Winter Shelters in Rittenhouse

Outdoor Dining Dons a Winter Cloak

The restaurants of Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square are getting ready for winter. The big question seems to be: Tents or carpentry? Both are popular. Above is a view of 18th Street, looking south from Sansom.

And below we have a shot of Moravian from the before days. It's worth remembering: Not too long ago, this was the summit of our ambition for outdoor dining.

The design pioneered by Parc is basically a frame of two-by-fours clad in plywood and plastic. Here's the original Parc winter shelter, on Locust just across 18th from the park.

To give you a better idea of how these structures are put together, here's a shot of the Tria winter shelter, up on Sansom, with the framing almost complete.

And here's Tria almost ready for customers.

Parc's first winter shelter, the one on Locust, soon gained a sibling around the corner, on 18th. You'll notice that it takes up the parking lane and one of the two traffic lanes, confining motor vehicles to a single lane. This single lane for moving cars is getting to be a bit of a theme in the neighborhood. 

On Locust, as neighboring restaurants have joined Parc in the street, drivers find themselves in a single-lane cattle chute, surrounded by winter shelters on both sides. A replay of the layout I showed you at the top of the story.

Meanwhile, over on the 1500 block of Sansom, the dining structures occupy the whole cartway. Don't worry, though - you can still get into and out of the architecturally undistinguished garage on the corner of 15th. 

(No picture of the garage - my camera said that such a photograph was beneath its dignity.)

See also Philly Plein Air.

Greed Is Not Good. It Is a Mortal Sin.

Our Elites Need to Support Democracy

 Miner at Freeze Fork, W. Va., Ben Shahn/FSA, Oct. 1935.

"It is hard to imagine an economy and society that can continue functioning indefinitely with such extreme divergence between social groups." 

- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) p. 297.

The central precondition for Trump's rise to power was the gutting of the white working class. We can lay this sin at the feet of the nation's wealthy elites - financial, industrial, agrarian, you name it. And let's not forget Mark Zuckerberg, or Charles Koch. Or the quiet and unobtrusive coupon clippers whose families have been wealthy for generations. I expect that none of them think of themselves as bad people, but this has not prevented many of them from happily participating in the project to pauperize working people (the destruction of unions played a big part here) while further enriching themselves. Tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations, joined with ever smaller slices of America's income for the workers, have been a part of this project since before the time of Ronald Reagan. 

The rage and frustration of the white working class has been a useful tool for Republican politicians, who for decades practiced a bait-and-switch in every election cycle, promising to address workers' grievances, and then after the election reverting to a policy of tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of banks and other businesses, and seeking to destroy government programs for poor and middle-income Americans. 

In 2016 the Brahmins of the Republican party received a rude shock when their preferred candidates were shouldered aside by Donald Trump, who rapidly became the People's darling. The Brahmins found themselves sidelined by a man who saw no point in maintaining even the superficial niceties of democracy, and they were surprised and shocked. Shame on them. The pot boiled over, and the people who thought they were the cooks didn't see it coming.

A strong supporting role in the project to destroy democracy has been played by the Protestant evangelicals and the Roman Catholic church, or at least the elites who see themselves as being in charge of those organizations. These people were willing to surrender all their precepts about how we should live in this world, in exchange for a ban on abortion. (Will they change? No. For a story, click here.)

Overturning Roe v. Wade is just a first step for these people. Shortly after they deal with abortion, look for them to move forward with a ban on contraception. Will they then push for a de facto ban on women working outside the home? I don't know. But I'm pretty sure daycare will become harder to find and more expensive.

This ecclesiastical lust for secular power will only grow, and we need only look at the history of the Roman Catholic church to discover that an increase in secular power almost always brings with it a concomitant decline in spiritual power. (For an example of clerical overreaching in fourteenth-century France, click here.)

Theocracy is not democracy.

The police in this country are, I'm afraid, in serious need of reform. The self-pitying warrior mentality that stands behind the flag with the thin blue line is a fascist construct. I'm the victim while I'm bashing in your head.  The infamous social media post by the national FOP, below, is only one exhibit among many. (For a story click here.)

Here's one more: a training program for the Kentucky State Police that repeatedly quotes Adolf Hitler with approval. 

It pains me to say these things about the police. I've gotten to know a number of honorable and dedicated cops over the years. But the policing system in this country is broken.

The judiciary are a mixed bag. I think we tend to concentrate on the ones who are happy lackeys to oligarchs, because they are so visible and so powerful, and perhaps because some of them display a certain acerbic flamboyance. But there are still honorable judges who are devoted to the Constitution and the law. We've seen a number of them at work in the litigation over the recent election.

The armed forces are actually a bright spot. People keep wondering why they are so reluctant to speak out, but their reluctance is a sign of their dedication to the Constitution and to our democracy. Unlike in many other countries, the military in the United States are supposed to stay out of politics. With luck, they will be able to maintain that absolutely vital tradition. A democracy in which the military plays an active part in politics is a democracy in peril.

I don't mean to let the politicians off the hook here. Now that the Republican Party has done everything but rename itself the Trump Party, some party officials may be genuinely shocked at what they see when all the shells in their little shell game get turned over at once. Others may be thrilled that they no longer need to dissemble about their deepest beliefs. Either way, they are unworthy of their offices.

And Steve Bannon deserves a paragraph of his own: Shortly after the election, he suggested that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray should be beheaded. A romantic amateur to the end.

(For a recent death threat by a Trump lawyer against Christopher Krebs, former head of the federal cybersecurity agency, click here.)

Lay on top of all this our four-hundred-year history of the enslavement and oppression of black people, and then sprinkle on all the other seeds of destruction that we have sown, not least the oncoming climate disaster, and perhaps you can see why I think we're in a pretty pickle.

See also Unsustainable Income Equality, Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil, Mr. Piketty's Book, Submerged Narratives, Life on the Farm, How Do We Put This Back Together?

