Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America, by James and Deborah Fallows, Pantheon, 432 pages, $28.95
When they started planning Our Towns in 2012, it looked like James and Deborah Fallows had found a clever new way to explore the heart and soul of flyover country. For the next four years, with James at the controls of their $600,000 single-engine prop airplane, the married pair of Atlantic writers intermittently dropped in on about 30 small towns and cities, from seaside Eastport, Maine, to James' hometown of Redlands, California.
Sometimes going back once or twice, sometimes staying for a week or even three, the couple explored the civic and socioeconomic health of such disparate American places as metropolitan Columbus, Ohio, and dusty Ajo, Arizona. They sipped local craft beers with the hippest, brightest, most progressive residents to find out how they were resurrecting deindustrialized towns, handling waves of immigrants, or otherwise dealing with national and global changes beyond their control.
Our Towns is the couple's account of their prolonged search for the "heart of America." It bills itself as a "vivid, surprising portrait of the civic and economic reinvention" that's happening under the radar of the national media, in places like Rapid City, Erie, Demopolis, Holland, Bend, Sioux City, Allentown, and Greenville.
With the Fallowses in the cockpit, you'd expect a smart, serious, and enlightening work of high-quality journalism—a 408-page Atlantic cover piece. James has 11 previous books under his belt, and Deborah's writings about women, education, and travel have appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, and elsewhere. Yet this collection of small-town snapshots is a plane wreck.
Our Towns sometimes reads like a bunch of travel notes stapled together chronologically. Other times it feels like it was written from 2,500 feet. It's overloaded with chamber-of-commerce details and laden with dull quotes from local politicians and other civic big shots. Repetitive and often stale, it contains no edge, no humor, no hate, not even any photos. It's the worst kind of serious journalism: the boring kind.
The Fallowses, who equitably took turns writing mini-chapters, didn't help things by taking four years to complete their geographically lopsided journey. (About half of the 29 places they cover, including Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Burlington, Vermont, hosted them in 2013 and 2014—an eon ago.) Their eccentric sampling of towns includes one in Texas, none in Florida, three in Kansas, five in California, and three in Mississippi.
But the chief reason for their book's page-turning tedium is how they reported it. The authors may have aimed to show us the hidden grassroots of America, but their reporting is more top-down than bottom-up.
Typically, they would drop into a town and start interviewing local powerbrokers and the booster class: the mayor, the city planner, the key developers, the important business tycoon, the president of the college, the principal of the most innovative high school, the editor of the dying newspaper, the head librarian, the "outsized" local personality. The authors rarely if ever interviewed regular townspeople about their jobs or asked what they thought of their kids' new Latino classmates. They hung out in rejuvenated public libraries, high-tech incubators, and craft breweries, not sports bars, truck stops, or corner churches. If they bumped into a pissed-off cattle rancher in line at D&M Agricultural Supply in Rapid City or asked some Rust Belt survivors at a Trump rally in Erie why they were wearing those big red MAGA hats, they don't share the experience with readers.
The Fallowses are a sophisticated, elite Beltway couple. Jim went to Harvard and Oxford and in his 20s was President Jimmy Carter's chief speechwriter. Deborah has a Ph.D. from Harvard in theoretical linguistics (and often writes like it). Moderate Hillary Democrats to their bones, they love all the correct liberal things: public schools and libraries, bike paths and public-private partnerships that redevelop dead downtowns with river walks and public art. They hate Walmart, of course.
Whether the town they're visiting is in a red state or a blue one, the authors are pleased and a little surprised to find a gang of progressive, creative, brewpub-loving people like themselves who have chosen to live in Smalltown USA when they could just as easily be in New York, D.C., or Los Angeles. They also "discover" that the towns contain a corps of "local patriots" who love their hometowns, defend them from outside critics, and try their hardest to make them better places to live, work, raise families, and die.
James Fallows says these "stalwart groups," which have existed in North America since Jamestown was a fort, invariably put aside their partisan differences and do the right civic things. For him that usually means the public sector springs into action. Payroll taxes are raised. School bonds are floated. Tax-deferred financing schemes are packaged. Or federal or state subsidies are poured into slick projects like Coca-Cola Park, a $50 million minor-league baseball stadium in Allentown.
It was not out of character for the Fallowses to gloss over Coca-Cola Park's obscene cost or the fallacious economic arguments and straight-up political corruption used to get it built. Wherever the duo landed, they walked the sunny liberal side of Main Street. They didn't give government officials and politicians the scrutiny or grief they probably deserved, and they never brought up testy local subjects like high taxes, eminent domain abuse, or failing public schools.
The authors were smart not to waste time polling baristas in Lewiston, Idaho, to find out what they thought the United States should do in Syria. They avoided deliberately discussing national politics and divisive issues like fracking, gun control, policing, race relations, and opioid abuse. They were determined to keep their focus local, local, local—to a fault. On the upside, this allowed them to realize, as James wrote in The Atlantic, that America's future is "full of possibilities that the bleak trench warfare of national politics inevitably obscures." On the downside, this meant they ignored a national earthquake happening under their wingtips: the election of Donald Trump.
The authors paid close attention to the election, but for the book, which was finished in early 2017, they skipped the historic Trump-Clinton race entirely. Trump's name is mentioned in passing two or three times, and that's it. It's a huge, conspicuous, and ironic hole in a project whose purpose was to explore the ignored heartland of America.
The Fallowses' aerial exploration was a good idea gone bad. Their flyby journalism turns 29 unique American places into a slow blur of progressive politicians, reclaimed Main Streets, and dry sagas of economic decline and renewal.
But it has its pluses. Individually, many of its stories are informative. The authors' optimism is refreshing. So is the absence of any snooty contempt for flyover country. And it probably wasn't intentional, but the book does make an indirect case for federalism. It doesn't extol federalism's virtues explicitly, and it certainly doesn't complain that the $4.4 trillion federal government has usurped too much power and money from the states, but its upbeat civic portraits clearly testify to the value of what's left of America's decentralized system of governance.
Our Towns is packed with examples of the social and economic benefits of leaving local people in local control; it shows that even the smallest communities in Arizona and Alabama can govern themselves with little if any supervision or interference from the central government. Whether or not they intended it, two elite liberals from inside the Beltway have made a strong case that Washington should leave the rest of the country alone.
