Why Can't The Republicans Compete In America's Cities?

A lot has been made about how Hillary and other Democrats have failed to address the needs of rural America and have failed electorally in rural areas. Democratic policy for rural America is actually far better than Republican policy but that isn’t where Democrats have failed. They’ve failed culturally in areas where social conservatism and religionist superstition is still powerful, something that would be hard to avoid while sweeping fear more progressive areas, the big cities. This past cycle, Hillary kicked ass in urban America, while losing in under-populated rural districts— from Maine’s second district to the Dakotas. Wyoming, whose 3 electoral votes were awarded by 174,248 Trump voters had far fewer voters than the city of Detroit, where Hillary beat Trump 95.0-3.1%, but whose votes were meaningless in the electoral college.

Detroit was Trump’s worst-performing city— but not the only one where he was uncompetitive. Trump’s percentage in some of the biggest cities in America, where he failed to score even 20% of the vote:

• Detroit- 3.1%
• Washington- 4.1%
• Seattle- 8.4%
• San Francisco- 9.2%
• Baltimore- 10.5%
• Minnespolis- 11.8%
• Chicago- 12.4%
• Portland (OR)- 12.8%
• Boston- 13.9%
• Cleveland- 14.3%
• New Orleans- 14.7%
• Madison- 15.0%
• Philadelphia- 15.3%
• St. Louis- 15.7%
• Salt Lake City- 16.3%
• Los Angeles- 16.4%
• St. Paul- 16.9%
• NYC- 18.0%
• Milwaukee- 18.4%
• Buffalo- 18.2%
• Denver- 18.9%

You might be able to guess what urban studies expert Richard Florida would say about this and how he would tie it in to his theories about density and the creative class and why progressive politics thrives in areas with high concentrations of technology workers, artists, musicians, gays and lesbians and "high bohemians,” (collectively the creative class), groups with a higher level of economic development and an open, dynamic, personal and professional environment which attracts more creative people, as well as businesses and capital. A couple of weeks ago Florida wrote a piece about how Jane Jacobs, writing decades ago, predicted the rise of Trump… or at least Trumpism. He reminds his readers that Jacobs “was one of the most prescient writers of the 20th century. In the 1960s, when suburbanization and heavy-handed urban renewal programs threatened urban neighborhoods, she published her classic Death and Life of Great American Cities. During the 1970s and 1980s, when policy-makers and economists focused on industrial competitiveness and national economic strategy, she drew attention to the role of cities and clustering in powering innovation and economic growth in her books The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations.”

But she may well have saved her best for last.

At a time when pundits and political scientists were celebrating the end of history, pointing to an emerging Democratic majority and extolling the virtues of a flat world of globalization, she ominously predicted a coming age of urban crisis, mass amnesia, and populist backlash in her final work, Dark Age Ahead. Eerily prescient as always, rereading the 2005 book today serves as a survivors’ guide to the Age of Trump.

Jacobs outlines an increasing distrust of politicians and politics, a burgeoning new urban crisis in cities, worsening environmental degradation, entrenched segregation, and an “enlarging gulf between rich and poor along with attrition of the middle class” as signals and symptoms of a coming Dark Age.

Nationalism and xenophobia form the core of Jacobs’ Dark Age. “Cultural xenophobia is a frequent sequel to a society’s decline from cultural vigor,” as “self-imposed isolation” leads to “a fortress mentality,” she writes.

That mentality transforms logic into myth, Jacobs writes, with a conservatism that “looks backward to fundamentalist beliefs for guidance and a worldview.” (Jacobs borrows that phrase from Karen Armstrong’s Short History of Islam, who points to Ferdinand and Isabella driving Muslims out of Spain in 1492, signaling a turning point for Mesopotamia in the Middle Ages).

Historically speaking, dark ages have come upon us relatively quickly, as “radical jolts” lead to the collapse of once-vital economic political and cultural institutions. Europe’s original Dark Age came about as local governments and city-states were “expunged by imperial decree and were replaced by a centralized military despotism.” Jacobs points to the cities of the Roman Empire, which lost the advantages of subsidiarity—closeness to the people—and fiscal accountability to the imperial treasury before its collapse. In the book, she asks a very big question that stands at the heart of dark ages: “how and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?”

Jacobs finds the answer in the rise of “mass amnesia.” The notion of a widespread, “permanent and profound” society-wide loss of memory, which seemed so strange and out of place when she wrote the book, seems suddenly all too real in a world of Trump and Brexit—a world where every new outrage quickly leads to another, where facts have no meaning.

The Five Pillars of Dark Age Descent

According to Jacobs, our own dark age is taking shape around the erosion of “five key pillars” of society.

The first is the decline of family and community. The same politicians who call families the foundation of society undertake policies that weaken and undermine them. The replacement of extended families with nuclear ones make it impossible for many to cover the cost of housing. Falling birth rates mean a smaller workforce to take care of an aging population.

At the same time, the broader community falls victim to market pressures, materialism, and the hegemony of brands. Jacobs points especially to the automobile as a “destroyer of worlds” that not only wastes energy and promotes sprawl, but skews priorities from public interest to self-interest.

The second is the decline of education, which has been transformed into vocational training. Education becomes an individualistic investment instead of a public good that produces well-rounded citizens. When that happens, jobs and profit become the sole measure of progress and ultimate justification for political choices, at the expense of everything else.

The third is an attack on science, or what she calls false analogies that mask reality. “If a body of inquiry becomes disconnected from the scientific state of mind, that unfortunate segment of knowledge is no longer scientific,” she writes. “It stagnates.” Objectivity and scientific progress are replaced with dogma.

The fourth pillar is the “dumbing down” of taxes. In place of public investments that build cities and societies, taxes and government investment come to be seen as waste. The result is that all sorts of public goods—education, transit, infrastructure and the social safety which contribute to a functioning and cohesive society—start to break down. Jacobs perceptively identifies the looming “new urban crisis” of unaffordable housing, gaping inequality, escalating sprawl, and congestion facing cities as the result of this sort of attack on taxes and public investment.

The fifth and final pillar is the subversion of the “learned professions” such as medicine, law, architecture, engineering and journalism. We cannot possibly learn every facet of the world, so professions are needed to instill trust and maintain common welfare. Doctors, for example, adhere to a Hippocratic Oath. Lawyers have ethical requirements to adhere to. When such professions come under attack and their norms and functions are undermined, Jacobs notes, society falls victim to the whims of “frauds, brutes, and psychopaths.”

What Would Jane Do?

How to break the cycle and combat our own impending Trumpist dark age? On this, Jacobs provides two important insights.

On the one hand, her life’s work shows us that the vitality of the city and its neighborhoods is the ultimate antidote to darkness. Jacobs had her pessimistic side. In Scranton, she saw first-hand the devastating toll of the Great Depression on industries and workers. As a young woman, she saw the rise of fascism and totalitarianism in Europe. During the 1950s, she witnessed the chilling effect of McCarthyism. Robert Moses-style urban renewal reflected the same unbridled top-down power.

For Jacobs, cities and neighborhoods are much more than walkable, mixed-use places, and much more than engines of innovation and economic growth. They are also bulwarks against the forces of darkness—the fonts of social progress, of human civilization, and of democracy itself.

