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.

Advantage: Bicycle

Park in Front of the Entrance

Bike corral by 7th avenue entrance.

The SeaHearNow music festival in Asbury Park, N.J., this September 14-15 was another great success - how could it not be, with Bruce Springsteen appearing for the finale on Sunday evening? 

My impression is that the success was not just on the stage but also in all the logistical areas that people take for granted as long as they are working well. Many readers will know that I take particular interest in transportation - how people arrive, and how they get back home. Generally, things seem to have gone very well in that department.

One thing that surprised me was a motorist who arrived in the early afternoon on Sunday, apparently expecting to park his car more or less at the festival's front door. At any rate, I encountered him attempting to turn from Third avenue - one of the east-west streets that bring you to the beach - onto Ocean avenue, which, as the name suggests, runs north-south next to the beach. At Third and Ocean he was next to the box office and two blocks from the festival entrance at Ocean and Fifth. 

The driver seemed nonplussed by all the pedestrians walking around in the street, not yielding him the right-of-way and in fact totally ignoring him. Oh well. I hope he found a parking spot somewhere. There certainly weren't any on Ocean.

Unfortunately, I doubt that he was the only motorist who arrived at SeaHearNow with unrealistic expectations about parking.

The City does its best, but it's not a big place. Only about 15,000 people live there, and the 2024 SeaHearNow attracted 40,000 fans. For years the City has been encouraging people who arrive by car to consider parking at a nearby train station and riding a train into Asbury Park. In addition, many people park in neighboring towns like Ocean Grove and Loch Arbour and then walk to the festival. 

The City also has a scooter share program, but the scooters are geo-fenced and only operate within Asbury Park. People parking in the western parts of the city are encouraged to use the scooters to solve what transportation people call "the last mile problem." 

James Bonanno, Asbury Park's transportation director, informs me that the scooter company added 100 scooters to its Asbury Park fleet for the weekend. The scooters normally get turned off at 10 pm, but during the festival scooter hours were extended two hours in the evening. That said, the SeaHearNow weekend stands at the top of Olympus when it comes to scootering in Asbury Park. On Saturday, there were 2,017 rentals; on Sunday there were 1,926.

For comparison, the weekend of 8/31-9/1 saw 1,242 and l,081 rentals, and the weekend of 8/24-8/25 saw 1,261 and 1,232.

The only day last summer that topped either of the SeaHearNow days was July 4, with 2,892 trips. 

I saw quite a few people riding these scooters who didn't necessarily look the part, but many of them were clearly having fun with a new toy. Perhaps Asbury Park was making some new converts to micromobility along the way to the music.

The scooter numbers are the only data on how people got to SeaHearNow that I have been able to find. I'm mindful of an old business bromide: "What gets measured is what gets managed." As I said before, I do think that arrivals and departures worked very well this year. But a more detailed understanding might turn up a few improvement opportunities. I think the simplest way to get a sense of what was going on in all transportation modes would be to survey ticket holders and ask them, in some detail, how they came and left. Not just did you take the train, but where did you get on. And how did you get from the train station to the festival. Perhaps SeaHearNow would be willing to conduct such a survey.

Meanwhile, many bicyclists had the option of parking their bikes very close to one of the festival's entrances. The photo at the beginning of this story shows the corral that was directly across Kingsley from the 7th avenue entrance. Here's another view of the corral.

And here's a shot of the 7th avenue entrance. Note the barriers designed to discourage motorists looking for a parking spot by the front door. How unsporting. 

Other cyclists chose to lock up on basically anything lock-uppable. 

Generally, people were respectful of small trees - it appears the word has gotten out that locking up to young trees is very bad for the trees.

I walked south from the 7th avenue entrance and took pictures of another large corral near the 5th avenue entrance, and then walked up to the boardwalk, south of Convention Hall, intending to take pictures of the bikes chained to the railing on the boardwalk, which has the advantage of an ocean view. But I was frankly tired of taking pictures of bicycles - yes, it happens even to me - so Lois and I sat down and watched the parade of pedestrians walking north on the boardwalk, toward the entrance and the main stage. 

Then something really odd happened. A parade of sea creatures was coming north on the boardwalk. I didn't know what I was looking at, so I took pictures. A piece of advice I received from an old photographer friend: If you have no idea what you're looking at, take pictures of it. Concentrate on whatever attracted your eye. Then sort it out later. 

