Did Carpet Bombing Inspire Urban Renewal?

Sifting the Rubble for Facts

Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937.

"Guernica is a small town of the Basque province of Vizcaya, lying in a valley ten kilometres from the sea and thirty from Bilbao. With a population of some 7,000, Guernica appears simply one more village in a hilly countryside of friendly villages and isolated farmhouses. It has nevertheless been celebrated since before records began as the home of Basque liberties. For it was before her famous oak that the Spanish Monarchs or their representatives customarily swore to observe Basque local rights.

"On April 26, 1937, a Monday (and, therefore, like all Mondays at Guernica, a market day) the small farmers from nearby were bringing into the main square the fruits of the week's toil. At this time Guernica lay some thirty kilometres from the front.

"At half-past four in the afternoon, a single peal of church bells announced an air raid. There had been some raids in the area before, but Guernica had not been bombed. At twenty minutes to five, Heinkels 111 began to appear, first bombing the town and then machine gunning its streets. The Heinkels were followed by the old spectres of the Spanish War, Junkers 52. People began to run from the town. These also were machine gunned. Incendiary bombs, weighing up to 1,000 lbs, and also high explosives, were dropped by waves of aircraft arriving every twenty minutes until a quarter-to-eight. The centre of the town was then destroyed and burning. 1,654 people were killed and 889 wounded. The Basque parliament house and the famous oak, lying away from the centre, nevertheless remained untouched." (Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 1961, p. 419.)

Guernica was only the beginning, of course. The Battle of Britain, familiarly known as the Blitz, involved a strategic bombing campaign in which the Germans laid waste to large sections of British cities - I've been to Coventry and seen the remains of the cathedral. In due course the Allies responded with strategic bombing campaigns against the Axis, leading to the widespread flattening of cities and culminating with the firebombing, most notably. of Hamburg, Dresden (immortalized by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five), and Tokyo, and also the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Initially there was some effort to focus strategic bombing on military targets, even if they were located in cities with their concomitant civilian populations. Another word for civilian is non-combatant, but civilians quickly became an object of attack, even if they were unable to fight back. Call them victims, as they have been, to a greater or lesser degree, throughout the history of warfare.

This is a story about bricks and mortar, but I hope we can keep in mind the vast suffering caused by the bombing campaigns of World War II.

Gales of Creative Destruction at Home
Guernica and its children came to mind when I was reading Robert Kanigel's recent biography of Jane Jacobs, Eyes on the Street (2016).  On pages 166-167, while discussing the zeitgeist of planning and architecture right after World War II, he says, "Something close to a social consensus emerged, one rejecting the old, ragged past, proposing to scrape it away, often literally, and replace it with a swept-clean, squared-away future: superblocks of Corbusian towers in town and great, green park-like tracts in the new suburbs. In both cases, the street, the heart of the old carcinogenic city and its evils, would be erased. And these sensibilities came on now with such ferocity, as if embracing the urgency, scale, and force of the war itself, that this New Truth could appear self-evident: no need to mend the postwar world's tattered social and physical fabric; best to obliterate it and start over." Or, to put it more succinctly, "the lesson of a postwar world of bombed-out European and Japanese cities: Clear out the rubble. Build anew."

I found that intriguing. I'm thinking I've heard the idea before, in conversation - that the bombed-out cities of Europe and Japan inspired the urban renewal movement in the United States after 1945.  But I'd never looked into it.  Well, it took a while, but I did follow up.

Not to keep you in suspense, I don't think this is true. My search was hardly exhaustive, and it's quite possible I'm missing something, but I haven't been able to find anybody saying or writing at the time that the flattening of cities in World War II was inspiring or even just encouraging the flattening of neighborhoods in urban renewal.

I should add that Kanigel has a decent critical apparatus in the book, but there are no footnotes for this passage. A zeitgeist without footnotes makes me nervous.

Of course, it's hard to prove a negative. I can't say there's nothing there, only that I haven't found it.

I also have two counterarguments. First, we had been flattening neighborhoods in this country long before World War II - back then it was called slum clearance rather than urban renewal; and, second, at least in Germany, rebuilding was a complicated mix where Corbusier's ville radieuse and the garden city competed with other architectural ideas, limitations imposed by the existing environment, and - who knew? - the wishes of the people who lived there.

Slum Clearance in New York
The fabric of cities has never been static, and the disasters of war and fire have frequently required the rebuilding of large areas. The British really did burn a good part of Washington, D.C., during the war of 1812, and during the Revolution there was a devastating fire on the west side of Manhattan. I could multiply examples - the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the great fire in Chicago in 1871 - but you get the idea.