The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office

A Delusional President Ignores the Coronavirus

Don't worry about the coronavirus. Its feelings aren't hurt. It doesn't have feelings. And it's used to not being seen. It is, after all, invisible to the naked eye.

I'm a bit more concerned about the idea that the president is psychotic. I don't generally throw around inflammatory psychological terms, but my God - pretty soon we're going to have more dead people than the U.S. had in World War II (405,399).

I imagine the coronavirus in the Oval Office. I'm seeing its diminutive figure sitting comfortably in an armchair. Wearing dark glasses (really, a very stylish virus).

Doesn't look like an 800-pound gorilla. But then, as you know, appearances can be deceiving. (And by the way, there are no 800-pound gorillas. They generally top out around 400 pounds.)

The sod behind the Resolute desk can't see the virus in the armchair. He's busy with other things, important things. Delusional things. Things that aren't there.

In his mad pursuit of a horse that has already left the barn, he is assisted by an attorney whose behavior has been, at best, bizarre for quite some time. A man who quotes the movie "My Cousin Vinny" badly. My family will never forgive him.

Our mass death event is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. It needn't have happened. Any moderately competent public health response would have had the pandemic under control months ago. Alas, it was not to be. 

Never trust a president who has his head up his ass. Oops. Too vulgar. Avoid flaming narcissists in the Oval Office. But very few people know who Narcissus was, or that while admiring his reflection in the calm surface of a lake, he lost his balance, fell into the water, and drowned. (We don't have good documentary evidence for this story. But then it is a myth.)

How about, Look for a president who looks after others as well as himself. A little flat, but it'll have to do.

See also Little Karl, And So the Worm Turned.

Philly Plein Air

Dejeuner sur le Tarmac

Rittenhouse Square, east side.

There is in fact a revolution taking place on Philadelphia's streets, and it has to do with food. Let me put this up front: I think restaurants have fractured the hegemony that the private automobile has held over our streets for a century.

We had a false dawn five years ago when Pope Francis visited Philadelphia, and the streets of Center City were closed to private automobiles (with a very few exceptions). In a lovely essay in the Inquirer, Katie Monroe evokes the quietly magical aura felt by so many: "Just to be able to stand in the middle of the street and take a photograph of City Hall from a new angle is exciting. To be able to walk around, talking to my mom on the phone, without getting interrupted by a driver cutting me off in the crosswalk where I have the right of way." (To see the full story, click here.)

Unfortunately, when the pope left town, he took the carless streets and the magical aura with him, and the everyday grind of trying to reform the city's streets snapped back to the status quo ante.

And stayed there. Tangible progress was made, but resistance to change proved highly effective, and progress was glacial, and there were repeated calls to rip out existing bicycle lanes.

Then, in November 2017, 24-year-old Emily Fredricks was killed by a garbage truck while she was riding in the old Spruce Street bike lane. I think this was a turning point. A project to rebuild the Pine and Spruce bike lanes had been mired for quite some time. Suddenly it came to life. 

And in time the City showed itself willing to pursue a range of innovative projects. For instance, the Chestnut Street bus lane had long been a joke. Delivery truck drivers regularly parked in the lane, tying traffic into knots. The City decided to expand the loading zones in the parking lane on the other side of the street, and, just like magic, conditions in the bus lane improved. Imagine - fiddling with one lane can help fix an entirely different lane. 

So it's not like we weren't going anywhere. But I was entirely unprepared for what happened this year. 

It got started in Old City when Second Street was closed to motor vehicles between Market and Chestnut for the weekend of July 17-19, and the local restaurants set up outdoor dining rooms in the middle of the street, where the cars and trucks suddenly were not.

This initial one-weekend experiment proved very successful, and soon streets were closing and outdoor dining rooms were popping up like mushrooms after a rain.

I'm gong to take a closer look at two of these alfresco dining clusters - one centered on 18th Street near Rittenhouse Square, and the other centered on 13th Street south of Chestnut, and branching out onto Drury, Juniper, and Sansom to form a rectangle of streets devoted to dining.

The picture at the beginning of this story shows 18th Street by Rittenhouse Square, where Parc, Devon, and Rouge occupy the full width of the cartway, normally populated with cars and trucks. There is a wide sidewalk next to the park that allows for comfortable pedestrian circulation. 

If we go north of Chestnut, we see a slightly different arrangement, with dining areas flanking a central fire lane that, again, provides for pedestrian circulation.

Below is a shot of Bar BomBon at Moravian.

Down Moravian we confront an innovative solution to hiding dumpsters - a theatrical scrim decorated with a fanciful streetscape. I expect this works even better at night.

Here's what Moravian usually looks like.

A little further on we have Dandelion and a reminder that restaurants are still doing home delivery.

The restaurants around 18th Street have recently expanded their street-closure dining hours, which now run from 4 pm on Wednesday to 10 pm on Sunday.

On our way to 13th Street, on Sansom, we discover this entrance to the bike room at 123 South Broad.

And here, on 13th Street, we see the fire-lane configuration again.

Here's the fire lane with people in it.

And here we are on Drury, where people are watching football and having a good time outside McGillin's Old Ale House.

Next to McGillin's is a well-hidden corral chock-full of dumpsters. I can't tell you how happy I was when I saw this. For a long time Drury Street had been blighted by a plague of dumpsters randomly strewn at odd angles on the sidewalks and the street, like so many cows in a pasture. 

Somebody convinced the merchants and restaurateurs on Drury to cooperate like good neighbors and put their dumpsters in this corral. I have no idea how this came to be. Maybe someone can do a lot of reporting and figure out what happened here. (I'm not that person, but I do know that discussions about cleaning up Drury Street go back quite a few years. For Jon Geeting's 2015 article in PlanPhilly, click here.)

Tucked behind the corral is a lovely, quiet beer garden. A sheltered oasis - really a little world by itself.