And much later, after pursuing a couple of dry wells, I got to Jenn Hampton, whom I should have contacted earlier. I think Jenn basically knows everything about the art scene in Asbury Park, and it turns out this promenade is sponsored by the Wooden Walls Project and has its own name: March of the Medusa II, Jörmungandr’s Journey. Jenn adds: "It is part mask-making workshop and a march that happens as a celebration of the students finishing their masks." 

Coney Island has a Mermaid Parade every summer. Maybe Jörmungandr can make his visit an annual event.

See also Sea Hear Now 2023; Bike Parking 9/29 Asbury Park; Surf School, Asbury Park.

What I've Learned

Thoughts on Reforming Our Streets - and Other Things

Generally speaking, our cities have not been designed for the convenience of the people who live there. They have been designed to make rich people richer.

This presents some challenges for people, like me, who are trying to make our streets safe, useful, and pleasant for everybody, not just rich people.

In the middle are the politicians, whose main job is to mediate between the rich and the hoi poloi. They used to have a side job of leading, and there have been some refreshing signs of actual leadership lately, but overall survival by triangulation still seems to be the basic approach.

If you are a policy person in this political schema, the simplest way to get things done is to become a servant of the rich. This will, of course, affect your work product in a variety of ways, but historically it was the only way, and if you admire the work of people like Michelangelo, you are a beneficiary of this system.

Rittenhouse Square was also a product of this system, as duly modernized to fit a more democratic society where money was not so tightly concentrated at the top as it was in the time of Pope Julius II.

Still, there is the lingering thought that policy, in a democratic society, should be able to speak for itself. That is simply not the way it works. In today's world, if you build a better mousetrap, you don't wait for the world to beat a path to your door. You have to go out and sell it. 

You might think that the policy entrepreneur could go and knock on the doors of politicians and sell them a policy or two. Again, that's not the way it works. Here, and now, all politics are interest-group politics, and every idea is a commodity looking for an interest group to peddle it to the politicians.

We're a long way from the Romantic ideal, expressed by John Keats, that a thing of beauty is a joy forever:

And now, at once adventuresome, I send / My herald thought into a wilderness: / There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress / My uncertain path with green, that I may speed / Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed. 

If you have ideas about how to improve things, do not try to do it on your own. Find some like-minded people, work with them, build a constituency, find politicians open to your ideas, try to find a few rich people who may be willing to support you if it's convenient - and then expect a long, hard struggle, prepare to watch your best ideas deformed almost beyond recognition, and recognize that you will lose more often than you win. The important thing - the prize - is to win in the end.

I was fortunate to find, in the endeavors that I remember fondly, a few colleagues, often very different people from me, where the group dynamic proceeded to a deeper, more complex, and astonishingly strong bond that held us together in difficult times, and in less difficult times allowed us to flourish in startling and often new ways.

What Victory Feels Like for Me

I'm sitting in my armchair at the end of the day. The yellow and pink and sometimes red of the sunset sky is slowly fading, and the living room is quietly filling with blue light. Inside my body there is a warm glow. As I unwind from the challenges of the day, I look back and feel that I have probably accomplished something. Will anything come of all this work? I hope so.

I've found that actual victory - passage of legislation, winning an election - can be somewhat anticlimactic. I do know the victories are important, and I enjoy sharing them with friends. But what gets me up in the morning are those quiet moments of satisfaction.

See also Sandy's Book, For Athena, Ron DeSantis Comes to Philly, Rebecca Rhynhart for Mayor, Hector at Troy, Some Things Actually Get Better.

The State of Play on Pine-Spruce

No Stopping? The Bill Has Passed! 

Cement Barriers? On the Way.

September 29.

I'm not used to seeing things move this fast, and frankly I find it a bit disorienting. But I'd be very happy to become accustomed to it. After Barbara Friedes, M.D., was killed on July 17, both Mayor Parker and City Council President Johnson, after initial hesitation, moved quickly to positions that I never expected them to take. I am grateful to them for their courageous and effective action. I am also grateful to the churches and synagogues that voluntarily agreed to stop the long-standing practice of allowing congregants to park in the Pine and Spruce bike lanes when attending services.