The post A Flyby Analysis of Flyover Country appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Raw Deal: How the "Uber Economy" and Runaway Capitalism Are Screwing American Workers, by Steven Hill, St. Martin's Press, 326 pages, $27.99
I've worked for Travis Kalanick for more than a year, but I've never met him. Technically, he's not my boss and I'm not his employee. I'm one of North America's 400,000 independent "1099" contractors with Uber, the company Kalanick co-founded and runs. In 2015, working in Pittsburgh three or four nights a week, I made nearly 2,200 Uber trips, carried more than 4,500 passengers, and put about 20,000 scratch-free Uber miles on my wife's 2013 Honda CRV. Subtracting expenses for gas and wear and tear on Pittsburgh's infamously potholed roads, I netted about $15,000 for the year.
This is the best part-time job I've had in a career of them. I have no bosses, I have no schedule, and I work when, where, and how long I choose. It's the perfect gig for an ex-newspaperman who's writing a book and whose income streams also include Social Security, a pension, and freelance writing. Every time I go to work, I know I'll pick up about 25 random, mostly under-30 people from Pittsburgh and around the globe who, sober or drunk, are happy to see me and, when asked, invariably express unconditional love for Uber.
Here in Pittsburgh, Uber is destroying the local Yellow Cab monopoly, one of the worst taxi companies in the country. It's getting drunk drivers off the roads in unknown numbers. It's energizing the city's nightlife. It has clearly been a boon for the city's young women, allowing them to move around safely, reliably, and affordably at night, alone or in packs of three and four. It has also created hundreds of part- or full-time jobs for Pittsburghers.
Steven Hill hates it.
Hill, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of Raw Deal, a grueling sermon accusing Uber—and similar "peer-to-peer" businesses, such as Airbnb and TaskRabbit—of exploiting part-time workers and eroding the wealth and security of the American workforce. These so-called "sharing economy" companies connect the buyers and sellers of goods, services, and labor online. For Hill, the people who run them and the venture capitalists who fund them "have conceived of nothing less than a wholesale redesign of the U.S. workforce, the quality of employment and the ways we live and work." This powerful, diabolical, apparently conspiratorial new species of techno-entrepreneurs has planned "a dead end for U.S. workers, as well as the national economy" by creating what Hill dubs "the freelance society."
The grueling element of Raw Deal is Hill's argument, not his prose. He's a good reporter, a lively writer, and a skilled propagandist for the progressive cause. (The book has been blurbed by both Ralph Nader and Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel.) Raw Deal offers a dense, often provocative mashup of interesting facts, opinions, history, capitalism bashing, union worship, Internet startup tales, paeans to Euro-socialism, examples of both real and imagined workplace injustice, petty name calling, macroeconomic doomsaying, and more.
It's got working-class heroes and greedy corporate villains. It's got scary ideas, like the looming Economic Singularity—the author's belief that our economy will soon implode from too few jobs and too little consumer demand because techno-elites have captured the choice parts of our wealth for their private use. And it has an exciting 10-page ideological duel between Hill and a union organizer who has renounced her faith in traditional progressive politics and embraced a far more libertarian model of activism.
I had fun consuming this book in careful bits and chunks as I waited for Uber customers at the Pittsburgh airport. But as I defaced its margins with my commentary, I felt no freelance worker's pain except my own. Virtually all its grievances about the new economy seemed questionable, silly, or wrong.
The new economy goes by many names: the freelance economy, the gig economy, the do-it-yourself economy, the independent economy, the 1099 economy. Its partisans praise it for the incredible flexibility it gives to workers and the efficiencies and labor-cost savings it brings to businesses. Hill hates it for the same reasons.
The growth of the 1099 economy is hard to measure well; Hill arguably overhypes its growth. About 53 million of America's 145 million workers—36.5 percent—are officially categorized as temps, freelancers, independent contractors, and part-timers. That's only up from 31 percent in 2006, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Still, some economists predict that in a decade, half the work force will consist of these "contingent" workers. To Hill, this spells doom. He can't seem to imagine why a sane and smart person would voluntarily take a single part-time job, much less work two or three simultaneously. He doesn't approve of independent 1099 workers and freelancers like me, and he doesn't approve of the people who hire us. Ditto for temps, micro-entrepreneurs, non-regular employees, and part-timers of any kind.
It doesn't seem to matter to Hill how much money independents and freelancers earn, or how much they value the flexibility and convenience their part-time jobs or multiple income streams bring to their lives. To him freelancers are by definition exploited because they don't get employer-paid health benefits, aren't usually protected by a strong union (certainly not the conventional kind he likes), and don't have a strong corporate or government safety net to catch them when they get sick or lose their jobs to outsourcing or robots.
Hill's long-range goal is a new social contract—a "new New Deal," he calls it—that would replace the "raw deal" he says independent workers are getting now. According to Hill, the only way to truly tame "feral" capitalism and bring fairness to the new American workplace is for the federal government to import the best practices of Euro-socialism and make every business and worker abide by them.
So he calls for free health care for all workers. And paid sick leave, and free or subsidized child care. And job sharing, and profit sharing, and works councils. He wants the federal government to intervene more in medical care, strengthen its labor laws, make organizing a union a civil right, and use the federal tax code to "better distribute the aggregate wealth to benefit society."
His big idea, explained in detail, is a portable, government-mandated Individual Security Account for every worker in the country. Mimicking European legislation that prohibits companies from treating part-time workers any differently from full-timers, he wants companies that use 1099 workers to be legally required to add several dollars to each worker's hourly wage to pay for the worker's safety net. The extra labor costs, which he unconvincingly claims will be passed on to consumers without any noticeable pain, would ruin most of the incentive for businesses to use temps or freelancers. But that's kind of the idea.
In general, Hill wants the United States to enact a full roster of new regulations and redistributive policies that he says will "harness and steer" the new economy for the benefit of workers and consumers. But to get there, and to resurrect the New Deal–era "good jobs" workplace he misses so much, he needs to get past certain techno-villains standing in the way—people like Travis Kalanick. The Uber chief, Hill sneers, is an unapologetic "Ayn Rand capitalist" and "capitalist-cowboy" who flouts local transportation laws from New York to Seattle, resists what Hill considers common-sense government regulations, and tries to pay as little as possible in taxes—all capital offenses according to the progressive criminal code.
