The Lady on Stilts

Third Street Had a Good Idea

I was slightly off my game on December 7, possibly because it was Pearl Harbor day, which is an emotional day for me. Anyway, what you see here is slightly off my usual polish, which nods to chaos but in the end finds a certain equilibrium. Or at least tries.

On the other hand, maybe I was right for the day. Old City closed a block of Third north of Market on that Saturday, and had an Open Street. The star was the lady on stilts.

But there wasn't a whole lot to back her up. I was only there for an hour, roughly from three to four, but there simply wasn't a lot of programming beyond the lady on stilts.

There was a brass band, but for the time I was there the players just stood around. A little music would have been nice. 

And there could have been some additions to the dramatis personae. A juggler or two would have been okay. There were quite a few kids to be amused, not to mention adults in a wide variety of ages.

Really, putting on a street fair can draw on well over a half millennium of practice. Just pick what you want (three-card monte may be a bad idea); then mix and match.

I'll be interested to see whether local merchants saw the desired boost in foot traffic. The windows I looked through showed spaces well populated with people who appeared to be in a good mood. But, as New York mayor Bloomberg used to say, "In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data."

Below: All this painting on the street has nothing to do with the holidays. The City is starting a major rebuild of this stretch of Market, with the intention of making it more pedestrian friendly. Before we dig, we must draw. Third and Market. 

Betsy Ross House (below) was just around the corner on Arch, and definitely on its game.

See also Open Streets: West Walnut.

Sweeping the Bike Lane

This Is Not a Fake Picture

1700 block of Pine.

I seem to recall, in community meetings nearly a decade ago, people questioned the existence of street sweeping machines that were small enough to fit in a bike lane. And frankly, I'd never seen one before January 2, when I took this picture.

So bike lane sweeping machines are real. The picture is not a fake. I am not a bot.

Still, I have always been impressed with the inventiveness of the anti-bicycle crew. Back in 2016, Randy LoBasso wrote a story for the Metro detailing some of the fact-free gossip swirling around bike lanes in Philly. His focus was on a community meeting in Wash West to discuss proposed upgrades for the Pine-Spruce bike lanes. I think the meeting left us all with a sense of stalemate.

The next year, 2017, Emily Fredricks was killed in Wash West, at 11th and Spruce, and in 2019 the Pine-Spruce bike lanes were upgraded to their current state.

Memorial gathering for Emily Fredricks.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly ..."
I Corinthians 13:12

We have definitely made progress since 2016, but the underlying opposition among various parts of the community remains a constant. The basic tactics are the same: throw a lot of chaff in the air, and do your best to distract people from the fundamental issue: parking in the bike lane cripples the bike lane.

Nowadays, opponents of bike lanes frequently start their argument by stating that they are in favor of bicycling. Often they say they are bicyclists themselves. They just don't want to have a properly functioning network of bicycle lanes in Philadelphia, because that would interfere with their ability to drive their cars and park those cars wherever they damn well please. 

Of course, they don't say that last bit out loud. Instead they spray the room from a grab-bag of bandaids - how about speed bumps? A decent tool, doesn't address the underlying issue. I could go on - but enough.

The opponents of bike lanes are persistent, and they need to be watched. But we have made progress - just look at that sweeping machine at the top of this story - and I think we will make more progress this year.

"But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away." I Cor. 13:10 

See also The Traffic at J'aime; Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce; Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends; The State of Play on Pine-Spruce; Mayor Parker Signs No Stopping Bill.

Unleashing the Oligarchs

Where Will It End?

Marie Antoinette gets around. Asbury Park boardwalk.

People are grasping for historical parallels to help them think about what the second Trump administration might look like. The 1920s, 1890s. The 1850s, with the slavemasters ascendant and Roger Taney declaring in the Dred Scott Supreme Court case that blacks are inferior human beings.

All these priors are good. But I have one more. Time: around 1790. Location: in a different country - France. This is when Marie Antoinette, the queen of France, did not say "Let them eat cake." But she might as well have. Marie and her husband, Louis XVI, and pretty much the entire French ruling class, had been giving clueless arrogance a bad name for a very long time.