Instead, I'm going to concentrate on slum clearance in New York City, where clearcutting and redevelopment of substantial areas got an early start and was pursued with considerable enthusiasm, to the extent that it has been called the New York Approach. This switch from reactive to proactive redevelopment may have taken inspiration, at least in the later nineteenth century, from Baron Haussmann's reconstruction of Paris between 1853 and 1870, but I don't have any proof, and that would be another story. (The first Roman emperor, Augustus, also carried out extensive public works in Rome, which I suppose is a precedent, but I sincerely doubt was an inspiration.)

Let us turn our attention to a bucolic pond that lay out in the country north of the New Amsterdam settlement at the lower tip of Manhattan. People loved to go to the Collect Pond for picnics in the warm weather and ice skating in the cold. However, as the city grew, things changed, and various industries moved in to take advantage of the water.

New York City's Parks Department puts it pretty succinctly: "By the early nineteenth century, however, New York City had transformed the sparkling waters into a communal open sewer. Disgusted, local authorities initiated a project to fill the sewer with earth from an adjacent hill. In 1805, in order to drain the garbage-infested waters, designers opened a forty-foot wide canal that today is known as Canal Street."

We'll stick with the Parks Department story here: "By 1811, the City had completed the filling of Collect Pond. A neighborhood known as Paradise Square soon arose over the pond’s previous site. Unfortunately, due to the area’s extremely high water table, Paradise Square began to sink in the 1820’s. The neighborhood also began to emit a foul odor, prompting the most affluent residents to leave the community. By the 1830s, Paradise Square had become the notorious 'Five Points,' an extremely poor and dangerous neighborhood renowned for its crime and filth." (For the full Parks Department story, click here. See also Tyler Anbinder, City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York, 2016, p. 120.)

So a bucolic pond became a noisome industrial zone, which in turn was replaced by a squalid slum. And later this space would become part of New York City's Civic Center, with a small park called Collect Pond Park nestled among the courthouses and other government buildings.

But before all the courthouses could show up, Five Points needed to be cleared. Enter Jacob Riis, a pioneering photojournalist and author of the book How the Other Half Lives (1890). A lot of people read this book, including a young Theodore Roosevelt, and Riis soon found himself with allies in the slum clearance business.

As Tyler Andbinder puts it in City of Dreams, on page 416, "The changes Riis and his allies sought came exceedingly slowly - tenement owners had enormous political clout and used every bit of it to resist renovating their lucrative properties - but change eventually did come. Thanks to Riis's efforts, the block of decrepit tenements known as Mulberry Bend was condemned by the city, torn down in 1895, and replaced by Mulberry Bend Park, which opened in 1897." (Mulberry Bend Park is now called Columbus Park.)

The demolition of Mulberry Bend was a turning point, and not just for Five Points. As Anbinder notes on page 434 of his 2001 book, Five Points, "the clearing of Mulberry Bend began a whirlwind of tenement destruction that, by World War II, had leveled huge swaths of the Lower East Side and many of the city's other notorious tenement complexes, and replaced them with huge public housing projects that in some cases became almost as frightful as the rookeries." (Rookery was a term that was often used for really bad slum buildings.)

New York City clearly did not wait until World War II for inspiration on slum clearance, and indeed the map below gives an indication of the city's future plans on the eve of the war. In 1940,  the New York City Planning Commission mapped 9,000 acres as "Sections Containing Areas for Clearance, Replanning, and Low-Rent Housing." You'll note that Manhattan and the older parts of Brooklyn look like they have measles. The South Bronx and the East River frontage of Queens are also major targets. (The map is from Joel Schwartz, The New York Approach: Robert Moses, Urban Liberals, and Redevelopment of the Inner City, 1993, pp. 76-77.)

Planned Clearance, 1940.

And the city did not wait for the end of the war to put these redevelopment projects in gear. The City Planning Commission approved the plans for Stuyvesant Town in 1943, a few weeks before the fire-bombing of Hamburg.

Reconstruction in West Germany
Now let's have a look at Germany. I confess I knew virtually nothing about the German reconstruction until I started working on this story - the better part of a year ago now. Fortunately there was a book to cure my ignorance: Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (1993).

(Professor Diefendorf's book covers West Germany only. East Germany was at this point under Soviet control and had a separate history. East and West Germany reunified in 1990.)

For our purposes, perhaps the first point is the reaction of Americans when they arrived on the ground in Germany and saw the devastation up close. Diefendorf tells this story about what things were like in early 1945: "A group of senior American military officers toured several of the bombed cities by jeep between 17 and 22 April, just before the war ended. Of Nuremberg they reported: 'This is the worst of all, hardly anything but dust. The medieval city center [is] obliterated, including parts of the old city walls. The Cathedral is shattered. A razed city, Biblical annihilation. No such destruction of a large city ever known.'" (P. xv.)

So, perhaps less of an inspiration and more of a cautionary tale.

