lone_pedestrian

View from the Observation Level of the Statue of Liberty

View from the Crown of the Statue of Liberty

I am too tired from my long commute to my new job to comment on my long commute to my new job. To sum up it is so tiring that it makes me wish I lived in Staten Island of all places.

David Byrne on Monday


PJ Harvey & John Parish on Tuesday


Josh Ritter on Friday (Maybe)

Jones Beach Water Tower Restoration

Central Park blurb at Curbed



I have some thoughts on porches I need to sort out.

"In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview."

A culture is not a style of building, a culture is much more interesting than that. It is a way of inhabiting what you have built. It is a way of thinking about yourself in relationship to those around you. You cannot preserve a culture without its people. Then again dispersal and disintegration seem like the point in this case.

The gray, rainy weather that stretched the month of April well into May is gone now. People complained the entire time but I liked it. Everything was so green and it looked especially beautiful against the dull cloudy skies. The sun is out now and the plants are running riot.

My favorite spot right at the moment is the untended strip of lawn on Buckingham. The imported turf is yellowed and dull but its more suitable local cousin is as tall as your knee with small wild white flowers blooming at the corner. It is far more lively than the manicured rectangles of green that surround it in every direction. It is a wonderful little mess.

I am going to try to head over to Hempstead Lake State Park this week. I am sure it will be much prettier now than it usually is. The month of May covers many of Long Island's sins and while the kids are still in school I can pretend I am the only one here to see it.

A humpback whale wandered into the Lower Bay of New York Harbor.





From Bowsprite's New York Harbor Sketchbook

This article in City Room reminded me about the much needed extension the the No. 7 line.

It also reminded me how much I love City Room. Just two examples:

David Dunlap on construction at WTC.

Jennifer 8. Lee on Street Vending

When I say to people that there are a lot of good places to live I suppose I am mistaken because according to this list all the good places to live are in the same 4 or 5 cities.

via Atrios

Ed. I got in, now I just have to figure out how to pay for it.

I meant to post this earlier but you know what they say if you want something done ask a busy person. On re-reading it I realized it is related to this blog but since I got so far off-topic with the LP I did not bring it up in my application. Here we go:

I grew up surrounded by a history that I absorbed but never truly appreciated until I was an adult. One of the last working farms in Nassau County was a mile from my home. My school, our church, the pharmacy, the hardware store and the deli were well within walking distance even for a child. The silver commuter train that whisked me into the City was twenty five minutes away on foot and 10 minutes away by bicycle. I grew up in the kind of environment that New Urbanists strain to create out of whole cloth.

Only when I began to explore my interest in the history of architecture and planning at New York University did I come to truly appreciate how much of my upbringing was made possible by the old Urbanism of the place I lived. Since then I have consciously sought out places that allow me to travel freely on foot and by bicycle including Astoria, Queens and Boulder, Colorado. My appreciation of the kind of independence and freedom such places provide is the direct result of the combination of my formative experiences and my academic pursuits.

For several years I struggled personally and academically and now that I have the ability to produce quality work I wish to return to school. I believe my experiences provide an "on the ground" perspective of what it means to live in an historic neighborhood without necessarily being aware of the specifics of that history. When proposing adaptive re-use or preservation projects to private stakeholders or to the public I would be able to tap into what they value about their neighborhoods and workplaces. After all, I came to value my freedom of movement and familiarity with my neighbors well before I understood that these were, in part, a function of urban design.

I want to devote myself to the study and practice of historic preservation because I believe that how we choose to construct our environment and live in it has far ranging cultural and ecological consequences. The most energy efficient, accessible and culturally significant places are those that already exist and not those that require new land and new materials to construct. My primary interests lay in the study of waterfront areas in the United States. Being on the edges where two radically different systems meet makes them both complicated and highly significant. Such areas have gone through several periods of momentous change from the historic transition from sail to steam to the much more recent shift from industrial to residential, cultural and recreational uses. I am interested in how such places are perceived and what factors drive people to consider a site historic and worthy of preservation. New York City provides numerous examples of the sites I am interested in and Pratt Institute is ideally located for me to explore such issues.