Hill's Uber hate is so strong that he can barely bring himself to give the company credit for creating a transformative new form of micro-transit that benefits millions of people around the world. Yet even he acknowledges that Uber's business model is doing society a favor by competing with the country's infamously awful cab companies. "Big Taxi," as he calls these iconic bastards of crony capitalism, is made up of corrupt, politically protected local monopolies that have screwed the public since the 1930s with lousy service, high fares, and crappy cars. Their chief victims have been minority neighborhoods and the carless poor. Taxi companies also regularly mistreat and exploit their drivers, who today are mostly independent contractors like Uber drivers.
Virtually everyone knows that taxi companies have been a national disgrace for decades. Yet there was no crusade spearheaded by Ralph Nader or cover story in Mother Jones aiming to take them down. Now Uber's law flouting is finally blowing up Big Taxi's monopoly and opening up urban transportation markets. Hill's poster villain of the new economy is using that "cowboy-capitalism" to do what progressives should have done decades ago.
Hill insists he's no Luddite. He assures us he's not against innovation and change. He swears he doesn't want to kill the entrepreneurial dynamism of the American economy. Yet he discounts the value of almost everything new economy companies do or make.
Amazon and eBay, for instance, started out fine in Hill's eyes by peddling used books and Pez dispensers for peanuts. But then their groovy "sharing" sentiment was corrupted by "raw" capitalism, and now they're just another faceless way for big businesses to make obscene profits by Web-hawking everything from groceries to pet-sitting services to (Marx forbid!) the labor of human beings. Hill offers the same complaint about Airbnb: It devolved from a hippieish no-charge couch-sharing club to a global corporate lodging giant that caters to rich property owners.
Hill is so focused on righting the alleged wrongs visited on exploited freelancers that he barely remembers the interests of consumers who want to be able to buy better and cheaper stuff. He never wonders or worries too deeply about the long-term real-world consequences of forcing employers to compensate every worker like a Hollywood union electrician. Will it increase unemployment rates, discourage new hires, put companies out of business, or raise the price of whatever they make or do to the point consumers will stop buying it? Don't ask, don't tell.
To his credit, Hill does find room in his rant for some ideological diversity. He brings in other voices who praise the gig economy or assure him that the market's creative destruction will continue to work its usual magic in the digital age. Others tell him not to worry about robots or high-tech automation destroying more jobs than they create. But Hill quickly downplays or rejects what they say.
Consider Sara Horowitz, the founder of the Freelancers Union, a nonprofit whose mission is "to create power in markets and power in politics" for the new economy's independent workforce. A former organizer for the Service Employees International Union, Horowitz has evolved in ways Hill finds tragic and traitorous. She no longer believes government action is the answer to everything, or almost anything. She has gone so far to the dark side that she has concluded the best way for her 300,000 members to get high-quality, affordable, and portable health insurance is to provide it for themselves.
To that end, Horowitz started the Freelancers Insurance Company in 2008. She has also built two primary care clinics in New York for her union's members; they have no copays and host events and classes.
For 10 pages, Hill critiques Horowitz's ideas about the new workplace. He gives her credit for what she has accomplished, but he is deeply troubled by her efforts to create a bottom-up, power-sharing economic model that essentially ignores government. Not only does her union not represent workers in negotiations, but it's not doing what he sees as a union's most important duty: teaching its members how "to wage a political struggle" and how "to be engaged citizens."
In turning away from government, Hill writes, Horowitz is playing into the hands of the evil Uberites by "letting economics corral our politics." For a professional progressive like Hill, it should be the other way around.
The post In Defense of Freelancing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Yet as Bill Steigerwald revealed in Reason's April 2011 issue, Steinbeck's work of "nonfiction" is riddled with fictional people and events and offers a mostly inaccurate portrait of the Nobel laureate's actual travels. As part of his groundbreaking research, Steigerwald read the original manuscript of Travels With Charley at New York's Morgan Museum and Library, where he discovered that the book's first draft was heavily edited to remove Steinbeck's New Deal politics and create the myth of an open-minded journey. Thus the reading public was deceived into seeing Steinbeck as an impartial observer, rather than as the staunch partisan he really was. Just as Barack Obama used composite characters and other fictional conceits in his memoir Dreams from My Father (as detailed in David Maraniss' recent biography of the president), Steinbeck departed from the truth in order to further his narrative.
Also excised from Steinbeck's original manuscript was a paragraph of racist and offensive language drawn from Steinbeck's encounter with a group of white female protesters outside of a recently integrated school in New Orleans. Disgusted by the hatred and annoyed that the national news media of the day censored the women's crude language, Steinbeck was eager to expose their statements. But the paragraph detailing their ugly hate was cut from the published version of the book and virtually no one has seen it in half a century. By cooperating with his publisher to suppress the disturbing truth about segregation, Steinbeck inadvertently abetted the system's continuance. Until now, the only place those chilling words of hate could be read was in the reading room of the beautiful Morgan Library.
Three weeks before I left on my trip to retrace John Steinbeck's steps in Travels With Charley in Search of America, I did something no one in the world had done in four years. I went to the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan to read the first draft of the book. The handwritten manuscript—along with a typed and edited copy—has been stored at the Morgan like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark for almost 50 years.
Few scholars, graduate students, or critics had bothered to read it. If they had, the Travels With Charley myth—that for 11 weeks Steinbeck slowly traveled alone, camped out often, carefully studied the country, and told readers what he really thought about America and its 180 million people—might have been debunked decades ago.
The Charley manuscript has been at the Morgan since Steinbeck donated it in 1962. It is broken up into five or six handwritten chunks that Steinbeck finished about nine months after he returned from his road trip in early December, 1960. Written entirely in his barely decipherable scribble, with hardly a word crossed out or changed, each page is filled from top-to-bottom and edge-to-edge. It's mostly in pencil on carefully page-numbered yellow or white legal pads. One 50-page section, which Steinbeck wrote while vacationing in Barbados in February of 1961, is written in pen in a ledger-like book that also includes a daily journal he kept.
