Barbarians Inside the Gate

The Immigration Debate Need Not Be a Fact-Free Zone

Newsboy, St. Louis, Missouri. Lewis Hine, May 1910.

"Most Americans believe that illegal immigrants should 'get in line' and immigrate legally, just like their own ancestors did. There are several fallacies, however, that underpin this viewpoint. First, for most of American history, there was no immigration 'line.' Every immigrant who wanted to come to the United States could do so without any wait at all. The immigration of Asians was eventually limited quite severely, but otherwise, even after Americans began imposing various medical and financial restrictions, 98 to 99 percent of Europeans and North Americans who wanted to come to the United States could do so without standing in any line. Waiting in a line began only in 1921, and even then, close relatives of those already in the United States were allowed to skip the line altogether. Consequently, very few Americans have ancestors who waited in an immigration line.

"The second fallacy is the belief that a line exists in which most of today's illegal immigrants could have waited. This is simply not true. The vast majority of visas given to immigrants today are reserved for family members of those already legally in the United States, and almost all of the remainder are awarded to those with highly sought-after job skills (nurses, software engineers, even university professors). If you do not have such a skill or a close relative already lawfully in the United States who can sponsor you, there is no way to immigrate legally - no line to get in at all. A poor Mexican or Ecuadorean without American relatives thus does not have the same opportunity to immigrate that a poor Irishman or German or Italian or eastern European Jew once had. Americans are certainly within their rights to decide that they no longer want to give other people the same opportunities that their own ancestors had. But Americans ought to acknowledge as much rather than perpetuate the myth that their forebears followed the same rules that today's illegal immigrants flout."

- Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams, The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York (2016), pp. 567-568. Footnotes omitted.

See also Citizens of the Planet.

Permeable Blocks

Going Off the Grid in Old City

Old City Philadelphia, 1811.

When I got to the top of the stairs and saw the dead squirrel lying in the dirt, barely three blocks from the Liberty Bell, I mused once again on Philadelphia's apparent inability to sustain a performance. Maestro, cue the tone-deaf trombones.

My friend Joe Schiavo tells me it used to be a lot worse. The area at the top of the stairs, now a parking lot, used to be a hot spot for short dumping. Still, the center of this block should be a Grand Central Station for distributing pedestrians - both tourists and locals - among the various destinations that lie a stone's throw from my dead squirrel. And it's not.

The pedestrian walkways through this block already exist. The east-west route actually extends from the mall, between Fifth and Sixth Streets, past Christ Church at Second Street, and all the way through to Front Street. The north-south route joins the Arch Street Meeting House to the north with Franklin Court just south of Market, and continues through the National Park to Old St. Joseph's Church, just south of Walnut.

However, there is a hitch in the north-south route - a gate at the southern edge of the Arch Street Meeting's property. This gate seems to be locked all the time.

Here's what the area around the gate looks like. The dead squirrel is just to the right, out of the picture.

Perhaps not a jungle, but definitely a jumble.

The gate is actually separating two parking lots - the lot for the Arch Street Meeting House to the north, and the parking lot to the south, which lies behind buildings that front on Third and also Market.

The gate issue is easily fixed with a key. But there's a reason the gate is locked. The parking lot at the center of the block - where all the walkways converge - is a very uninviting space. To put it charitably, this lot does not meet the City's current design standards for parking lots. (See Putting Some Park into Old Parking Lots.)

Here's what the bad-boy lot looks like. The stairs that lead to the walkways running south and west are just out of sight to the right.

There's also room for garbage. (Think sheds, at the very least. See What Should We Do With the Humble Dumpster?)

And here's my favorite wall. Something assembled by people who simply do not give a damn.

The one good thing about the mess in the middle of the block is that it's hard to see unless you're standing right on top of it. There's a significant grade change right in the center of the block, which is why there are stairs.

Don't forget to set the hand brake.

From Fifth to Third
Let's back up and talk about some of the parts that are pretty. The walkway, as I mentioned, begins in the west at Fifth Street, across from the mall. It would be nice if there were a mid-block crossing here, so people visiting the mall might actually feel invited to go see where the walkway takes them.