On the other hand, Jacobs implores us to do everything in our power to protect ourselves from the forces of top-down power and mass amnesia that would destroy our communities and the key pillars of human civilization.

One of the last times we spoke, I asked Jacobs where she and her colleagues found the strength to combat Robert Moses and the incredible centralized power he represented. At the time, she had just finished Dark Age Ahead and was absorbed with her tellingly titled but unfinished last book, A Brief Biography of the Human Race. Still, her optimism came through.

For the longest time, she told me, people would avoid their protests. But one day, a few people started picking up their leaflets; soon many more were joining in and ultimately this cast of neighborhood characters won the battle and saved their neighborhood.

If a dark age starts with a radical jolt, it ends with one too.

Maybe Jane got her ideas from Freddy and Sally Mutant and the gang, the San Francisco punk rockers, The Mutants, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This is one my indie label, 415 Records, released in 1980:

Locals feel the chill as gentrification looms over a block in Upper Manhattan's Washington Heights

The west side of Broadway between 161st and 162nd Streets

by Ken

Even as Jane Jacobs described the process of organic neighborhood revival she called "unslumming" in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she recognized that it could go haywire if all spoils were allowed to go the highest bidder. What we later came to call "gentrification" bears a superficial resemblance to Jane's "unslummng," but one difference is that gentrification pays no heed to the energies of the local residents whose faith in their neighborhood gets the process started -- and another difference, of course, is that gentrification, far from guarding against the money-takes-all killer wave, joyfully embraces it.

So there's often muted cheer in a neighborhood that perks up in the early stages of gentrification, but since Jane J's attempts to build in checks against the rampage of raw greed now seem decidedly quaint, there is unfortunately no way to halt the development process at anybody's idea of a "sweet spot." Ironically, by the time the process is complete, and the fully gentrified neighborhood is now a restricted habitat of the rich, it no longer has most of the features that once made the neighborhood what Jane thought of as a real neighborhood. The cruelest irony is that it has happened to her own beloved West Village, which has become both unaffordable and increasingly dead.

How one reacts to "gentrification stories" depends on where one is on the economic spectrum and the social-sensitivity scale. For many of us, though, despite the initial giddiness, it has the feeling of a death sentence.

And so even a humorous take on the subject is likely to be a subject for fairly dark humor. Which seems ample setup for this report on the changes that appear to be lurking ahead on this block of Upper Manhattan's Washington Heights -- the west side of Broadway between 161st and 162nd Streets -- which thus far have reached only what we might call "the eviction stage," definitely not part of Jane Jacobs's organic "unslumming" process.

This report by DNAinfo New York's Lindsay Armstrong, drawing on earlier reporting from Jeremiah's Vanishing New York ("Washington Heights Gentrification Sale") and the Village Voice ("A Manhattan Landlord Is Evicting an Entire Block of Latino Business Owners"), was posted Tuesday evening.

WASHINGTON HEIGHTS AND INWOOD
Business and Economy

'Gentrification Sale' at Uptown Diner Offers Single French Fry for $8.99

by Lindsay Armstrong



Just call it Williamsburg Heights.

An Uptown restaurant locked in a legal battle with its landlord got a gentrification-inspired makeover Monday.

Punta Cana Restaurant, which has been at 3880 Broadway for almost 30 years, was temporarily transformed into the Casa de Campo Restaurant, named for an exclusive resort in the Dominican Republic.



Signs announced a “Gentrification in Progress Sale,” with faux ads for Jarritos with an $11.99 corkage fee, a single hand-cut seasonal French fry for $8.99 and a “Desayuno del Hipster,” or hipster breakfast, for $8.99.

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York reported that the signs were the work of Doug Cameron and Tommy Noonan, two Brooklyn residents who created a similar campaign when their local deli was threatened by a large rent increase in May 2015.

This time Cameron and Noonan focused their energies on a stretch of Broadway between 162nd and 163rd streets, where landlord Coltown Properties recently evicted several longtime local businesses, including a barbershop, two clothing stores and a tax preparer. Only Punta Cana and El Buen Camino fruit stand remain.

Cameron and Noonan gave a similar treatment to the now-vacant storefronts, which officials said would likely become one restaurant.



Tongue-in-cheek signs that advertised the storefronts for rent suggested possible uses for the spaces, including a barbershop specializing in “CrowdSourced Artisan Bangs with Flax” and a pet spa offering “Doggy Botox.”

Another banner advertised a new version of the fruit stand.

“Frutera El Buen Hipster: Now with Expensive Green Juices and Kombuchas,” it read.

The pair also included a sign urging people to support the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, or the "Bill de Bodega," as they have re-christened it. The bill would ensure business owners 10-year leases with the right to renew, leveling the playing field between landlords and commercials tenants, supporters say.



Raul Liriano, a 35-year resident of Washington Heights and a regular customer at Punta Cana, supported the campaign.

“They’re trying to say that the neighborhood will soon be too expensive for us, the community who has been living here for a long time,” Liriano said. “Somebody has to say something.”

Although the signs seemed to poke fun at some of the area’s newer residents, Liriano said he doesn’t blame them for the rent increase.

“The rent Downtown is too expensive so they move here,” he said. “Everything goes back to the landlords. They make the law and whatever they say, we have to pay.”

Cameron and Noonan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Urban Gadabout: Is Jane's Walk Weekend coming up where you are? Plus some additional NYC-centric gadding notes

No, you can't click on anything here, or type anything in. But you can by going to janeswalk.org.

by Ken

Just some quick updating, mostly occasioned by the upcomingness of a favorite weekend of the year in this space, Jane's Walk Weekend. For us in New York it means, once again, a generous calendar of incredible walks (and also some bicycle rides) -- free events -- overseen by the Municipal Art Society, which knows a thing or two about walking tours, except that this year the calendar includes a pretty full schedule on Friday as well as Saturday and Sunday, May 1-3.

New Yorkers can go directly to the New York City page. In theory there are filters that should enable you to sort the total schedule to fit your particular needs and wishes. I guess it's my contrariness that make those filters really not terribly helpful for my purposes, making it necessary to scan repeatedly through the whole schedule. But then, wouldn't I have wanted to peruse the whole schedule anyway? (New Yorkers may also check out the recent MAS blogpost, "Jane's Walk Weekend Is Back -- and Bigger than Ever.")

I know we're getting close to the actual dates. All the more reason to find the appropriate Web page for your locality and see what whets your exploring appetite. It's a great tribute to that great urbanist Jane Jacobs, one of the foremost champions of cities and one of the most revealing students of the way cities work, or don't.


"WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN"

One other Urban Gadding note I can pass on is that urban geographer Jack Eichenbaum, the Queens borough historian, has scheduled a new edition of what he calls his "signature" tour, The World of the #7 Train, an all-day extravaganza that consists of six mini-walking tours along with an exploration of the #7 train from Manhattan to its terminus in Flushing, Queens. Here's how Jack describes the outing on the "Public Tours" page of his website:

THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN
Saturday, June 13, 2015, 10am-5:30pm

This series of six walks and connecting rides along North Queens’ transportation corridor is my signature tour. We focus on what the #7 train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service in 1914. Walks take place in Long Island City, Sunnyside, Flushing, Corona, Woodside and Jackson Heights and lunch is in Flushing’s Asiatown. Tour fee is $42 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address) The full day’s program and other info is available by email: jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people.

MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY

As it happens, I've just done a couple of MAS tours with Jack: a couple of weeks ago a fascinating walk along Woodside Avenue in Queens, and just yesterday the East Side version of his Manhattan "Conforming to the Grid" tour, which focuses on the disruptions to the Manhattan grid created in the Commissioners' Plan of 1811 caused by pre-existing development of the area north of present-day Houston Street between Broadway and the Bowerie. Jack will be doing Part 2, the West Side version, looking at the grid disruptions caused by the pre-existing settlement of then-"suburban" Greenwich Village along the Hudson River, is coming up Sunday, May 31, at 11am. The day before, Saturday, May 30, Jack will be doing Part 2 of his MAS series "What's New (and Old) in Long Island City.

For more information on both, and to check out the rest of the current MAS schedule, go to mas.org and click on "Tours" -- or this link will take you directly to the "Tours" page. Right now MAS is coming up on the final month of the current March-May MAS schedule. Watch for the announcement of the next schedule -- which one might guess will cover June-August -- sometime in mid-May. It's worth checking for the new schedule in a timely fashion, because for some time after it's announced, it's possible to register for any darned tour you want, including the ones that are "never available." Well, they're not available if you wait till they're filled!


NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM

Registration has already begun for non-members as well as members for the Transit Museum's busy summer schedule. For more information go to the "Programs" page of the Transit Museum website, and click through to the link for any date that looks interesting to you to see what the current availability is.

I was going to recommend the two additional outings of a tour that Mike Morgenthal offered for the first time in the last schedule, "Ghosts of the Elevated: A Walking Tour," a walk through the Lower Manhattan risings of the old Second and Third Avenue els, which I enjoyed enormously. But I see that both dates are sold out! On the plus side, this suggests that the tour will continue to be offered!

One thing you know will be available is the Transit Museum's 2015 schedule of ever-popular "Nostalgia Rides," which happen on tenderly cared-for vintage equipment from New York City Transit's collection. Two outings are scheduled for summer: "Beach Bound: Coney Island," on Saturday, July 18, and "Orchard Beach by Rail and Bus," on Saturday, August 8. I can recommend both from personal experience, and may do the Orchard Beach outing again, hoping for better weather than we had the last time we set out there. In addition, we have advance news of another outing I can recommend from personal experience, a fall "Evening Ride to Woodlawn Cemetery," on Saturday, October 24.


WOLFE WALKERS with JUSTIN FERATE

Again there's a new schedule in progress, but there are still a lot of terrific-looking programs to come: "Summer Mansions of Astoria" (Saturday, May 9, 10am-12:30pm), "Kleindeutschland in the East Village" (Saturday, May 16, 1-4:30pm), "An Offbeat Day in Staten Island: Tottenville and Conference House" ("by ferry, foot, and overland railway," to the southern tip of Staten Island; Sunday, May 31, 9:15am- 3:30pm, "possibly later"), and two of Justin's famous grand bus outings: "Hyde Park: Val-Kill, Springwood, FDR Library, and Vanderbilt Mansion" (Sunday, June 7, 6:45am-7:30pm) and "New Paltz and Hurley: 17th and 18th Century Stone Houses of the Hudson Valley" (Saturday, July 11, 7:45am-6:30pm).

I'm doing all of the above except the Tottenville excursion, and that's only because of a schedule conflict. The first tour I ever did with Justin was a version of the all-day Tottenville outing he did for MAS some years ago, in admittedly dreadful weather -- looking out over the Arthur Kill, which separates southern Staten Island from New Jersey, we could barely make out the city of Perth Amboy opposite. What's more, we weren't able to go inside Conference House itself, which has now been refurbished and just been reopened to the public.

But my abiding memory of the Tottenville trip is that as soon as Justin got our group safely organized on the Staten Island Ferry he started talking, and about eight hours later, on the return trip, he took a breath. My official policy became that if Justin thinks there's something worth seeing someplace, I'm going, as long as I don't have a schedule conflict. In the case of the above-mentioned "Summer Mansions of Astoria" tour, I'm going even though I had a schedule conflict. As I've mentioned I've been reading Edith Wharton, including the Old New York quartet of novellas, and I'm not going to miss that!

Download the Spring 2015 Wolfe Walkers brochure for more information, including the registration form.

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Let's listen to madcap prankster Oliver Wendell Holmes sing the praises of "more complex and intense intellectual efforts"

You said a mouthful, Ollie! Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935) served for 29 years (December 1902-January 1932) on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court.


"When Robert Moses received a copy of Death and Life from the publisher he replied, 'Dear Bennett [Cerf]: I am returning the book that you sent me. Aside from the fact that it is intemperate it is also libelous. . . .

Sell this junk to someone else.

Cordially, Robert Moses' "
-- the conclusion of Jason Epstein's Introduction
to the 50th Anniversary Edition of Jane Jacobs's
The Death and Life of Great American Cities

by Ken

It was bad enough to admit it once. Now I have to return to my embarrassing admission that, however inspired I have been by the vision of Jane Jacobs for a livable city, I have never actually read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, when Jane was 40. But, as I explained, I figured the time has come in anticipation of Francis Morrone's upcoming Municipal Art Society tour "Then and Now: Jane Jacobs and the West Village." In his tour description, after writing that The Death and Life "so sharply and logically articulated many people's inchoate misgivings about the city rebuilding of the preceding decade and the orthodox notions of city planners," Francis adds parenthetically: "The book, not least a literary masterpiece, is highly recommended reading for this tour."

(You can read the full tour description here, but it's too late to register; the tour sold out quickly. However, as I keep insisting, it's utterly possible to register for any of Francis's tours as long as you watch for the posting of each new MAS schedule, usually in the middle of the preceding month, and act accordingly. Francis, by the way, says -- making clear that he's not talking about his own tours -- that the September-November MAS schedule is the richest he's ever seen, that as he looked through the array of offerings, his eyes popped out. The tour schedule is here -- or just go to the ridiculously-easy-to-remember mas.org and click on "Tours.")

My copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition of The Death and Life arrived today, and in my excitement I jumped over Jason Epstein's 2011 introduction and even Jane's own 36-years-later "Foreword to the Modern Library Edition" of 1992 -- both of which I of course mean to return to in due course -- with the intention of diving right in. And in case you've forgotten, or like me have never read it, Jane's 1961 text begins with an Introduction that starts: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." Whoa! No shilly-shallying here!

She quickly adds, though, that the book "is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines."

And in case we're not hearing her right, she goes on: "My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding." The alternative principles and aims she staked out have resonated so powerfully across those 50-plus years that the book has probably never been more widely read. Heck, even I'm finally reading it.

The thing is, before you get to that 1956 Introduction, there is a full-page inscription, in the form of a quote that, containing no ellipses, I take to be an unamended quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

"Until lately the best thing that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief worth of civilization is just that it makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether you have enough of it.

"I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers."

