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Old Urban Rail Movies: NYC and SF


The above video shows the subway line from Union Square to Grand Central, in 1905. This would be the route taken by the 4, 5, and 6 trains, today; the Lexington Avenue IRT. According to the Library of Congress:

The camera platform was on the front of a New York subway train following another train on the same track. Lighting is provided by a specially constructed work car on a parallel track. At the time of filming, the subway was only seven months old, having opened on October 27, 1904. The ride begins at 14th Street (Union Square) following the route of today’s east side IRT, and ends at the old Grand Central Station, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1869. The Grand Central Station in use today was not completed until 1913.

The clothing at the end is incredible. After the route covered by the video, the train would have turned west, and followed the shuttle tracks to the West Side, where it would have continued north along the tracks now used by the 1, 2, and 3 into Harlem and Washington Heights, and eventually the Bronx. This was before there were tunnels under the rivers to Brooklyn, Queens, or Jersey City. As the subway grew northward, it would include architecturally unique stations like the one at 168th Street, whose design echoed the tepidarium of the Pompeiian baths:

DSC00308

The deepest, oldest level of the 168th Street IRT station in Manhattan.

(It’s interesting how much more front-and-center the references to the Classical world once were in American city planning.) In spite of being the only subway, the first line existed in the context of an established and extensive elevated system, which had provided above-ground urban rail to New Yorkers since the mid-Victorian period; and also electric streetcars. The NYC video is kind of like a subterranean version of the below movie, which was filmed from a San Francisco streetcar, on Market Street, traveling towards the Embarcadero, just days before the infamous earthquake in 1906:

This is the route now followed by the underground BART. Great stuff.

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Natalie de Blois

David Dunlap has a retrospective on the work of the architect Natalie de Blois, who died last week in Chicago, at the age of 92. Ms. de Blois was one of the first women to make it into the competitive upper echelons of American commercial architecture, during the mid-20th century. I walked past Lever House a few weeks ago, and was unaware of her role in designing it. I did notice that it was part of a really interesting cluster of green-tinted, curtain-wall type buildings in the blocks north of Grand Central along Park Avenue. It’s an interesting pocket that seems to capture the modernity of post-war New York City, while also offering an interesting contrast with the older buildings in the neighborhood. One can get a good sense of the aesthetics by periscoping around in Google Street View from this location.

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Irish Vernacular

Irish Vernacular

Dominic Stevens, an Irish architect, built a house for just €25,000.  He’s a proponent of what he calls the Irish Vernacular, a DIY, back-to-the-basics take on architecture in which decent housing is recovered as a product that resourceful individuals can create through self help and cooperation. Stevens’ is a small house, but it looks like a good deal for the price. (Although, I think I’d go for a more traditional visual effect.) The cost doesn’t include the land, but the footprint is modest. From his web page:

The model that we have become used [to] now places the house as a way of driving the economy – we build houses as a method of making money not in order to house people well. The vernacular tradition produces houses in another fashion, here people build their own house, not with help from the bank, rather with the help of their neighbours. The by-product of house production is an interdependent community, instead of lifelong debt to the bank.

The web page also includes instructions about how to build such a house. My favorite:

instruction

It’s interesting how much this concept overlaps with those that drove both the limited-equity (LE) co-op model from New York City in the mid-20th century, and also the prototypical Garden City model that (as noted before) the NYC LE framework so closely resembled. The difference here is that the cooperation proposed here is more organic, and personal, and therefore lacks the formalizing legal framework of the more ambitious co-ops of the past. But that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be made to work between less-intimate acquaintances with the introduction of certain contractual and property-rights assurances. The BBC also interviewed Stevens as part of a video report on alternative housing frameworks throughout Europe, including land-free boat housing that people have set up in the waterways around Amsterdam, and co-housing-type arrangements in both the youth punk scene and among upper-middle-class professionals in Berlin.

It’s also interesting how much this concept overlaps with the traditional American housing patterns of the 19th century. One thing I’ve learned from watching the Civil War lectures lately is just how much the Free Soil-Free Labor ethos in the Northern states was driven by the idea that — in the absence of slavery and its devaluing effect on labor — the vast expanse of the American continent provided an almost endless set of opportunities for anyone who was willing to work. In that concept, one can see the roots of various interpretations of the American Dream. But to appreciate the original democracy of its promise, in a time long before the New Deal or Levittown, one must also acknowledge that this dream would not be financed by banks or limited by zoning boards or designed by architects and planners with elite credentials. Instead, the small towns and urban neighborhoods along the westward-moving frontier grew because they offered a chance to combine free (or very cheap) building land with abundant, life-sustaining resources (farmland, timber, stone, etc.) and sweat equity — and enough individuals had the building skills to make it work.