Between Fifth and Fourth things are quite lovely. I was puzzled by this oddity. My brother thinks it may be a work of art - bench frames standing in for benches, part for the whole. Sort of like the ghost structures at Franklin Court.

Ghost benches.

The pretty part continues across Fourth Street, which could also use a mid-block crossing. This area is formally known as the Commerce Street Walkway, after a street that used to run just north of Market and now lives mainly in memory and old maps. Commerce Square, in the 2000 block of Market, takes its name from Commerce Street.

Commerce Street Walkway, from Fourth Street.

If you look carefully, you can see the wall and the parking lot in the distance, but they're hardly detracting from the bucolic ambience.

When you hit the wall, you need to turn left to go up the steps or right to go to Market Street. The walk down to Market is rather barren, but there is a nice outdoor eating area attached to a restaurant.

This may be Orianna Street. Or maybe not.

If you go left up the steps you come to the ugly part, but you can push through to Third Street on Wistar Alley.

Wistar Alley.

Some nice pavers in the foreground. I'd love to see what's underneath all the asphalt. The alley itself is rather dark and unadorned. Calling Isaiah Zagar. Let's do mosaics with lots mirror shards, like the 800 block of Pemberton. (See My New Favorite Alley.)

Building across the street not my problem today.

It's important to remember the purpose of the exercise here. The basic purpose of fixing the walkways in the 300 block is to allow people to move easily through the block to get to adjacent destinations, like Franklin Court south of Market and Christ Church east of Third. We need to raise our game on this block so that people will feel comfortable rambling east from the Liberty Bell and discovering Philadelphia as a nineteenth-century city.

For that we need to learn how to sustain our performance. No flat trombones. No dead squirrels.

Here's what's available just across Third Street, on Church Street, not far from Christ Church. We need to live up to this.

Church Street.

So Who Cares About Going Off the Grid?
I do, and I think I have very good reasons. But first let's back up and glance at a little history.

Philadelphia's basic street grid dates to William Penn's 1682 plan, which was "aspirational" - the city didn't exist yet. When settlers who had purchased land showed up, they rapidly started adding little streets between Penn's big ones. (They also built out the city north and south along the Delaware, rather than expanding west toward the Schuylkill, but that's another story.)

Most of these little streets run generally north-south or east-west, like the ones in Penn's grid, but they often don't line up from block to block. You need to scoot a little bit right or left to pick up your little street again - and it may have a different name. Sometimes a little street will just go away - sometimes they come back a block or two later; sometimes they don't. And sometimes a little street is just a stub, ending in the middle of the block.

So it's not a grid the way William's 1682 plan is.

This pattern recurs widely throughout the older parts of the city, but it is particularly notable in Old City. And it is in Old City where these little streets are best placed to be a major tourist attraction.

I think there has been a tendency to view these streets as a mildly embarrassing remnant of our pre-modern past - after all, some of them are so narrow you can barely fit a car down them, let alone a beer truck. (And some are really tiny, like Grindstone Alley near Christ Church. It's just about six feet wide, wall to wall. I measured it.)

Grindstone Alley.

The Role of Permeable Blocks
What purpose do such streets serve in a modern city? As you may have guessed, I have an answer to that question: I think that the little streets, or alleys, offer a significant and sustainable competitive advantage built around human scale.

Old City is really two cities laid on top of one another - the modern, car-dominated city, and an older, almost accidental city that is profoundly human in its scale and appeal.

The alleys of Old City can be charming, quirky, occasionally mysterious, sometimes surprising. Oh, did I mention historical? Elfreth's Alley, commonly known as the nation's oldest residential street, is a National Historic Landmark. Only a short walk from the Betsy Ross House, it is located between Front and Second Street, north of Arch and south of Quarry.

But my new favorite alley is Cuthbert Street between Front and Second, a bit south of Arch and a stone's throw from Christ Church. It's just loaded with charm.

Cuthbert Street.

Recently I was sitting in my new favorite cafe, Old City Coffee on Church Street, when a happy and energetic group of middle-aged Italian tourists bustled in. As they were settling in to a collection of tables, one of the cafe's more senior people came out and explained to them in Italian how to order. And I think they liked the place, and liked the narrow Belgian block street out the window, the virtual absence of cars, and even though it clearly wasn't home, I think they felt at home.