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

Whoa again! If you close your eyes, can't you just see Texas Sen. Rafael "Ted from Alberta" Cruz or Iowa Rep. Steve "Nuts I Am" King making -- or debating -- the case that "more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life"?

Holmes's Wikipedia bio notes that in the summer of 1864 (when he was 23), following a three-year military enlistment, "Holmes returned to the family home in Boston, wrote poetry and debated philosophy with his friend William James, pursuing his debate with philosophic idealism, and considered reenlisting." (Both William and his brother Henry are described as "lifelong friends.") In my mind I imagine eavesdropping on a spirited philosophical debate between Justice Holmes and, say, Justice Sammy "The Hammer" Alito.

I don't imagine that this was everyday discourse in 1915, when Holmes spoke it (see below), but in today's savagely anti-intellectual climate can you imagine the response to a public officeholder announcing that he has come around to appreciating civilization because it "calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones"?


THE SOURCE OF THE QUOTE

So many people just quote this fizzy chunk of Holmesiana -- though nobody but Jane Jacobs seems to tack on the "but a word"  without troubling to source it that I was beginning to wonder whether like everything else it was actually written by Mark Twain. But no, on the Harper's blog in May 2009, Scott Horton provided a source: " 'Life as Joy, Duty, End,' speech delivered to the Bar Association of Boston, Mar. 7, 1900 in Speeches of Oliver Wendell Holmes pp. 85-86 (1915). Doesn't it sound like just the sort of speech Justice Nino Scalia or Chief Justice "Smirkin' John" Roberts or even "Slow Anthony" Kennedy would give at a bar association shindig?

By the way, of the numerous other rehashings of this quote I found -- all, no doubt coincidentally, post-Death and Life (after, all Internet citings are awfully likely to be post-1961) -- I didn't find any that included the "but a word" that Holmes added, about us all being "very near despair."

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Urban Gadabout: Curiosity (Plus news from OHNY, MAS, the NY Transit Museum, and Jack Eichenbaum, including another trek on the No. 7 train)

On Saturday, September 6, Norman Oder leads the MAS walking tour "Long Island City, Queens in Flux: Court Square and Hunters Point." I've done at least six or seven tours with Norman now, and they've all been tremendously rewarding.

by Ken

If you look among the newly announced September, October, and November walking-tour offerings of the Municipal Art Society at the description of Francis's Morrone's September 28 tour, "Then and Now: Jane Jacobs and the West Village," you'll see that it --

looks at the life and work of Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities so sharply and logically articulated many people's inchoate misgivings about the city rebuilding of the preceding decade and the orthodox notions of city planners. (The book, not least a literary masterpiece, is highly recommended reading for this tour.)

I think the tour should be pretty much self-recommending. I've already registered. (And contrary to the incessant complaints about certain MAS tours, like Francis's, being impossible to book, the fact is that if you take the trouble to look at the schedule early in the registration period, they're all available.) In addition, since I'm embarrassed to say that I have never in fact read The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I've ordered myself a copy of the 50th Anniversary Edition.

Which I bring up because of that phrase Francis uses in the description: "highly recommended reading for this tour." This is a stepped-back version of a formulation Francis experimented with awhile back, which again I'm embarrassed to say I flunked on my very first opportunity. It was a tour, naturally down in the Old Seaport region of Lower Manhattan, devoted to Herman Melville's and Joseph Mitchell's New York, and I must have decided to register for the tour without properly reading the description, which contained a notice that two pieces of the legendary New York-centric New Yorker writer, at least the opening section of "Old Mr. Flood" and the story "Up in the Old Hotel," both of which bear directly on what we now think of as the South Street Seaport area.

Francis mentions Joseph Mitchell pieces frequently on his walks, for the obvious reason that Mitchell explored New York City the old-fashioned shoe-leather way, and listened to the people he met -- in places that fancy writers rarely venture to -- for a sense of who they were, who they had been (and where they had come from), and who and what they wanted to be.

Not long afterward, while doing another walk with Francis (Greenpoint and Williamsburg open spaces, as I recall), I confessed my guilt but told him I had been doing my remedial Joseph Mitchell reading and brandished my copy of the lovely immense Mitchell anthology -- four books in one! -- whose name was taken from none other than Up in the Old Hotel. Which prompted a story from Francis. I've never seen anything yet that didn't prompt a story from Francis.

He mentioned that for his upcoming tour of Brooklyn's Boerum Hill neighborhood, which has seen barely imaginable gentrification since the '70s, he had included more required reading in the description which had simply vanished from the published version. A couple of us who were registered for the Boerum Hill tour asked what that was. It was, he told us, two Joseph Mitchell pieces, "The Mohawks in High Steel" (from 1949, when the neighborhood included a packed enclave of those Native American daredevil ironworkers from upstate New York, whose union had its headquarters on Atlantic Avenue, on the northern edge of the district), and -- are you ready for it? -- "Up in the Old Hotel," plus a novel by Jonathan Lethem.

We'll come back to the Lethem novel in a moment, but having just read "Up in the Old Hotel," which deals primarily with the proprietor of a humble South Street eatery that, much against his will, had come to be called Sloppy Louie's, I puzzled initially at the Brooklyn connection. And then I remembered Louie's story of the restaurant in Brooklyn where he had learned the business as a waiter, and been drawn into the social history of the city.

As to the Lethem novel, I had to trust to memory, despite the enormous risk of trusting to my memory these days, since that day I wasn't carrying anything to write with. So imagine my chagrin when, back at the computer, I discovered that Lethem, whom I'd never read, is a Brooklyn boy, and the novel in question could have been either of his early novels Motherless Brooklyn (1999) or The Fortress of Solitude (2003). I figured it wouldn't kill me to read both, and naturally -- since this is the way my mind works -- I attacked them in chronological order

I loved Motherless Brooklyn, a grisly story told from the perspective of a grunge-level detective who suffers from Torrrete's syndrome, which is built into the fabric of the book and the way the story unfolds. But I had a feeling it wasn't "the" book, since the office out of which the narrator worked was in the sort of no man's land between Boerum Hill and adjoining Cobble Hill. It's a sensational book, though, and I was delighted to have been led to it, however accidentally. The result, though, was that by the time the tour came round, I was only about two-thirds of the way through Fortress of Solitude, which does in fact deal directly with Boerum Hill pre-, mid-, and post-gentrification.

(And the Francis story about Jonathan Lethem? When a German TV company was doing a piece on Brooklyn, they choose as their experts on the subject -- Jonathan Lethem and Francis Morrone! And I gather they've kept in touch.)

Do I have to tell you how much those readings enhanced my sense of what we saw on that Boerum Hill walk? Because the tour description hadn't included the "required reading," Francis took the time, while we were standing opposite the site where the restaurant Louie had worked in once was, to read a passage from "Up in the Old Hotel," which gave a sense of what the location and the people had meant to Louie while he worked there and took his lunch breaks in the area.

Later still, when Francis scheduled his Cobble Hill walking tour, he included as required reading a novel whose name and author I've forgotten, but which I bought and read, even though while I was deciding whether to do that walk again (I had found the Cobble Hill tour one of my most enjoyable with Francis, but as a result I thought maybe I remembered it too well for the time being), it sold out! So I wound up doing the required reading without doing the tour -- but it was a remarkable book, and not just an on-point Brooklyn book, with a chillingly icy slant on our supposedly closest relationships. (I'll think of the name.)

