A Turning Point

How I Became a Democratic Socialist

Asbury Park, 1982.

On Saturday, February 5, Joy Huertas of Philadelphia's Office of Transportation, Infrastructure, and Sustainability posted a charming piece of fiction about Washington Avenue, a dreadful street in South Philly that has been awaiting a remake for nearly a decade. 

In 2020, the City released its "final design decision" for Washington Avenue, calling for a "road diet" to reduce the avenue from five lanes for motor-vehicle traffic to three. 

Then came the calls for more public input. And so began the dance. Whatever proponents of the design did, it was not enough. Surveys, letters of support, community board approvals. Nah. Not the right answer. 

Finally, City officials huddled with groups of residents in Point Breeze and Grays Ferry to gather further information. They then decided that there was significant opposition to the three-lane design. (It appears that these meeting did not violate Pennsylvania's open meetings law, aka the Sunshine Act.) 

So the City dropped the "final design decision" - the product of seven years of work - and is now mulling two significantly weaker designs, with a final final decision expected in weeks and construction to take place this year. (For two stories in PlanPhilly, click here and here.) 

What struck me, in all this recent activity, was that the City was essentially acting as if this project had no history before 2020. 

Just to refresh everyone's memory, this project began in 2013. I went back and reviewed the emails in my "Washington Avenue" folder. They start in 2014. 

I attended two meetings - one in 2014 and one in 2015. The first (October 15, 2014) was at the Bryant Baptist Church on 19th Street a bit south of Washington Avenue, and the second (September 3, 2015) was at the Rock School for Dance Education on Broad at Washington. I have distinct memories of both. I will limit myself to one story. 

At the second meeting we were sitting at round tables, engaging in conversation. A middle-aged Black woman was sitting to my right, and we had a cordial discussion of the issues at hand. It may be a bit difficult to remember today, but back then the focus was on bike lanes. Today the focus is more on the whole street and on dead pedestrians. 

At any rate, I'm a good listener and a genial person, and the lady warmed to me, and at one point leaned a bit in my direction and said, smiling, "Bicyclists are evil." 

I didn't challenge. I just tucked the story away. And now you have it. 

I certainly had no doubt, after the two meetings in 2014 and 2015, that there were Black residents in Point Breeze who were strongly opposed to proposals to redesign Washington Avenue. 

In my opinion, for the City to come back at this late date and say they're shocked, shocked to discover that there is opposition in Point Breeze is disingenuous at best. 

Let me be very clear: I don't think opposition from Point Breeze residents is driving the design decision. Why do I think that? Because I was also present at the Battle of 11th Street, which took place in a community room near the Italian Market in 2019 and was focused on the proposed new, two-way cycle track for a stretch of 11th Street. (To see my report on that evening's meeting, click here.) 

One anecdote I didn't put in the 2019 story: A middle-aged white woman stood up and told the packed room that she had regular fantasies of running bicyclists down with her SUV. 

I thought at the time, and think today, that people who fantasize about committing mass murder should not be allowed to drive policy. And in this case they were not. Despite such vehement opposition from members of the community, the City went ahead and built the cycle track. And guess what? The sky has not fallen. 

Why is the outcome different on Washington Avenue? I will tell you what I think. I think the people in Point Breeze are being cynically used as a smokescreen. As the Wizard of Oz puts it, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain." 

And who's behind the curtain? In my opinion, it's the business owners, many of whom treat Washington Avenue as their own private brick yard, loading zone, and parking lot. The old English common law held that the King's highway was not to be treated as a stable yard. This idea has been worn away over the years, but I still think it's valid to suggest, as a general principle, that we should not allow people to unilaterally privatize public property. 

There's a saying that goes back to Ozzie Myers, although he didn't quite say it this way. Over the years it's been slowly smoothed out. Here's the version that's in the Lexicon of Aphorisms: "Money talks, bullshit walks."

This is, of course, not a problem that is unique to the politics of Philadelphia. We see it in Washington every day. And in both parties. 