After the fatal crash, three bike-friendly organizations - the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, 5th Square, and Philly Bike Action - presented the City with a petition making three demands: cement barriers to prevent motor vehicles from entering bike lanes; change No Parking signs next to the bike lanes to No Stopping signs; and an end to church and synagogue parking in the bike lanes. 

The churches and synagogues, which had been under pressure concerning this issue for some time, all agreed to stop parking in the Pine and Spruce bike lanes, and have done so. Meanwhile, the City has taken important steps forward on the other two issues.

I thought it might be useful to assemble a timeline for at least some of the significant events that have occurred in the last few months. 

July 17: Dr. Friedes dies. 

July 21: A vigil for Dr. Friedes is held at the site of her death. 

July 26: Bicyclists conduct a protest ride from the Art Museum, through Center City, and ending at City Hall. 

August 15: Reform petition presented to City Hall. 

August 26: Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel becomes the final religious organization to agree to stop parking in the bike lanes on Pine and Spruce. A total of seven congregations have given up these spaces. 

August 30: Mayor Parker holds a press conference supporting the reform agenda. 

September 5: No Stopping bill introduced in City Council and referred to the committee on streets and services. 

September 28: Ghost bike commemorating Dr. Friedes instated on Spruce street near 18th. 

October 8. City officials make the first public-facing presentation of Mayor Parker's plan to reform the bike lanes on Pine and Spruce. The Center City Residents' Association hosts the meeting. 

October 15: City Council's streets and services committee holds a hearing on the No Stopping bill, and the bill is reported out favorably. 

October 17: City officials hold a large open house to present the plan to the general public. The event takes place at Jefferson University and is very well attended.

October 24. City Council passes the No Stopping bill by a vote of 17-0, at 12:40 pm. A last-minute attempt to delay consideration of the bill failed. 

The time is always right to do what is right. - Martin Luther King

And that is where things stand now.

_______________

The City Council streets committee kindly asked me to come and tell them a little bit about loading zones. And so I did, at the October 15 hearing. Here's the prepared text of my statement:

Good afternoon. My name is Bill West, and I am the chair of the streets committee of the Center City Residents' Association. CCRA looks after the part of Center City west of Broad, between South Street and JFK Boulevard. The Pine and Spruce bike lanes run east-west through the middle of this area, from Broad to 22nd.

All the comments and queries about our streets that local residents send to CCRA come to me, and I answer them. When it comes to the proposed changes to the bike lanes on Pine and Spruce, residents have asked me: Where will Uber and Lyft go for pick-ups and drop-offs? How will my contractor unload his tools and materials? How will I unload my groceries?

Here's the answer: loading zones. In June, the City and the Parking Authority installed loading zones at or near the beginning of each block on Pine and Spruce, from Broad to 22nd Street. They're working well, although not perfectly. They're so popular, I think we're going to need to add some more.

I do think loading zones are the correct answer for Society Hill and Washington Square West. As chair of the CCRA streets committee, I have had a hand in getting those loading zones on Pine and Spruce, west of Broad. They were inspired by the earlier expansion of loading zones on Chestnut Street, which of course is a commercial rather than a residential area. Chestnut continues to have challenges, and I think the answer there, too, will be to add more loading zones.

The basic mission of the CCRA streets committee is to help make our streets safe, useful, and pleasant for everybody. I hope you will agree that we have a distance to go before we actually get there, but I do think loading zones are a step in the right direction.

Cement block emplacement, Spruce and 18th.

See also The Vigil for Dr. Friedes, Defense Doesn't Win Wars, No Parking v. No Stopping, Loading Zones Are the Key, Pine-Spruce: Will We Replay Washington Avenue?

Campaign Poster Number Five

This 1984 photo is from Asbury Park. My son kindly agreed to put a blanket over his head, creating (at least for me) both erasure and a blank slate, or perhaps a projection screen.

See also The NRA and the Truth; It's Not Like Gunsmoke; School of Arms; Gunfight at the O.K. Corral; Guns Without Responsibility; George Zimmerman, Giving Town Watch a Bad Name.

A World in Ruins

War Is Hard. And Then There's Peace.

Aeneas chats with Turnus. Briefly.