In The Modulor Le Corbusier writes "Architecture is judged by the eyes that see, by the head that turns and the legs that walk." It is upon reading passages like this that he manages to move me despite my disagreements with him. In all that I have done, and at times failed to do, I never stopped turning my head, moving my feet and learning all I could about the world through which I traveled. Using my experiences and the skills I would acquire in your Historic Preservation program, I believe I can help positively re-form our built environment and improve the ways we all live.

The big tree. That is all we call it. I do not even know what kind of tree it is and a good part of me does not want to know. It is not merely a type of tree, it is our tree.

There were several trees in our neighborhood but the big tree was one of the two that stood outside the front of our house. They leaned away from each other ever so slightly and they were the biggest trees left standing on the block. The roots of the big tree twist and form the most perfect places for you to sit. In the summer this is a good thing since it is frequently cooler under the big tree than it is inside our house.

The big tree is base. For all games: Hide and Seek, Alligator and of course Ghosts in the Graveyard. However in games of Tag and Freeze Tag you are not permitted to linger there for very long. I want to say you had ten seconds but I cannot remember exactly.

It's mate, the small tree which was not all that small, was cut down several years ago. The big tree lost a rather large limb at some point and its brittle gray base sits ominously high above the street. My parents keep waiting for the big tree to finally die before they have it cut down but every spring it still brings forth new leaves. Its bunches of green seeds hang like grapes then slowly drop onto the sidewalk. It made me smile today when I saw them.

The big tree winds its way under the pavement and breaks up our driveway. Our small front lawn is more roots than proper turf. It will probably damage the foundation if it hasn't already. Every Nor'easter, every weakening hurricane and tropical storm bring the threat of massive limbs knocking out power lines, damaging cars or breaking windows. This would make me sad or angry if it did not seem like the tree was an essential part of the house itself. It is certainly part of the home I grew up in.

I am frequently torn between two impulses: to see more of the world or to observe more about one place. If I must remain in one place, settle there for the remainder of my adulthood I hope I come to know that place I well as I know this one. I think I could be content once I find such a place, a place I would know as well as the wild curving roots of our big tree.

It is a sight you have no doubt witnessed yourself if you ride the bus with any frequency. It is a half empty bottle of water rolling backwards and forwards on the floor in time to the stops and starts of your trip. You stare at it and you see people walk by it, never bothering to pick it up, as they exit. You have thought to yourself "Somebody ought to pick that up". I hate Somebody. I want to kill Somebody dead. There is no Somebody.

I am not so reliant on Somebody because I pick up the bottle as I leave and throw it in the municipal trashcan. The elusive Somebody does not trouble me because I know that Somebody has a real name and a face. It is frequently my name and face. I am the person who picks up other people's trash, rails against loud drunken neighbors in the middle of the night and asks strangers if they are lost when they look confused. If some small service needs doing I will step to it without thinking too much about it at that moment.

Personally and privately I am paralyzed by the unreachable Later.

Later I will be more organized. Later will be a better time to get these things done. Later will always make more sense than Now. Now is a mess. I hate Later. I need to kill Later dead. There is no Later. I do not understand why it is so easy for me to immediately address other people's problems in public or at work but so difficult for me to do the same for myself.

I suppose I just have to keep reminding myself that there is no Later.

The ice cream truck is going by so I will have to wait to walk the dog for a few more minutes. I walked to the market today past the deli and the pizzeria and past the playground behind the school. It felt like spring today but it will probably snow at least one more time.

This is basically a good place. No matter how unhappy and frustrated I may be at any given moment, I try to remember how incredibly lucky I am to have it to come back to when I struggle and fail and nothing quite works out right.

Spring is pushing itself out and in and I am hoping that it brings with it new purpose.

Today I got my newly recovered bicycle out of the shop and promptly got honked at, twice, on my way home. Ahh, Long Island.

It's not a fancy bicycle just your standard step-through ladies mountain bike. I love the fact that it is old and new at the same time. I love its crooked basket the one I warped when it crashed in Astoria. I love the gears that seem so familiar and so easy in comparison to the bikes I had in Boulder. I love that I can sit perfectly upright and see everything so clearly. I love its burgundy color, the color that used to match my melodramatically dyed hair.

This is my bike. The one that I rode on bad dates in Long Island City and late nights working in Soho. The one that I rode 42 miles on the 5 Borough Bike Tour when it had nubby mountain bike tires. Only now having ridden so many more miles, on bicycles far more suited to that purpose, do I realize how insane that was.