On a tour not long ago, I finally asked Francis what had happened to those reading assignments. The problem, he said, was that nobody was reading them. He reflected a moment, then said he should probably get back to that.

And he should. I've come to understand that it isn't so much the tour leaders' knowledge that I'm looking for on these tours, although the good ones are overflowing with it. It's their curiosity I treasure -- the curiosity that has driven them to acquire the knowledge they've acquired and the ways they've found to satisfy and further stimulate it. They're very different people, people like Francis and Matt Postal and Justin Ferate and Jack Eichenbaum and James Nevius, but in the few years I've been doing this, I've tried to walk in the path of their curiosity -- and learned more than I could have imagined on my own about the world around me.


AUTUMN IN NEW YORK

It's the time of year when everyone is announcing fall plans.

Before we get to actually announced plans, I should mention that the 12th Annual Open House New York Weekend is scheduled for October 11-12. "More than 300 sites and tours. 75,000 visitors," the Facebook page says. The website says:

Celebrating the city’s architecture and design, the 12th Annual Open House New York Weekend will once again unlock the city, allowing New Yorkers and tourists alike access to hundreds of sites, talks, tours, performances and family activities in neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs. From private residences and historic landmarks, to hard hat tours and sustainable skyscrapers, OHNY gives you rare access into the extraordinary architecture of New York City, while introducing you to the people who make the city a vibrant and sustainable place to live, work, and play.

Please note: Sites and tours for the 2014 Open House New York Weekend will be announced in early October. Be sure to check back in October for the 2014 list or follow us on Facebook or Twitter for updates.

MUNICIPAL ART SOCIETY

As I mentioned up top, the September-November MAS schedule is posted now (or you can just go to mas.org and click on "Tours"). I have it on the authority of a source whose judgment I respect immoderately that this is the best MAS schedule he's ever seen. That's not quite my response, but then, that's just me. No doubt you'll find an enormous range of offerings covering a large chunk of NYC. And the last time I looked, every one of them was still available for registration.


NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM

The fall schedule of programs and off-site tours is here. As always, there's a two-day pre-registration period exclusively for NYTM members, on August 20-21, beginning at 9am, with registration thrown open to all on August 22.

Remember that two popular tours are open only to members:

• The visit to the long-abandoned, ornate old City Hall subway station ("The Jewel in the Crown: Old City Hall Station," offered at 1:30pm and 3:30 pm on Sunday, October 12)

• And a walk through the old subterranean space, now contemplated as a possible underground version of the High Line, that once housed a busy trolley terminal leading out onto the Williamsburg Bridge ("Trolley Ghosts: The Terminal Under Delancey," offered at 6:30pm on two Thursday evenings, October 23 and November 6).

Yes, you can register in time to use the early-registration period. For membership information, check here.

Among the tours open to all are:

• An evening fall Nostalgia Ride, for Halloween season, to Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx

• A look at the Flushing Meadows site of the 1939 and 1964-65 World's Fairs considered from the standpoint of their transit options, with the always-interesting Andrew Sparberger, whose Transit Museum offerings I try never to miss (Sunday, October 19, 1pm, or Saturday, November 15, 2pm). Note: Andy will also be doing a free program at the museum on Wednesday evening, December 10, 6:30-7:30pm, in connection with the publication of his new book, From a Nickel to a Token ("a microhistory of New York's transit system," which "examines twenty specific events between 1940 and 1968, book-ended by subway unification and the creation of the MTA").

• A "behind the scenes" visit to the Bergen Sign Shop, "New York City Transit's only locale for sign production (Saturday, October 18, or Sunday, December 6, at 10am or 12n either day)

• A Staten Island bicycle tour, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Verrazanno Narrows Bridge, from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal to Fort Wadsworth and the anchorage of the bridge, with a stop-off at the Alice Austen House (Saturday, September 13, 11am-3pm)

• "Power Play: Steampunk and the Transit System," an after-hours event at the museum on Thursday, October 2, 7-9pm, held in conjunction with Atlas Obscura, in which "we examine the marvel of engineering that transformed the city from steam to electric at the dawn of the twentieth century"

Among the mostly free (but reservations recommended) programs at the museum are:

• A "Bus Bonanza!" clustered around NYTM's 21st Annual Bus Festival (Sunday, September 28), held in conjunction with the always-lively Atlantic Antic on nearby Atlantic Avenue, 12n-6pm, celebrating its 40th anniversary, and including $1 museum admission

• "The MTA's Next Big Thing: Fulton Center" (Wednesday, October 29, 6:30pm; $10, $5 to NYTM members)

And several conversations with authors of bound-to-be-interesting new books:

• With former MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch (Thursday, October 9, 7pm), author of So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises

• With power super-whiz Joe Cunningham (another longtime NYTM tour favorite, Wednesday, October 15, 6:30pm), author of New York Power

• As mentioned above, with Andy Sparberger (Wednesday, December 10, 6:30pm), author of From a Nickel to a Token

Again, for the full list of events scheduled, check the NYTM "Calendar of Events" page.


JACK EICHENBAUM IS DOING HIS "SIGNATURE
TOUR," "THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN," AGAIN

I've written about Jack's "World of the #7 Train" a bunch of times, and was signed up to do it again on May 31, when disaster, aka New York City Transit, struck, with a last-minute announcement of the shutdown of the western half of the No. 7 line for that date. Jack was able to reschedule the outing for June, but I wasn't able to do the makeup date. I've already sent in my check for September 20!

THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN
Saturday, September 20, 10am-5:30pm

This series of six walks and connecting rides along North Queens’ transportation corridor is my signature tour. We focus on what the #7 train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service in 1914. Walks take place in Long Island City, Sunnyside, Flushing, Corona, Woodside and Jackson Heights and lunch is in Flushing with a great variety of Asian restaurants. Tour fee is $40 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address)

The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com

The tour is limited to 25 people.

You can keep up to date on Jack's event plans on his website -- where you can also sign up for e-updates. The tour-info page is here. For his upcoming MAS tours, you'll be directed back to the MAS site for registration information. To bring this full circle, I've mentioned that Jack was the person who turned me on to MAS, when I took his "Three Transit Hubs" for NYTM!

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Urban Gadabout: Coming up -- Wolfe Walkers spring walks, World of the #7 Train, Jane's Walk Weekend

The No. 7 train to Flushing here has its most dramatic view of the Manhattan skyline. Jack Eichenbaum is doing this year's version of his "signature tour," the all-day "World of the #7 Train," on May 31 (see below).


by Ken

I mentioned recently that I did a pre-Passover tour with Justin Ferate to the heart of Chassidic Brooklyn -- to the worldwide nerve center of Chabad Lubavitch, on and around Kingston Avenue below Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights South. It was the first tour on Justin's Wolfe Walkers Spring 2014 Calendar. (You can download the Spring 2014 brochure here.) When our utterly engaging tour guide from the Chassidic Discovery Center, Rabbi Beryl Epstein, asked us all to introduce ourselves and explain briefly how we had come to take that day's tour, I was tempted to offer as my reason that Justin had scheduled a tour there, and if Justin thinks it's worth visiting, the odds are awfully good that it is.

