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A New Pattern Language for Growing Regions
An extension of the work done by Christopher Alexander and team to document successful urban design patterns in the 1970s, this wiki describes 80 patterns applicable to today's problems in urban design, such as retrofitting suburban sprawl.
10 Secrets of the Hotel Pennsylvania, Under Demolition - Untapped New York
Demolished earlier this year, it was built in 1919 as a companion to the original Penn Station across the street, and both were designed by McKim, Mead, & White. It was the largest hotel in the world when it opened. Its phone number inspired a hit Glenn Miller song, "Pennsylvania 6-5000." In 1981, as the New York Statler, it was the headquarters hotel for the National Invitational Tournament, held across the street at Madison Square Garden. The University of Tulsa Golden Hurricane, with Nolan Richardson in his first year as head coach and great players like Paul Pressey, Greg Stewart, and Rondie "Poindexter" Turner, prevailed over West Virginia and Syracuse to take the NIT title. My best friend was given a trip to the NIT with the team as an early high school graduation gift, and he invited me along. Another high school friend joined us, and we stayed in a very small room at the very aged Statler, where the soda machines sold only White Rock beverages and the TV was black and white (no cable). Tulsa radio and TV sportscasters set up in the hotel's lobby to interview players, coaches, and the fans who made the trip. The team's charter flight to LaGuardia was my first ever plane flight, and I had my first (and for many years, only) alcoholic beverage, a celebratory cup of champagne, on the flight home after the final victory.
MORE: New York Times feature story on the Hotel Pennsylvania and the preservationists who tried to save it.
'Building a Deeply Inclusive Culture' : The Other McCain
Baltimore tech startup exec murdered and left on the roof of her apartment building. "She wanted to disrupt the tech industry's reigning power structure of white men and make way for more women and other people from disadvantaged groups. . . . She studied computer science for three years before switching her major to sociology because, she said, she wanted to use entrepreneurship to solve inequalities in society. . . . EcoMap has committed to a '50/50%' goal of employing a staff that is half women and half people of color."
Eternity 1950-1989 : Free Texts : Free Download, Borrow and Streaming : Internet Archive
The Internet Archive has borrowable grayscale scans of the full 1950-1989 run of Eternity, a monthly Christian magazine founded by Donald Barnhouse, pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Christian philosopher Douglas Groothuis writes: "I am taken by the earnestness of the topics addressed and the quality of the writers, such as John Stott, Bernard Ramm, Billy Graham, G. Elton Ladd, and others. It was a magazine of serious evangelical commentary. I found articles on the God is dead theory, race relations, various political issues, LSD, youth culture, television (note the cover I posted from 1976), and other issues of moment.... I wrote a few articles for them [in the mid '80s], one rather long piece on New Age politics. By combing through these old issues, I see that Eternity gave us solid evangelical commentary and Bible study back in the day and for many years. For this, I am grateful and look forward to working my way through the years of their magazine." Because the magazines are still under copyright, you must have an Internet Archive account to check out a copy for viewing one hour at a time. The final issue dated January 1989 has cover stories by Brian Frickle regarding the moral content of architecture and by Thomas L. Kerns on architecture and creating a place of worship.
The Magic of Legacy Shops Comes Back to Life in Buffalo
Buffalo's new zoning code allows for long-abandoned neighborhood retail -- corner stores, bars, and other commercial buildings -- to be reopened as commercial, with reduced regulatory hurdles and no minimum parking requirement. Bernice Radle provides several examples with photos -- a couple of coffee houses and a bar that honors the history of local labor unions. There aren't nearly as many such spaces in Tulsa -- urban renewal took out most of them -- but they exist and could be neighborhood gathering spots once more.
The Pacific Electric Railway and Its History In The San Bernardino Valley
"For a railroad town, this spelled certain doom. San Bernardino no longer had its critical strategic importance as a transportation hub. It was no longer the "Gateway City." Third Street degraded into a dismal ghost town. It is also not a coincidence that the Central City Mall was built (obliterating much of Third Street) at the site where the Pacific Electric Railway station had been, and that other demolition and "redevelopment" projects took place in the 1960s and early 1970s. This was the same time period when San Bernardino lost most of its critical railroad industry, which would ultimately seal the city's fate. Today, it can be said that San Bernardino still has never completely recovered from that loss. For over 50 years, the Pacific Electric Railway, though only one of many railroads to serve San Bernardino, played a huge and inseparable role in its early development and prosperity."