There was a tremendous amount of rubble.  Berlin alone had 55 million cubic meters of rubble. Some of this material -  particularly bricks and stone - could be salvaged, but much of it became landfill. "Hamburg was fortunate to have at hand unused canals that could be filled in," and it "also used rubble to raise the level of one whole bombed-out area, Hammerbrook, which had been built originally on marshland and had perpetually suffered from bad drainage and defective sanitation." (Pp. 15, 26-30.)

Hamburg, 1943.

As the work of rubble clearance progressed, a piece of good news gradually became clear - the damage to underground systems was substantially less than the devastation above ground. In Munich, for instance, the damage level for the electrical system was 6.58 percent, the gas system 15.71 percent, the water system 4.21 percent, the sewer system 4 percent, and the telephone lines 40-50 percent (p. 19).

These cities, despite their appearance, were not blank slates. The survival of the underground bones of the city gave the old city layout a significant advantage over new plans that would require new utility grids.

Another hindrance to radical replanning was the pesky issue of private property. As in the United States, expropriation of property was not easy in Germany. The same was true for moving lot lines, perhaps to widen a street, or combining lots to allow for construction of a larger building. (See pp. 230-231, and really all of chapter 8, "Reconstruction and Building Law.")

Various laws were passed to aid the reconstruction process, but, perhaps more importantly, the planners were not the only ones who wanted to rebuild. The people wanted to do it too. Here's how Diefendorf puts in on p. 283:

"Finally, a spirit of cooperation generally prevailed in the bombed cities. Postwar Germany witnessed an efflorescence of citizens' groups dedicated to helping rebuild individual monuments or whole streets or quarters, such as associations that facilitated the redrawing of property lines. Although reconstruction laws enabled authorities to mandate such property adjustments, that involved the time and expense of pursuing complicated administrative and legal procedures. In many places, voluntary associations of property owners, acting upon the advice of local planners, went ahead and made the adjustments on their own, trading lots or buying out individuals who were unwilling or unable to rebuild. As long as they seemed reasonable, property owners usually accepted the proposals of planning authorities, even when those proposals entailed some personal sacrifice."

Overall, the reconstruction of Germany's cities was a great success. Certainly there were shortcomings, and there have been many vocal critics with valid points. However, as Diefendorf puts it on page 276, "Those who condemn reconstruction as a failure and sharply criticize architects and planners may have forgotten that in 1945 Germans faced the enormous challenge of housing millions of people, rebuilding businesses, schools, hospitals, and government buildings, repairing streets and utilities, and restoring or reconstructing the major monuments that characterized each city. Not only was all this work accomplished, but it was completed much faster than anyone at the time thought possible. Within a decade or so after the war, cities that had been reduced to rubble and ashes were again livable and lived in. At least in a quantitative sense, and in terms of speed, reconstruction was a great success."

Just to reinforce this point, "By 1954, the population of most West German cities exceeded that of 1939." (P. 281.) Remember that, in 1945, seasoned military observers were talking about "Biblical annihilation."

The rebuilders faced two main issues: housing and highways. Neither of these was new, and the reconstruction efforts after World War II could draw from a body of ideas and experience dating back over decades.

Germany's population expanded very rapidly during the nineteenth century, and there was a large shift of the population from rural to urban areas. The housing stock in the cities grew, but failed to keep pace with the growing population. Slums became increasingly crowded as the number of people (related or not) in an apartment escalated (p. 108). Think of a dystopian "Friends."

City governments recognized a limited number of options: Renovate or rebuild existing slums, or build affordable housing in new areas outside the city (p. 109). They did all three before the war, and they did all three after the war, although it seems fair to say that the pace picked up a bit. In new construction, for instance, "Between 1949 and 1955, an average of about 450,000 dwelling units were completed yearly in the Federal Republic, compared to about 300,000 units yearly between 1927 and 1930, the prosperous years of Weimar." (P. 131. See also all of chapter 5, "The Housing Problem.")

The twentieth century brought another population explosion - this one in motor vehicles. Postwar planners clearly saw a need to make cities work for cars - the phrase was "die autogerechte Stadt," or the automobile-ready city. The planners wanted it, and so did the people. Streets were widened "even though such work frequently entailed removing historic facades, demolishing potentially restorable damaged buildings, undercutting facades to create arcades for pedestrians, and appropriating former sidewalk space for roads or parking." In addition, new streets were cut through built-up areas. The word for this was Durchbruch, or breakthrough (p. 206).

Opposition to this work started early. As one planner put it in 1947, widening old streets or cutting through new ones could only make traffic flow "at best no better than approximately good, approximately fluid." (P. 210.)