I find it hard to describe how transformative these street closures are. Not just moving cars but parked cars - supposedly a third rail of municipal politics - vanish, at least for a time. As we can see on Moravian and again on Drury, even the dumpsters have been moved to the background.

What's left? A place for people.

For a brief moment I had to ask myself if I was jealous of the restaurateurs. They have come so far, so fast. But I found that I'm not jealous - I'm thrilled. The restaurants have set a new mark for achievement and speed. 

I just hope that some of the positive energy the restaurants have generated flows over into the other reforms we so desperately need on our streets.

See also It's the Road Design Stupid, Reimagining Our Streets.

And So the Worm Turned

In Defense of Very Small Animals

One day my Uncle Ed was harrowing the field directly across the road from his house. His harrow was a series of metal disks on a bar. He pulled it along behind his tractor, and when he was done the ground was pretty much pulverized, and ready for planting.

Anyway, on this particular day, as he was riding along in the sun, he looked down in front of the tractor and saw a little mouse. The mouse was up on its hind legs, facing him, and it showed no sign of running away, which is what mice usually do in such a situation.

Uncle Ed stopped the tractor and got down for a closer look. The mouse continued to face him, and he soon saw why. The mouse was defending a little nest populated by a bunch of baby mice. It was almost time for lunch, so he turned off his tractor and headed up to the house. 

When he returned, the mouse and her babies were nowhere to be seen. Uncle Ed got on his tractor and finished harrowing the field.

After telling us this story, Uncle Ed added some context for his young listeners. He was a farmer, and he killed mice regularly, especially if he had a pitchfork in his hand. Just, on that one day he had to let that mouse and her brood go.

Why do small animals turn and offer defiance in a hopeless situation? I don't know. But I do know that people have been noting this phenomenon for a long time. Take the lowly worm. The indefatigable researchers at Wikipedia found this, from 1546: "Treade a worme on the tayle, and it must turne agayne." In Shakespeare"s Henry VI, Part 3, we have this line: "The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on, and doves will peck in safeguard of their brood." (3H6 2.2.17-18.)

Sometime between Shakespeare and Walt Disney's 1937 cartoon "The Worm Turns," the concept evolved to include the underdog actually winning. (To see the cartoon, click here.)

I find this cartoon hilarious, but I feel bound to note that the cartoon itself does not contain a worm. (We do have a worm on the title card.) It appears the cartoonists got so excited by the internal dynamic of their story they forgot to include a worm in the action. Oops.

Today's use of the phrase does not seem to include a guaranteed victory for the little guy, but it does seem to include agency and effective action - as in "I may not have won, but he knows he was in a fight."

The online Cambridge Dictionary has an entry for "the worm turns." It goes like this: "used to describe when a person or group of persons who have been treated badly for a long time suddenly become forceful and stop accepting a difficult situation." 

I think the worm turned on November 3. Whether the little guy wins in the long run is, I think, an open question. The struggle goes on - or, as the French say, La lutte continue. 

See also For Athena, Lidice and the Power of Nothing.

A Teacher's Dilemma

Academic Life in a Totalitarian State

Feliks Dzerzhinsky, father of the Soviet security forces. 1918.

"The problem was that, yes, his favorite student who used to sit on the left side in the third row from the top had been right, and the professor had been able to head the department all these years only because he had engaged in treachery, had kept silent, and had gagged those just beginning to speak, gagged them with the phrase 'politics has no place in the classroom,' although what was at issue was not politics but ancient history and the parallels that arose on their own when readings concerned Caligula or Nero, and you knew how Muraviov ... No, no, one cannot talk about that. Ancient history should be banned from the curriculum and replaced with any other kind of history. Then everything would be clear-cut and logical. Then such monstrous questions would not arise in his classes, and he would not be forced to betray anyone. He touched the window at which he had spoken with the student: it bore blurred traces of the lines on his forehead and the jumbled grid of his hair. The professor had stood, leaning against this window, after being summoned to the dean's office and served a short, ridiculous ultimatum: by evening the next day one of them, either the student or the professor, would have to abandon these walls forever and with no possibility of reinstatement. The dean, with his puffy face and excessively large violet lips that seemed to hang from their own skin, informed him that the most appropriate reason to give for the expulsion would be academic truancy. His favorite student had already spent fifteen days behind bars for having uttered the word 'Muraviov' during an even less appropriate argument. It had happened in winter. In hindsight, the student obviously had no intention of 'committing himself to his studies.' Just the opposite: he would continue speaking the word 'Muraviov,' and nothing would stop him. He would not be able to compensate for the classes in ancient history that he had missed. Therefore, the university could not allow him to continue his studies. No politics. Just academic progress." 

- Victor Martinovoich, Paranoia (2013) p. 26. After expulsion, the student is quickly drafted into the armed forces, and shortly thereafter he dies in a training accident.

"A little fire is quickly trodden out / Which, being suffered, rivers cannot quench."

- William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 3 4.8.7-8.

Dzerzhinsky photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #6464, http://visualrian.ru/ru/site/gallery/#6464

See also A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, Narcissism and Dictatorship.

The Real Parallels Are With Weimar

What Happens When Elites Hate Democracy

President Hindenburg delivering a radio address, 1932. 

If you say the word Hindenburg to an American, the reaction is likely to be a blank stare, or possibly the thought that a dirigible of that name burned and crashed in Lakehurst, New Jersey, on May 6, 1937. But behind the zeppelin there stands an actual person: Paul von Hindenburg, a German field marshal who was a hero of World War I and later served as the second and last president of the Weimar Republic (he served as president of Germany from 1925 to his death in 1934). 

When Americans think of military leaders who have later careers as presidents, they may think of Washington, or Grant, or Eisenhower. Hindenburg was not like them; he did not believe in the form of government he was presiding over. 

As historian Mary Fulbrook puts it: "... Hindenburg was not in principle committed to upholding and strengthening the democratic system: on the contrary, he made little secret of his intention to replace it with a more authoritarian political system as soon as was practicable." (Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany 1918-1990, 1992, p. 45.) 