My thinking on this subject has undergone an evolution over the past decade or so. I used to be more accepting of the power of money in politics. But, really, how far is "money talks, bullshit walks" from Mao's dictum: "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun." 

I think not far. And so I do prefer the notion that power proceeds from the consent of the governed. (I'm not alone in this. Have a look at the Declaration of Independence.)  So, I believe that an objectively good policy, supported by a very good public approval process, should not be trumped by shadowy forces acting behind closed doors. To use Ozzie's words, bullshit should talk, and money should walk. 

And that is why Washington Avenue has brought me to a turning point. For the last decade I have been devoting myself to reimagining Philadelphia's streets. They could, after all, be so much better. And I am perfectly willing to lose in a fair fight. I have volunteered on eight political campaigns, and my candidate has won twice.  

But Washington Avenue was different for me. I still think we need streets that should be safe, useful, and, if possible, even pleasant for all users. But I no longer think that designing better streets and then undergoing a thorough public review process are enough. I think we need to look at our broken political process and fix it. This involves replacing people and also reforming the way we do things in our political life. 

I don't think either the Republican or the Democratic party is up to this job. And so I plan to spend more time working with the Democratic Socialists of America, aka the Party of Bernie Sanders. 

I actually joined DSA about a year ago. My son suggested it to me. You can be a DSA member and also a registered Democrat.  Much of what the DSA does involves nesting within the Democratic Party and pushing it to do the right thing - something Bernie Sanders has had notable success with in the past few years. Dues are on a sliding scale, and you can sign up online. 

They have a nice magazine, and I got a membership card that says "A better future is possible." It sits on my bureau, and I look at it every day. It's red, of course. 

I haven't done much with DSA over the last year - they reach out on a regular basis and are happy to take no for an answer. But now I think I'm going to be reordering my priorities. I'm tired of being played for a sucker. 

See also Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce; About That Parking Lot in South Philly; A New World Being Born; It's the Road Design, Stupid; Looking and Not Seeing, Listening and Not Hearing.

City of Lights

Asbury Park's Boardwalk Circa 1980

1978.

I do miss the lights. Traveling carnivals still come to Asbury Park and work their magic in Bradley Park, just inland from Convention Hall. But the big permanent rides are gone, and I miss the lights.

There are still a few attractions for children on the boardwalk - a water park, miniature golf, and a pinball museum that has four small rides out front. Last summer my four-year-old grandson was quite fond of the school bus, which moved and made sounds when you fed it three quarters. He was a little bit fond of the train engine. The Batman car and the Flintstones car seemed to attract smaller children. There is also a playground on the beach, not far from the pinball museum.

1981.

It's not the same. Have a look at this Ferris wheel preening in the twilight.

1978.

I find myself entranced, and I can only imagine the effect on children. 

Let's have a look at the carousel house, which is attached to the Casino building. 

1978.

And inside the carousel house. (The carousel was built in 1923 and moved from Asbury Park to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in 1992.)

1981.

As nearly as I can tell, the first carnival people who glommed on to the idea of using electric lights to create an evening wonderland were the builders of Luna Park, one of the three big amusement parks that were in the Coney Island entertainment district before World War I. The key man here was Frederic Thompson.

John Kasson traces Thompson's inspiration to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, also known as the White City for all its white buildings, This event had a strong and lasting influence on American architecture and urban design, and it also explored the outdoor potential of electric lighting, which was only beginning to displace gaslit street lamps. "At night the splendor of the scene was further enhanced by an unprecedented battery of floodlights, using three times as much electricity as the rest of Chicago." (John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century, 1978, pp. 21, 61-66.) 

1978.

Professor Kasson reports the result in Luna Park: "Borrowing from the example of the White City, Thompson studded Luna with a quarter million electric lights. The same buildings that excited wonder during the day assumed a dazzling new aspect; the strings of lights seemed to sketch an insubstantial, dreamlike scene" (p. 66). 