When it comes to tourists, I think the big issue is to lure them away from the Liberty Bell and into Old City. Once they get there, I think they'll like it. Foreigners may find it comfortable. Americans may find it unfamiliar - even odd - but perhaps also charming.

I think there are big benefits for locals as well. Whether they live in Old City or work there, or are in from another neighborhood, perhaps to go to an art gallery or the Arden Theater, or to buy a bar stool at Mr. Bar Stool (that's an actual store, not far from Elfreth's Alley), you have more than one way to walk to your destination. You can get off the big grid and have a quiet ramble, maybe even let yourself get a little bit lost, if you enjoy that sort of thing.

Sustaining the Performance
All of these possibilities already exist in Old City. There are just a few spots that could use some tidying up, and the block we've been talking about is, to my mind, at the top of that list.

I mentioned my friend Joe Schiavo at the top of this story. He and Janet Kalter and their non-profit organization, Old City Green, led the successful 2016 makeover of Girard Fountain Park, across the street from the Arch Street Meeting House, and are now leading a project, including a Community Design Collaborative planning grant, to bring the 300 block of the Commerce Street Walkway up to its full potential as a community amenity. I spoke with them, and also with David Rubin, the landscape architect, Job Itzkowitz, executive director of the Old City District, and Jonas Maciunas, who consults with the Old City District and was a principal author of the Old City Vision 2026 planning document. I'm grateful for their insights. However, the opinions I express here are my own.

My understanding is that soon we will be seeing some proposed designs. I look forward to commenting on them, but first I wanted to do this story, to lay out the context and to encourage people to think not just about what these improvements will do for the block, but also what they can do for the whole of Old City.

One Last Thing
I've concentrated in this story on the potential to make it easier and more pleasant for people to move around Old City. But Commerce Street Walkway should also be a place for people to hang out. In fact, it already is. The benches in the 300 block regularly sport a variety of people taking the air, wielding cigarettes, cell phones, and laptops, or just sitting.

Here's my idea. At the top of the steps, place a few tables and some chairs. (I am stealing this idea, of course, from Dilworth Park and Love Park.) Oh, and throw in a gelato stand. Call it the Dead Squirrel Cafe. Or maybe not.

Cobblestones, Cuthbert Street.

See also Alleys, This Isn't Just Any Alley, A Tale of Three Alleys, City Beautiful Sprouts on Cypress Street,  Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Second and Chestnut, The Invitation, The Future of Christ Church Park.

Bike Parking 9/29 Asbury Park

Helping Make Civilization Happen

Here are some shots of the bike parking for the Sea Hear Now music festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey, on September 29, 2018. The festival continues tomorrow. People noted that the car parking seemed less crazy than usual. Maybe the large number of people who rode bikes had something to do with that.

The main bike parking lot, 5th Ave. and Ocean.

A wide view of the main lot.

Parking next to Convention Hall. 

More parking and some happy listeners, 7th Ave. at Webb.

Taming Chestnut Street

The Limits of Enforcement

Chestnut Street, shortly after 10 a.m. Parking lane to the right.

Here's an email I sent to Mayor Kenney yesterday.

September 27, 2018

Dear Mayor Kenney,

Thank you for your initiative to improve traffic flow on Chestnut Street in Center City and also on Market Street east of City Hall.

I am convinced that enforcement alone will not do the job. In fact, as the various enforcement agencies see that their efforts are ineffective, and they quietly lose interest in the project, I think we could easily wind up in a worse situation than the one we started from. However, I do think the problem can be solved.

A few years back, the City took a lot of the parking spaces on Chestnut and turned them into loading zones - but only until 10 a.m., when they become regular 2-hour parking spaces. If you want to move delivery vehicles out of the bus lane, you need to give them places to go. And I think one very feasible solution would be to extend the hours of the loading zones that are already there.

Here's a story on Chestnut Street that I wrote a while ago.

Sincerely,

Bill West

All the Whining Will Be the Sound of Change

The Revolution in Parking Has Started. Just Listen.

Occasionally, Donald Shoup goes literary on me. Here he is quoting Machiavelli:

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old order of things, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new."

