We're Actually Winning

Cars Can Be Civilized

Bike lanes didn't do it. Streeteries did.

A few days ago my wife and I walked to Parc, on Rittenhouse Square, for dinner. It was a beautiful late afternoon, warm and sunny, almost no wind.

We sat on Locust Street near 18th, at one of the open-air tables next to the building's wall, and had a lovely meal. I had a nice view of the park in the late afternoon sun, and Lois had a nice view of the long array of people extending down Locust Street, sitting outside and having a good time.

After a while I noticed something. I had a good view of the intersection at 18th and Locust, right next to the square, and because I do this automatically these days, I had one eye on the moving vehicles. 

And then I had two eyes on. Something had happened to me. I wasn't scared. I looked at the cars and trucks and buses as they rolled up 18th or turned and went down Locust, and I was not intimidated.

All these drivers were proceeding slowly and carefully. The flow of traffic was smooth, and the transit times were clearly not deterring a robust traffic flow.

And I wasn't feeling afraid. I'd been told many times that speed was the crucial factor in taming the traffic, but looking back I don't think I had really believed it until that moment.

I thought of a few improvement opportunities. Switching from gasoline to electricity, for instance. And removing the dumpster from in front of the Curtis Institute. It's just possible that both of these things will happen, each in its own time.

We can actually live with cars in our cities. We just need to tame them.

I have seen the future, and it works.

See also Checking in With Outdoor Dining, The Space-Time Continuum.

Angry and Ridiculous

A Man for Our Time

Milord la Chamarre, outside, 1993.

Years ago a kindly and well-informed docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art explained cubism to me. Basically, she said, cubism disarticulated the surfaces of a cube and rearranged them in a novel fashion, and I think you can see that in Jean Dubuffet's Milord la Chamarre. Body parts have been separated, flattened and sometimes crumpled, and then (tentatively) reattached. I sometimes think he looks like he's in the initial stages of exploding. Sometimes I think he's just about to fall apart. And sometimes I think he's just angry.

I was not prepared for my first encounter with Milord la Chamarre. The first Dubuffet sculpture I remember seeing was in New York City, in front of the Chase Manhattan Bank headquarters near Wall Street. It's called Four Trees, it was installed in 1972, and I thought it looked like a group of gigantic, marshmallowy mushrooms. It made me happy just to look at it.  

When I first saw Mr. Milord, he was glaring off into space, or perhaps glaring down at me. He was standing on an elevated platform attached to an exterior wall of the Centre Square development, across the street from Philadelphia's City Hall. 

He looked odd. And he looked angry. I found it unsettling to be in his presence.

The Peripatetic Mr. Milord

It turns out that I have not been alone in finding him a bit unnerving. 

Milord la Chamarre was first installed on New York City's Park Avenue, in front of the Seagram building, in 1974. One observer told the Times that it looked a "giant version of the Tin Man in the 'Wizard of Oz.'" Another said he looked like "the Frankenstein monster in a suit of armor."  

Philadelphia developer Jack Wolgin thought the statue looked like a Mummer, so he brought Mr. Milord home and set him up in the Centre Square atrium in 1976. He was moved outside, where I first saw him, in 1990, and then back inside in 2019. (There's still a plaque outside, which helpfully summarizes some of his travels.)

A lot of Philadelphians just call him the Mummer. I think it's a valid way of looking at him, although I sincerely doubt that Jean Dubuffet ever saw a Mummer, or had one puke on his shoes.

Here he is, back inside the atrium.

Mr. Milord is 24 feet tall and weighs 5,000 pounds. He's made out of stainless steel and was fabricated by Lippincott, Inc. 

And he's still angry.

Right shoulder. A complicated bit.

Left hand. I think this is the only part of the statue that makes me feel comfortable. I don't know why. And no, I have no way to relate this hand to human anatomy.

Here's a detail of the lower right leg. This plate, just above the foot, reminds me of a soccer shin guard. If you think it's armor, call it a greave. Note the rivets. (They're in the black.)

What Does Chamarre Mean? 

So what was Dubuffet intending when he created Mr. Milord? I think we can learn a bit more about the artist's thinking if we have a look at the word chamarre. Usually Milord La Chamarre is translated as My Lord of the Fancy Vest. I looked in my French dictionaries, and found the verb chamarrer, which means "to bedizen." Bedizen, in turn, means to dress or adorn with gaudy finery. 