As competitors refused to be left behind, the lights of Coney Island proliferated, and news of this unique little world soon spread across the globe. Charles Denson argues that, by 1904, Coney Island "was the mechanical amusement center of the world. No longer just a resort, it was a phenomenon that attracted curious high-brow visitors such as Sigmund Freud and Maxim Gorky. Coney's electric skyline was unlike anything ever seen before. Gorky described it as 'shapely towers of miraculous castles, palaces and temples. Golden gossamer threads tremble in the air. They intertwine in transparent, flaming patterns, which flutter and melt away in love with their own beauty mirrored in the waters." (Charles Denson, Coney Island: Lost and Found, 2002, p. 31.) 

Gorky is perhaps best known today as the author of a play called The Lower Depths, which was first produced in 1902.  It was directed by a fellow named Konstantin Stanislavski. Gorky visited Coney Island in 1906 and actually did not approve of the amusements, but the nighttime view clearly knocked his socks off. (To see his essay on Coney Island, entitled "Boredom," click here.) 

1978.

I can't match Gorky for florid prose, but around 1980 I found myself reconnecting with my childhood sense of wonder. Looking again at these pictures forty years later, I find myself reconnecting with two of my younger selves.

There was enchantment on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, all those years ago, and it was a lively place after dark.

1981.

My sense is that Gorky's basic concern about Coney Island was that the amusements were not uplifting - they didn't make you a better person. In this he was right, but out of sync with the audience, which did not want to be uplifted - it wanted the release of amusement, and if the result was childlike wonder, happy shrieks, or raucous laughter, so much the better. The carnies knew their audience well, and they delivered.

1978.

See also What Streets Can Learn From Boardwalks, Tillie Goes Biking.

Hans Fallada and the White-Collar Proletariat

The Fantasy of Rugged Individualism

South Philly, 1989.

Recently several members of my family have been reading the German writer Hans Fallada, who died in 1947. I came late to the party, and I'm not quite sure how many of his novels we currently have in our house. Books travel from home to home in our family, as needed.

I've only read two of Fallada's novels, The Drinker (published posthumously in 1950) and Wolf Among Wolves (1937). At some point I may read Every Man Dies Alone (1947) and his most famous novel, Little Man - What Now? (1932).

But I don't think I'm going to do it right away. Frankly, I find reading a Hans Fallada novel exhausting and depressing. I believe this is because his characters are so real, and the situations he puts them in are so demoralizing.

I do strongly recommend Wolf Among Wolves if you want to understand what life was like during the German hyperinflation of the early 1920s. 

In December my son gave me a small book for the holidays - Heinz J. Schueler's Hans Fallada, from 1970. It is a critical analysis of the major themes in Fallada's work, and it tops out at 119 pages, which makes it easily the shortest book connected to Hans Fallada that I will ever read. I would caution an English-language reader that there are extensive quotations in German, which are not translated. They are, however, explained, and you can get the gist of what's going on by just reading the English. 

Personally, I discovered that the German I had in graduate school has just about completely disappeared, but I also noticed that if I'd read the novel under discussion, that helped quite a lot.

I found several spots where I was disagreeing with Schueler. There's a whole chapter on Fallada's portrayal of women, which frankly sounds a bit sexist today; Professor Schueler focuses on the role of women in marriage, saying that their job is to save men from isolation. Well, the book did come out in 1970, and that was another time. But I'm thinking of a woman in Wolf Among Wolves, who freely engages in sex for pleasure and who turns down an offer of marriage from a man she likes, but who is a bit stupid. And she's clearly not all that interested in being one of Fallada's angels of salvation. She's been helping an old lady run a junkyard in Berlin, and it's fairly clear the old lady wants her to take over the business. So all kinds of hints of modernity here, but Schueler doesn't write about them. 