Hindenburg was not alone in his dislike of the Weimar form of government. A whole bunch of German elites basically wanted democracy dead. This did not always come in the form of active support for the Nazi party, but industrialists, for instance, "certainly made little effort to sustain the democratic political system and indeed attacked its structure and fabric sufficiently to render it weak in the face of the final onslaught. The agrarian elites who had such a favourable reception with Hindenburg must also bear a burden of guilt, as must those army officers who worked to undermine democracy and install an authoritarian alternative." (P. 64.) 

If all of this sounds to you like the earlier rise of Mussolini in Italy, you wouldn't be wrong. (For more on Italy, see Jim Crow Was a Failed State, So Why Do We Want to Go Back?)

Even the churches got into the act: "Both the Catholic and the Protestant churches propagated essentially conservative, monarchist and anti-democratic sympathies; they were moreover highly critical of the moral decadence, as they saw it, of a society in which birth control was for the first time becoming widespread." (P. 41.) 

It was in this very opportune context that the Nazis cleaned up their definitely fringey act and started appealing to a more mainstream audience. A key was messaging. As Fulbrook puts it, "... Nazi 'ideology' was a somewhat rag-bag collection of largely negative views combined with a utopian vision of a grandiose future coloured by nostalgic appeals to aspects of a mythical past." (P. 52.)

As history has shown, such a formula can have considerable success, and not just in Germany.

After Hitler came to power, the parade of prefiguration continued. For instance: "... some civil servants who harboured misgivings about the Nazi regime justified their decision to stay as 'preventing something worse.' Yet the overall record of civil servants in the Third Reich remains one of compromise, rather than serious subversion of the regime." (P. 69.) 

Hitler did eventually become Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and immediately began to consolidate a totalitarian regime. If you were to ask an ordinarily knowledgeable American when democracy died in Germany, the reply would probably be it was when Hitler became Chancellor, or possibly when the Reichstag burned down a few weeks later.

In fact, parliamentary democracy in Germany died nearly three years before Hitler became Chancellor. Fulbrook again:

"The Grand Coalition of 1928-30, including the SPD [social democrats], led by Chancellor Hermann Muller, was the last genuinely parliamentary government of Weimar Germany. Plans had already been made for its replacement by a more authoritarian alternative - essentially presidential rule through a Chancellor and cabinet lacking majority support in parliament - several weeks before its actual collapse." (PP. 53-54.) 

The proximate cause of the government's collapse was the question of how to pay the rapidly rising bill for unemployment benefits as the depression threw more and more people out of work. The parties in the coalition were unable to agree.

"Foundering on this issue, the last cabinet of the Weimar Republic to rely on parliamentary support was replaced by a presidential cabinet under Chancellor Bruning, which, lacking majority support in parliament, was to rule by presidential decree." (P. 54.)

A brief observation on the role of chance in history. Weimar's first president, the social democrat Friedrich Ebert, was only 54 when he died from appendicitis and septic shock in 1925. If he had lived, the course of German and world history might well have been very different. 

Hindenburg Disaster, Lakehurst, N.J., 1937.

One final note. The fiery crash of the zeppelin Hindenburg is, in my opinion, a valid metaphor for the collapse of the Weimar Republic under President Hindenburg. It's true that one was slow and complicated, and the other was over in less than a minute. But the result was the same - disaster.

President photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13227 / CC-BY-SA 3.0.

Zeppelin photo: Sam Shere.

See also Fascism, What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?

He Saw It Coming

And He Warned Us

September Sunset, Asbury Park.

In 2018, John M. Barry looked back at the 1918 flu pandemic and then assessed our preparedness for a future pandemic:

"In 1918, the world population was 1.8 billion, and the pandemic probably killed 50 to 100 million people, with the lowest credible modern estimate at 35 million. Today the world population is 7.6 billion. A comparable death toll today would range from roughly 150 to 425 million.

"Chiefly because antibiotics would slash the toll from secondary bacterial infections, if a virus caused a 1918-like pandemic today, modern medicine could likely prevent significantly more than half of those deaths - assuming adequate supplies of antibiotics, which is quite an assumption - but tens of millions would still die. And a severe influenza pandemic would hit like a tsunami, inundating intensive-care units even as doctors and nurses fall ill themselves and generally pushing the health care system to the point of collapse and possibly beyond it. Hospitals, like every other industry, have gotten more efficient by cutting costs, which means virtually no excess capacity - on a per capita basis the United States has far fewer hospital beds than a few decades ago. Indeed, during a routine influenza season, usage of respirators rises to nearly 100 percent; in a pandemic, most people who needed a mechanical respirator probably would not get one. (The strain influenza puts on health care was driven home to me in a personal way on my book tour. In Kansas City, a flare-up of ordinary seasonal influenza forced eight hospitals to close emergency rooms, yet this was only a tiny fraction of the pressure a pandemic would exert.) This and similar problems - such as if a particular secondary bacterial invader is resistant to antibiotics, or shortages of such seemingly trivial items as hypodermic needles or bags to hold IV fluids (a severe shortage of these bags is a major problem as I write this) - could easily moot many medical advances since 1918."
_________

See the 2018 afterword to John M. Barry, The Great Influenza (2004, 2018), pp. 450-451.

No Parking Sign, Philadelphia.

See also Coronavirus, The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along.

Hope Hicks Is Sick

Should I Feel Bad About Not Feeling Bad?

No. We're in a war. It's a war for the soul of America. In wars people do things they ordinarily wouldn't do, and they have feelings they would rather not have.

In this case the feeling is a certain numbness. The empathy string on your violin has been muted.

Years ago I read Jonathan Shay's Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, and it changed my view of these matters. Friedrich Nietzsche's famous dictum "What does not kill me makes me stronger" is simply wrong. It doesn't make you stronger, But it does make you different.

Shay also wrote Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. I've never quite been able to lay my hands on it - it's a bit rare. Perhaps now I'll make another try.