And, as Shoup notes on page 281 of his new book, Parking and the City (2018), if the entrenched forces of the status quo ever do give ground, they will whine a lot as they move. Nobody ever said this process would be easy, or pleasant, or neat. (The Machiavelli quote is also on page 281.)

Shoup's topic, of course, is parking. He's been at it for decades, and in the last decade there have clearly been some tectonic shifts. You wouldn't necessarily know this by looking at the streets of Philadelphia, but then we've rarely been seen as pioneers or even fast followers, and the new book gathers examples of progress from around the country and the globe.

Shoup edited the book, which contains articles by him and several dozen other writers.

The book also performs another important service. Since the publication of The High Cost of Free Parking in 2005, says Donald Shoup, "many people have asked for a shorter version of the book to appeal to general readers who are concerned about the future of cities but don’t want to buy or read an 800-page book about parking. ... The Introduction to Parking and the City is this shorter, updated version of The High Cost of Free Parking." (P. xviii.) The introduction is about 50 pages long, and it does what Shoup says it does. And it's available online for free. Just click here.

Sound Bites and Pithy Quotes 
This is actually a well-written book. When it comes to economists, city planners, and traffic engineers, I'm generally willing to grade their writing on a curve, but I didn't have to do that here. (Well, maybe once or twice.)

Below are a bunch of quotations from the book - some of them brief, some of them very brief. I'm not convinced that the public's attention span is any shorter than it always has been - after all, the Greeks gave us aphorisms and the Romans gave us epigrams. However, some people persist in thinking that you can convince the man or woman in the street with dense prose and highly convoluted argument. And those people are as wrong today as they were in the Greek agora, back in the day.

These are snippets that can help you get your ideas across. Borrow them, or make your own. It will help you keep your audience awake.

The Wild West
Houston, Texas: "It's Saturday night. The streets are teeming with people streaming out of nightclubs and bars at the end of a raucous night. Partiers ramble down residential streets, searching for their cars, yelling and sometimes fighting in the yards along the way. Meanwhile, valets are running back and forth setting off car alarms to quickly identify customers' vehicles.

"Residents watch the mayhem from their bedroom windows and wonder if they will ever be able to sleep through the night on a weekend. They dream of waking up in the morning without finding empty cans, bottles, and pizza boxes in their front yards.

"Sound familiar? A burgeoning entertainment district can deliver great economic gains to a formerly sleepy area, but those gains come with a lot of pain." (P. 445.)

Austin, Texas: "Why lease a parking space if you can park on the street for free? Students stored their cars on the streets, sometimes without moving them for months at a time. On-street parking was completely unmanaged and overcrowded. People parked too close to intersections, cars blocked driveways and fire hydrants, and parking spaces were hard to find." (P. 455.)

Management: The X Factor
"For years, parking policy has been based on the fallacy that there is not enough space to park, while what is really lacking is effective parking management." (P. 190.)

Dreaming Is Not Planning
"The physical transformation of cities and the loss of valuable, active urban land are probably the most visible consequences of urban parking growth. The transformation was planned decades earlier in the futuristic forms popularized by Le Corbusier, Norman Bel Geddes, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others. In these designers' collective vision, high-rise towers were surrounded by parks and plazas and connected by giant, free-flowing highways. Missing from most of these early images, however, were the many cars required to move people around in these increasingly disconnected places and the space to store those cars while not in use. Only now can we see and measure those outcomes." (Pp. 126-127.)

Why Price Is Important
"Demand is a function of price, and this does not cease to be true merely because transportation engineers and urban planners ignore it." (P. 73.)

"Misinterpreting the peak demand for free parking as the demand for parking and then requiring that amount of parking everywhere has led to a planning disaster of epic proportions." (P. 72.)

"Parking spaces outnumber cars, and each space can cost much more than a car parked in it, but planners continue to set parking requirements without considering this cost." (P. 83.)

"To use a familiar analogy, if pizza were free, would there ever be enough pizza?" (P. 94.)