For three summer days in 2010 I sat in the reading room at the Morgan Library like a monk and took notes in longhand. I compared the first draft of what Steinbeck had given the working title In Quest of America with the final version of Travels With Charley stored on my smart-phone's Kindle app. According to Declan Kiely, the Morgan's curator of literary and historical manuscripts, fewer than six people had looked at the Charley manuscript since 2000. I was the first since 2006.
The edits to the first draft mostly make sense; a lot of extraneous details and long-windedness on Steinbeck's part are cut. But excising material about Steinbeck's regular liaisons with his wife Elaine in fancy hotels, his stay with his good friend and failed presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson, and his outright contempt for Richard Nixon serve another purpose. The casual or romantic reader is left with the impression that Steinbeck was alone and on the road most of the time, when in fact he was neither. By the time Viking Press was done marketing the book as nonfiction and dressing it up with excellent but misleading illustrations by Don Freeman, the Travels With Charley myth was born and bronzed. The book was an instant and huge bestseller. Critics and reviewers, followed by several generations of scholars, never questioned the book's nonfiction status.
Nixon, Kennedy, and Adlai Stevenson
The historic Nixon-Kennedy presidential race was playing out in the fall of 1960 and part of Steinbeck's original mission was to take the political pulse of the country. He was sad to find that most of the people he saw on his trip did not have political opinions. Steinbeck was not a disinterested political observer. He was openly partisan and said as much in the first draft, where he wrote that he and Elaine "were and are partisan as all get out … confirmed, blown in the glass democrats…." That admission was cut.
A devout New Deal Democrat, Steinbeck had supported, worked for, and almost idolized the witty and egg-headed Adlai Stevenson, who lost the White House to Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 in lopsided elections. Steinbeck even stayed at Stevenson's 70-acre estate outside Chicago during the Charley trip, a fact that didn't make it into the published version of the book. Steinbeck, who wanted Stevenson to try again in 1960, didn't swoon over the prospects of a President John Kennedy. He was leery of JFK's character flaws and didn't think he could win because he was a Roman Catholic. But he loathed Nixon, as the first draft of Charley repeatedly makes clear.
A 50-word passage mentioning Nixon was cut from the scene in Charley where Steinbeck is lost in a rainstorm in Medina, New York. Steinbeck had joked about hearing Nixon on the radio blaming every natural and unmentioned calamity "as far back as the Flood" on the Democratic Party. A few pages later a larger cut was made. Steinbeck wrote in the first draft that he watched Nixon and JFK debate on TV in his motel room in Buffalo. He criticized Nixon and Herbert Hoover and went on for about 150 words, making fun of their pedestrian reading habits and comparing their low intelligence levels to Kennedy's high one. "Being a democrat," he wrote, without capitalizing the word, "I wanted Kennedy to win…."
All four Nixon-Kennedy debates occurred while Steinbeck was on the road. Based on his letters and what he wrote in the first draft, he saw or heard each debate in full or in part. He wrote that he watched the third presidential debate on the TV in his room at a "pretty auto court" in Livingston, Montana. He sarcastically asked himself if Montanans had any real interest in the major geopolitical issue of the debate—whether the United States should stay and defend the tiny islands of Quemoy and Matsu, which the Red Chinese were shelling and threatening to take from Taiwan. Other political comments he made in San Francisco, Monterey, and Amarillo—some of them bipartisan in their cynicism—were axed completely.
Though it took most of the edge away from the book, cutting out almost all the presidential politics from Travels With Charley was smart and logical editing. First of all, by the time the book hit bookstores—in late July of 1962—the 1960 election was ancient history. Who cared what Steinbeck thought about the third JFK-Nixon debate? Plus, Steinbeck's political sniping was partisan, boring, and at odds with the rest of the book's grouchy but generally likable tone.
Yet cutting the politics out of Charley was an odd thing to do in a book that was supposed to be a nonfiction account of a trip taken during one of the country's most exciting and historic elections. The names Kennedy and Nixon hardly appear. In fact, thanks to the edits made to the first draft, each of their names appears just once—on page 176 of the 246-page 1962 Viking Press hardback edition, when Steinbeck arrives in Monterey a few days before the election and has a brief, hot partisan argument with his Republican sister.
In the end it was no great loss that politics was purged from Charley's first draft, because Steinbeck had pulled most of his punches anyway. What he wrote was softball stuff compared to what he expressed in long letters to Adlai Stevenson and his operatives in the run-up to the 1960 primary. In one letter now among the Stevenson papers kept at Princeton's Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Steinbeck casually referred to Kennedy as "a bed-hopper." It was a character flaw the author obviously knew about in the summer of 1960, even if the voting masses didn't.
Nor was Steinbeck shy about sharing his distaste for Richard Nixon in his first draft. But he didn't dare tell readers of Charley about the personal dirt he had on Nixon—which he privately urged the Stevenson camp to leak. In a letter to a Stevenson aide in the summer of 1960, Steinbeck wrote that he knew a talkative "psycho-analyst" in New York who bragged that he traveled three times a week to Washington to "put Dickie on the couch." Calling for tactics Tricky Dick himself would have countenanced, Steinbeck said, "it is pleasant to know that Poor Richard is not happy. But this should be used." If the Stevenson people didn't use it, Steinbeck said he'd try other channels. (Nixon's secret shrink was Dr. Arnold Hutschnecker, whom the Kennedy campaign didn't find out about until the first week of September 1960.)
The Reality of Racism
Near the end of the Charley manuscript comes something that had to be cut because it was too graphic to publish in 1962. It was Steinbeck's transcription of what he heard a group of white mothers screaming outside the newly integrated William Frantz Elementary school in New Orleans' white Upper Ninth Ward. The women, the so-called Cheerleaders, gathered outside the school each morning and their protest had become a national news story. Steinbeck drove to New Orleans specifically to see the daily circus of hate and what he saw rightly disgusted him. He felt that the "sad sickness" of that racist sideshow could not be conveyed unless the foul things the working-class women screamed were put down on paper for all to see. Writing that he knew there was "not a chance in the world that my readers will see" the women's "bestial and degenerate" words, he quoted—or, more likely, he wrote down a condensed version of how he remembered them. His rendering raises questions of veracity in me if only because the taunt seems so masculine in its specifics. But there's little doubt that he was capturing what too many Americans thought when it came to integrating blacks into their full share of American life.