I was stunned when I first read the following paragraphs by Bernard Knox. Frankly, I'm still stunned. They're in his introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of Virgil's Aeneid. This section of the introduction (pp. 39-41) is a personal reminiscence about his military service in Italy during World War II, and how Mr. Virgil came for a visit one day and effectively told Knox what he should do after the war. Knox followed his advice.

Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1914, Knox had studied the classics at Cambridge, and after the war he went back to the classics, earning a Ph.D. at Yale and winding up as director of Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. He died in 2010, at the age of 95. 

Before we start, I need to explain something called the sortes Virgilianae. People seeking guidance for the future would open a copy of Virgil's writings and select a passage at random. People would also use the Bible for the same purpose. 

_______

"I consulted the Virgilian lottery in April 1945. The year before, while a captain in the U.S. Army, I had worked with French partisans behind the lines against German troops in Brittany, and after a leave I was finally sent to Italy to work with partisans there. No doubt the OSS [Office of Strategic Services] moguls in Washington figured that since I had studied Latin at Cambridge I would have no trouble picking up Italian. The partisans this time were on our side of the lines; things had got too difficult for them in the Po Valley and they had come through the mountains. The U.S. Army, very short of what the soldiers called 'warm bodies,' since so many of its best units had been called in for the invasion of southern France, armed them and put them under the command of American officers to hold sections of the mountain line where no German breakthrough was expected. I had about twelve hundred of them, in various units ranging from Communist to officers of the crack corps of the Italian army, the Alpini; but they had two things in common - great courage and still greater hatred of Germans. For several months we held the sector, which contained the famous Passo dell' Abettone, then impassable for wheeled vehicles since the German engineers had blown its sides down. We made frequent long patrols into enemy territory, sometimes bringing back prisoners for interrogation, sometimes passing civilian agents through the lines. In April we were given a small role in the final move north that brought about the German surrender of Italy. The main push was to the left and right of us, where tanks and wheeled vehicles could move - on the coast road to our left and on our right  through the Futa Pass to Bologna. We were to attack German positions on the heights opposite us, take the town of Fanano, and then go on to Modena in the valley. 

'We killed or captured the German troops holding the heights without too many losses, liberated Fanano, and started north on the road to Modena. ... 

"Every now and then we met a German machine-gun crew holed up in a building that delayed our passage. Usually we too occupied a building to house our machine-guns and keep the enemy under fire while we sent out a flanking party to dislodge them. On one of these occasions we occupied a villa off the road that had evidently been hit by one of our bombers; it had not much roof left and the inside was a shambles, but it would do. At one point in the sporadic exchanges of fire I handed over the gun to a sergeant and retreated into the debris of the room to smoke a cigarette. As I looked at the tangled wreckage on the floor I noticed what looked like a book, and investigation with my foot revealed part of its spine, on which I saw, in gold capitals, the letters 'MARONIS.' [Virgil's full name is Publius Vergilius Maro.] It was a text of Virgil, published by the Roman Academy 'IUSSU BENEDICTI MUSSOLINI,' 'By Order of Benito Mussolini.' There were not many Italians who would call him 'blessed' now [Benedictus means Blessed]; in fact, a few weeks later his blood-stained corpse, together with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, and that of his right-hand man, Starace, would be hanging upside-down outside a gas station in Milan. 

"And then I remembered the Sortes Virgilianae. I closed my eyes, opened the book at random and put my finger on the page. What I got was not so much a prophecy about my own future as a prophecy for Italy; it was from lines at the end of the first Georgic:

"... a world in ruins ... / For right and wrong change places; everywhere / So many wars, so many shapes of crime / Confront us; no due honor attends the plow. / The fields, bereft of tillers, are all unkempt ... / ... throughout the world / Impious war is raging. 

"'A world in ruins.' It was an exact description of the Italy we were fighting in - its railroads and its ancient buildings shattered by Allied aircraft, its elegant bridges blown into the water by the retreating Germans, and its fields sown not with seed by the farmers but with mines by the German engineers. 

"The fighting stopped; it was time to move on. I tried to get the Virgil into my pack, but it was too big, and I threw it back to the cluttered floor. But I remember thinking: 'If I get out of this alive, I'll go back to the classics, and Virgil especially.' And I did." 