But I do know a bit about the Greeks and war. Homer saw these things very clearly. The path that Odysseus takes home to Penelope is full of twists and turns, and it takes a long time.

After we win the war, we will need to recover. The path will be long, and unpredictable.

See also The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along.

A Lesson From the Berlin Wall

Win the People, and Then Trust Them

Imperial War Museum, London, 1998.

At left in the picture above is my son, Ben. To the right is a piece of the Berlin Wall.

What follows is from Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (2014), page 96.

"As November 4 dawned, it became clear that the demonstration in East Berlin would be a truly huge event. An estimated half million participants flooded Alexanderplatz, in the heart of the city. Aerial photographs showed a city center completely darkened by the swarm of people. The event continued for much of the day with a long list of speakers, including Schabowski. Birthler was asked to be one of the speakers as well. Despite her anxiety about being in front of such a large crowd, she agreed to do so. She wore her boyfriend's coat to help her nerves, thinking that it would be as if he were hugging her while she stood onstage. Looking out at the sea of people, she found herself silently asking for forgiveness, realizing that she had been too pessimistic about her fellow East Germans. 'I had not trusted the people to have so much self-confidence and courage,' she recalled; she was amazed to see so much of both on display on November 4."

The Berlin Wall opened on November 9, 1989.

See also The Cost of Delay.

Reform in Head and Members

The Rot Is Pervasive

Independence Mall, September 15.

Donald Trump came to Philadelphia on Tuesday, September 15, for a town hall at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall. He basically did a face plant. Meanwhile, outside, his head was exploding. At least that's what I first thought when I saw this apparition in my viewfinder. Others may take the explosion of white light on the back of his head as a gift of divine light. Or maybe the makers of this mannequin-puppet were in a hurry and didn't paint the back of his papier mache head.

The red horns are a nice touch, but I think the disheveled clothing - really, man, get a decent knot in that necktie - may be over the top. I think the thing on the white pole in front of the effigy is meant to be a microphone.

Several hundred anti-Trump protesters attended this little manifestation, along with perhaps ten pro-Trumpies and simply scads of cops. (For a story in the Inquirer, click here.)

Cops with masks, Trumpies without.

It would be nice to get rid of Trump, and that may just happen. But that's not going to be enough to turn the country around. The rot is not just at the top. 

I had a window on what this looks like in Philadelphia, when I served on Grand Jury 25 a few years ago. One of our main cases was the York Street fire. Briefly, at the corner of York and Jasper in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, there was a large, vacant factory complex that had once housed the Thomas W. Buck Hosiery Co. On the night of April 9, 2012, the Buck factory burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances. Grand Jury 25 was asked to investigate. 

My oath prevents me from disclosing what went on in the jury room, but the grand jury did create a lengthy report on the fire. The grand jury's supervising judge then ordered the report filed as a public record. Here's the first paragraph of the report:

"Two Philadelphia firefighters died, and two were seriously injured, in a building that two Brooklyn real estate investors slowly turned into a firetrap. But this grand jury report is really about a failure of government—the failure of Philadelphia administrative agencies to accomplish the basic functions for which they exist. Unfortunately, we have reluctantly concluded that there is currently no appropriate criminal penalty for the tale of misdeeds we found. While the building owners violated virtually every regulation that got in their way, they were never held accountable for doing so, and we do not believe that the available evidence can establish that their flagrant code violations and tax delinquencies caused the fire that eventually destroyed their property and the firemen’s lives. Nevertheless, there are lessons to be learned. Had city departments done their job, these deaths might never have occurred."

It appears that the report is no longer available on the district attorney's website, but it is available from WHYY. To see it, click here.

My takeaway from the grand jury's work was that the baseline competence of a number of Philadelphia's city departments is marginal at best.

Fast forward to the spring of 2020, and it was the turn of the police department. As the local protests over the death of George Floyd developed, the performance of the police went from bad to worse. 

From their failure to prevent looting at numerous locations around the city, to the fiascos in Fishtown and Marconi Plaza, to the police riot on the Vine Street Expressway, the Philadelphia police showed themselves to be ineffectual, undisciplined, and poorly led. So, on June 1, on the Vine Street Expressway, exactly how close were we to another Kent State? Four Dead in Ohio. (Just Google it.)

I expect we'll never know, but I'm thinking it wouldn't have taken much.

There are serious consequences to ignoring these issues of baseline mediocrity. After all, government is supposed to do stuff. This is actually a controversial statement, I know. But as I watch the coronavirus, and the wildfires out west, and the hurricanes popping up seemingly out of nowhere; and as I look at all the everyday sources of unnecessary death - traffic crashes, guns, drug overdoses, the abysmally low rate of vaccination for seasonal influenza - I'm prepared to stand by my statement: government is supposed to do stuff.

Moving on from government, I would like to make one further observation: in addition to a better president and a better government, we need a better educated citizenry. We are simply much too easily bamboozled. Where are the knowledge base and the critical thinking skills that would inoculate us against at least the most obvious cons? 

Erroneous beliefs are often not harmless. For instance, there is apparently a very widespread belief that the practice of medicine is just like repairing an automobile. You know - take the car into the shop, flush the fuel line, replace the catalytic converter, maybe get the car detailed. 

That's not the way the body works, and it's not the way that medicine works.

In many cases there are no silver bullets, and often the most important thing is for a patient to change a behavior - such as giving up smoking. The resistance to changing behavior can be impressive, as can the fascination with shiny new technology.

These two things combine to give us the curious picture of people refusing to wear a mask while clamoring for a vaccine that may in fact be less effective than the mask.

There's a lot to do. I hope we can get started in January.

Improvement opportunities are not hard to find.

See also A Moment in Time, Quagmire, Void on Center, End of Life Counseling.

Ed Bacon on Ed Bacon

A Look at What Might Have Been

What a difference a year makes.