Marie and Louis do remind me of the oligarchs who are coming into power in the second Trump administration, which Timothy Snyder has dubbed Trumpomuskovia. 

I think the oligarchs, and their ringleader Trump, will make the fatal mistake of overreach. They are definitely primed for it. The reality they live in - the bubble, if you will - is a place that brings them comfort and power on a silver platter. Their earwigs and flatterers are quick to praise anything they do as an act of genius, explaining to lower-class people such as journalists that a stupid, impulsive, lurching mistake is actually a masterful piece of political jiu-jitsu, or perhaps just a brilliant bargaining chip that will cause the opposition to give the oligarch what he really wants, and be grateful that the worst has not happened.

There are wealthy and apparently intelligent people on Wall Street, and in many other places, who don't believe that Trump will actually deport millions of people, both undocumented aliens and American citizens whose sin was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I think Trump will try. I also think he will fail. He may avoid ruffling the feathers of industrial farmers in largely rural red states by attacking blue cities in blue states. I'm a fan of the movie Casablanca, where Humphrey Bogart tells Major Strasser that there are parts of New York City that he would advise the major not to invade. 

Or look at what happened in the airports in 2017, when the first Muslim ban went in. Lawyers flooded the zone and gummed up everything in sight. It was beautiful, in a messy way. 

Cities are gooey, with occasional patches of quicksand. Going in is easy. Getting out again is another thing.

Or take the tariffs. People say he won't do the tariffs. That would be a good thing, but a fail for Trump. And if he does pass them, they will be a disaster. A brilliant disaster, of course, and exactly what Trump wanted. Tell that to Herbert Hoover. (For information on the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff act of 1930, click here.)

Trump and his oligarchs will try to do these things, and others, and - I think this will be their downfall - they will continue to squeeze the middle-class lemon until the pips squeak. 

As I said, I think their fatal flaw is overreach. I don't, however, think the response will be at all like what happened in the French Revolution, with people rising up in the streets of Paris. I personally think the troubles will begin in the world of finance, as they did in 2007-2009 and on many prior occasions. And I think this is Trump's weakest point. He and his motley crew don't understand the issues, aren't interested in learning, and will be unable to cope. I think they will panic.

This is, of course, what happened during the Covid pandemic.

I'm hopeful that what comes next will not be terribly violent. There are examples of bloodless revolutions. The one closest to home is what Franklin Roosevelt did after his election in 1932. But my favorite is the 1989 fall of the wall in Berlin, followed by the reunification of Germany. And East Germany, a country for four decades, ceased to exist.

I think we are headed into a period of major reconstruction, and not the one that the Project 2025 people have outlined. Instead I see positive change. This needs to start with our Constitution, which is clearly broken and needs to be fixed. We also need to reform the Supreme Court and purge the grafters and perjurists. But I don't think that is the end. We certainly need to reexamine the role of oligarchs in our national life, and while we're at it I think we need to have a close look at the American corporation, which may have evolved to the point where it is doing more evil than good. Certain companies and perhaps even whole industries might be called upon to explain what their value added is. I'm thinking particularly of the health insurance industry, where I worked for sixteen years. (Paul Krugman plays with the idea "that at this point private health insurance is, in large part, a parasitical racket.")

This will all be quite scary for many people. But I for one am very hopeful for the future. Scared to death, but hopeful.

Greetings from Asbury Park. Or, if you prefer,
Darkness on the Edge of Town.

See also Quagmire, What a Cold Civil War Feels Like, What's Wrong with a Nice Little Recession?

Painting with Light

The Trees Are Very Happy

The evening before Thanksgiving found me with family, walking around the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the dark. There was a light show. It was called Lightscape. And I think it was the best light show I have ever seen.

I don't say this lightly. I've enjoyed the light shows at Longwood gardens. They are utterly charming and use a classical French garden very sensitively. And then one year they added a walk through the woods, which I thought took the whole experience to a new level. Call it a walk on the wild side.

