a replacement continues, state transportation officials said an effort to shore up the sinking vertical supports in the block between Yesler Way and Columbia Street would begin shortly after Labor Day and could extend into early next year.

And Yesler Way and Columbia Street  is one of the most critical areas. Probably not coincidentally, that is also one of the few areas of the seawall which needs repair.  And probably not coincidentally, that is also the general location of the heavy-breathing Washington State Ferry terminal which generates tremendous street traffic and ferry 'wash.'

All politics is local

A blogger who scorns the local and

dogcatcher elections, busted fire hydrants, the cost of pothole maintenance, and every other yawner of a local story

doesn't get politics.

Gauche Indeed

Paris tries to redevelop an old industrial area and seems unable to re-create the principal thing for which one visits Paris:

Others complain that, like La Defense, the area lacks the street life and sidewalk-level charm for which Paris is loved. At the moment there are few cafes, restaurants or small shops to speak of.

I wonder if the problem (no life on the sidewalk) is something as simple as failing to observe The Three Rules of Urban Design.

Clowns like to balance

Carter urges balance on Israeli issues.

"There's political fear in Congress and among U.S. presidential candidates to speak out on a balanced position with anything that relates to Israel. But college students can play a crucial role in this debate," he said. "You have nothing to lose."

If Carter is correct about the power of the pro-Israel lobby, then Carter is wrong that students have "nothing to lose." Following Carter's view that the pro-Israel scares people at the very top of the greasy pole such as Presidential candidates, then students who speak out against the pro-Israel lobby should be fearful of being put on a list. "They" will keep track of any students who offers an opinion contrary to AIPAC and through "their" control of media, finance, the universities etc etc will ensure that such a person never gets a job beyond dog catcher.

Yes, I am joking.

But I am not joking that Carter is missing the point entirely with his stress on balance. Balance is not the politically-convincing criterion. The put-away argument is that current US policy is simply not helpful to Israel. Just because one proclaims that one is pro-Israel doesn't mean that one's policies are the wisest and most effective. Bush can claim all he wants that he is good for Israel but I think the facts are otherwise. It is such an argument — that Bushism is bad for Israel — which (among people who are pro-Israel, anyway) will have the most resonance. Israel needs a bit of "tough-love "from the US. But the "love" has to be there.

And that btw is how you can tell the bigots when a discussion of Israel comes up: you don't hear from them any sense of vexation or sadness at the mis-guided actions of a friend. You hear — Alexander Cockburn is a good example — delight and glee at the mistakes of another. I groaned when I saw Israel invade Lebanon; some gloated because they were delighted to see Israel making a strategic & public relations blunder So, yes, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Israel per se but you can tell when it is because the speaker is smiling with pleasure.

 

A reader asks

In the post immediately prior to this one (on the New SAM) Gomez comments:

I'm curious what exactly it is about the Seattle Public Library that fails.  I can tell it fails, but I can't exactly pinpoint how.

I wrote about this issue here and referenced an article which I had written for The Seattle Times in 2000, long before construction on the Public Library even started:

My focus in the article was on the building as a piece of urbanism --- not as a piece of architecture. I analyzed the Koolhaas proposal in terms of The Three Rules of Urban Design. I found Koolhaas' work a weak and unsuccessful design.

My critique was ignored by the architect and the Library Board. Judge for yourself. Here is the article:

Koolhaas Library Design.pdf 

Hard at work, dreaming

The Dream Home bloggers of the NYT have a site plan and an elevation of The Design of Paul’s Dreams. It's cute, though it seems a bit big, but hey, if you are going to borrow for a house, go borrow the maximum. (Not really.)

What puzzles me is the two car garage which appears to be two separate single-car garages. Why? Seems awfully wasteful at a number of levels: bigger — two 1-car garages must be wider than one 2-car garage; more expensive, two garage doors, not just one; more paving and a visual impression of priority given to the cars.

I was there

Thousands join 35-hour-long party to celebrate SAM's makeover.

I am a skeptic, even a cynic, about civic boosterism and hoopla. It's all too typically just third-rate junk with first-rate marketing. But, happy to say, Seattle finally does something truly right with SAM (Seattle Art Museum.)

The new SAM succeeds in all the ways which the Seattle Public Library fails. SAM is a city comfort, a fine urban design which meets the sidewalk in a friendly and open way. Folks who were hoping for a piece of "iconic" self-reverential "freaky-tecture" will be disappointed. Those of us who believe that museums are about displaying art  and about supporting a walkable city will be happy.

New SAM is terrific. More later, and I'll even try to find something about which to carp.

Everyone loves a convenient fiction

Accidental Sustainability and Why We Can't Sustain It

In Seattle a battle rages on over how to replace an aged and unsafe viaduct along the waterfront. Any of the options will result in a decade of massive disruption on a road that supports more than 100,000 cars each day (and growing yearly). Seattleites don't like any of the options, due in part to a number of environmentally irresponsible plans, the obstruction of a beautiful urban waterfront near the famous Pike Place Market, and of course, being forced into alternative routes to their old familiar commute. But any way you slice it, the city will have to figure out a way to get people where they need to go during years of viaduct reconstruction. Which means the city will be establishing a functional temporary alternative to the viaduct altogether. So...why not just establish that alternative, keep it permanently, and get rid the viaduct, leaving free urban space where a giant concrete overpass formerly stood? (italics added)

I think that this San Francisco writer has been mis-informed about the Seattle Viaduct. There has been a conspiracy of silence about the inconvenient truth that the Viaduct can be Repaired. Advocates of the Tunnel and of the "Surface/Transit" goal have both furthered the convenient fiction that "the Viaduct must be Replaced!" because it furthers their own respective agendas. From a distance, the covenient fiction — that the the Viaduct cannot be Repaired in place while maintaining a substanial part of its capacity — wins out.