My brother, John, told me one of his friends had died and left him a substantial collection of books on architecture and urban design. John noticed that he now had two copies of Edmund Bacon's Design of Cities (1967, 1974), so he gave me one. (My copy says "ex lib Terry Williams.")

I don't know why I'd never read it before. Just one of those lacunae, I guess. I have a lot of them. Filling this one led me to poke around in more current work on Bacon, and I read Scott Gabriel Knowles, ed., Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City (2009) and Gregory L. Heller, Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Philadelphia (2013). 

I think I'll be writing several stories centered on Bacon, but I wanted to start with a little present that he left me in his book.

Two of Ed Bacon's major endeavors were Market West and Market East, and I'm not terribly fond of the way they turned out. I am, of course, not alone.

Perhaps in a later story I will get into why the design processes on these two stretches of Market Street, one on each side of City Hall, absolutely in the heart of the city, had such suboptimal outcomes.

But for now I want to focus on how good the original designs were. I'd gotten an inkling of this from Ken Halpern's Downtown USA (1978), but I don't think I understood the magnitude of what we lost until I read Design of Cities. 

Market West

Below is a model of Market West before it went through the design meat grinder. (The picture is on p. 106 of Halpern's book.) City Hall is just out of the picture in the top right. What I want you to look at is the three high-rise slabs that run west along Market Street, which is to the right of the buildings. You'll notice there are a number of other, lower buildings that face the street fronts. And, if you look carefully, you can see that the three large buildings are straddling a lower space that extends through the length of the development, running parallel to the east-west streets. 

Market West model, view from southwest.

As Bacon explains in his book (p. 272), that lower space, open to the sky, is a shopping concourse. It was one level below the street, and because of the north-south orientation of the high-rises, it would have been flooded with sunlight much of the day. Hmm. Light, air, shopping. Sounds pretty nice. 

This proposal dates from 1952. What happened next is, I think, best described as a travesty. Have a look at the drawing at the beginning of this story. It's from Bacon's Design of Cities, page 272. The 1952 proposal is on the left. In 1953 the Pennsylvania Railroad, owner of the property, came out with its design. It is on the right. 

(And, yes, Bacon proposed demolishing all of City Hall except the tower. He had earlier recommended demolishing City Hall in his architecture thesis at Cornell in 1932.  Paul P. Cret also recommended demolishing City Hall in 1924. See Heller, Ed Bacon, pp. 19, 100, and 246 fn. 15. I'm very happy this didn't happen.) 

Anyway, in the 1953 proposal the north-south towers have been replaced by towers running east-west. This would have placed the shopping concourse in the dark almost all the time. If you want to know how dark, just visit today's JFK Boulevard, where the prevailing illumination is perpetual gloom. Those east-west towers did get built. But not to worry. The towers did not affect the illumination of the concourse. Instead, the railroad's design put a cover on the concourse, turning what had been designed as an open space of light and air into something quite different.

Bacon did convince the railroad to provide a few light boxes, or light wells, so that at least some natural light could filter into the concourse level. In my opinion, they do help, but not a lot. Here's one:

The light boxes do help. A little.

The concourse, as built, does get a lot of use, and it has a bunch of stores, but it also has that unpleasant little-white-mouse-in-a-maze feeling that shows up in another Pennsylvania Railroad real-estate venture, Penn Station in New York City. 

As for the cover, at street level, it is basically a no-man's land. You'd think somebody would use these spaces for open-air restaurants and cafes, but instead they just sit there. Some enterprising souls have turned a section into an informal parking lot. 

I'm thinking a restaurant with an acre of outdoor tables.

(Wait. Actually, there is a small open-air dining room at 17th street. Good start.) 

Market East

Over on Market East the outcomes were similarly suboptimal. Bacon describes the original proposal on page 281 of Design of Cities. (The illustration below is on p. 280.) 

"Here the basic concept was a pedestrian area punctuated by gardens one level below the street, accessible to the subway, and an extension of the underground commuter railroad system. The shops at street level were set back behind covered walkways, and above the street a continuous shopping promenade connected with the bus terminal and parking garages with their own ramps to the expressway."

What we got in the end, of course, was something quite different: "a commonplace suburban shopping center" (Guian McKee in Imagining Philadelphia, p. 71). 

More recently, this mall has received a makeover, and what was called the Gallery at Market East has become Fashion District Philadelphia. I'm not going to talk about it here because I want to focus on the original designs and what they can tell us.

Market East, drawing by Willo von Moltke, 1960.

Life in a Bubble

Looking at the original proposals for Market West and Market East, my reaction is simple: I wish we'd built them.

The story of why they didn't get built is complex, but I think the underlying reason is, again, simple: Ed Bacon was swimming against the tide. Bacon's assumption was that people like to be connected to the outside world. Since World War II, America has been creating a built environment that does its best to cut us off from the outside world.

It's quite possible nowadays to live your life in a series of hermetically sealed bubbles - wake up in a suburban house where the windows are never open in any season, drive to work in a car with the windows up, spend the day in an office tower where the windows don't open, go shopping in a mall that doesn't have windows.

And I know some people who like their bubbles. I don't like bubbles, and I think it's clear that Bacon didn't like them either.

It's possible that the coronavirus is giving many people a deeper appreciation of the outdoors, at least at dinner time. Will the blooming of outdoor restaurants prove a lasting phenomenon or a passing fancy? One thought - it's cheaper to put tables in the street than it is to upgrade an HVAC system or install windows that - gasp - open. As a friend of mine likes to say, Follow the money.

The view from underground.

See also Go to the Light, Turning JFK into an Extension of Love Park.

The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along

Would You Buy a Used Car from Mr. Sincerity?

Mr. Sincerity

"Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war!" Donald Trump never tweeted this. I think his familiarity with Shakespeare rivals his familiarity with the Bible.  