This is what Steinbeck said one woman shrieked at a white man who was defying the boycott by bringing his child to the virtually empty school: "You mother fucking, nigger sucking, prick licking piece of shit. Why you'd lick a dog's ass if he'd let you. Look at the bastard drag his dirty stinking ass along. You think that's his kid? That's a piece of shit. That's shit leading shit. Know what we ought to do? Strip down them fancy pants and cut off his balls and feed them to the pigs—that is if he's got any balls. How about it friends?"
Whether the quote is literally accurate or not, that paragraph of filth and hate, like Steinbeck's political play-by-play, never made it into the final version of the work. Travels with Charley is very much a PG-rated road book. Steinbeck's partisan leanings would have disturbed the general tone of the story by revealing its narrator as something other than a world-weary observer who cared more about deep truths and social trends than any ephemeral presidential election (his partisanship also ran the obvious risk of alienating the nearly 50 percent of American voters who voted for Nixon in 1960). The stark and vile racism expressed by the women in New Orleans similarly would have disrupted the overriding sensibility of Steinbeck's last major book. Cutting the women's crude remarks shielded millions of readers from the indefensible and irrational hatred and foulness at the heart of racial discrimination.
And so the obscenities were cut, as Steinbeck knew they would be. He ultimately rewrote part of the Cheerleaders scene, capturing the ugliness of the scene without using a single dirty word (he reported that the women used words that were "bestial and filthy and degenerate" without quoting them directly). The resulting book proved to be a massive hit with readers and critics, but partly because Travels With Charley was less than honest not just about early 1960s America but about its author's true feelings.
Bill Steigerwald worked as a writer, editor, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette in the 1990s, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the 2000s. This is adapted from his forthcoming book On the Road With Steinbeck's Ghost: In Search of America and the Truth about Travels With Charley. The blog he wrote while retracing Steinbeck's journey in the fall of 2010 is at The Truth About "Travels With Charley."
The post Whitewashing John Steinbeck appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Hah!" I shouted as a million North Dakota cornstalks rattled in the October wind. "Who were you trying to kid, John? Who'd you think would ever believe you met a Shakespearean actor out here?"
For three weeks I had been retracing the 10,000-mile road trip John Steinbeck made around America in 1960. I wasn't in the habit of speaking directly to his ghost. But I couldn't stop from laughing at the joke Steinbeck had played on everyone in the pages of his subsequent travelog, released in 1962 to general acclaim and still revered as a mid-century document of the American soul.
A huge commercial success from the day it hit bookstands, Travels With Charley in Search of America was touted and marketed as the true account of Steinbeck's solo journey. It stayed on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list for a year, and its commercial and cultural tail—like those of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath—has been long and fat. For five decades Steinbeck scholars and others who should know better have not questioned the book's honesty. But I had come to realize that the iconic American road book was not only heavily fictionalized; it was something of a fraud.
No one could hear me talking to Steinbeck's ghost that October afternoon. I was parked on an unpaved farm road in the earthly equivalent of outer space: the cornfields of North Dakota, 47 miles southwest of Fargo.
The closest "town" was Alice, a 51-person dot on the map of a state famous for its emptiness. The closest human was more than a mile away, hidden in the cloud of dust that her combine made as it shaved the stubble of the family wheat crop.
The area was the scene of one of the most dubious moments in Travels With Charley. Steinbeck wrote that he and his French poodle, Charley, camped overnight somewhere "near Alice" by the Maple River, where he just happened to meet an itinerant Shakespearean actor who also just happened to be camping in the middle of the middle of nowhere. According to Steinbeck, the two hit it off and had a long, five-page discussion about the joys of the theater and the acting talents of John Gielgud.
Bumping into a sophisticated actor in the boondocks near Alice would have been an amazing bit of good luck for the great writer. And it could have really happened on October 12, 1960. But like a dozen other improbable encounters that Steinbeck said he had on his 11-week road trip from Long Island to Maine to Chicago to Seattle to California to Texas to New Orleans and back to New York City, it almost certainly didn't.
It's possible Steinbeck and Charley stopped to have lunch by the Maple River on October 12 as they raced across North Dakota. But unless the author was able to be at both ends of the state at the same time—or able to push his pickup truck/camper shell "Rocinante" to supersonic speeds—Steinbeck didn't camp overnight anywhere near Alice 50 years ago. In the real world, the nonfiction world, Steinbeck spent that night 326 miles farther west, in the Badlands, staying in a motel in the town of Beach, taking a hot bath. We know this is true because Steinbeck wrote about the motel in a letter dated October 12 that he sent from Beach to his wife, Elaine, in New York.
Steinbeck's nonmeeting with the actor near Alice is not an honest slip-up or a one-off case of poetic license. Travels With Charley is loaded with such creative fictions.
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My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years.
I had a lot of Steinbeck homework to do, and I dove in. First I reread Travels With Charley—and immediately became suspicious about the credibility of almost every character that Steinbeck claimed he had met, from the New England farmers who sound like Adlai Stevenson crossed with Descartes to the archetypal white Southern racist in New Orleans.
Using clues from the book, biographies of Steinbeck, letters Steinbeck wrote from the road, newspaper articles, and the first draft of the Charley manuscript, I built a time-and-place line for Steinbeck's trip from September 23, 1960, to December 5, 1960. The more I learned about Steinbeck's actual journey, the less it resembled the one he described.
The synopsis of Steinbeck's road book is fixed in our culture's hard drive like a mythic TV Guide movie listing. It goes something like this: "Travels With Charley: Novelist John Steinbeck and his poodle spend three months alone on the American road, roughing it and camping out each night like hobos as they carefully document the soul of a changing nation and its people." But after nine months of fact checking and 11,276 miles of drive-by journalism, I can tell you for sure that:
• Steinbeck was almost never alone on his trip. Out of 75 days away from New York, he traveled with, stayed with, and slept with his beloved wife, Elaine, on 45 days. On 17 other days he stayed at motels and busy truck stops and trailer courts, or parked his camper on the property of friends.
