fauxklore | Entries tagged with urban planning

Celebrity Death Watch: Jayne Meadows was an actress, most famous for having been married to Steve Allen. Suzanne Crough played the youngest member of The Partridge Family. Jack Ely mumble-sang "Louie Louie" with The Kingsmen. Ben E. King sang "Stand By Me." Jean Nidetch founded Weight Watchers, inflicting untold damage on American women.

One Day Hike: I spent a few hours on Saturday morning volunteering at the Seneca Creek support station for the One Day Hike of the C&O Canal towpath. I did a few miscellaneous chores, e.g. hanging up signs, but most of my time was spent checking hikers out of the station. That meant I called out their bib numbers, while the other person at check-out wrote down their times. It wasn’t too arduous, though it was bloody cold out. We didn’t lose any hikers, though a couple did drop out at the station. I should also mention that this station was only for people doing the full 100K, which made it easier, since we only had one list of hikers to deal with.

Storytelling: Saturday night was a Better Said Than Done show I was performing in. I told my flying story. I don’t normally wear costumes, but this was a fine (and rare!) opportunity to wear my flight suit. It went well, overall. It is always a pleasure to tell to such a responsive audience.

Sunday:There were 2 things I wanted to do on Sunday. Both of them were in Baltimore. Given the unrest on Saturday (which was repeated on Monday), I thought better of it and caught up on some household odds and ends. Of course, my place still looks like an audition for Hoarders, but I am slowly making progress.

(Sub)Urban Planning Rant:The Virginia Department of Transportation did a presentation at my complex the other night about their plans for widening I-66 outside the Beltway. There were plenty of concerns raised, which mostly amounted to this benefiting the people who live further out at the expense of those of us who live close in. (We are just outside the Beltway. Almost everyone who lives in our area does so because of the short walk to the Metro.)

They claimed they would add transit improvements (e.g. some dedicated bus lines). But everything I have ever read about adding highway lanes indicates that it just increases traffic. They just widened 66 in the Manassas-Gainesville area and now they’re talking about doing that again? Why should I believe it will help? If you’re really going to get people out of their cars, you need to make using their cars more painful than the alternative. Adding a variable toll for 2 lanes (out of 5) in each direction is unlikely to do that.

The other problem is that all of the planning assumes everyone works downtown. That is less and less true. What we really need is an outer Beltway, maybe a partial replacement of Route 28.

Eastern Cities Compared: In my comparison of NY and DC, I forgot to mention that ads in the NY subway system are for financial counseling or drug treatment, while ads in the DC metro tend to be for fighter jets.

Rationalization for Levitation: I had promised myself that if I finished in the top half in the crossword tournament, I would give myself permission to spend huge amounts of money for a weightless flight. I have, indeed, gotten out the plastic and booked this. In the process of doing so, I came up with an even more absurd rationalization. See, I had been looking into going to the North Pole as a 50th birthday present to myself. The dates didn't work, alas. The flight, while absurdly expensive, is still only about a quarter of the price of going to the Pole. So I am saving money.

Public Crafting: I have been known to work on my nalbinding in public. When somebody asks me what I am knitting, I usually say something like, "I'm working on slipper socks. But this isn't knitting." They inevitably say, "oh, of course. It's crocheting." And I have to explain that it isn't crocheting either and tell them all about how nalbinding is what the Vikings did because they didn't know how to knit. For the record, knitting involves two or more sticklike needles (sometimes joined together by a cable, as in circulars). Crocheting involves a hook. If somebody is using what looks like a tapestry needles, they are probably doing something else. (Tatting needles are generally longer and thinner, by the way.)

Food Network: Since I don't have cable, I don't watch the Food Network often. However, that does not seem to stop them from stalking me. First, there was the Dinner Impossible banquet at the ACPT. Then I learned that Nongkran Daks was on Throwdown with Bobby Flay last night. Who is Nongkran Das, you might ask? Just the owner / chef of Thai Basil in Chantilly - where I had eaten lunch on Tuesday. (It's the best restaurant reasonably near my company's Chantilly offices, so I go there regularly during the rare occasions when I have to visit the mothership. I usually get the kra pow.)

Pangram: A pangram is a sentence that contains all of the letters of the alphabet. The one Americans tend to find most familiar is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." A fair number of people will recognize "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs." Apparently, the British favor a different pangram since a recent BBC item calling for people to send in samples of their handwriting used "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex."

I also have a note I jotted down about white-nose syndrome killing bats in northeastern caves, but I don't remember what I intended to say about that. Except for it being bad, of course.

At some point, I will get around to writing about The Amazing Race and about tonight's "Music and the Brain" lecture.