But the sentiment is clearly there. He's trying to foment a civil war between - who? A lot of his followers think it should be a race war. And of course his Aryan supermen will crush the blacks, and I suppose the browns, and the yellows and the reds. And of course the white race-traitors - the ones that people like Trump used to call commie faggots, back in the 1950s.

Unfortunately for Trump, as he tries mightily to blow hot air into this balloon, the dogs of war are already loose, and have been for a while. Of course, I'm talking about the war between the coronavirus and humanity.

By the way, the coronavirus is winning. In case you hadn't noticed. 

Trump is frantically waving a bloody shirt that has remarkably little blood on it, and much of that has been spilled by his people - fascist cops and boogaloo anarchists.

We'll probably never know for sure, but it seems that a great deal of the property damage may also have been at the hands of such as the boogaloos. Trump's people. We used to call them agents provocateurs.

Anyway, the coronavirus trundles on: 180,000+ dead, 6 million+ infected. Actually, the number of infected is almost certainly much higher. And an economic catastrophe where the numbers - eye-popping as they are - simply don't tell the story. Despair does not have a number.

The coronavirus will not kill us all. But it has the capacity to destroy American society as we have known it. It's already made a good start.

The people know this. Even the people who will vote for Trump know this. A lot of them have been staring at the death of the American Dream for a long time.

I think, at this point, there's a touch of the Stockholm syndrome about the Trumpies. They may have started as avid soldiers in a race war, but now I'm getting a whiff of desperate hostages who wouldn't know what to do without their captor.

And they may pull us all down with them as they fight a magical war and refuse to face the real war. 

If Trump says grandma has to die, then grandma has to die.

And, at this point, it's baked in.  A lot of grandmas have already died, and many more certainly will. Along with a bunch of children and - gasp - healthy young adults. And many of them will be Trumpies.

How do we get out if this nightmare?

See also Quagmire, The Problem with Dystopia.

Bruce Springsteen Almost Didn't Happen

Springsteen Father Hit By Car When Little

Sunset Pavilion, Asbury Park.

It turns out that somebody forgot to childproof the streets of Freehold, N.J., where the Springsteen family was living when Bruce's father, Douglas, was a child. Those new-fangled horseless carriages were just about everywhere, and people were still wrestling with the idea that cars and trucks didn't behave at all like a horse pulling a carriage or a wagon.

Anyway, Douglas, nine years old at the time, was on the way to the movies with his grandmother on a Friday evening in September 1933 "when he ran into the side of a car" and was knocked down, according to a report in a local newspaper. A researcher looking into the history of Freehold found the story in the Freehold Transcript, and the Asbury Park Press shared the news with the world on Bruce Springsteen's birthday in 2018. (For the APP story, click here.)

Fortunately, Douglas was not seriously injured. He was taken to a doctor, who determined that the boy "had suffered nothing more than a bump on his head and a severe shaking up."

His older sister had not been so lucky. In 1927, when Bruce's Aunt Virginia was five years old, she was riding her tricycle when a truck backing out of a gas station ran over her and killed her.

It seems fair to say that the Springsteen family never recovered from this little girl's death. Bruce Springsteen tells the story on pages 5 and 6 of his 2016 autobiography, Born to Run.

As a teenager, Bruce Springsteen had his own brush with vehicular death. This also happened in Freehold. "In 1967, I would crush my leg and suffer a concussion after being T-boned on my small Yamaha motorcycle by a '63 Caddy on my way home up South Street. The bike crunched and slid under the car's front end. I went sailing (no helmet law, no helmet) twenty feet into the air, landing on the hard-ass blacktop on the corner of Institute and South Street. I was knocked out cold for thirty minutes, all the way from Freehold to the hospital in Neptune." (Born to Run, p. 86.)

The good news is that the concussion got him out of the draft. The draft board in Newark classified him 4F (pp. 101-102).

See also Springsteen's Bill of Rights.

One-Eighties

Doing U-Turns in the Oval Office

Schuylkill Banks, in the brief interval between Isaias and the flood.

I think I detect a new wrinkle in the president's modus operandi. It involves doing a u-turn. The first time I noticed this was with the Republican National Convention, which started in North Carolina and then moved (mostly) to Florida and is now back to North Carolina (maybe).

Then he did something similar with mail-in voting. First it was terrible (except when he does it himself). Then it was wonderful in Florida, although it continued to be terrible in Nevada. 

I'm now waiting for a 180-degree turn on his demolition derby at the post office.

(You'll notice, by the way, that none of his one-eighties are clean. The turn always involves some splintering. Everything this man touches becomes a chaotic jumble.) 

I do think the U-ey is a new move for him. I may have missed some earlier examples, and I'd be happy to be corrected. But I do think it's new. And I think it's dangerous for him.

The president has had a couple of standard moves.

Usually, he does something for a while and then just drops it. And then he may pick it up again later on. This is what happened with the coronavirus briefings, now resumed after a hiatus that may have had something to do with the ingestion of bleach. 

For a quicker and apparently more permanent drop, have a look at his proposal to postpone the election. A quick and noisy flash followed by - nothing. An old, old term for this is "flash in the pan." 

The four executive orders, or memoranda, are still playing out, but I think they will also be a flash in the pan. 

I think launch-and-drop is his go-to move. After all, he has the attention span of a gnat, so it fits well with his psychological profile.

Sometimes he does stick with an initiative, slogging ahead in a famous corporate bad move - attempting to make a failure look like a mediocre success. The management consultants will tell you not to try to save face. Just kill the turkey, and spend your time working on stuff that may indeed be a real success.

An example of the president as slogger would be his dogged pursuit of a border wall with Mexico.

He may have some other moves, but I'm not seeing them right now.

And that brings us back to the 180. I mentioned that it was dangerous for him. Why is that? Because it's going to piss off the people who work for him. 

I understand the fascist goal of keeping the people in a state of permanent anxiety - angry, frustrated, uncertain. The 180 is different. The people most disoriented and eventually annoyed are the leader's own troops.