• Steinbeck didn't rough it. With Elaine he stayed at some of the country's top hotels, motels, and resorts, not to mention two weeks at the Steinbeck family cottage in Pacific Grove, California, and a week at a Texas cattle ranch for millionaires. By himself, as he admits in Charley, he often stayed in luxurious motels.
• Steinbeck rarely camped under the stars in the American outback. The campout in Alice, North Dakota, wasn't the only fabricated resting place in Charley. Steinbeck also made up the very next night, when he said he slept under the stars in the evil Badlands as the coyotes howled. He couldn't have done that, since that was the same night he was taking his hot bath in a motel in Beach, North Dakota.
• Steinbeck also fibbed about camping alone overnight on a farm near Lancaster, New Hampshire. When a local writer, Jeff Woodburn, innocently went looking for that farm and the Yankee farmer who owned it as part of a 50-year anniversary story, he discovered that neither had ever existed. What Woodburn learned was that in September 1960 Steinbeck had actually lodged overnight at the exclusive Spalding Inn, where hotel management had to loan him a tie and jacket so he could eat in the dining room.
About five nights of Steinbeck's trip are unaccounted for, so it's possible he slept in his camper shell on one or two of them. But virtually nothing he wrote in Charley about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.
Did Steinbeck actually camp out on a second farm in New England or near the Continental Divide along Route 66 in New Mexico? Did he sleep in his camper in the rain under that bridge in Maine? Did he really camp on private land in Ohio and Montana? And did the shy Steinbeck really bump into all of those interesting, quotable, all-American characters parading through Charley's pages? Or did the great novelist make up, embellish, or liberally fictionalize the Canuck potato pickers in Maine, the erudite Yankee farmers, the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the son of an Idaho mountain man who wanted to be a hairdresser, the good veterinarian in Amarillo? Not to mention a full spectrum of civil rights characters, from a Southern white racist to an old black field hand?
Only Steinbeck's ghost knows for sure. Does it matter?
Maybe Travels With Charley should be shelved with Steinbeck's novels instead of in the nonfiction section. All nonfiction is part fiction, and vice versa. It's not like Steinbeck wrote a phony Holocaust memoir that sullies the memories and souls of millions of victims.
From what I can gather, Steinbeck didn't fictionalize in the guise of nonfiction because he wanted to mislead readers or grind some political point. He was desperate. He had a book to make up about a failed road trip, and he had taken virtually no notes. The finely drawn characters he created in Charley are believable; it's just not believable that he met them under anything like the conditions he describes. At crunch time, as he struggled to write Charley, his journalistic failures forced him to be a novelist again. Then his publisher, The Viking Press, marketed the book as nonfiction, and the gullible reviewers of the day—from The New York Times to The Atlantic—bought every word.
Travels With Charley is almost 50 years old. It has its slow parts and silly parts and dumb parts. It contains obvious filler and fiction, but in many ways it is still a wonderful, quirky, and entertaining book. It contains flashes of Steinbeck's great writing, humor, and cranky character, and it appeals to readers of all ages. That's why it's an American classic and still popular around the world.
Still, there's no denying Steinbeck got away with writing a dishonest book. Not only did he fudge the details of his road trip, but he pulled his punches about what he really thought about the America he found. In Charley he fretted about the things he didn't like about American society: pollution, early signs of sprawl, the rise of national chains, the increasing prevalence of plastic. But in private he complained directly about the failings of his 180 million fellow Americans: They were materialistic, morally flabby, and headed down the road to national decline.
If Steinbeck sounds like a liberal who'd been living like a prince in New York City too long, it's because that's what he was. Fifty-eight and in poor health when he set out on his ambitious voyage of discovery, he quickly ran aground on his own loneliness and the realization that our "monster land" was too big and too complex for one man to understand.
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I toured the same sliver of America Steinbeck did, but what I saw in 27 states only affirmed what I already knew: America is big, beautiful, empty, safe, clean, and unfairly blessed with natural and human resources. I met only a few hundred of my fellow 309 million citizens last fall, but to a person they were friendly and helpful. And despite a depressed economy, the gauntlet of beautiful homes and shiny pickup trucks, RVs, boats, and snowmobiles I passed through day after day testified to the democratization of the material riches that the wealthy Steinbeck had decried.
From cell phone towers to Hyundai dealerships and Walmarts, I saw modern things that would have amazed, shocked, or offended Steinbeck. Yet what surprised me most was what might have surprised him most too: how little change has taken place on the Steinbeck Highway in the last 50 years. From the fishing villages of Maine to the redwoods of California to the Mississippi Delta, I drove by hundreds of towns and farms and crossroads that looked almost exactly like they did when Steinbeck passed through.
Steinbeck dropped hints in Charley that it wasn't a work of nonfiction. He insisted, a little defensively, that he wasn't trying to write a travelog or do real journalism. And he pointed out more than once that his trip was subjective and uniquely his, and so was its retelling. Whether that story was true or not, I'm glad I got to take my own strange trip down his highway—and got to laugh out loud in Alice.
Bill Steigerwald (xpaperboy@gmail.com) worked as a writer, editor, and columnist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1980s, the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette in the 199s, and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in the 2000s. His blog recounting his journey in Steinbeck's footsteps can be read at travelswithoutcharley2010.com.
The post Sorry, Charley appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>We Pittsburghers sincerely hope you enjoy your visit to our beautiful city later this week, when you'll be chairing the exciting G-20 Summit that you so thoughtfully chose our city to host without finding out whether we could handle it or afford it.
But please, Mr. President, don't think that the chaotic and barricaded and over-policed city you will see is anything like the real Pittsburgh we know and love.
The summit of finance ministers and central bankers from the world's top 20 economies will be held Thursday and Friday in downtown Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle," the wedge of skyscrapers and priceless old office buildings that sits between the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers as they meet to form the Ohio River.
Usually, Mr. President, downtown Pittsburgh's streets and sidewalks are quiet and peaceful, as in almost dead and without life.
It's certainly not a regular tourist destination for protestors and anarchists from around the world like the ones who, thanks to you, are expected here in the tens of thousands to express their unhappiness with the global economy by disrupting our city and breaking as many windows as they can.