And another planner mentioned - also in 1947 - the quality-of-life issues involved in creating arterial highways to run through densely populated areas. "We also do not want people to have to live on these traffic arteries as we are planning them. It is systematic murder for the individual resident every day to have to experience and put up with the smell, noise, and dirt of a major artery." (P. 208.)

As for historic preservation, the focus was primarily on churches and government buildings, where it knew considerable success. Private buildings, however, were generally left to their owners, where restoration naturally competed with issues such as the pressing need for shelter (pp. 69-70, 74).

It's worth taking a moment to think about all the nice, old buildings in Germany that were lost to the war. In Hannover, before World War II there were approximately 1,600 half-timbered buildings in the older parts of the city. At the end of the war there were 32 (p. 78).

As for the architectural quality of all the new construction, "No one would claim that the postwar period marked a golden age of German architecture." (P. 278.) Yet, again, arguments for or against a particular style, or whether the architect's design maximizes the building's potential for utility and beauty, seem a bit beside the point when we look at the actual situation in Germany in the late 1940s. As Diefendorf puts it, "During the process of urban reconstruction, it proved much more important that architects design and build whatever was needed than that they build in one particular style." (P. 66.)

The actual outcomes of the reconstruction varied considerably from city to city, because each individual city essentially directed its own rebuilding. We can place these cities on a spectrum, with Frankfurt at one end as the most "American" city and Muenster at the other end as the most "traditional" city.

Frankfurt had started building modern suburban housing projects in the 1920s. The devastation of the war meant that modern thinking could be applied to the rubble of the inner city as well as the suburbs. Because Berlin was isolated in the Russian sector, Frankfurt became the financial capital of West Germany, and soon banks and major corporations were sprouting major skyscrapers, "and Frankfurt went on to become perhaps the most modern - its critics might say the most Americanized - of West Germany's cities, replete with traffic-clogged thoroughfares and smog-obscured views of the commercial downtown." (Pp. 77-78.)

In contrast, Muenster "succeeded in creating the air of a historic city in its center. It did so by reconstructing key monuments, retaining much of the old street and property layout, and requiring that new buildings in proximity to historic buildings utilize traditional proportions, colors, and materials." (Pp. 87-88.)

In sum, Muenster "impresses observers as a historic city with a clear identity." (P. 89.)

Germany vs. the Big Apple
When we set the German and American experiences side by side, what strikes me the most is their commonalities. The two basic issues are housing and highways. In both countries the origins of urban crowding lie well back in the nineteenth century; the problems with cars are newer, but certainly predate World War II.

I think the biggest difference between Germany and the United States is the Altstadt, or old city. In Europe there are three phases in the history of cities - the early city, the industrial city (in the nineteenth century), and, with apologies to Detroit, the motor city of the twentieth century.

American cities often lack the Altstadt. As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California, "There is no there there."

In Germany, it turned out that many people actually liked their old town centers, with relatively small buildings, narrow streets, quirky street patterns, and lots of pedestrians.

In a number of American cities, particularly those with downtowns that date from before 1800, I believe we are now seeing a similar attraction to the old city.

Much as I love the old buildings, I think the German experience teaches us that the key issue is the survival of the old street network. The quirky little old streets set the human scale, and even prepare the occasional surprise. Think of it: Intimacy outdoors.

Special thanks to the staff of the Free Library's City Institute branch and to the Interlibrary Loan Department. This story would not have happened without them.

See also Permeable Blocks, A Larger Story Coming On, Small Streets Are Like Diamonds, Transportation Should Not Trump Destination, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?

Transit Memories

Poor Marcel Proust Only Had a Madeleine

Entrance to the New York Transit Museum.

I remember the Third Avenue El in Manhattan. It stopped running in 1955, when I was seven years old. I lived a block and a half away, between First and Second Avenues. I don't remember it very well - just the steel pillars and the gloom cast by the superstructure. I don't recall riding on it. I have lots of childhood memories of riding the subway - mainly the Lexington Avenue IRT - but no memories of a trip on the El.

These and other transit memories came crowding back to me as I recently spent a very pleasant two hours going through the New York Transit Museum, located in an old subway station at 99 Schermerhorn Street in downtown Brooklyn, a few blocks from the Fulton Mall.

The entrance in the photo above takes you down to a mezzanine level, where you purchase your ticket at an old-time fare booth. The mezzanine is quite long - there's a sizeable lunch room at the west end - and it's loaded with educational panels and display cases that explain the history of New York City's subways, buses, and elevated lines. My favorite artifact sits quietly in a vitrine it shares with other objects, and I almost missed it. It's the New York and Harlem Railroad Ledger Book, 1831-1837. This was New York City's first rail line, incorporated in 1831. (For a short story on this line, click here. For a longer story, click here.)