_______

About the picture at the top of the story: At the end of the Aeneid, when Aeneas has finally reached Latium (the future Rome), there's a big fight over who gets the girl (Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, the king of Latium) and also who gets the country (which goes with the girl). The local boy, Turnus, is very unhappy that an outsider (Aeneas) looks like he's going to get it all without a fight. And so there's a big battle.

A lot of people get killed, but eventually Aeneas has Turnus on the ground. Turnus says, hey, let's make a deal. We can live together peacefully. But too much blood has been shed. And, frankly, I think Aeneas has PTSD. He kills Turnus. Or, as Virgil puts it, Aeneas "plants / his iron sword hilt-deep in his enemy's heart. / Turnus' limbs went limp in the chill of death. / His life breath fled with a groan of outrage / down to the shades below." (12:1109-1113). These are the last five lines of the Aeneid. 

Today, killing an unarmed and defenseless soldier is a war crime. But back then it wasn't. 

I didn't learn about this part of the Aeneid when I was in school. I recall Dido and Aeneas, and the call of duty, which trumps all desires for a peaceful life. But the idea that the Roman empire was based on murder was not a message taught to me in school.  

Luca Giordano made the painting in 1688; I found it on Wikimedia Commons. 

_______

If you're interested in what the girl at the center of this story thought about all these goings-on, have a look at Ursula K. Le Guin's novel Lavinia (2008). It's a pretty amazing work of reimagination. 

See also Narcissism and Dictatorship, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, Fascism, Mussolini's Personal Sex Factory, What Happened in Ferrara?

Surf School, Asbury Park

Can 4-Year-Olds Learn to Surf? Yes.

One of my hangouts is on the beach near the jetty that separates the surfing beach - the northernmost beach in Asbury Park - from the swimming beaches that lie to the south, down to Ocean Grove. And possibly my most favorite thing to watch is the very young children in surfing school. We're talking four to seven years old.

But don't worry, Mom and Dad. In the class for the youngest surfers, there is always an instructor mounted behind the child on the surfboard. And there are more instructors standing in the water, which generally comes up around their knees. And there are more instructors on the beach, watching everything that goes on in the water and keeping an eye on the kids who are sitting on the beach, waiting for their turn.

Here's a bigger kid getting a ride. Practice makes you better.

And here's a class getting ready to go down to the sea with surfboards. (Apologies to Psalm 107.)

Another class in the water and heading out.

A day at the beach. Note the mini-surfboards.

And one more.

The whole show is put on by a company called Summertime Surf.  This engine of commerce, or scholarship, or surfing, or maybe just plain fun was founded in 2006. It seems to pretty much own a large stretch of the Jersey shore, with schools offered in Asbury Park, Bradley Beach, Belmar, Point Pleasant, and Manasquan River. A tentacle appears to have reached out to Rhode Island.

The kids - and the instructors - don't spend all their time in the water, and so the camp in Asbury Park comes with a large tent - a shady refuge for breaks and the occasional bit of instruction.

Below, a student racks her board after a lesson.

These camps are expensive. Not everybody has room for something like this in their budget, but in Asbury Park there is an option - the Asbury Park Surf Club, which traces its origins to 2019. It runs a class every Thursday in the summer. The children come in groups from places like the Boys and Girls Club. The instructors are volunteers; they're also surfers, and their love of the children and the sport shines through every time I'm watching them.

Here's a shot of a group of APSC surfers heading out to the waves.

Again, notice how many instructors there are.

And here's a shot of the beach crew at the end of the day, standing and watching as the campers take their last rides.

The pictures here were taken in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

See also How Surfboards Get Around, Umbrellaville.

Loading Zones Are the Key

To Unlocking our Parking Lanes

New loading zone, Pine near 18th.

People who live in what is sometimes called CCRAville live in a very nice place. Geographically, it is the southwest quadrant of William Penn's 1682 plan for Philadelphia. The present-day City Hall sits in the square that was at the center of Penn's plan; a bit to the southwest lies Rittenhouse Square, and a bit further to the southwest lies Fitler Square. Rittenhouse and Fitler squares are the lungs of CCRAville. 

This part of the city was largely developed in the nineteenth century, and today many of the tree-lined streets in the area are flanked by rows of red brick and brownstone houses from that time. It is, generally speaking, a prosperous, well-tended area. But it is not without its problems - this is, after all, the real world. And one of those problems is parking.