Off-Street Parking Requirements Deform the Fabric of the City
"A successful Central Business District (CBD) combines large amounts of labor and capital on a small amount of land. CBDs thrive on high density because the prime advantage they offer over other parts of a metropolitan area is proximity - the immediate availability of a wide variety of activities." (Pp. 75-76.)

"The high cost of structured parking gives developers a strong incentive to build in low-density areas where cheaper land allows surface parking, thus encouraging sprawl. Surface lots cost developers less money, but they cost the city more land that could have better uses." (P. 85.)

"Because parking requirements reduce the supply of apartments, they increase the price of housing. On some days, planners think about housing affordability, but on most days they think about parking requirements and forget about housing affordability." (P. 92.)

"Cities thrive when they offer more rather than fewer choices; cities that remove parking requirements will create more diverse and inclusive housing markets, and become more diverse and inclusive places." (P. 212.)

"Would the public interest be better served if parking and housing were unbundled, creating separate markets for each? Vehicles could be parked off the street in parking garages independent of dwelling units." (P. 146.)

Trade-Offs
"Cities seem willing to pay any price and bear any burden to assure the survival of free parking. But do people really want free parking more than affordable housing, clean air, walkable neighborhoods, good urban design, and many other public goals?" (P. 200.)

Hard Work Ahead
"There is a largely unspoken assumption that city governments have an obligation to ensure parking is cheap, plentiful, and convenient at most destinations. In order to realize effective parking reforms and the associated benefits, cities must dispense with this assumption." (P. 111.)

"While there is no silver bullet, repealing minimum parking requirements is a foundational step toward sustainable, affordable, and equitable cities." (P. 124.)

"Fair market prices can end the Hundred Years' War over free curb parking, and the revenue will provide a peace dividend to rebuild our neglected public infrastructure." (P. 282.)

"Like the automobile itself, parking is a good servant but a bad master. Parking should be friendly - easy to find, easy to use, and easy to pay for - but cities should not require or subsidize parking." (P. 203.)

"Trying to reform your own city's parking policies may feel like paddling a canoe to tow an aircraft carrier but if enough people paddle, the ship will move." (P. 500.)

See also Finding Our Way to a Parking Policy, Parking in San Francisco, Professor Shoup's Parking Book, The Supreme Court and Parking.

Jane Jacobs Was a Bicyclist

She Commuted by Bike in Manhattan in the 1950s

Boardwalk, Asbury Park. Not Jane's bike.

Jane Jacobs didn't drive, but her husband, Bob, did. They had a car, which largely sat in a garage on Greenwich Street, near their home at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, and got used mainly for vacation trips. For a number of years, the family car was a Fiat Multipla, an odd-looking little van that was famous in the Jacobs family for a highly temperamental fuel pump. Later, as they were moving to Canada, they purchased from friends a VW bus that was on its third engine.

Jane Jacobs didn't dislike cars. She just thought there were too many of them. And she hated what cars were doing to cities: "Traffic arteries, along with parking lots, gas stations and drive-ins, are powerful and insistent instruments of city destruction. To accommodate them, city streets are broken down into loose sprawls, incoherent and vacuous for anyone afoot. Downtowns and other neighborhoods that are marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled." (Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961, p. 338.)

Jane the Cyclist
Jane got started cycling as a child in Scranton, Pa., where she competed for saddle time on two tricycles in a family that eventually included four children. She was one of the few in her era who continued bicycling into adulthood - the nadir of American bicycling may be considered the 1930s to the 1960s, and she cycled right through them.

(This article relies heavily on Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, 2016. For the paragraphs above, see pp. 25, 114, 207, 261, 262, 277.)

Fortunately husband Bob was also an avid cyclist. When he was nineteen years old, in 1936, he toured through Europe by bicycle, even spending some time in what was then Nazi Germany. (Kanigel, p. 95.)

In addition to practicing architecture (he specialized in hospitals), Bob taught and wrote. Here's something from one of his articles: "We run the risk," he wrote, "of letting verbalized symbols overwhelm, smother and even negate the direct data actually supplied by our senses." (Kanigel, pp. 97, 123, 281.)

I think I like Bob.