But that's where Brooklyn starts. It's an artist-driven show. There is a synoptic power bringing the individual efforts together, and also sequencing an experience that starts with happy discovery and moves to - shall we say happy shock - and then through some quieter and subtly seducing sections, all leading you finally to the exit and the real world. Which, after what you've just been through, is also something of a shock.

I think it's fair to say that the invention of electricity changed the way we all see light. Before that we had sunlight (particularly on a sunny day) and we had night, which could be dark in ways that many now living have never experienced. Imagine a moonless, overcast night with absolutely no electric lights - not even the flashlight on your iPhone. Against that black velvet background, there were torchlight parades, and eventually whale-oil lanterns, and then gaslight. But the switch to electricity took things to a new level.

And very quickly electricity transformed entertainment. The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago extended its hours deep into the evening by bathing the exposition grounds in electric light, in the process consuming three times as much electricity as all the rest of Chicago. (For more, see City of Lights.)

Coney Island was quick to pick up the gauntlet, bathing its already fanciful structures in artificial light and drawing admirers (and detractors) from quite literally around the world. (For more, see Night Lights at Coney Island.)

And then of course we had the lights of Times Square, where neon showed what it could do in the service of Mammon. I haven't smoked a Camel cigarette in more than half a century, but I am still drawn to the garish charm of Times Square.

What happened to me in Brooklyn, though, was something deeper and more meaningful. I was dealing directly with actual artists, who in turn were telling me things that could not be put into words. 

To quote Arnold Schwarzenegger, I'll be back.

For a story in the New Yorker from 2023, click here.

See also City of Lights, Night Lights at Coney Island, Lighting Rittenhouse.

 

Mayor Parker Signs No Stopping Bill

Also Changes Taney Street to LeCount

Mayor Parker signs the no stopping bill.

Philadelphia, Dec. 4: Mayor Cherelle Parker had a busy lunch hour in the Mayor's Reception Room in City Hall. She signed a bill making it illegal to stop a motor vehicle in any bike lane throughout the city, and she signed a bill changing the name of Taney street to LeCount street. 

Council President Kenyatta Johnson was in attendance at the signing ceremony, along with several members of City Council. 

LeCount Street

Roger Taney was chief justice of the United States before the Civil War, and he wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision declaring that blacks are inferior human beings. I have not been able to find anyone who can explain to me why this street was named for Taney in the first place. He seems to have had virtually no connection to Philadelphia.

Caroline LeCount was an early warrior for civil rights, helping her fiance Octavius Valentine Catto to desegregate Philadelphia's streetcars. Catto was shot to death during an election in 1871. LeCount was the first black woman in Philadelphia to pass the teaching exam; later she became principal of a school that, in time, was named after Catto. She retired in 1911. 

No Stopping

The mayor explained the importance of putting the no stopping signs up along the bike lanes on Pine and Spruce at the same time that the planned loadings zones are added to those blocks, noting that otherwise the existing loading traffic would have no place to go. This installation will happen in the spring; the installation of concrete protective barriers will come along later, but I'm confident that it will come. There seemed to be widespread recognition that, while the no stopping signs will significantly cut down on incursions into the bike lanes, those lanes will not actually be safe until the concrete barriers are installed.

I'm prepared to call it a good day.

See also The State of Play on Pine-Spruce; Loading Zones Are the Key.

Open Streets: West Walnut

Come with Me to the Casbah

Despite the best efforts of our City Council to keep Philadelphia's streets exclusively for moving and parked cars and moving and stored trash, it appears that sanity is actually beginning to gain traction.

My most current evidence for this phenomenon is the recent Open Streets: West Walnut celebration, which extended across all four Sundays in the month of September.

The City closed Walnut Street to motor vehicles from 19th Street to 15th; it also closed 18th Street from Locust to Chestnut. And then it put out a well-planned welcome mat for pedestrians of all ages.

In the picture above, we have a woman on stilts teaching two girls how maneuver a hula-hoop. All while standing in the middle of the right-of-way on Walnut Street, with parents sitting in lawn chairs and fiddling with their iPhones.

This is not normal.

That is a good thing.