The main focus of Fallada's writing is the plight of the Kleinburger, or lower-middle class man, during the turbulent twenties. Another term for him is Stehkragenprolet, or white-collar proletarian (although Stehkragen really means "stand-up collar" - the kind of stiff collar, often made of celluloid, that middle-class men in those days kept in collar boxes and attached to their shirts each morning.)

This class - the white-collar proletariat - was a critical element in the rise to power of both Mussolini and Hitler, so what Fallada has to say on the subject has relevance today. The two most important things to know are that Fallada saw them as isolated and demoralized. The people below them - the actual proletarians - often had class solidarity and traditions of mutual dependence and help. The people above them had their networks of power. The Kleinburgers believed in the capitalist canard of individualism, or each man on his own, or each against all, or wolf among wolves. 

And that is their fatal flaw. Nobody above them or below them is silly enough to believe they can get by without networks.

It's also what makes the Kleinburgers easy prey for fascists, who give them a place to belong and The Other to fight against.

The flip side of this is what happens when they find their isolation deepening, and their former leaders deny that the little people had simply been doing what their masters told them to do.  

Siege warfare: Isolate and diminish. (See The Correct Strategy: Fight.)

The Other, South Street, 1992.

See also Fascism, On Demagogues, Jim Crow Was a Failed State, The Roots of the Republic, Boos Are Good, Rugged Individualism: From Daniel Boone to Barack Obama.

Tillie Goes Biking

A Migrant from Brooklyn Finds His Legs

Who knew? Tillie has legs! And now he's riding a bike!

Frankly, I hadn't known that Tillie existed below the collar and that oh-so-stylish necktie. At least, stylish for its time.

There he was on a penny-farthing bicycle, which is in fact age appropriate - Tillie is well over 100 years old. (The name penny-farthing comes from old British coins - the penny, or front wheel, being rather large, and the farthing, or rear wheel, being quite small.)

This new version of Tillie - Tillie 2.0? - showed up just before the pandemic, and briefly graced a number of the bicycles that were available in Asbury's bike share program. Sadly, the bike share did not survive the pandemic. The scooter share also went on hiatus for a while, but it's back, and there are scooter-share scooters everywhere. We can only hope Tillie 2.0 and his bike-share bikes will come back as well, some day soon.

It's hard to explain how important Tillie has been for Asbury Park. For many years, through thick and thin, the good times and the bad, Tillie has been our icon. He does have some competition from various references to Bruce Springsteen, usually involving the words Greetings From Asbury Park. Our parade of identity might actually profit from some new recruits - I'm fond of the dolphins who swim on various facades of Convention Hall - but for now Tillie is the smiling face of Asbury Park. 

And so it's probably even harder to explain that Tillie is actually a migrant from Brooklyn - Coney Island, to be precise.

His older cousin, Funny Face, graced Coney Island's Steeplechase Park for many years. George C. Tilyou, owner of the Coney Island park, opened another steeplechase in Asbury Park and decorated it with Tillie, a kinder, gentler version of Funny Face, whom I frankly find a bit scary. 

A large mural rendition of Tillie currently graces the Wonder Bar, where he kindly presides over Yappy Hour, a Happy Hour for dogs and humans (only the humans get alcoholic beverages). The Wonder Bar mural is actually the third incarnation of Tillie as a mural. Tilyou's was the first, and then came the famous mural on Palace Amusements, which was removed from its site when Palace Amusements was demolished; it then spent nearly two decades hanging out at the city's sewage treatment plant, and in 2021 was transferred to a storage site just north of Convention Hall.

Here's a picture of Wonder Bar Tillie.

Presiding over Yappy Hour at the Wonder Bar.

Yappy Hour explained.

Commerce in Convention Hall.

Tillie, king of souvenirs.

Tillie at Palace Amusements. Note the utility wires.

Tillie as a towel, with a t-shirt thrown in.

Iconographic options on Convention Hall. There are more.

Tillie everywhere: The side of the bike basket.

See also What Streets Can Learn From Boardwalks, The Pavements of Asbury Park, Liberate Cookman Avenue!