A certain amount of this is not so long gone. My mother once told me that when she was growing up in upstate New York, in the 1950s, the men who lived on her block — all World War II veterans — worked together on building projects, taking turns to finish attics into livable spaces, and paving all of the driveways on the block. By the time I was growing up, the only house-skill that most boys seemed expected to learn was lawn mowing. Still, you figure things out. There’s a pretty interesting book called Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture that covers some of these concepts through a diverse collection of writings on folk architecture. I looked at it in the Rutgers bookstore last year, and I’ve been meaning to read it more thoroughly because it seemed to shed some light on the context that allowed for the variety and individuality of structures that characterized American building patterns pretty much down to the Great Depression. When one considers how banks and lawyers have managed to turn simple housing into both a major expense, and a key component of an increasingly calcified economic landscape, one can’t help but recognize the inherent power that exists in frameworks that would allow individuals to recover their housing options on more autonomous terms. And imagine the benefit to the economy as a whole if all of the rent-dollars and interest-dollars were redirected to more productive ends. There are a lot of interesting ideas beginning to bubble up. Stevens definitely has one of them.

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Warrior Cops … and Democracy?

The Wall Street Journal has a disturbing piece by Radley Balko about the rise of military tactics in domestic US policing. While one can clearly see the need for certain police officers to be trained in these approaches to handle the occasional life-threatening crisis — say, an unfolding attack or a deteriorating hostage situation — there’s something sick about a legal culture that just sort of decadently slouches toward the use of military tactics for serving warrants or securing evidence against civilians, as a matter of expedience, or to reinforce its own psychology of power. What’s worse is the intimidation factor that these practices imply toward the general public. If the legal system needs to increasingly engage in this sort of violence as a matter of course, that seems like prima facie evidence that the system is no longer governing by the kind of consent and consensus that Holmes identified as the prerequisite of a legitimate body of law. Scary.

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Civil War Lectures

I’ve been watching this Open Yale course about the U.S. Civil War, taught by David Blight, when I have a few minutes here and there. In the first few lectures, he goes into the regional differences that surrounded slavery, as well as what was at stake, legally and politically, in the fight over its westward expansion. Some of the narrative is a review of the basics, but then Blight builds a deep context for the dual sovereignty of federalism — and how much more of a cultural controversy it really was in the 19th century. So far, the course is really good.

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The Chronic Meltdown of Law

The New Republic has a withering piece by Noam Scheiber about the meltdown of the American law firm model. I saw a little bit of this first hand when I worked as a paralegal at a couple of the big firms in Midtown before law school — in particular, the incivility toward those of lower (usually chronological, but sometimes credentials-based) status, and the indifference of many of those who seemed to have any clout within the firms. It’s hardly news; these places have been hell for a long time. It’s just that the business model is now failing, and so it’s an economics story. And because (at least for now) there are fewer alternatives for lawyers who are not insane enough to go along for the ride, long term, the protests are louder. I get the competition in law, but the rest of this is just nuts. I mean, how does a profession that is so rooted in the humanities and that has a basic threshold requirement of critical thinking skills ever get to such a point?

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“A Chicago Every Year”

Over the next 12 years, the Chinese government plans to relocate 250 million people from the countryside to brand new urban developments, in order to build a new middle-class, urban consumer culture. These stories about planning in China are always bracing. There’s something deeply impersonal and anti-individualistic about the way citizens are treated like movable commodities. But, even so, contrasting the ambitiousness of the Chinese vision with the petty resistance to things as practical as affordable apartments and small business space in the American suburbs, I sometimes feel like I’m on the wrong continent for city planning.

Apartments in Suzhou, China. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

Apartments in Suzhou, China. Source: Wikipedia Commons.