The heart of the museum is down at the platform level, where a menagerie of antique rail cars welcomes visitors. I was particularly taken with BMT Q Car Number 1612C, which has wooden sides. It was originally built in 1908; in 1938 it was gussied up and repainted orange and blue. Suitably attired, it was one of the cars used to transport visitors to the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens.

From 1950 to 1955 this car ran on the Third Avenue El. I went inside and sat down. Like other subway cars of this vintage, it had the old straps. I remember the straps. Being able to reach them was one of the little ways you knew you were literally growing up. You became a member of a relatively new class of human beings called straphangers. (Merriam-Webster says the first use of straphanger was in 1896.) But I was pretty sure I'd never been in this car before or anything quite like it.

Later on, this and the other World's Fair cars ran on the Myrtle Avenue El until 1969. As the museum's website puts it, "They were the last wooden elevated cars to run in North America."

I found myself engrossed in the early history of the elevated lines - something I had known nothing about before I entered the museum.

The first elevated line opened in 1868. The cars were pulled by cables. It seems this arrangement didn't work very well, and the steam-powered locomotive was introduced in 1871. This was the Ninth Avenue El. The Third Avenue El entered service in 1878. (If you really want to get into the weeds on all this, click here.)

Electrification came around 1900, but with electrification came the subway. Steam locomotives in a tunnel were problematic. As lovers of charcoal barbecue are often reminded, it's best not to barbecue indoors. The same with coal-fired steam engines.

New York's first subway began running in 1904. This was the IRT, and it had a simply magnificent station at City Hall, which is no longer open to the public. (The museum offers tours. It seems to take several months to get in, but the pictures suggest that the station is well worth the visit.)

The subways were faster and could carry more passengers than the elevated lines, and, with continued construction of new subway lines, the handwriting was on the wall for the elevateds. The Ninth Avenue El shut down in 1940, the Sixth Avenue El in 1938, and the Second Avenue El in 1942. (For a relatively short story, click here.)

There are still lots of elevated lines in New York City, of course. Just go to a Mets game or Coney Island, and you can still have that experience. Generally these start off as subways and jump up into the air when they get to less densely populated parts of the city.

And of course there's the famous High Line, which is now a park. The High Line was a freight line, so it falls into a slightly different category from the els we've been talking about.

The museum also takes the occasional detour from transit. For instance, there is the Cyclists' Road Map of New York from 1898. It was produced by the New York Club of the League of American Wheelmen, and free to members.

And in the gift shop, in addition to the hats, t-shirts, bags, and the pen I'm currently writing with, you can buy a mug that says Cawffee - a nod to the museum's location in Brooklyn and part of a useful crockery collection that also serves as an introduction to the famous Brooklyn dialect. I now, for instance, know how to spell Buttah, and I know what it means.

There's an argument that the Third Avenue El should not have stopped running in 1955. It and the Second Avenue El, which gave up the ghost in 1942, were supposed to be replaced by the Second Avenue subway, the first segment of which began to run in 2017. 

My brother, who is a little older than I am, doesn't remember the El very well either, and he has no memory of riding on it. Here is something he does recall: "I do remember returning from school one winter afternoon with snow on the ground and attempting to loft a snowball at a passing south-bound elevated train.  Not a chance of my feeble arm getting the snowball that high but I did receive a reprimand from a nearby policeman." 

Not to neglect the streetcars, here is a 1917 photograph of Broadway near 17th Street. There were lots of streetcars in New York. They even named a baseball team: the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers, which became the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

Walking to the Free Library

The Distracting Charm of Logan Square

Entrance to Sister Cities Park.

I love going to Philadelphia's main library, up on Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The gorgeous Beaux Arts building, designed by Horace Trumbauer and Julian Abele, is an experience inside and out. And I always nod hello to Dr. Pepper, founder of the library, whose statue hangs out on the landing in the main staircase.

I find myself going to the library when a project moves me to. So I will go a bunch of times, and then not go for a while. I still love browsing the bookshelves, and it still amazes me how often I'm interested in the book that's shelved next to the book I was looking for.

Walking to the library, on the other hand, has not until recently been a great experience. There are basically three ways for me to get there - 18th, 19th, or 20th - and they all suffered from visually dead zones roughly between Market and Arch. That has changed.

18th Street, My Favorite
In particular, 18th Street has perked up a lot between JFK Boulevard and Arch, thanks to Comcast, which now has two buildings on this block, one on each side. I sometimes divert eastward and take the midblock crossing of Arch in the 1700 block, so I can walk up through the plaza and fountain by Three Logan Square and then the few feet beyond Cherry Street to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

It's here - at 18th and the Parkway - across from the cathedral, that you encounter the Amor statue, a translation of the Love statue three blocks down the parkway in Love Park. Amor takes after its English cousin, and is very popular with the tourists.