Usually our downtown is not sealed off from traffic and pedestrians like the Green Zone in Baghdad or guarded by 3,000 police in riot gear, as it will be Wednesday evening through Friday. And usually we don't have to show our ID at barricades when we go downtown to work.
We're grateful that federal taxpayers will pick up most of the $20 million-plus tab for extra security personnel. But we hope you didn't pick us to host the G-20 because you think we could afford it or because you really believe, as you recently said, that Pittsburgh is "a bold example of how to create new jobs and industries while transitioning to a 21st century economy."
That sounds sweet to local boosters' ears, Mr. President. But it's not really what Pittsburgh is. In the real world, Mr. President, this city is what urbanists and economists technically refer to as "a basket case."
Its unemployment rate and housing foreclosures are lower than the national average, it's true. And its famously low-low housing prices are stable to slightly rising. But it's all relative.
Much of the rest of the country is in a deep recession after having a crazy housing-driven boom. Pittsburgh's "eds & meds" economy isn't booming or busting: it's stuck in the same stagnant-to-slowly-growing mini-recession we've been in since we pioneered deindustrialization in the 1970s.
The city you chose to host the G-20, Mr. President, is in fact bankrupt and in state receivership because of decades of chronic mismanagement, stupidity, and generous pension deals that previous generations of political hacks promised their employees but couldn't pay for.
For at least the last 30 years, Pittsburgh's power brokers have wasted billions of federal and state tax dollars on a series of destructive urban renewal schemes, redevelopment boondoggles, and wasteful mass-transit projects.
Almost everything new and shiny that you and Michelle will see in downtown Pittsburgh or on its riverbanks was built with government money or millions in taxpayer subsidies—whether it was PNC Financial Service's almost completed downtown skyscraper or the new homes of the Pirates, Steelers, and (soon) the Penguins.
That kind of government intervention may not bother you and your crew of czars. But if you and Michelle get a chance to stroll around downtown this week, look for the big hole in the street in front of Fifth Avenue Place. You can hardly miss it.
That hole—part of a construction site that has ripped up parts of downtown for several years—symbolizes everything that's wrong with Pittsburgh.
It is the downtown end of the infamous North Shore Connector, a 1.2-mile transit tunnel that was built under the Allegheny River to go where the pro baseball and football palaces are. We unaffectionately call it our "Tunnel to Nowhere."
Our wise Democrat and Republican politicians, 1960's-era planners, and mass-transit apologists thought the tunnel would be a swell way to waste at least $600 million in "free" federal and state money to carry fewer than 10,000 humans a day back and forth across (under) the river.
There is much more evidence of city hall's clumsy handiwork around downtown, Mr. President, but it's time to end this note with a simple request. Next time you're looking to "honor" a city with a G-20 summit, pick Chicago.
Bill Steigerwald is a former associate editor at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The post Anarchy in PA appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It'd be politically painless. He'd double-cross no special-interest group. He'd offend no important voting bloc. And he wouldn't have to create a new federal bureaucracy or spend $30 billion to make it happen.
With just the power of his oratory and his yet-untarnished moral authority, our new changer-in-chief could save 7,000 American lives a year, put an end to the physical and mental suffering of another 100,000 men, women and children, and save billions of dollars in unnecessary medical costs.
All he has to do on Jan. 20 is call for the repeal of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. That's the terrible federal law that criminalizes the buying and selling of human organs for transplant operations—and therefore makes it a virtual certainty that the supply of kidneys, livers, and hearts will never meet our demand for them.
Justifications for prohibiting the trade in major human body parts—including that the world's poor will be forced into selling their children's organs to Westerners or people will be kidnapped and have their organs harvested—are largely irrational, exaggerated, or bogus, as an Oct. 11 article in The Economist magazine pointed out.
Meanwhile, the "moral" arguments of the ivory-towered medical ethicists, who think treating human body parts like a commercial commodity is an indignity that trumps saving lives, are indefensible. So is the position of the National Kidney Foundation, which recently lobbied against a bill that would have permitted the mere testing of financial incentives.
The bad news is that more and more patients need organs and legal sources in the United States—altruistic donors, family members, and cadavers—can't possibly keep up. About 74,000 Americans were on waiting lists last year for kidneys alone; about 4,300 (12 a day) died waiting; in 2005, 341,000 Americans were on dialysis at a total cost to Medicare of $21 billion; living donors totaled 6,000 while 7,400 people allowed their organs to be used after they died.
The good news is that, as The Economist reported, doctors, patient groups, and politicians around the world are coming to realize that paying for organs is the only practical and ethical solution. Israel, for example, now allows donors to be paid about $1,500 for lost work time and recuperation.
No one expects Obama to start reading old Cato Institute position papers on how the free-market could provide all the human spare parts the world needs. But he might want to pick up When Altruism Isn't Enough, the new book edited by Sally Satel, a psychiatrist and a kidney transplant recipient.
With contributions from physicians, legal scholars, economists, and philosophers, Satel's book spells out how to design a safe, ethical, affordable, and practical government-regulated system for rewarding individuals for donating their organs to strangers. She also makes the ethical case that we have a moral imperative to do so.
Obama should have Satel's book on his presidential nightstand. And if he wants to know how a market for transplant organs might work in practice, he can call up the leaders of the only country on the planet where donating organs for money is officially sanctioned.
That progressive land—where today there is no waiting list for kidneys, where dying citizens do not have to go abroad to get a transplant, and where since 1988 kidneys have been traded freely—is Iran.
Bill Steigerwald is an associate editor at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. This article originally appeared in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The post Bring On the Organ Market appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Local boosters and most of the equally joyous local media in this economically stagnant, over-taxed and poorly-governed region greeted the "news" like it was a scientific certainty—or like Pittsburgh had been awarded a new Toyota plant. It's not the first time the PR-savvy folks at "Places Rated Almanac" have crowned the former "Steel City" most livable city. It also happened in 1985, just as the region's manufacturing economy was being crushed by the collapsing steel industry like a rusty old car.