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Le Corbusier at MoMA

This exhibition looks like it might be really interesting. It runs through September 23rd at the Museum of Modern Art. I’ve never actually seen a museum-curated show about Le Corbusier’s work, but he deserves one. In addition to his architecture, the show focuses on Corbusier and landscape. This is an aspect of his work that I haven’t given much thought, and it’s definitely got me intrigued about the exhibition. To me, Corbusier has always been a sympathetic character, albeit an often hopeless product of his crazy, driven time. And I think it’s no accident that the more mundane aspects of Corbusier’s vision came to influence the soul-numbing housing projects and office buildings of the mid-20th century, because Corbusier himself seemed to have a blind spot about others’ individuality, and the settings whose builders superficially imitated Corbusier’s forms were usually those in which individuals were reduced to mere cogs in a wheel, or numerical problems to be solved. Corbusier’s work is so perfectly emblematic of that modern Western insanity that tries to standardize and quantify everything, without doing the required qualitative analysis first, to see whether doing so even makes sense.

Corbusierhaus, Berlin. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Corbusierhaus, Berlin. “A machine for living in.” Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Even though I’ve never seen a museum exhibit on his work, I did read a great book called Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, by Robert Fishman. The author gives a fascinating account of Corbusier’s life and works, beginning with the architect’s childhood in the Swiss watchmaking town of La-Chaux-de-Fonds, on the western edge of the Alps, in the late 19th century, when the tradition of home-based artisans’ and craftsmen’s workshops was collapsing under insurmountable competition from heavy industry. Fishman then narrates Corbusier’s long career, in which he designed a world that increasingly seemed like a mechanized dystopia — where the most inherently human subjects of design, like homes and political buildings, were built in an industrial, impersonal, even brutal style. Of course, some of Corbusier’s designs were quite beautiful. But they were often pleasing in ways that allowed little room for the individual or the small community that used them to shape its own space; and they were attractive in ways that showed little concern for the human instinct for familiar forms. The ironies and psychological implications of Corbusier’s career are rich. Fishman’s is a great book — it also covers Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright — and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone with an interest in the human imagination, and some of its blind spots, in the early 20th century.

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Using Eminent Domain for Underwater Mortgages

The New York Fed has an interesting white paper out by Robert Hockett, in which the author proposes the use of eminent domain to purchase large numbers of underwater mortgages — as in, the actual financial instruments. The idea targets mortgages whose debt holders are the holders of mortgage-backed securities– so called privately securitized mortgages. The strategy is based on the fact that PSM shareholders are such large and geographically dispersed classes that it is not reasonable to expect them to write-down the values of their claims in the same way that — say — a large bank could do. And, since there’s no cram-down power regarding home mortgages in bankruptcy court, the same write-downs couldn’t even be imposed through equity in cases where distressed homeowners wind up in bankruptcy. I thought the details of the proposal were fairly interesting to read through.

One aspect of the paper that’s really shocking is the following map, showing how many outstanding mortgages remain underwater, by county:

Underwater Mortgages as a Share of All Mortgages, by County, 4Q 2012. Source: CoreLogic Negative Equity Report, via Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Underwater Mortgages as a Share of All Mortgages, by County, 4Q 2012. Source: CoreLogic Negative Equity Report, via Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

At the end of 2012, blue counties had the lowest rates of underwater mortgages, with increasing rates of negative equity correlating with increasing greenness, yellowness, and then redness. Note that (with the tiny geographic exceptions around wealthy New York City and San Francisco), the places with lowest levels of underwater mortgages are almost all rural areas that didn’t experience much of a run-up in residential property values in the decade before 2008. That’s a lot of pain.

It certainly makes theoretical sense that eminent domain can be used to take personal property — such as contract rights — and not just real estate. But it’s not something that you run across all that often. I liked this paragraph, summarizing the phenomenon:

Forms of intangible property that have been purchased in eminent domain include bond tax exemption covenants, insurance policies, corporate equities, other contract rights, businesses as going concerns, and even sports franchises (Hockett 2012a). Because the law draws no distinctions between kinds of property that can be purchased in eminent domain, it is unsurprising that loans and liens in particular, as one form of contractual obligation among many, are themselves regularly purchased. Among these are mortgage loans and liens, as the Supreme Court and state courts have long recognized.

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Is Culture the Counterculture?

Leon Wieseltier, in a speech at last month’s Brandeis commencement, had strong words about the priorities of our time — and praise for those who take a more traditional path.

You who have elected to devote yourselves to the study of literature and languages and art and music and philosophy and religion and history — you are the stewards of that quality. You are the resistance. You have had the effrontery to choose interpretation over calculation, and to recognize that calculation cannot provide an accurate picture, or a profound picture, or a whole picture, of self-interpreting beings such as ourselves; and I commend you for it.

After a rowdy meeting, the LegalTowns Board of Directors voted unanimously to endorse the humanities — but split on the topic of actual human beings.

Posted in Art