Jane was also no stranger to bicycle touring. In 1940, she had taken a week-long bicycling trip in Quebec with her older sister, Betty. So it should come as no surprise to us that, after their wedding in 1944, the couple found themselves on a cycling honeymoon, riding through northern Pennsylvania and southern New York State. (Kanigel, pp. 25, 81, 96.)

In the early days of their marriage, they would go "hitch-hiking with the fish," as she put it. Here's what her biographer, Robert Kanigel, has to say: "they'd load their bikes on the train, get off somewhere within cycling distance of a fishing port, and, with their beat-up bags, hitch rides on fishing boats plying East Coast waterways. No reference to what Jane called this 'intricate network of unofficial transport' appeared in any atlas or tourist map. They made no hotel reservations, yet always found someone to take them in. In a little town on Pamlico Sound in North Carolina, it was the owner of a local shrimp-packing plant. In Maine, it was the island butter maker and her lobsterman husband." (P. 135.)

When at home in New York they would go for Sunday bike rides in the city, and after they had children, the little ones would come along too. (P. 135.)

But it is Jane's bike commuting that is, for me, the most arresting part of this picture. After all, Americans have historically viewed the bicycle primarily as a recreational vehicle. There was an awareness of the concept, even though very few adults were riding by this time. On the other hand, riding a bike to work between Greenwich Village and midtown Manhattan, in the starchy, gray-flannel suit days of the 1950s - that has a decidedly transgressive feel, at least to me. I love it.

Jane kept her bike parked just off the kitchen in their home on Hudson Street. It was accoutered with a wicker basket attached to the handlebars. In the morning, wearing conventional office attire, "sometimes even pearls," she would get the bike out and pedal through highly congested streets to her office at Architectural Forum, in Rockefeller Center - all this without bike lanes or even a helmet. Standard comments were "Get a horse!" and "Watch out, girlie, you'll get hurt." (Pp. 134-135, 200.)

Jane the Street-Fighter
Jane Jacobs is of course mainly known for her epochal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She is also remembered as an early and important community activist. She fought a whole series of battles in defense of her West Village neighborhood, and in two of them she faced off directly with uber-highwayman Robert Moses.

They were oddly matched antagonists. Moses was the quintessential insider, amassing vast power without ever getting elected to anything. And there was Jane, the quintessential outsider, organizing her neighbors to crack open the doors of power and give residents at least a little bit of say about what happened to the place where they lived. It was a long time ago, and it's difficult to imagine today how radical this whole concept of community involvement was.

There's something called asymmetric warfare -  it's one of the reasons we lost in Vietnam - and I think the asymmetry between Moses and his world and Jacobs and her emerging world was one of the keys to her success. In the two battles she had directly with Moses, over Washington Square Park and over the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway, she won. I think Robert Moses just didn't see it coming. (See Kanigel, chapters 15 and 17.)

I've searched around for something, anything, that Moses and Jacobs had in common. And I did find one thing. Neither one of them drove. Bob Jacobs drove Jane, and Bob Moses had a chauffeur. He never learned to drive.

I think there's something ironic about the fact that, in these two crucial battles over making space for more cars, neither side was led by a motorist.

(In 1958 Jane Jacobs wrote a story for Fortune magazine that provides an early summary of her ideas. I found it online; it's quite a lot of fun, and substantially shorter than the book. To see it, click here.)

See also Cars and Bikes - the Back Story, Why Are European and American Bicycling So Different?

Narcissism and Dictatorship

Benito Mussolini near the end of his career.

 "Count Carlo Senni has just been talking about his years with Mussolini, to whom he is whole-heartedly, but not wholly uncritically, loyal. He emphasizes one trait which strikes everyone who has ever worked with Mussolini: his unbounded, almost undisguised, utterly cynical contempt for his own human instruments. Except for his brother Arnaldo (now dead) and perhaps, to a lesser extent, his daughter, there is no human being in the world whom he loves and trusts. He believes in the ability of his son-in-law; he does not trust him. A sentimentalist about 'the people' en masse, he is completely cynical about all individuals, and measures them only by the use he can put them to... Yet so great is his personal ascendancy that his underlings - knowing that they themselves will be kicked away as soon as they cease to be useful - still retain their personal devotion to him."

- Iris Origo, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary, 1939-1940 (2017) p. 66.

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