The West Walnut open street was, as you might guess from the appearance of an acrobat on stilts, a carefully curated event. When I was there, the streets were not jam-packed with people, the way some street fairs are. It was busy enough, but there was room to move around. And there were lots of activities, such as jump-roping (double-dutch, no less), ping-pong, blowing bubbles, bean-bag (also called cornhole), and my favorite: writing on the black asphalt with many colors of chalk. Musical performers included a harp player and, further east on Walnut, a keyboard artist. 

Parc extends a pseudopod onto the asphalt.

Intersection of Walnut and 18th.

The art of the bubble.

Eating sushi on the tarmac.

On September 22, a large screen appeared on the northern section of 18th Street, and Eagles fans with strong stomachs got to watch their team win a game - 15 to 12 over the Saints.

I managed to visit Open Streets: West Walnut on three of the four Sundays. I spent the most time there on the third Sunday of September, which coincided with the last day of the Rittenhouse Square Fine Art Show. That was a particularly busy weekend. During the afternoon there was a small brass band playing jazz in the center of the square, and down by the goat statue we had the swing dancers, also with a live combo.

Streets Can Be Fun

Why do people like open streets? Because they're fun. Fun is a thread that runs through and ties together the many ways people are trying to reimagine our streets. People like biking because it's fun. They like eating outdoors because it's fun. They like hanging out in the middle of a street with other people. Perhaps it's just the novelty of an outdoor living room, but it is fun.

Come with me to the Casbah, Charles Boyer did not say in the movie Algiers, but he might as well have. The Casbah was a place of freedom. Open streets are places of freedom. 

Open Space That's Not Scary

So open streets are attractive; they are also places of safety. Center City Philadelphia is short of open spaces that are safe and attractive. We have Independence Mall, but few people spend time there unless there's an event like Barack Obama's speech on April 18, 2008, which drew 35,000 people. 

The mall is pretty, but it's surrounded by streets full of motor vehicles that are busy shifting into, or out of, Interstate mode. Something like an island surrounded by sharks. And for many years, many important people saw the mall simply as a viewshed. Stand in the middle of it, and you can take a very pretty picture of Independence Hall. Then what do you do?

People have been working on answers. In September, a coalition led by the Independence Historical Trust unveiled a proposal to redesign the whole historical area of Philadelphia that has as its heart Independence National Historical Park, Independence Hall, and Independence Mall. The redesign extends east from the mall to the Delaware River, which means that it will be covering Philadelphia's nineteenth-century history, as well as the eighteenth century. 

It's a pretty exciting plan, focused on turning the area into a pedestrian-priority zone, so that tourists who have been told that we are a very walkable city can come here and actually walk around without having to deal with the bizarre behavior of Philadelphia motorists at every turn.

The plan incorporates and expands upon a redesign centered on Market street in Old City that was proposed in 2016 and is moving ahead; construction should start this year. 

I'm particularly pleased to note that Commerce street is included in these plans. Commerce street is a little pedestrian walkway located between Market and Arch. It runs east from Fifth street, past the Congregation Mikveh Israel on the north and the former Faith and Liberty Discovery Center on the south. It crosses Fourth street and then, in the middle of the 300 block, splits in several directions. I fell in love with Commerce street back in 2018, when I was working on a story that wound up with the title Permeable Blocks. I had the positively brilliant idea to open a gelato stand at the point where Commerce street splits in three directions. I wanted to call it the Dead Squirrel Cafe, after a squirrel who slowly turned into a skeleton while I was writing the story.

Currently, Commerce street is an underutilized space. The key to activating it is installing mid-block crosswalks on Fifth and Fourth streets. 

I'm informed that the Commerce street project is fully funded, and it looks like construction may be complete for the 2026 celebration of the country's 250th birthday. 

Where Do We Go from Here?

So progress is possible, and I think Independence Mall and Old City may be getting ready to give the Rittenhouse Square area some serious competition for the title of best open space in Philadelphia. 

Open House: West Walnut provides an excellent example of temporary closure of major streets. For four Sundays in September it provided a massive increase of open space - well programmed space - directly connected to Rittenhouse Square.

I'm reliably informed that the square itself covers only six acres. I did some very rough calculations, and came to the conclusion that the street closures added well over an acre. And it was well used. 