Amor stands at the beginning of Sister Cities Park, which is one of my favorite places in Philadelphia. There are two water features flanking the Sister Cities Cafe, and in the good weather the place is, shall we say, well populated with children, their parents and caregivers, and people like me who come to sit and enjoy a place of happiness.

The library seen from the Sister Cities Cafe.

Logan Square is a very complicated space. Sister Cities Park lies on the east side of the square. Inside the square there is a large traffic circle that is part of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. On the west side of the square is another park called Aviator Park. And on the north side of the square, on either side of 19th Street, are two more patches of land that could be called park, but aren't. So, one square, one circle, how many parks? I don't know. But I do know that the whole place is a sculpture garden.

When I finally finish my cup of coffee at the Sister Cities Cafe, and wander on toward the Free Library, I pass the statue of Galusha Pennypacker, which is one of the quirkier public sculptures in our fair town. (Dubuffet's Milord la Chamarre, on Market Street, gives Galusha a run for his money.)  The Pennypacker memorial statue - he was a Civil War hero - is pretty well documented, so instead of showing you a picture of that, here's the view looking back toward Sister Cities Park.

Galusha Pennypacker's view of Sister Cities Park.

After my old friend Galusha, you can walk up 19th to the library, or you can cross over 19th to the Shakespeare Memorial. I'll get to that in a minute.

19th and the Swann Fountain
So if you're walking up 19th to the library, you can walk directly across Logan Circle. In the middle of the circle, where cars are not allowed, you will find three very large people bathing in a fountain. They're not real people. They're sculptures by Alexander Stirling Calder.

Swann Memorial Fountain, 1924.

And I like to sit on a bench here. The bathers are old friends, and I do love to watch the tourists walk through here. They're probably headed somewhere up the parkway - Franklin Institute, Barnes Foundation, Rodin Museum, even the Philadelphia Museum of Art that hovers in the distance, at the end of the parkway. But they almost invariably stop and spend some time in this space, which among other things is an island. You can see all these destinations around you, and, as I said, you're probably headed to one of them, but just for now you're cut off from the outside world. It's an interesting experience.

When the spirit moves, I walk across the parkway traffic and up 19th Street to the library.

20th: Should Be the Easiest Way in, but It's Not
Just west of 19th Street, on the north side of the circle, is the Shakespeare Memorial. Again, it's pretty well known, so, not to be boring, here's a shot from the Shakespeare Memorial looking back at Aviator Park, with 20th Street and the Franklin Institute in the background.

Aviator Park from the Shakespeare Memorial.

It's a lovely, if underused, park, with the Aero Memorial and the All Wars Memorial to Colored Soldiers and Sailors and a very adequate number of benches, most well shaded by trees. It should be the easiest way to get to the Free Library, but it's not.

Why? Bear with me.

If you do come this way, and cross the zebra stripes in the picture above, and get to the Shakespeare Memorial, you come upon a simply wonderful plaza.

The Shakespeare Memorial is directly behind me.

This plaza sits on top of the Vine Street Expressway, and it provides a truly epic approach to a grand building. There's just one problem. Vine Street (the above-ground, not expressway part of Vine) lies between this space, which would be a suitable parade ground for the French Garde republicaine, and the library, which, come to think of it, is inspired by two buildings on the Place de la Concorde in Paris.

So what's the problem? It's illegal to cross the street. The entire approach from 20th Street, through Aviator Park, across the parkway, and across this fabulous no-name plaza, is designed by the heirs of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, whose specialty was moving people through space and making them feel grand while they were doing it. But when you get to this last piddly street directly in front of the library, you're told no-no, we didn't really mean it.

At least they tell you to go to the corner.

If ever a spot cried out for a mid-block crossing, surely this is it. Of course, intrepid souls (including me) have been known to ignore the sign and stride confidently across the street. But what about the tourists from Sweden? They probably have enough English to know what the sign says. And do you really want to go jay-walking in a foreign country? Maybe we should get the signs to agree with what the built environment is saying to everybody.

Just a matter of some paint, and switching out a few signs.

See also The Last Man Who Knew Everything, Extend the Diagonal, Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets?

Scooter Share Coming to Asbury Park

30 Stations, Up to 250 Electric Scooters

Scooter parking area, Kingsley at Deal Lake Drive.

Asbury Park is launching an electric scooter share program on July 24. There will be up to 250 scooters distributed among 30 stations.  Asbury's bike share company, Zagster, and its partner, Spin, will be involved with the program. The scooters will not be able to go faster than 15 mph, and they will be available from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Riders must be at least 18 years old.

Scooters will not be allowed on sidewalks. They may ride on the street, on bike paths, and on multi-use paths. Scooter riders must yield to pedestrians and stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. Only one rider per scooter. Helmets, although not required, are strongly encouraged.