Finding a curbside parking space in CCRAville is a challenging process in the best of times. And sometimes, frankly, it's impossible. I speak from personal experience.

The shortage of open space at the curb makes it very difficult for people to gain access to the area. And so the plumber who arrives to fix the leak in your basement may very well wind up parking illegally, possibly in a crosswalk or possibly blocking a traffic lane. All these maneuvers contribute to congestion on our streets, and sometimes they are quite dangerous.

Recently the City government and the Philadelphia Parking Authority (a state agency) agreed to do something about this problem. They worked together to install loading zones at or near the end of each block of Pine and Spruce streets, running between Broad and 22nd - basically running east-west through the middle of CCRAville. (For the City's flyer explaining this project, click here.) 

The Center City Residents' Association, the local community group that looks after CCRAville, encouraged this project from its conception and through a lengthy gestation.

The final result, in place since June, is a great success. Illegal parking on these streets has declined dramatically, improving traffic flow and increasing safety.

The rules of the game.

A Long Backstory

You might think that putting up a few posts and some small signs is a quick and easy process. You would be wrong. I can trace the roots of this project back for a decade, and I think others could probably add a few years to that.

What I'm going to do here is tell you the story as I saw it. Like an infantry soldier in a trench, my view of this project was quite limited. I know what I did; I know some of what the people around me did. I can't tell you what was going on with other people further down the trench line, and I have no idea what the colonels and the generals were thinking and doing.

When I retired in 2009, my daughter got me a gmail account, and my wife set me up with a blog called westwordsphilly. The blog started as a friends and family affair, with me processing my departure from corporate life for a small audience. I soon found myself writing about health insurance - I had worked for an insurance company and developed a strong interest in reforming the industry. This led me to work on the campaign to get Obamacare passed. And then, after the bill became law, I found myself looking at other topics. I had worked for the New York City Planning Commission in the 1970s, and as I walked around CCRAville it struck me that we weren't managing our streets any better than we had been handling health insurance.

I had been an avid runner and bicyclist, but I was particularly annoyed by the parking in my neighborhood, and in due course I found Donald Shoup, a professor at UCLA who had been analyzing parking for decades and was in the process of revolutionizing the entire field.

That's a story for another day. Today, all we need to know is that, if curbside parking is free or very inexpensive, and off-street parking is more expensive, the street will always fill first. 

Many of our City leaders do not understand this mechanism even today. When confronted with streets where curbside occupancy is 100 percent or more, City Council tends to respond by trying to create more off-street parking. The main problem with this approach is that it doesn't work.

Bug truck, 1600 block of Pine.

Implementing Shoup in Philly - or Not

At this time, ten years ago, I did not have the idea of reimagining our streets lane by lane, and I certainly had not thought about how changes in one lane could affect the other lanes. And, frankly, I didn't yet know much about parking. In all this, I don't think I was alone. 

I saw three things. First, what we were doing wasn't working. Second, we needed to reimagine the whole street and not just nibble around the edges of various problems. And, third, the arrival of bicycles in large numbers could drive reform.

I had been talking with various friends about these ideas, and on May 4, 2014, I wrote an email emphasizing the importance of bicycling to the reform of our streets: "I can't help thinking that bicycles, starting as a disruptive force, may well be the catalyst for a long-needed solution.  Bicycle lanes, reduced speed, improved intersections, better separation of traffic overall, and more attentive drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists." 

Be careful what you ask for. CCRA president Jeff Braff was one of the recipients of this email. He was an enthusiastic bicyclist, but in his CCRA job he naturally heard a lot of complaints about parking in the area, and he was interested in getting a better understanding of the issue. So, I suppose we could say that talking about bicycling brought me to working on parking. Jeff asked me to work with Mike Axler, CCRA's assistant treasurer, to count the parking spaces in CCRAville, something which had never been done. (To this day, nobody knows how many parking spots actually exist in large swaths of Philadelphia.) 

Mike and I agreed; we received our commission from Jeff on September 15, 2014, and promptly started counting parking spots. Jeff had hoped we could finish in three weeks, but the work carried us well into 2015. The summary report of our study was published in the Center City Quarterly in summer 2015, p. 19. 

I'm not going to go through all the details here. If you're interested, have a look at the stories on my blog that are listed at the end of this article. 