American Murder Mystery - The Atlantic
Hannah Rosin, writing in 2008, about the impact of Section 8 housing subsidies on crime patterns.
"According to FBI data, America's most dangerous spots are now places where Martin Scorsese would never think of staging a shoot-out--Florence, South Carolina; Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Reading, Pennsylvania; Orlando, Florida; Memphis, Tennessee....
"Betts had been evaluating the impact of one of the city government's most ambitious initiatives: the demolition of the city's public-housing projects, as part of a nationwide experiment to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty. Memphis demolished its first project in 1997. The city gave former residents federal "Section8" rent-subsidy vouchers and encouraged them to move out to new neighborhoods. Two more waves of demolition followed over the next nine years, dispersing tens of thousands of poor people into the wider metro community....
"Janikowski merged his computer map of crime patterns with Betts's map of Section8 rentals.... On the merged map, dense violent-crime areas are shaded dark blue, and Section8 addresses are represented by little red dots. All of the dark-blue areas are covered in little red dots, like bursts of gunfire. The rest of the city has almost no dots."
"If replacing housing projects with vouchers had achieved its main goal--infusing the poor with middle-class habits--then higher crime rates might be a price worth paying. But today, social scientists looking back on the whole grand experiment are apt to use words like baffling and disappointing.... The best Popkin can say is: 'It has not lived up to its promise. It has not lifted people out of poverty, it has not made them self-sufficient, and it has left a lot of people behind.'...
"[Ed Goetz]'s most surprising finding, he says, 'is that they miss the old community. For all of its faults, there was a tight network that existed. So what I'm trying to figure out is: Was this a bad theory of poverty? We were intending to help people climb out of poverty, but that hasn't happened at all. Have we underestimated the role of support networks and overestimated the role of place?'"
The Invisible Asylum | City Journal
Christopher Rufo writes: "In the absence of the old asylums, Olympia's mentally ill are now crowded into a city-sanctioned tent encampment, then shuffled through the institutions of the modern social-scientific state: the jail cell, the short-term psychiatric bed, the case-management appointment, the feeding line, and the needle dispensary. In the name of compassion, we have built a system that may be even crueler than what came before."
The Renaissance Neighborhood History Project
Arena Mueller posts her research into the history of homes of the 1/2-square mile between Lewis and Harvard Avenues, 11th and 15th Streets, just south of the University of Tulsa, and the people who lived in them. The most recent entry is a story about a fatal 1942 drag race on 11th from Peoria to Elgin.
Tulsa People profiled Arena and her neighborhood history project in the March 2019 issue, along with Rachel Shoemaker, who has identified over 30 Sears kit homes in Tulsa.
If you're interested in house history that's a bit more exotic, visit the case files of Marianne Taylor, The House Detective, based in Brisbane, Australia. Her Facebook page is full of interesting stories.
"Not for Camera View" -- Strong Towns
Photographer Johnny Sanphillippo's habit of photographing ordinary places has attracted a fair amount of negative attention and suspicion over the years.
"Why not capture what the landscape really looks like? America is mostly parking lots, squat concrete strip malls, storm water retention ponds, refineries, chain link fences, and tract homes made of plastic siding. Photographing the authentic American landscape is both more challenging and ultimately more rewarding if you can do it well....
"I was walking around a nondescript neighborhood in Chicago a few years ago when five squad cars surrounded me at an intersection. I was asked for my identification, they were keen to see what was on my camera, and there were all sorts of questions about who I was and what I was up to. The police wouldn't say exactly why they descended on me in such an overwhelming fashion, but it was pretty clear there had been a report of unsavory activity of the terrorist variety."
I can only think of one occasion where I was challenged in a frightening way for taking pictures. I had spotted an interesting neon sign on a hotel located along what was once a major highway on the edge of Orlando. I made the mistake of getting out of the car to take the picture, and a burly guy who looked like he stepped out of The Sopranos came out to ask me what the **** I was doing. (Maybe he thought I was photographing license plates.) He calmed down after I explained that the sign had caught my attention, and he encouraged me to come back some time for dinner at the restaurant. (No thanks.)