I had let it go years before. I left it here when I went to Colorado. I got other bikes, several of them in fact. I assumed this one would be sold or given away because I said I did not need it anymore. I sincerely thought that was true.

Luckily for me it was not sold or given away. As a result of a mixture of cheapness and stubbornness, he tucked it into a closet for almost six years. He assumed it was worth something other than 25 dollars and some extra storage space. He was right.

Thanks, Matt.

In all of the reading I have done lately on the housing bubble and the financial crisis the most interesting phenomenon I have come across is the confusion surrounding the words worth, value and price. The article in the New York Times on the slowdown of the housing market in the Hamptons was grimly fascinating in this regard.

A home's worth lies in how well it suits your needs. How does it shelter you and where does it allow you live in relation to what you value as a person? Your family, your work, a city you love, the solitude you crave or, in the case of the Hamptons, the proximity to a beach full of rich people. If other people value what you value they may be willing, if they are able, to pay a high price for your home but your home has no intrinsic price that others are obligated to recognize and thereafter, pay.

It is unfortunate when people lose money and especially sad if they lose the place they live but buying a house only ever guarantees that you will have a home. The idea that it could only grow both in worth and price was always an illusion. It is apparently an illusion that is very difficult to relinquish.

From the Gothamist via Curbed

The feeling of walking from one destination to another, of being able to accomplish all that you need to accomplish without the help of a machine or the indulgence of other people is a feeling I hold very dear. It is vital to how I see myself and how I feel about the course of my life. Unfortunately that feeling is based entirely on an illusion. It is the illusion of independence.

The simple fact is that I would not be able to live my life this way, in this place, if decisions had not been made for me several decades before I was born and continue to be made for me even now. These streets were planned on a grid with their small houses placed closely together near a train station. There are two major surface roads within less than half a mile that have four separate bus lines running on them. Retail shops are, more often than not located in the downtown areas near the train stations. Residential streets without sidewalks are the exception and certainly not the rule. Regular drivers on these streets are accustomed to the presence of people exactly like me.

Admittedly this illusion of independence is nearly impossible to maintain when you are taking public transit and riding a bicycle. Nearly every moment on a train, a bus or a bicycle clarifies reality for you. You are obviously dependent; exposed to the elements, living by other people's timetable, a timetable they do not have to live up to the way you do, crowded by others just like you and physically vulnerable to other people's bad decisions. When in motion on your own two feet it is easy to get lost in yourself and start to feel relieved and happy. You can unconsciously revel in your good fortune and ability. People like myself who argue for and use so called "alternative" forms of transportation are given to saying things like "Why don't they just walk there?" as if other people in this country are as lucky as we are. As if everyone lives in a place where is possible and safe to walk or ride a bicycle. The pleasure of our walking can blind us to our surroundings while we credit our lives to our own good judgment and on occasion a superior sense of environmental justice. This is a mistake and one that I have made myself every once and a while. You have to remind yourself that other people's lives are not your life. You have to separate yourself as best you can from your habits and privileges to see exactly what and who makes your life possible.

As much as I may fault myself for being occasionally short-sighted I have to admit that this illusion of independence seems far easier to maintain when you are driving a car. When you are driving a car other people are not responsible for making your trip possible they are simply in the way. Other people are traffic. You do not get the physical sensation of your body moving itself but you do get a certain sense of accomplishment. It is your car. You filled up the tank. You paid to get it fixed. You bought it yourself. You decide when to leave and when to go home. Surrounded by yourself, your taste, your work, your money it seems easy to forget that the ease with which you travel is just as dependent on other people's decisions and positive contributions as the ease with which I might walk to a train.

I am no more independent because I walk than other people are independent because they have their own car. We are if anything interdependent and the more we fight the illusion of independence the easier it will be to reshape the environment to give everyone more choices about how they live and travel.

I am going to try and re-establish this journal as the walking, public transit and urban planning commentary journal that is once was and leave the rambling nonsense, YouTube videos and angsty blurbs in their natural home... on Facebook.

I have worn out a pair of sneakers since I got back to New York and I have plenty of thoughts on those travels. They are in disarray right now but spring is coming soon. Everything will be put in order.