I'm not quite taking the "what I said I'd write about" in order. But here are some quick observations about New York vs. Washington:

1) When New Yorkers in Washington ask me where to go to get good deli food, my answer is, inevitably, "New York." Actually, the deli counter at Wegman's in Fairfax isn't bad. But only in New York can you get great pickles. I like half sours, but full sours are the pickles of the gods.

2) I did not, alas, have time to stop on the Lower East Side on the way back and pick up a bialy or twelve and/or an onion pletzel. But you can't get either down here. (You can sometimes get things that call themselves bialys, but not ones worth eating. Trust me on this - my mother's family is from Tykocin, just down the road from Bialystok.)

3) No buskers inside
the D.C. Metro system.
New York has music.

In particular, coming back to the hotel on Saturday night, there was a guy playing a kora on the platform. And on the way back to Penn Station, a mariachi band was playing on the A train. All three of them, including the bass player, moved down the car (and from one car to another - a major taboo in the eyes of the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority), which reminded me of the scene in Take the Money and Run in which Woody Allen plays the cello in a marching band.

4) New York has better pizza.

5) New York has a theatre district. Washington has theatres, but they are more scattered about. What that means is that Washingtonians have to do more planning.

6) Sadly, the tourist herds in both cities move just as annoying slowly.

I meant to write something here about walking around Brooklyn, but I don't have anything in D.C. to really contrast it with. Maybe I can find some similarity between the way that the monuments just mesh into the residential part of the Hill and the way you cross the street from Borough Hall in Brooklyn and you're right into a pleasant residential neighborhood. I think I'm trying to get at a broader statement about the Northeast since what I like about Boston (and Philiadelphia) is how people still live in the city. I'll have to ponder that more. At any rate, I was surprised by how much I liked the neighborhood around the hotel which had yuppie amenities (e.g. a Trader Joe's) and businesses that meet real needs (an actual hardware store!). I wish I'd had more time to browse the used bookstore on Atlantic or to shop at Sahadi's (a Middle Eastern grocery supplier).

I love lists. I make my own lists all the time, from the grand (e.g. My Life List to the mundane (my daily to-do list in my planner, lists of books to read, lists of restaurants to try).

I also like reading other people's lists of things. There were a few interesting lists in the news this week.

For example, Travel and Leisure Magazine has a list of "green American landmarks." It includes a parking lot in Santa Monica, California. Now, I'm sure that it is the most eco-friendly parking garage in the U.S., but driving is inherently not environmentally friendly.

Then there is The American Planning Association's list of great places. I'm not familiar enough with a lot of the places to comment on them, but I know a few fairly well. And they provide a good example of what is wrong with a lot of urban planning in the country. I will pick on Wilson and Clarendon Boulevards in Arlington, Virginia since they are close to where I live. (And I used to work right on Wilson Blvd.) The area is, indeed, successful - but it is successful less because of the streets themselves than because of their metro accessibility. And the site says nothing about public transit. There is also a significant flip side to their success. Clarendon used to have a lot of interesting ethnic restaurants, mostly running to the sort of Vietnamese places that have lighting that makes everyone look jaundiced but serve food otherwise obtainable only in Hue. Then the area got gentrified and rents went up. And now you get to eat at the likes of Cheesecake Factory. Too many successful urban renewal projects end up as the same collection of upscale chain shops. Can't we have low crime rates without high blandness?

Finally, there have been a couple of lists of most expensive colleges. The lists differ, depending on whether they deal only with tuition or include typical room and board costs. What is, however, interesting is that MIT is not in the top 20 on any of the lists I've seen.

Current Music: The Capital steps Halloween show

Since the weather was nice out, I walked to the Georgetown University Hospital from the Rosslyn metro, instead of taking the shuttle bus this morning. It's a pleasant walk with just one very steep block (on 35th between M and Prospect). I do admit to a preference for modern smoothly paved sidewalks over the Georgetown bricks, but the architecture is nice and I appreciate the exercise. I will particularly note a sculpture in front of a house on Reservoir Road (more or less immediately across the giant lawn chair at the Duke Ellington School for the Arts). It's a man with some sort of elongated ears. My assumption is that they're donkey's ears and he is, therefore, King Midas, but I could be wrong. It's an interesting piece, anyway. And one of the donkey party animals is just a few doors down.

I walked back a slightly different way (still using 35th Street, but turning down M to stop for lunch before taking the metro from Foggy Bottom). I often find this frustrating since M Street often has a lot of very slow moving tourists, inevitably walking 3 or 4 abreast. I have a theory that hospitals release patients onto M Street right after hip replacement surgery as a form of physical therapy. But it wasn't bad today at all, so maybe they don't do hip replacements on Monday mornings.