There are other possibilities within the world of open streets. I've written a lot about our little streets, often called alleys. A lot of these alleys could follow the example of Stone Street, a pedestrian street in lower Manhattan, where the neighboring restaurants use the street just as Parc did during the West Walnut open streets, only every day. Oktoberfest is apparently a really big deal. 

It strikes me that Drury street, a one-block street that lies two blocks southeast of City Hall, between Juniper and 13th, is well on its way to being a de facto open street. One of the keys here was repurposing part of an open lot in the mid-block as a corral for the block's dumpsters. This opportunity will not arise in every block.

The 1500 block of Sansom street was a huge success as an open street during the Covid crisis. It could be brought back in a New York minute.

Intriguing but more challenging are the 1400, 1700, and 2000 blocks of Moravian, a little east-west street that runs just north of Walnut and south of Sansom. The architecture on the 1400 block, next to the Union League, is among the most memorable in the city. It just needs to be cleaned up and have a restaurant or two on Walnut decide to utilize the existing facades on Moravian as a second front door.

Here's an artist getting in a little plein air painting on Walnut Street. 

See also Alleys, Gordon Cullen and the Outdoor Floor, Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Philly Plein Air, A Few Deft Touches for Back Streets, Come for the Sights, What Should We Do With the Humble Dumpster?

What's Wrong with a Nice Little Recession?

 A Lot.

The Scream, by Edvard Munch.

I don't like recessions. I remember two of them with a particular lack of fondness - the Reagan recession in the early 1980s and the financial meltdown in 2007-2009.  Both of these economic events substantially altered the path of my life. 

Even little recessions can do a lot of damage. And then there is always the possibility that, with appropriate mismanagement, things can spin out of control.

Kind of like a nice little war.

Also kind of like 1929.

Let's have a look at Walker Evans, one of the most celebrated American photographers of the twentieth century. Evans actually started his photographic career at the beginning of the Great Depression, and for a while, things seemed to be going well. Hart Crane's poem The Bridge was published in 1930 with three photogravures by Evans. But his work was not necessarily putting a whole lot of bread on the table, a common experience for many Americans at that time. 

Between 1929 and 1933 President Herbert Hoover presided over an amazing economic death spiral. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president in November 1932, but he did not take office until March 1933. Here's what Evans was doing a few months after the inauguration:

"July 13, 1933: A day in the life of an itinerant photographer. Evans was still in straitened circumstances, forced to cadge a midday meal with friends who were as badly off as he. 'Hungry, so walked to see Noda; they were in and I ate.' ... Considering Evans's situation, he was taking it with a certain equanimity: 'Not panicky, nor yet careless-bohemian about it.' ... 'Always wondering if past experiences with poverty have or have not depleted me.' ... That evening, another near-starving friend, the artists' model Avis Ferme, with whom he had once pursued a courtship if not an affair, telephoned him. He acknowledged a certain coldness in his attitude: 'I feel careless about it and don't know what that's a sign of. A sign that I am tired of the hypocrisy of sending stranded people around to unstranded people. Weary of this perpetual inability we all share to be strictly honest about our indifference. I don't care if Avis Ferme starves to death as long as I don't have to watch her do it; so I feel like writing that down."

(My source here is James Mellow's excellent biography Walker Evans, 1999. The quotations are on pages 195-196.) 

Things started going better for Evans in 1933. That year he had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, and he also went to Cuba to take photographs for a book by Carleton Beals entitled The Crime of Cuba, which was published the same year. His big economic break came in 1935, when Roy Stryker of what would become the U.S. Farm Security Administration hired him as a staff photographer. He took a leave from his staff job in 1936 to collaborate with James Agee on a project centered on sharecroppers in Alabama that eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His later career included a lengthy stint at Fortune magazine and a number of years teaching at Yale. 

I'm haunted by what those early years of the Depression did to Evans, and I expect to many other people. Exhaustion is here, and despair is close by.

Not too many years later FDR suggested that government had a role in giving the people freedom from fear, and freedom from want.  

But this appears to be a controversial proposition today.

See also Wounded Souls, Little Karl, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.