I did eventually find the noun chamarre online, where it has several meanings. One is embroidery. (This was in the French-language division of Wiktionary-land. To follow along, click here.) 

Both noun and verb derive from the Spanish noun zamarra, which is a sheepskin coat worn by Spanish shepherds. 

So how does a working-man's coat in Spain (admittedly a very warm coat) father a French word for gaudy adornment? I don't know. Is our statue a milord - that is, a nobleman - in a suit of armor or perhaps a fancy vest? Or is he a blue-collar Mummer? I don't know. I've decided he's both - or all three, depending on how you're counting.

In any event, there he is, gaudily dressed, clearly malevolent under the comedy, striding forward as if he owns the place.

Art Brut 

Where does the anger come from?

Dubuffet was one of the spark plugs behind the Art Brut movement, which got its start in the late 1940s. In the words of the Tate, "Art brut is a French term that translates as 'raw art', invented by the French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art such as graffiti or naïve art which is made outside the academic tradition of fine art." The Tate adds that, in addition to graffiti, art brut includes "the work of the insane, prisoners, children, and primitive artists." It was "the raw expression of a vision or emotions, untramelled by convention." Dubuffet tried "to incorporate these qualities into his own art." 

I have decided that Four Trees is channeling children and Mr. Milord is channeling crazy people.

But, in addition to the anger, there is a brittle quality, a fragility. The way his body has been assembled, he appears to be in imminent danger of collapse, possibly held together only by his anger.

To see how Dubuffet pulls this off, we need to look at something called the Hourloupe Cycle.

The Hourloupe Cycle 

When you look at Mr. Milord or the Four Trees, it's hard not to notice the black outlines of the various segments. And then I find myself thinking of Keith Haring. Haring has a mural in the Point Breeze section of Philadelphia. Here's a photo of We the Youth (1987, restored 2013). 

(For a story and pictures by Mural Arts Philadelphia, click here.)

It turns out that Mr. Milord and the Four Trees, in addition to being influenced by Art Brut, also came along in the middle of what is called Dubuffet's Hourloupe Cycle. (Just so you know, the word hourloupe doesn't seem to have any meaning.)

I think that a basic idea behind hourloupe was radical simplification. Dubuffet wanted his hand to connect directly with - something - without the intervention of his conscious brain. Here again, as with Art Brut, Dubuffet, a sophisticated Frenchman to his fingertips, was attempting to escape the clutches of the French Academy.

The National Gallery of Australia reports that the hourloupe cycle "was inspired by doodles that Dubuffet made with a ballpoint pen while talking on the telephone in July 1962." 

His hourloupe studies began with drawings and paintings, but in due course he started exploring his ideas in three dimensions, and eventually we get to Mr. Milord. 

So if parts of Mr. Milord look like crumpled paper to you, I wouldn't disagree. And if you think some of his armor plates may have gotten started as post-it notes, I'd tell you that Post-It notes weren't introduced until 1980, and then I would agree with you on the general proposition, maybe with Elmer's glue or - better - pushpins that eventually get turned into rivets. Just guessing.

Disintegration

It is worth remembering that Dubuffet was French and not American. Let's have a look at some of what France went through while he watched. First there was World War II, an experience of defeat, occupation, and eventual liberation by foreign powers. Then France had not one but two Vietnams. The first was actually in Indochina. The second was in Algeria, and it brought down the Fourth Republic. Then, in May 1968, students began their famous revolt, many others joined in, the government and the economy came to a halt, and it seemed briefly that the new Fifth Republic might fall in turn. (It didn't.) And, shortly thereafter, Dubuffet created Mr. Milord. I think this statue is basically about the ever-present possibility of disintegration, and what that might look like. 

Angry and ridiculous.

So what can we Americans learn from Mr. Milord? I think we are rounding out a long historical circle that began in the middle of the last century, with the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War and Watergate (for me the turning point was the Tet offensive in 1968). Will we fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as amended, or will we continue down the path to a military state under autocratic rule, similar to eighteenth-century Prussia? These issues were raised pointedly at mid-century, and I think we will see the answers in the relatively near future.