Rental is through an online app.

For more information, see the Asbury park press release and this story in the Asbury Park Sun.

Abortion and the Bible

Wishing Doesn't Make It So

One weekend recently I was up in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, and there was a group of zealots on the sidewalk, with a megaphone, declaiming against abortion, among other things. It was a nice day, and there was a plainclothes police officer there, nattily dressed with a necktie but no suit jacket, so we all got a good view of his simply enormous pistol. He was politely begging us not to engage. And so, respectful of authority as I always am, I did not engage.

One of the protesters was holding a large sign indicating that Exodus 20:13 clearly showed that abortion was murder, and that anyone connected with the act was surely going to hell, and possibly to jail as well. (I just made that last part up, but things do seem headed that way.)

As a happily lapsed Episcopalian, I confess I didn't recall Exodus 20:13, so when I got home, and after we put away the vegetables from the farmer's market, I got down my Bible and looked it up. Sure enough, it was the ten commandments. Verse 13 says, "Thou shalt not kill."

George Foreman tells a story about fighting Muhammad Ali. It was the famous Rumble in the Jungle, and Foreman thought things were going pretty well for him until, in a clinch, Ali whispered in his ear, "That all you got, George?" And things went downhill from there.

And that's how I feel about the earnest young person holding the poster sending me to Exodus 20:13. This verse does not say Thou shalt not commit abortion. It says don't kill.

Which is an admirable admonition, but one that in the Christian world, as elsewhere, has been shown to be primarily aspirational.

Let's just say there are a few loopholes.

Jericho
Here's one that comes along fairly early in the Bible. It's in the book of Joshua, who has recently taken over leadership from Moses, who died, and is beginning the process of conquering the promised land. He comes to the city of Jericho, and many people are familiar with the old spiritual, "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho." And the walls came tumbling down.

Here's a closer look at what happened. My quotations are from the King James version. Please forgive me if you prefer another translation. Some preferences get fixed in childhood.

Jericho was a strategically important city, controlling the valley of the lower Jordan River. God gave Joshua specific instructions to walk around the city for seven days, and Joshua carried them out to the letter, with priests blowing trumpets made out of rams' horns and other priests carrying the ark of the covenant (which of course contained the tablets on which were written the ten commandments, including the one about not killing). On the seventh day, on cue, all the people gave out a great shout, and the walls came tumbling down, and "the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." (Josh. 6:20-21.)

All this is in chapter six of the Book of Joshua. In fact, a few people were spared. The harlot Rahab, who owns chapter two of the Book of Joshua, had hidden two spies Joshua had sent into the city, and in return she and her family got to live.

I find this whole narrative highly suspect. If the Lord is going to come down on the seventh day and destroy the city's walls, why are we spending all this time talking about spies and prostitutes? I do have a thought. Rahab's house was actually built on the wall of the city, and here's how she helped the spies to escape from Jericho: "Then she let them down by a cord through the window: for her house was upon the town wall, and she dwelt upon the wall." (Josh. 2:15.)

And the spies told her: "Behold, when we come into the land, thou shalt bind this line of scarlet thread in the window which thou didst let us down by." (Josh. 2:18.)

Was the fall of Jericho actually an inside job, with a select squad of commandos entering by Rahab's window and opening a gate for the rest of the army? I have no idea.

And, for our purposes, it doesn't matter. The Bible says the walls came down on the seventh day, so let's just go with that.

About all the killing. I should observe in Joshua's defense that, until modern times, this is just the way these things were done. Kill everybody, or kill the men and enslave the women and children. For another example, we need look no further than the sack of Troy.

Deuteronomy 20 recommends, as a general case, that only the men be killed; killing everybody was reserved for the inhabitants of the promised land, who were about to be displaced. All on God's orders.

One last thing. The Bible does not record this, but surely at least one of the women who died at Jericho was pregnant.

Stonewall Jackson
You can say that this was all a long time ago, and now we have the new testament as well as the old testament. Now, when we sing "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," it's really all about faith, hope, and charity.

But let's not forget that the old testament has not gone away. Let's switch for a minute to the American Civil War. One of the war's most able generals was Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson. Historian Douglas Southall Freeman had this to say about Jackson: "He lives by the New Testament and fights by the Old." (Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee's Lieutenants, v. 1, 1945, p. xlii. Many thanks to my brother, John West, who kindly ran down this citation in his home library.)

Clearly General Jackson has not been alone in the course of history. Let's dial back to the time of the First Crusade.