For me, the most surprising number was that no more than 13 percent of the households in CCRAville were parking a car on the street. Roughly half the households didn't own a car, and the rest were parking off the street. 

So a small minority of residents were monopolizing the curb space in CCRAville, and virtually everyone in the area was suffering from a lack of access, whether it be visits from friends and family, a house call by the friendly local plumber, or the ability to drop off groceries that you've brought back in your carshare car. (See, in particular, Parking: Storage v. Access.)

I'll just add one more number. The parking authority had issued more than twice as many Zone 1 parking permits to CCRAville residents as there were Zone 1 parking spots in CCRAville. (See Parking Permits and Musical Chairs.) 

All this struck me as an easy act to follow. And Professor Shoup had provided the tools to make the system function effectively. My thought was that we should use them.

Needless to say, things did not go well.

Cash machine, Starbucks. Spruce near 18th.

Not

It took a couple of years, but I eventually came to understand that Philly was simply never going to use fancy tools like variable pricing or uniform price auctions to manage its public parking. But we did manage to head off a bad move by City Council that involved something called parking minimums. 

Parking minimums are legal requirements that new construction contain a certain minimum number of parking spaces. In 2012, Philadelphia adopted a new zoning code that substantially reduced parking minimums. (Professor Shoup's recommendation is to abolish them.) 

In 2017, when City Council introduced a bill to raise parking minimums, CCRA president Wade Albert wrote a letter to Council President Darrell Clarke and Council Member William Greenlee. Here is one paragraph of a fairly long letter: 

"CCRA further opposes the bill because it is not at all clear that mandating more parking space for multi-family housing will in any way reduce the shortage of on-street parking. A relatively recent study of car owners in CCRA's neighborhood conducted in [2014-2015] by CCRA members Bill West and Michael Axler concluded that there are many vacant parking spaces in local garages and lots. And this is not surprising, given that many individuals with cars often choose not to pay for garage parking (with a monthly average cost likely between $175 and $275) when they have the option of parking on the street with permits that only costs [sic] $35 on an annual basis." 

The curb will always fill first. And CCRAville dodged a bullet.

When the loading zone fills,
there will be spillover.

Loading Zones in Residential Areas

And Professor Shoup had given me another tool - loading zones in residential areas. I first wrote about a version of this idea in 2015, and in 2016 I applied the idea to Pine and Spruce streets, where the concept was particularly appealing because the bike lanes there were being severely impacted by cars and trucks blocking the lane.  The 2016 story contains one of my favorite lines: "I don't think the bike lane is the problem. I think the parking lane is the problem." 

Later, I joked to a friend about this article: "Needless to say, it didn't exactly move and shake the movers and shakers."

And things were quiet for a while. 

A Pivot Point on Chestnut Street 

In the summer of 2019, the City greatly increased the number of loading zones on Chestnut Street. (For an article in the Inquirer, click here.) On September 26, 2019, CCRA president Maggie Mund wrote to Jeannette Brugger of the City's Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability. Here is part of what she wrote. 

"The Chestnut Street loading pilot is still in its early stages, but it already seems clear that increased provision of legal loading zones has dramatically decreased the incidence of illegal parking or stopping in the traffic lanes, thereby substantially reducing congestion and smoothing traffic flow.

"Chestnut Street is a commercial corridor, but we believe that these lessons are also applicable to residential zones, which have seen a dramatic increase in package delivery, as well as pick-ups and drop-offs by companies such as Uber and Lyft.

"CCRA would be very interested in exploring with you the possibility that the CCRA area could become a pilot zone for testing the utility of increased numbers of loading zones in residential areas." 

This proposal was received positively, but in the end nothing came of it. I recall that one of the problems was picking an appropriate area in which to conduct the pilot. Virtually every block in CCRAville would have benefited from loading zones, so how do you pick.

And then of course, early in 2020, the Covid epidemic arrived, and this project went into long-term storage. 

If only the vehicles looked half as interesting as the buildings.

Same spot: Spruce near 21st, July 4.

Another Pivot Point

It turns out, though, that the idea of installing substantial numbers of loading zones in residential areas was not dead. Randy LoBasso of the Bicycle Coalition had been talking with the parking authority, engaging in what the Quakers call friendly persuasion, and asking them to increase the effectiveness of their enforcement activities on the Pine-Spruce bike lanes, which were being crippled by cars and trucks blocking the lanes. In September 2021, those talks bore fruit. 