In the army it's called marching and countermarching. As a bright-eyed second lieutenant you line up your platoon and march them down a dirt road from one little village to an identical village five miles away. Then you get a call from headquarters, informing you that you were in the right village in the first place, and you should get back there tout de suite.

And so your soldiers get to walk ten miles in one day, and wind up exactly where they started. This results in sore feet and what the army calls "poor morale."

The army has an old saying: Move with a purpose. The troops know when they're being jerked around, and they don't like it. Meanwhile the people, who are supposed to be "all wee-weed up," as President Obama put it, are actually starting to laugh. (Mr. Obama's phrase, by the way, dates back to Chaucer and puts in an appearance with Shakespeare. For a story, click here.)

Is the president capable of moving with a purpose? I don't think so. Not with his inartful turns, his splintering focus, his tendency to unbalance himself as well as all those around him. What I see most consistently is an impulsive reaction to some outside stimulus and then an ocean of semi-coherent blather. And then on to the next one.

See also Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil.

Setting Speed Limits for Safety

After 100 Years, the Need for Speed Meets Another Idea

Car show, Ocean Grove, N.J., 2019.

I'm hopeful that NACTO has finally driven a stake through the heart of the old 85 percent rule for setting speed limits. NACTO is the National Association of City Transportation Officials, and it has been doing very good work for a number of years, but this one is near and dear to my heart. The 85 percent rule got its start with some traffic studies on rural roads in the 1940's, and it says you should set the speed limit at a level where 85 percent of drivers are going under the limit, and 15 percent are speeding. You'll notice the concept of safety does not enter into this little construct. In fact, the 85 percent rule essentially lets drivers vote with their wheels, and effectively decide what the speed limit should be on a particular road.

Here's the text from City Limits: Setting Safe Speed Limits on Urban Streets (summer 2020). To see the whole document, click here.

"Current speed limit setting practice in the US uses a percentile-based method, typically set at the 85th percentile, to determine speeds. Traffic engineers record how fast vehicles are traveling on a road, determine the speed that 85 percent of drivers are traveling at or below, then set the new speed limit by rounding from that speed to the nearest 5 mph increment. Traffic engineers who use the 85th percentile method are instructed to raise the speed limit when more than 15% of drivers are driving faster than posted signs. This method forces engineers to adjust speed limits to match observed driver behavior instead of bringing driver behavior in line with safety goals and the law. When it comes to safety, this method is designed to fail.

"Percentile-based speed limit setting methods fail at keeping people safe because they set a permanently moving target based on current human behavior, not safety.

"Two issues are at play. First, percentile-based models are designed to respond to extremes. When enough people drive faster than the set percentile, the model rewards them by instructing traffic engineers to increase the posted speed.

"Second, people decide how fast to drive based on both the street’s design and cues such as the posted speed and other drivers’ speeds. Researchers originally recommended using the 85th percentile approach to determine posted speeds, assuming that drivers always travel at reasonable speeds. But a growing body of research shows that drivers base their decisions at least partially on the posted speed limit. When they see higher posted limits, and see the resulting increased speed of their peers, they drive faster too, which results in an increased speed of the street overall.

"Posting higher speed limits does not increase compliance with the law. Even when higher speed limit signs are posted, some number of people will still choose to drive 5-15 mph faster than the posted limit. These “highend” speeders travel even faster as speed limits rise and typically spread out over a wider range of speeds. This can increase the likelihood of crashes because people are traveling at increasingly different speeds, and increases the likelihood that crashes will be fatal because they occur at higher speeds.

"In cities and other urban contexts, percentile-based speed limit setting methods are particularly dangerous because they are based on outdated research that is inapplicable in urban settings. The 1940s-era research supporting the 85th percentile relied on self-reported crash data and was conducted on two-lane rural highways, devoid of multimodal activity. But these historic roads are a far cry from the vibrant streets and arterials that typify city streets today. In particular, rural roads and highways lack the type or volume of conflicts found in cities, such as people crossing the street, and people biking, walking, or rolling at a variety of speeds. They also lack driveways, loading, parking, and double-parking. 

"Los Angeles’ experience with Zelzah Avenue provides a telling example of the dangers of percentile-based speed limit setting. In 2009, Los Angeles conducted a traffic speed study and raised the speed limit on Zelzah Avenue from 35 mph to 40 mph. In 2018, the city again studied existing traffic speeds, and again raised the speed limit, this time to 45 mph. While other additional factors may also have played a role in speeds inching up over time, absent any design or land use changes, the increase suggests that the 85th percentile operating speed can shift over time in accordance with the posted speed limit. Notably, this time period in LA corresponded to a 92 percent increase in pedestrian fatalities.

"The most commonly cited alternative for the 85th percentile is USLIMITS2, an online tool developed by the Federal Highway Administration that incorporates other factors when determining speed limits. USLIMITS2 is a step forward in that it allows practitioners to also consider the street’s most exposed users. However, it still relies on the 85th or, more commonly in urban areas, the 50th percentile operating speed, which is often still much higher than is safe. Relying on a percentile based system focused on current drive behavior, rather than a defined safety target to set speed limits, significantly limits cities’ ability to reduce traffic deaths." (Pages 18-20. Footnotes omitted.)

The overall report is about how you should set a speed limit, particularly in urban areas. It's nearly 100 pages long, and I've only read a bit of it. Perhaps I will write another story, but I won't keep you in suspense about the main conclusions. NACTO recommends the following speed limits for urban areas: main streets 25 mph, neighborhood streets 20 mph, shared streets (pedestrians and others in street, mixing with cars) 10 mph. 

I think NACTO may have done for speed limits what Professor Donald Shoup did for parking minimums in his 2005 The High Cost of Free Parking - proving intellectual, if not moral, bankruptcy. This makes me very happy. 

See also Death as an Acceptable Outcome; It's the Road Design, Stupid; We Should Not Overestimate the Driving Skills of the Typical Philadelphia Motorist; Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?