Which is pretty much my governing principle in attacking each Wolfe Walkers brochure when it becomes available. Next up on the schedule (and I don't know if there's even still space) is:

ROOSEVELT AVENUE: "TASTES OF THE WORLD" FOOD TOUR
Walking Tour with Queens Food Specialist Jeff Orlick
Saturday, April 26, 2014, 1:30pm-approx. 5pm
(Note: The start time is a half-hour earlier than is indicated in the brochure. Justin just sent out this change of time late tonight, as requested by Jeff, "to ensure that we are given ample time to savor the experience.")

Here’s the tour you’ve been asking for! Join the noted Queens food specialist Jeff Orlick on this very special food discovery tour of perhaps the most diverse area in the world: Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. Experience the cultural enclaves of Jackson Heights, Woodside, and Elmhurst in one afternoon. Get an insider’s view to as many as nine cultures such as Tibetan, Nepalese, Filipino, Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Mexican, Ecuadorian, Colombian, Thai and more in one afternoon. In neighborhoods noted for their complex array of cultures and ethnicities, we’ll taste our way across the globe to demonstrate Jeff’s ultimate premise: Food is the greatest medium for communication and connection.

On this special 3-hour tour, created just for the Wolfe Walkers, we'll travel from Little Manila to Little India, then the Himalayan Heights to Bogotá through Bangkok, exploring only the most authentic foods not made for tourists. In between bites, we'll stop at some of Jeff’s best-kept secret shops for clothing, jewelry, and other authentic ethnic wares while we work up our appetites. The tour will be tailored to our needs and interests, so we’ll share our interests with Jeff and be ready for an amazing afternoon. This promises to be a one-of-a-kind experience – unlike anywhere else in the world. This isn't a lecture; it’s an insider’s experience to the most culturally rich and diverse place in the world.

Food and non-alcoholic beverages are included. The world is ours!

Limited to 15 participants. Fee: $75, advance registration only (includes tour guide, food, and non-alcoholic beverages)

There's usually an all-day bus extravaganza on the Wolfe Walkers schedule, with lunch included. For Spring 2014 it's a trip up the Hudson River to the Gomez Mill House Museum (the house, built in 1714, is the oldest Jewish dwelling in North America and the oldest home in Orange County), then back for lunch at the Buttermilk Falls Inn ("a delightful country hideaway that includes a renovated 1680 home on a 70-acre estate on the banks of the Hudson River"), stopping next at Wilderstein ("a remarkable 1852 house and estate that was owned by three generations of the Suckley family"), with a final stop at the bridge across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie, the old Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge, whose 1.3-mile span was reopened a couple of years ago as a recreation area, the Walkway Over the Hudson, now "the world's longest (and tallest) elevated footbridge," with "expansive vistas" over the river.

GOMEZ MILL HOUSE, BUTTERMILK FALLS,
WILDERSTEIN, and WALKWAY OVER THE HUDSON
Bus and Walking Tour with Justin Ferate
Saturday, May 10, 2014, bus leaves promptly at 8:15am, returns approx. 7pm

There's a much more detailed tour description in the brochure.

Limited to 40 people. Fee: $115, advance registration only (includes bus, admissions, guided tours, luncheon, and gratuities)

Farther along the schedule are:

* WHAT'S UP IN BROOKLYN HEIGHTS?
Saturday, May 24, 10am-1pm, $25 in advance, $28 on-site

* CHURCHES OF MONTCLAIR, NJ
Sunday, June 1, 10am-3:30pm (from and to Manhattan), $25 in advance, $28 on-site, plus bus fare
Tour led by John Simko, director of the Nutley Historical Society Museum (a splendid tour guide who led us through the museum on our Wolfe Walkers visit to Nutley last year)

* MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS
Saturday, June 15, 10am-1pm, $25 in advance, $28 on-site

Wolfe Walkers advance registration (which you'll note is required for some tours) is by mail only, by check only -- you can download just the registration form here; of course it's also included in the PDF of the complete spring brochure.

I have no idea whether there's still space (it's limited to eight people), but there's also a (free) bicycle tour with the Belgian journalist Jacqueline Goossens, who has lived in New York for a couple of decades now and is one of the smartest and most charming and funniest people you'll meet. The spring ride is CENTRAL PARK, HARLEM, AND A BIT OF THE BRONX, and it's Saturday, June 21, from 10am to about 3:30pm.


JACK EICHENBAUM PRESENTS THE 2014
EDITION OF HIS "SIGNATURE TOUR"

I've mentioned this famous tour a lot, but it's been a few years since I actually did it, but I'm doing it again this year. Jack, an urban geographer who for some years now has been the Queens Borough Historian, has been talking about updating some of the mini-walking tours that make up the whole adventure to take note of changes that have been taking place in those areas, so it should be even more interesting.

THE WORLD OF THE #7 TRAIN
Saturday, May 31, 2014, 10am-5:30pm

This series of six walks and connecting rides along North Queens’ transportation corridor is my signature tour. We focus on what the #7 train has done to and for surrounding neighborhoods since it began service in 1914. Walks take place in Long Island City, Sunnyside, Flushing, Corona, Woodside and Jackson Heights and lunch is in Flushing’s Asiatown.

Tour fee is $40 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address)  The full day’s program and other info is available by email jaconet@aol.com

The tour is limited to 25 people.

Jack's public tour schedule is here, and there's also a link to sign up for Jack's e-mail list. One walk I'm especially looking forward to is a Municipal Art Society tour that has been rescheduled from last summer, when Jack wasn't able to do it. It's of WILLET'S POINT, the patch of terrain in northern Queens between Citi Field (home of the New York Mets) and Flushing, a sort of Land That Time Forgot. Jack describes it as "a sewerless, hardscrabble area of auto junkyards and related businesses that has twice beaten back attempts at redevelopment." Now, with developers lurking again, Jack aims to help us "understand the area’s important setting, confront ecological issues and learn why “Willets Point” is a misnomer." It's Sunday, May 25, 4pm-6pm, $15 for MAS members, $20 for nonmembers; for more information or to register, use the MAS link above.


MARK THE DATES FOR JANE'S WALK
WEEKEND: IT'S MAY 3-4 (SCHEDULE TBA)


The birthday of that late great urbanist Jane Jacobs provides a good clue to the timing of each year's celebraton of her visions of cities that work for their inhabitants, now celebrated widely around the world -- you can check online to see what festivities (free!) may be offered in your area.

In New York, since the Municipal Art Society took over the planning and operation of Jane's Walk NYC, it has become one of the great urban gadding weekends of the year. This year it's May 3-4, and I'm itching for the schedule of events myself. You can keep track at MAS's Jane's Walk page, where you can also sign up for updates.

AS FOR THE REGULAR MAS TOUR SCHEDULE --

There are still a fair number of tours that have space in the remainder of the March-May schedule (or just remember mas.org and click on "Tours"). The new schedule should be posted sometime around May 15, and while it's true that some tours will fill up well before they take place, if you start doing your registering when the schedule comes out, you'll be able to register for any tour you want.