What a Cold Civil War Feels Like

A War

An American soldier escorts prisoners in the rain during World War II. From Bill Mauldin, Up Front (1945) p. 21. 

Years ago a friend sent me a list of aphorisms from World War II that she, in turn, had received from her father. I haven't been able to find the list in quite a while, but a number of the entries keep coming back to me when I'm facing certain situations.

The one I've been thinking about recently goes like this: "When both sides think they're losing, that's when you know you're fully engaged."

Right now, many friends of democracy are quite worried about the future. I'm one of them. But I also know that this is what it feels like when you're in the middle of a fight. 

I was taught in school that the turning points in World War II were in 1942 - the battle of El Alamein in Egypt, the battle of Midway in the Pacific, and the battle of Stalingrad in the Soviet Union, which began in 1942 and lasted into 1943. 

However, if you look at 1943, it seems that people were feeling much as we are today - tired and anxious. 

And they had good reason. The Allied march up the boot of Italy was excruciating and frequently stalled by German tactical brilliance and Allied command mistakes. 

The crucial battle of the Atlantic - German U-boats v. Allied supply convoys - had its turning point in the middle of 1943, but, as with the events of 1942, this was not clear at the time, and the Germans continued to fight with great skill and determination. In fact, despite enormous casualties, discipline held in the German armed forces until a few weeks before the surrender in 1945.  

I could go through the parallel history in the Pacific, but I'll spare you. Oh, well. Let me just mention Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. And I'll airlift us over China-Burma-India. Stop, Bill.

As we look back on all this, there is a warm glow of historical inevitability. It's misleading. First, yes, we had turning points as early as 1942, but the war wasn't over until it was over. Remember the Battle of the Bulge. Second, people were very uncertain of the future, and morale was not excellent always and everywhere.

What did happen, during the course of the war, was that people just kept showing up and doing their jobs. And in the end they got the job done.

What will our turning points be? I don't know. I'd nominate Charlottesville in 2017 as an early one. I think the idea that we were dealing with fascism, rather than Republicanism, reached a large audience only at that point. The November 2020 election and the January 6 sack of the Capitol may prove to be other turning points.

It's worth noting that the fascists lost all three of these battles.

The forces of sanity have been fighting a cold civil war, leaving violence to the Trumpies, who fortunately aren't very good at it. Our asymmetrical response involves reform throughout the government and the society, and prosecution of people who have committed criminal acts.

The big difference between a cold war and a shooting war is the amount of shooting. Death from violence has so far been very rare in our current struggle, although the coronavirus pandemic, which has been going along in parallel with the war for the last two years, has certainly produced a lot of fatalities.

Another reason to feel tired and anxious.

Interestingly, Donald Trump, when faced with a pandemic, made the same mistake that Woodrow Wilson made during World War I, when the great influenza epidemic broke out in 1918. Trump and Wilson both chose to concentrate on the prosecution of the war they were fighting. In Trump's case, of course, he was fighting mainly on Twitter, but in both cases, the death toll in the pandemic was certainly higher because of the failure to take sensible public health measures.

A lot of people are concerned about the slow march of justice. I am one of them. The January 6  committee has been doing very encouraging work, but there is a long path from here to actual indictments based on the committee's findings.

I am a bit surprised that nobody has yet indicted the Former Guy. What's going on in Georgia? What's going on in New York? 

But I think there are positive signs. Every once in a while, I check in on a fellow Pennsylvanian, Riley June Williams, who may or may not have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop. One of the small fry, certainly. But we need to be thorough in our follow-up to January 6. I had doubted the staying power of the Justice Department in dealing with such a mass act of criminality, but now I do see encouraging signs that most of the small-fry perpetrators will have to answer for their crimes.

I hadn't checked up on Riley Williams in a while. I did late last year, in December. It turned out that, in October, news had arrived that she had been indicted on a laundry list of charges. Apparently the prosecutors got tired of negotiations for a plea deal that weren't going anywhere. The charges include theft of government property and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers. 