Ma'arra
The culmination of the First Crusade came when the crusaders captured  Jerusalem in 1099, but I would like to direct your attention to the earlier attack on Ma'arra, a small town of no great strategic importance. Its population was probably less than 10,000, and it had no army, just an urban militia of several hundred young men whose military training was sketchy and whose military experience was nonexistent. They did improvise the tactic of throwing occupied beehives down on the attackers. Soon though, under pressure from the crusaders, the defenders made the mistake of abandoning the city walls and retreating into redoubts in some of the stronger buildings in the city.

The attackers were soon firmly atop the walls - this is much easier to do if the walls are undefended. It was the night of December 11, 1098. The future didn't look very good for the inhabitants of Ma'arra. They contacted the invaders' commander, whose name was Bohemond, and asked to have their lives spared. He agreed. At dawn the crusaders spread out through the town and, over the next three days, killed just about everybody. (See Amin Maalouf, The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, 1984, pp. 38-40. See also the account of of Ibn al-Athir, a twelfth-century Arab historian, in Francesco Gabrieli, Arab Historians of the Crusades, 1993, p. 9. Thanks to Emily Marston for lending me these books.)

This much is kind of par for the course, but something else happened. To understand it we need to go back to the epic siege of Antioch, a large city just north of Ma'arra, where the crusaders raised their already formidable game in the art of psychological warfare.

The troops encamped under the walls of Antioch had been bedeviled by enemy spies. Bohemond (here he is again) had some prisoners of war executed; their bodies were then publicly roasted on spits, as if the crusaders were preparing to eat them. Word went out that, in the future, captured spies would be roasted and eaten. As historian Jay Rubenstein puts it, "All spies, naturally, fled the camp and spread word to Antioch and all over the region." (Jay Rubenstein, Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, 2011, p. 151.)

The soldiers, who were very hungry at this point (logistics was not a strong point for the crusading army), may in fact have taken a cue from their leaders and actually cooked and eaten some of the dead enemy.

Among the chroniclers, only William of Malmesbury directly reports that crusaders besieging Antioch had eaten human flesh. (Rubenstein p. 365, fn. 13.) When it came to Ma'arra, there was no such reticence.

The crusaders at Ma'arra openly engaged in cannibalism, "hoping to terrify the enemy - a step beyond desecrating Saracen graves or using Saracen heads as saddle ornaments." (Rubenstein, p. 240. For a detailed examination of the sources and their meaning, see Jay Rubenstein, "Cannibals and Crusaders," French Historical Studies, 31:4, fall 2008, pp. 525-552.)

This was the face that Christianity showed to the Muslim world in the year 1098.

Back to Exodus 20:13 
The people who oppose abortion like to talk about the sanctity of human life, but the history of Christianity and western culture often belies these platitudes. I don't mind having a discussion about the merits of abortion, but to suggest that the Bible forbids abortion because the Lord said "Thou shalt not kill" in Exodus 20:13 is just silly.

See also Lidice and the Power of Nothing, Submerged Narratives, Where Have All the Grownups Gone?

A Carbuncle on the Buttocks of Humanity

The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

I had a math teacher in, I believe, the ninth grade, who would occasionally refer to a laggard student as "a carbuncle on the buttocks of humanity." This would no longer be acceptable, of course, but the phrase has been recurring to me with some frequency recently, in connection with our president. Is Donald Trump "a carbuncle on the buttocks of humanity"? I'm thinking the answer is yes. His most recent tweeting, suggesting that sitting members of Congress should return to - where? - reinforces the concept that he is a capacious reservoir for the most evil and vile sediment of American history. I do have a hopeful thought. Perhaps, if we can lance this festering boil of pus, the larger body politic will actually find itself drained of at least some of the racist, sexist, misogynistic venom that he has helped to bring to the surface. Undoubtedly further therapeutic interventions will be required, and perhaps, as with third stage syphilis, it is simply too late. But I continue to have some hope.

See also Narcissism and Dictatorship and What Can Pierre Laval Tell Us About Donald Trump?

7/11 - The Day the Trump White House Fell Apart

 Another Inflection Point in a Downward Trajectory

National Mall, Washington, D.C., July 4.

Degringolade is a wonderful French word that basically means falling down the stairs, although by extension it is commonly used to refer to a bankruptcy.

So I think a morally and intellectually bankrupt presidency had a degringolade moment today over the citizenship question. The delayed announcement by Mr. Trump that he would not in fact be issuing an executive order mandating the inclusion of the citizenship question on the census, followed by Attorney General Barr's rather pathetic attempts to sweep up the mess, were low points even for an administration as disorganized and incompetent as this one.

Chief Justice Roberts of the Supreme Court hogtied Donald Trump on this issue on June 27, and it took Trump until today to figure it out.

I look forward to the many post-mortems, and I won't get into the weeds here, but I think this was probably his worst day since Helsinki. Which was only last summer. Feels like a lifetime.

I'd like to predict that this will end quickly and neatly, but I just don't believe it.

See also An Inflection Point.