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Urban Gadabout: It's Jane's Walk weekend -- be sure to check to see what's happening in your area`

The NYC subways' Brighton Line had its origins in the Brooklyn & Brighton Beach Railroad, one of the railroads that connected to Brooklyn's ocean beaches. The big news in summer gadding is that Jack Eichenbaum is devoting another of his day-long subway-line odysseys to the Brighton Line.

by Ken

Okay, I've been kind of grumpy about the fact that I'll be on the shelf for one of my favorite weekends of the year: that of Jane's Walks, in honor of pioneer urbanologist Jane Jacobs, who did so much to reorient the way we think about urban life and to empower urban folk to feel that we can claim a voice in shaping the life of our cities in the direction of design and scale optimized for heightened human interaction.

Jane spent as much of her time as she could out in the field observing -- watching the way real people live actual lives, and see what sorts of design configurations produce the most diverse and enriching experiences. If you don't know her work, one word that should give you a clue is neighborhood. She was a great believer in the richness of neighborhood life, at a time when her frequent nemesis Robert "Pave It and Run a Parkway Through It" Moses was destroying every neighborhood he could get his eminent-domain-empowered mitts on.

In New York City we now have the best imaginable situation, since the Municipal Art Society took over the planning and execution of Jane's Walk offerings, which are free and mind-bogglingly rich, diverse, and generally tantalizing. With some dedicated work I can winnow the list -- numbering 100-plus this year -- down to about 30 walks over the two days which I would really, really like to do. I hadn't even planned to look at this year's list, knowing the weekend would fall less than three weeks after my knee surgery. I finally sneaked a peek, and with enough work I think I could get it down to 30 again.

As it happens, although not formally part of the Jane's Walk festivities, on Saturday there's an open house at the 225-plus-year-old Dyckman Farmhouse, now a museum, which I can reach easily via a bus that passes right in front of my building, so I'm thinking I'll give that a shot -- plus I can't help noticing that just sticking to my home bailiwick of Northern Manhattan, between Jane's Walk offerings and those of NYC Parks there are a number of other outings Saturday and Sunday.

Note that most of the MAS-organized Jane's Walks don't require preregistration. If I were zeroing in on tour possibilities, I might incline to those that seem likely to be less crowd-drawing to enjoy a more intimate walk. That said, though, the offerings are awesome. And it's all free!

MAY AT MAS

As it happens, my knee is coming along well enough that I've gone ahead and signed up for two Municipal Art Society tours I've had in my sights for the following week ever since the March-April-May schedule was announced. I can get to both by bus, so I don't have to deal with subway steps yet.

On Saturday the 11th, my old pal Joe Svehlak is doing "Downtown's Lost Neighborhood," 11am-1pm, exploring "the diverse immigrant history of Manhattan's Lower West Side in conjunction with the Arab American National Museum's exhibit on 'Little Syria.' " Now "Lower West Side" isn't a geographic term you hear a lot in connection with Manhattan. The Manhattan end of the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel -- a Robert Moses project -- wiped out the heart of the onetime neighborhood, and the various immigrant groups that once clustered there, including Joe's Czech parents, dispersed. I once almost did a version of this walk with Joe, but it was pouring that day and I didn't even have an umbrella.

Then on Sunday the 12th I'm going to try to do Laurence Frommer's "Bloomingdale Blocks" (2-4pm) -- "the quiet tre line streets from West 96th Street to West 110th Street that boast some of New York's finest remaining turn-of-the-century row-houses, apartment buildings, institutional structures and public monuments. I figure that will be easier on my legs than Eric Washington's "Uptown Trinity Church Cemetery Spring Tour," 11am-1pm.

On Saturday the 11th baseball aficionado-historian Peter Laskowich is leading a tour called "Brooklyn and Jackie Robinson," 1-3pm. And the following weekend, if I felt more secure about those subway stairs, I might venture to Brooklyn for Matt Postal's "New to New York: Downtown Brooklyn," Saturday the 18th, 11am-1pm, and for Suzanne Spellen and Morgan Munsey's "Brooklyn's Automobile Row" (Bedford Avenue between Fulton Street and Empire Boulevard in Crown Heights), Sunday the 19th, 11am-1pm. It's looking as if my first subway venture may be for the rescheduled version of Snyder Schools scholar Jean Arrington's "Brownsville's Cache of C.B.J. Snyder Schools," Saturday the 25th, 11am-1pm.


NEW YORK TRANSIT MUSEUM SUMMER TOURS

Meanwhile, New York Transit Museum members have been early-registering for the newly announced summer schedule since Tuesday, with registration for nonmembers scheduled to begin this Saturday the 4th. Among the tours I signed up for is one I've been awaiting eagerly for months: a visit to the (now finally reopened) totally rebuilt Smith-9th Streets elevated subway station perched on the viaduct over Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal along with the neighboring 4th Avenue-9th Street station. There are more Grand Central Terminal-themed tours, food tours, visits to the 240th Street Maintenance Facility, and more, including the summer's three "Nostalgia Rides," to Coney Island (June 29), the Bronx's Orchard Beach (another Robert Moses legacy, July 13), and the Bronx's Van Cortlandt Park (August 25).


FINALLY, NEWS FROM JACK EICHENBAUM

First off, Jack is doing a Jane's Walk this Sunday the 5th, "Bowne Street, My Street," "a walk along the length of historic and multiethnic Bowne Street in Flushing where I have been living for 35 years." If I weren't mobility-impaired I would definitely do this. About a month ago Jack did a walk through the Bayside (Queens) neighborhood where he grew up that was notable both for personal and for regional history. Meet at the northwest corner of Main Street and 39th Avenue (St. George Episcopal Church), near the Main Street (Flushing) station of the no. 7 train.

Jack has a couple of walks scheduled in rapidly developing Long Island City in conjunction with the third Long Island City Arts Open (LICAO), May 15-19, and in May he'll be resuming the series of Wednesday evening walks (6-8pm) he's been doing in recent summers. Scheduled so far under the heading "Changing Cultures of Queens" are: On and Off Jamaica Avenue Avenue (May 22), Sunnyside to Jackson Heights (May 29), and Long Island City to Old Astoria (June 5).

The big news for those who have done or wish they had done Jack's daylong subway-line odysseys ("The World of the #7 Train" and "A Day on the J") is:

Brighton Line Memoirs: Meandering off the Q train
Sunday, July 21, 10am-5:30pm

This is a series of five walks and connecting rides along what was once the Brooklyn, Flatbush and Coney Island RR dating to 1878. Walks take place in Prospect Park, Brighton Beach, along Avenue U, in Ditmas Park and Central Flatbush. Lunch is in Brighton Beach where you can picnic on the Boardwalk. Tour fee is $39 and you need to preregister by check to Jack Eichenbaum, 36-20 Bowne St. #6C, Flushing, NY 11354 (include name, phone and email address). Get the full day’s program and other info by email jaconet@aol.com The tour is limited to 25 people. Don’t get left out!

You better believe I've already sent my check in! (And not just because the Brighton Line was my subway lifeline to "the City" growing up in Brooklyn.)

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Urban Gadabout: Jane's Walks NYC reminder (May 5-6)

by Ken

One last reminder that the Municipal Art Society has coordinated a bumper crop of 70-plus walks (plus a few bike tours) in all five boroughs for Saturday and Sunday's annual celebration of Jane Jacobs's vision of the livable city. The complete list is here, with start and finish points, and presumably any changes will be noted on the website.