However slowly, the wheels of justice are turning. In other words, democracy is alive, if not necessarily very healthy.

It often happens that things do not end well for demagogues.

See also Hope Hicks Is Sick, The 800-Pound Gorilla in the Oval Office. The Coronavirus Caravan Trundles Along, On Demagogues.

Of Planters and Whimsy

Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn

My friend and son-in-law, Chris Murtha, sent me this picture of Willoughby Avenue, an open street near Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, which I wrote about in a blog post last year. The picture shows a recently installed planter that creates two chicanes, one for motor vehicles and one for bicycles. I think this is a brilliant design - simple, effective, inexpensive, attractive, and even a bit whimsical. I like whimsy.

See also South Portland Avenue, Brooklyn.

Humboldt on Education

Teaching People to Think for Themselves

Casino on the boardwalk, Asbury Park.

In my leisure reading I try to strike out in new directions. Odd how the diversions have a habit of gently guiding me back to my central concerns. 

Here's a passage about Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German educator from the early nineteenth century. It's worth remembering how long these ideas have been around, even though so many of us seem never to have made their acquaintance. 

"In 1806, Humboldt was living with his family in Rome, hard at work on a translation of Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Only after the collapse of Prussia and the plundering by French troops of the Humboldt family residence in Tegel to the north of Berlin did he resolve to return to his beleaguered homeland. It was only with great reluctance that he agreed to accept a post in the new administration. 

"Once installed, however, Humboldt unfolded a profoundly liberal reform programme that transformed education in Prussia. For the first time, the kingdom acquired a single, standardized system of public instruction attuned to the latest trends in progressive European pedagogy. Education as such, Humboldt declared, was henceforth to be decoupled from the idea of technical or vocational training. Its purpose was not to turn cobblers' boys into cobblers, but to turn 'children into people.' The reformed schools were not merely to induct pupils into a specific subject matter, but to instil in them the capacity to think and learn for themselves. 'The pupil is mature,' he wrote, 'when he has learned enough from others to be in a position to learn for himself.'" 

This is from pages 331-332 of Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Fall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (2006). (Footnotes omitted.) 

I'd heard the Humboldt name before - there is, after all, the Humboldt Current in the Pacific - but it turns out the current is named for Wilhelm's younger brother, Alexander, so it's entirely possible that I had never heard of Wilhelm before delving into Professor Clark's book. 

The elder Humboldt was effectively the Prussian minister of education during a time known as the Prussian Reform, which took place after the catastrophic defeat of the Prussian army by French forces under the command Napoleon Bonaparte, at Jena in 1806. 

Politics in Prussia took a conservative turn from 1819, but Humboldt's edifice proved durable. "In the 1840s, when the American educational reformer Horace Mann visited Berlin, he was surprised to observe that school children in Prussia were taught to exercise their mental faculties for themselves by teachers whose techniques were anything but authoritarian. 'Though I saw hundreds of schools and [...] tens of thousands of pupils' Mann wrote, 'I never saw one child undergoing punishment for misconduct. I never saw one child in tears from having been punished, or from fear of being punished.' Liberal visitors from Britain frequently expressed their surprise that such a 'despotic' political arrangement should have produced such a progressive and open-minded educational system." (Clark, p. 407.) 

The summit of Humboldt's achievement was the new Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, founded in Berlin in 1810 and renamed Humboldt-Universitat in 1949. "The Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat, with its powerful commitment to the freedom of research, became a model admired across Europe and widely emulated in the United States, where Humboldt's prescriptions helped to establish the idea of a modern academy." (Clark, p. 341.) 

I've given this matter some thought, and I think that I personally owe quite a lot to Wilhelm von Humboldt. I'm glad to have gotten to know him a little better.

Also at the casino.

See also The Real Parallels Are With Weimar, A Lesson From the Berlin Wall, A Teacher's Dilemma.