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.