As I suggested earlier, I think Milord la Chamarre, with all his aggressive fragility, speaks to our time. Will he destroy everything around him, or will he finish disintegrating first? I think it's an open question.

Closing with a shot of Claes Oldenburg's 1976 Clothespin sculpture, which stands outside at Centre Square, perhaps 100 feet from Mr. Milord.

1993.

Special thanks to Chris Murtha for guiding me to sources I would not otherwise have found. Needless to say, we will not blame him for the many zany opinions I have expressed in this story. 

See also What the Greeks Knew, Little Karl, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office.

The People Screaming Were White

Hall of Mirrors in South Philly

Outdoor dining, Asbury Park.

Professor Elijah Anderson has written a book about Center City Philadelphia entitled The Cosmopolitan Canopy (2011). He points to the Reading Terminal Market and Rittenhouse Square, in particular, as places where all people are welcome, and where just about everybody tries to be nice to one another. This attitude of welcome and mutual kindness contrasts with many other parts of the city, which are best analyzed as urban villages, where residents are clannish and deeply suspicious of outsiders. You don't need to be a gated community to be a closed community, or at least one that tries hard to be so.

I found myself mulling these thoughts as I attended yet another meeting on the future of Washington Avenue in South Philadelphia. At the Christian Street Y, Tuesday, March 1, 6:30 p.m. I got there at 6 in an attempt to make sure I got a  seat, and it was a good thing that I did so. The meeting was in the gym, a large space, but there were remarkably few chairs set out for the audience. The vast majority of attendees stood.

The show began with Mike Carroll, the deputy managing director in charge of the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability (Otis); he ran through the final final design for the remaking of this street. He was standing at the front, behind a desk, with the presentation slides on the wall behind him and a large microphone in his hand. 

Mike's an accomplished speaker with a good baritone voice, but soon I found myself unable to hear him. There were many hecklers in the audience; the one standing behind me and basically shouting into my good ear had a particularly shrill voice. I did try to follow her meaning for a while. As nearly as I could tell, her argument boiled down to this: You didn't consult the neighbors (not true), we're the neighbors (okay, I believe you), we don't want the redesigned road (other people do), so don't do it (it doesn't work quite like that).

This person was unmasked, but had a ready answer for those who queried her on the topic: "Covid is bullshit!" Nearly a million dead, and the coronavirus is bullshit.

As nearly as I could tell, the hecklers were all white. I was sitting among a group of Black neighbors who, like me, had arrived early and gotten seats. I doubt they were particularly happy about the street redesign. I have my own reservations about it. But they weren't yelling. They were sitting quietly and attending to Mike Carroll as best they could.

As I've stated before, I think the current final design, which was reworked from the previous final design, was not brought about by the desire to please the Black residents of Point Breeze. I think it flows from a desire to mollify the owners of businesses located along Washington Avenue. Call them the Auto Repair Oligarchs.

And I think that the business owners, like the Black community in Point Breeze, are urban villagers. They want to have unilateral control over the space they occupy, and they don't like outsiders. Although I think the oligarchs do like the money that comes in from outside.

The Black community in Point Breeze rightly fears gentrification. I think the existing businesses on Washington Avenue fear being replaced by more upscale businesses and large apartment buildings. These processes are already underway, and if the City of Philadelphia were truly interested in slowing the rate of change, there are a number of things it could do, such as helping homeowners in Point Breeze to fix up their homes so they would be less tempted to sell. 

Maintaining Washington Avenue as a barrier between Point Breeze and the neighborhoods to the north may or may not slow the rate of gentrification, but it will certainly encourage the new people moving in to use their cars more and to walk and bicycle less. This is because, right now, you're a lot safer in a car on Washington Avenue than you are either on foot or on a bike.

Towards the end of Cosmopolitan Canopy, Professor Anderson suggests that it would be nice to see the concept move out from Center City and into other parts of Philadelphia. I like that idea quite a lot, and I think the battle on Washington Avenue is basically about an expanding cosmopolitan canopy. This could be rooted in the existing urban villages, if people were willing to live together with mutual respect and kindness. 

Near Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Feb. 27, 2022. 

See also A Turning Point; Quo Vadis, Philadelphia? and Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?