"In September, the Philadelphia Parking Authority announced that it was creating a dedicated unit of bicycle-mounted enforcement officers, who would be ticketing cars illegally parked in bike lanes and bus lanes. CCRA ran a survey in its weekly email newsletter, asking residents if they would be willing to see more loading zones added to the parking lane on blocks of Pine and Spruce where the crosstown bike lanes run. The response was overwhelmingly positive. In October, CCRA wrote to the Office of Transportation, Infrastructure and Sustainability (OTIS) asking the City to work with us on installing loading zones in this area. OTIS responded affirmatively, and planning is expected to begin in January 2022." - CCRA Streets Committee Report for the Year 2021, submitted December 9, 2021. 

Here's the text of the letter from CCRA president Rick Gross to Chris Puchalsky of oTIS on October 4, 2021. 

"Dear Chris,

"We read with interest the Philadelphia Parking Authority's announcement that it was forming a special, bicycle-mounted unit of enforcement officers. Their mission: Write tickets for motor vehicles parked illegally in bike lanes and bus lanes in Center City and University City.

"It's worth noting that people parking in this way often don't see any option, because there are no spaces available in the parking lane.

"CCRA has been looking at the issue of parking congestion in our area for some time. We have been discussing the idea of creating one or two loading zone spaces per block in areas such as Pine and Spruce from Broad Street to 22nd, where there are bike lanes and where the parking lane is almost always at 100 percent occupancy or higher. The loading spaces would operate during the day and then revert to regular spaces in the evening.

"After the PPA announcement, CCRA surveyed its members regarding this notion, and 83% of respondents replied affirmatively to the idea.

"We would like to see a loading zone pilot for Pine and Spruce between Broad and 22nd. We think this should be done in conjunction with the PPA's enforcement pilot.

"We would be happy to collaborate with you on this project, and we look forward to hearing from you in the near future." 

Planning progressed, and in October 2022 I joined representatives from the City and the Philadelphia Parking Authority for a walk-through of Pine and Spruce, between Broad and 22nd streets. It turned out that quite a few of the blocks had idiosyncrasies that needed to be dealt with. This is what walk-throughs are for. 

We met at Spruce and Broad and walked to Spruce and 22nd, where something interesting happened. It was outside our study area, but we noticed that the block of Spruce between 22nd and 23rd had signage on the north side of the street barring parking during the day. The blocks east of 22nd had only one lane for motor vehicle traffic, so why two lanes here? We discussed. People went back to the office and researched and discussed. In the end, nobody could understand why the north side of the street was no parking during the day. And in 2023, the signs were changed to allow parking both day and night, adding thirteen spots - a baker's dozen - of daytime parking in an area where parking is famously tight. 

In August of 2023, CCRA received notice that the City planned to skip the pilot phase and install the loading zones on a permanent basis. 

Finally, in June of this year, while I was at the beach, I received an email from Anna Kelly, one of the people I had been working with at the City, informing me that the loading zones had been installed. That was a very happy day. 

What a street corner can look like.

Streets Are for People

Early on, I saw the need to look at the whole street. Call me slow, but I only gradually came to the unifying principle that streets should be designed for people. I did not come to this idea by myself. Just as Professor Shoup educated me on parking - and particularly loading zones - Jan Gehl, with his book Cities for People, educated me on the many ways, large and small, that design of our public spaces can make them interesting and welcoming.

I think the pope's visit to Philadelphia in 2015 was an eye opener for many people. Streets can be very versatile, if only you let them. And then in the pandemic we had the streeteries. We also fiddled with Open Streets, but in the end didn't do nearly as much as we had hoped. 

Many people, including many in positions of power, are definitely not on board with this new approach. After all, for many years our streets have been for transportation and sanitation, and basically everything else was unimportant.

But I feel that seeds have been planted and taken root and cannot be easily extirpated. And I'm hopeful for the future.

See also Parking: Storage v. Access; Measuring the Health of a Parking System; Parking Permits and Musical Chairs; The Supreme Court and Parking; Reimagining Our Streets: Bikes Will Lead, But They Will Not Be Alone; Barnacles at the Curb.