Without exaggeration I must have noted at least 40 walks I would be happy to do. I finally settled on one relatively remote destination for each day, in the two least-accessed boroughs: to Staten Island Saturday for "New Dorp: Possibilities for Walkability and Transit in a Railway 'New Village'" (10:30am-1pm), and to the Bronx Sunday for "The Unknown Riverdale" (12n-2pm). I'll be reporting on my travels, and would love to hear about readers'.

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Urban Gadabout: So what did you do for your Jane's Walk free(!) walk this weekend?

"The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations."

-- Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, the epigraph on the 2011 Jane's Walk USA website

by Ken

Really, I'd be curious to know what people did and saw around the country in this weekend of free walks (yes, free!) celebrating and keeping alive the memory of that pioneer of modern urban life Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), author most famously of The Death and LIfe of Great American Cities, timed to her birthday (which was Wednesday).

On the Jane's Walk USA website there's a list of 25 cities represented this year: Anchorage, Austin, Baton Rouge, Brunswick (ME), Boston, Chattanooga, Heber Valley (UT), Houston, Jackson (MS), Kansas City (MO), Mesa (AZ), New Orleaans, New York City, Oakland (CA), Orange (NJ), Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Scranton, Syracuse (NY), Tempe (AZ), and Waterbury (CT).

On the actual birthday, the Municipal Art Society has an annual tour, "Her Village," in which architectural historian Matt Postal leads participants through sites associated with Jane's life and causes in the neighborhood. We wound up in front of the modest little three-story house on Hudson Street (down the block from the White Horse Tavern) which she and her husband, Robert, bought and in which they raised their two sons and a daughter until pulling up stakes for Toronto in 1968, unwilling to allow the coming-of-age Jacobs boys to be subject to the draft for the Vietnam War, which they vehemently opposed.

I think my very first MAS tour was one of Matt's, which remains one of my all-time favorites from a "concept" standpoint: a walkthrough of a project that never got built, thanks in part to the activism of Jane Jacobs. It was the legendary Robert Moses's first major defeat, planned as another of his slash-and-destroy neighborhood-killers, the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have provided a direct vehicular link between the Holland Tunnel on the west and the East River bridges to Brooklyn on the east, at the cost of a neighborhood filled with the kind of people that neither Moses nor the business community that supported him cared about.

Every time Moses was pushed back, he came back with an altered version of the plan, until finally community groups discovered -- with Jane Jacobs playing a major role -- that they really could fight City Hall. (Moses wore so many public hats that fighting him was in effect fighting a united wall of bureaucracies.) The strategic breakthroughs involved in the LME fight(s) included organizing community resistance and finding ways, normally (necessarily) through the standard media, to make a "story" of that opposition.

It was a stark reminder of the gulf between Robert Moses's way of looking at cities and Jane Jacobs's. If you look at Moses's plans for the city of the future, you see high-rise buildings containing hermetically sealed dwellings that the dwellers leave only to go to their cars to drive on Moses's highways to . . . well, destinations, including Moses's parks and other recreation facilities. Left out was any kind of human interaction, any kind of community -- the very thing that counted for so much in Jacobs's thinking, that and the idea that people living and working in neighborhoods are entitled to a say about the use made of their neighborhoods.

Jane famously loved low-rise buildings with stoops, which encourage neighborhood interaction, and buildings with stairs rather than elevators. She was an obsessive observer, getting out in the field, seeing what made neighborhoods work, what made them active and vital, and what made them work less well. She was correspondingly distrustful of top-down planning by people who didn't know, or often didn't care, how people actually live their lives.

My only regret about the Jane's Walk weekend was how many interesting-looking tours were scheduled in New York which I wasn't able to go on. I was out of commission Saturday because I wasn't going to be deterred from another Queens tour led by Jack Eichenbaum, with whom I've done both New York Transit Museum and Municipal Art Society tours and last week his own spectacular all-day "World of the #7 Train" tour (for which in the end he had to turn away eight would-be registrants). I didn't imagine I'd have another opportunity to walk "The Right-of-Way of the Flushing Central Rail Road" (under the auspices of the Queens Historical Society), which for some seven years in the 1870s connected Flushing to Hempstead, Long Island, and which "lives on in a swath of parkland and streets," of which we walked the portion from Flushing to Fresh Meadows.

BY THE WAY, JACK EICHENBAUM HAS A WHOLE
SERIES OF QUEENS TOURS COMING UP

One of the things that makes Jack, as an "urban geographer," such an interesting tour leader (he's the current Queens borough historian, by the way) is his fascination with how and why areas and neighborhoods have developed and continue to develop, and one of his current fascinations is the incredibly rapid evolution of Long Island City in the wake of a major zoning overhaul by the city. He has five tours of the area coming up: next weekend ("Daylight Loft Buildings in Long Island City," Saturday, May 14, and "Long Island City Shoreline to the Noguchi Museum," Sunday, May 15), the following Wednesday evening ("Queensboro Plaza to the Waterfront at Sunset," May 18), and the following weekend ("Long Island City Studio Strolls," Saturday and Sunday, May 21 and 22). The sunset walk to the waterfront is also part of an extensive series of Wednesday-evening tours Jack is doing from May through July under the heading "Changing Cultures of Queens: A Walking Anthology," including "Flushing's Chinatown" (this Wednesday, May 11) and "Sunnyside to Jackson Heights" (May 25).

They're all $15, and no advance reservations are required. For more information, check Jack's website.

THE JANE'S WALK I FINALLY CHOSE FOR TODAY


In addition to the Saturday Jane's Walks I couldn't take, but tried to keep track of in case maybe someday I can try to do them on my own, there were a number on Sunday I might have done, but in the end I opted for "The Draw of a Vibrant Waterfront," a tour organized by two New York Harbor-obsessed bloggers, Will Van Dorp (of Tugster, recently profiled in nytimes.com's City Room), an English professor by day who thinks of the vast working New York Harbor as the city's "sixth borough"; and Christina Sun (of Bowsprite), an artist whose passion is directed toward the people who work the harbor -- people who are mostly from someplace else. On a picture-perfect day, with just enough clouds to add drama to the blue sky, our small but hardy band took the noon Staten Island Ferry (it was a difficult decision, knowing how unpunctual people are these days, to depart on time rather than wait the half-hour till the next ferry), then headed west from the St. George Ferry Terminal along the north shore of Staten Island, with spectacular views of the Upper Bay from the Kill van Kull (which separates Staten Island from New Jersey) on the west to the distant Brooklyn shore on the east.

As excited as I was by my recent Municipal Art Society outing to Staten Island's Snug Harbor Cultural Center, farther around the bend on the Kill van Kull, I had one regret: that of necessity, by taking the short bus ride from the ferry, we zoomed past that magnificent shoreline. So I couldn't resist returning in the company of people who could help point me at and explain what there was to see from that wonderful vantage point, and Will and Christina (and their tugboat-savvy friend Burke) were splendid guides -- and our small group included terrifically interesting people. I had a grand time.

Thanks to Will and Christina. And thanks of course to Jane.

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