Anyway, later in the day, I was reading the Dr. Gridlock chat on the Washington Post's website and one of the subjects was pedestrian safety. My experience with this walk (and walking around the city on Saturday) reminded me of a key point that the planners who are lamenting pedestrian death seem to have missed.

Namely, the lights are designed to favor drivers and bear no relationship to how long it might take a pedestrian to cross a street. Again and again, I cross little one-lane streets where the count-down timer indicates that you have 60 seconds (or more) to cross. And then you come to 6 lane streets where they give you a mere 20 seconds. This has got to be a significant hazard for the mobility-impaired.

Perhaps the best approach is the one in my neighborhood. The light at our corner (which leads to the metro station) gives you only about 15 seconds normally. But, if you push the pedestrian button, that increases to roughly 40 seconds.

Last night when I left the office, I noticed a couple of sculptures of airplanes had suddenly appeared on my way to the metro. There was one at the corner of 18th and Bell Street and another right outside the Crystal City metro station.

This morning, I had a couple of errands to run, including a stop at the post office, as well as a meeting at a building a couple of blocks from my office. There were more airplanes along Crystal Drive. I looked closely enough to discover that this is apparently part of a public art project called Crystal Flights. I haven't found anything yet to tell me where they all are, but there are a lot of them. There are at least 4 in the park on the other side of Crystal Drive, for example. I haven't walked around enough to find all of them since I was pretty tied up in meetings today. And, frankly, they aren't good enough to be worth finding.

I believe it was Chicago that started this whole trend with their Cows on Parade. Several cities have followed with various iconic sculptures - angels in Los Angeles, guitars in Phoenix, and pandas in D.C. are among the ones I've seen. (Actually, before there were pandas, there were party animals - both donkeys and elephants. At least that provided a cute name for the project.) There are often a couple of variant forms to the sculpture and local artists and organizations paint them.

The problem is that they are usually not starting with particularly good sculptures. And the decoration is, in general, not all that interesting. Of the planes I have seen so far, most are too cutesy, with lots of bright colors, reminiscent of the mobiles parents bought before they were told that infants can't see colors well anyway. The one by the metro has an Uncle Sam added on, sort of as a pilot, and isn't too bad. There's also one by Olsson's Books which is covered with silver tile that isn't too bad. But most of them are not worth a look.

It isn't entirely clear why airplanes. For those unfamiliar with Crystal City, it is an entirely soulless section of Arlington, Virginia. The major distinction of the area is that the buildings are connected by underground walkways, which is convenient in bad weather but also allows one to feel like a complete mole person. (At my office, we refer to the underground paths as "the gerbil trails.") Apartments and condos there are, however, fairly expensive since it is convenient. There are some decent shops (though no actual supermarket) and a few good restaurants. I suppose it is the nearest residential area to DCA. And I suppose that one can't really create sculptures of the most common animal I associate with Crystal City, namely the slow-moving clueless tourist. (There are also a lot of hotels of the ilk favored by arrangers of junior high class trips. It is no coincidence that the words "tourist" and "tortoise" sound similar.)

Good public art is possible, albeit uncommon. "The Awakening" is an example, although its relocation to National Harbor from Haine's Point is distressing. The Claes Oldenburg clothespin in Philadelphia is also a fine work. My favorite piece of public art in the giant hand with paper airplane sculpture outside the Green Line station in El Segundo, California, across from the old Hughes Aircraft plant. It's both witty and site relevant.

The Chicago cows have a lot to answer for.

There was an article in the Washington Post yesterday that had to do with several towns in Montgomery County (Maryland suburbs of D.C.) putting in sidewalks. Apparently, residents are not entirely happy about this. It amazed me that there were people who said they bought places in their neighborhoods specifically because they didn't have sidewalks. (The county has always had the right of way to build the sidewalks, by the way.)

This is so completely alien to my way of thinking. I'd never consider living somewhere that didn't have sidewalks. Do people really not want to be able to walk around the neighborhood?

On another urban planning subject, maybe it is just me, but there seem to be a lot fewer mailboxes than there used to be. It's not a real problem for me since there is an outgoing mail slot at the mailboxes in my building and there is a post office right by my office. (And there is another mailbox right across the street from the building I work in, as well as the very odd R2D2 one by the shops south of the building.) But I had a meeting at another location in Arlington today and I did not see a single mailbox within about 5 blocks of the Ballston metro. Which made me think about it more and I realized I have never seen an actual public mailbox in my neighborhood. Very odd.