Choosing Pittsburgh in 1985 was so shocking, the New York Times couldn't believe it. It parachuted a reporter into Pittsburgh who wrote that "With its breathtaking skyline, its scenic waterfront, its cozily vibrant downtown, its rich mixture of cultural amenities, its warm neighborhoods and its scrubbed-clean skies, it no longer is the smoky, smelly, gritty mill town of yesteryear."
It was a nice plug for the "Smoky City," though in '85 it hadn't actually been smoky for more than 30 yesteryears. Meanwhile, as the Pittsburghers basked in the glory of living in America's most livable city, the region's manufacturing economy was falling off a cliff. In 1985 alone, 38,000 mostly young job-seekers moved away. By 2000, more than 140,000 had left.
Since 1985, despite bleeding people and slowly converting to a sluggish service economy based on health care and organ transplants, the region has always been ranked among the almanac's Top 20 most livable cities. That's mainly because the ranking system favors the area's many priceless assets, which include an abnormally low crime rate, a populace of regular-guy, smart-ass Michael Keaton-types (Keaton's a native), great old city neighborhoods and big suburban homes so cheap they'd make a Washingtonian weep. Pittsburgh also has top universities like Carnegie-Mellon and Pitt, major league sports teams, and a beautiful green landscape of hills, hollows and wide rivers. Sure, pay scales are low and the populace can be a little bigoted, too Democrat, and too working class. The two unofficial regional religions—unionism and Steelerism—can be annoying. And pop culturally, it's at least 5 years behind L.A. But Pittsburgh is a good city to raise a family in, grow old in and die in.
"Places Rated Almanac" bases a city's over-all rank on nine categories, on each of which the Pittsburgh region consistently hits doubles and triples but no home runs: recreation, education, transportation, ambiance, health care, crime, economy, housing, and climate.
"Ambiance" includes historic districts and cultural and artistic assets, and Pittsburgh is amply blessed with them. Its best (i.e. lowest) score was in recreation (21st in the country). Its moderate four-season climate score was worst, but not bad—135th best out of 379 cities.
Being picked most-livable over great cities like San Francisco, Boston, and even overrated Portland, Oregon, is always nice. But the more you know about what's really wrong with this once great and still very fine city, the less you trust "Places Rated Almanac" knows what it's doing.
Maybe its data crunchers secretly grade on the curve for Rust Belt cities ruined by the arrogance, greed, and stupidity of political and corporate power brokers. Or maybe they slipped the city some extra points for having the country's youngest mayor, for winning five Super Bowls, or for pioneering the deindustrialization of North America 60 years ago.
The almanac didn't subtract livability points for the City of Pittsburgh's high tax rates, decades of moronic management, and the millions in subsidies handed to the Steelers, Pirates, and Penguins for their new playpens, as well as to national retailers whose outlets that then went belly up.
Pittsburgh is in a death spiral. It's bankrupt. Its school district spends $16,000 a year per kid. Its parking tax is the highest on Earth: 50 percent. City police and firefighters irresponsibly pad their numbers, salaries, and pensions—and openly trade their mayoral votes for sweetheart contracts. Meanwhile, local school and property taxes are among the highest in the country. So are public bus and taxi fares. And, oh yeah, highways are congested, in bad shape, and under-built.
Yes, Pittsburgh is highly livable. But it's also dying. The region has the doomed demographics of Western Europe. It has fewer foreign-born immigrants and a higher percentage of white people than any major American city. In 1960, when the country had 175 million people, there were 2.4 million people in the metro Pittsburgh region, 1.6 million in Allegheny County and 604,000 in the city of Pittsburgh. Today, with 300 million Americans, the comparable numbers are 2.3 million metro, 1.2 million county and – incredibly – just 315,000 souls left in a city built to handle 1 million.
No matter how flawed or unscientific the almanac's title of most-livable is, beating out 378 cities was great for the morale and civic pride of Pittsburgh, whose thriving civic booster sector will live off the good PR for a decade. Unfortunately, however, a recent U.S. Census Bureau study reported some disappointing news. Since 2000 Pittsburgh has lost more people—almost 60,000—than any other metropolis in the country except for poor New Orleans. But New Orleans' depopulation disaster doesn't count. It was caused by a once-in-a-lifetime act of God and the ineptitude of the Army Corps of Engineers. So unless 50,000 immigrants invade Pittsburgh real soon, it looks like "America's Most Livable City" will soon become "America's Most Leave-able City."
Bill Steigerwald is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
The post Pittsburgh: Livable or Leavable? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>That book was part literature, part journalism, and part sociology; it looked at cities from the sidewalks and street-corners up, not from the Ivory Tower down. Healthy cities, Jacobs argued, are organic, messy, spontaneous, and serendipitous. They thrive on economic, architectural, and human diversity, on dense populations and mixed land uses—not on orderly redevelopment plans that replaced whole neighborhoods with concrete office parks and plazas in the name of slum clearance or city beautification.
Jacobs has no professional training and only a high school diploma. But in the years since Death and Life was published, her "radical" ideas about what makes cities livable have become popular—in some quarters, near gospel. To some extent, this was driven by Jacobs' own civic activism, fighting to protect her New York neighborhood against the city planners' designs.
Jacobs' subsequent books have been just as revolutionary, if not always as widely read. The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) laid out new ideas about urban economics, stressing the importance of dynamic, open-ended growth. Systems of Survival (1992) delved into political philosophy, while last year's The Nature of Economies showed some of the ways economics follows the same principles that govern nature. She has also written a children's book and a book on Quebeçois separatism, and has edited the memoirs of her great-aunt, a schoolteacher in early 20th century Alaska.
Jacobs, who turns 85 this year, is as sharp as ever. She has lived in Toronto's bustling Annex neighborhood since 1968, when she and her late husband moved there from New York City so their sons wouldn't be drafted during the Vietnam War. She's a Canadian citizen, but she was born in the hard-coal town of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Bill Steigerwald, an associate editor and columnist for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, interviewed her in mid-March by phone.
Reason: What should a city be like?
Jane Jacobs: It should be like itself. Every city has differences, from its history, from its site, and so on. These are important. One of the most dismal things is when you go to a city and it's like 12 others you've seen. That's not interesting, and it's not really truthful.
Reason: Unlike American cities, Canadian cities have not been destroyed by the experts and the planners, have they?
Jacobs: Well, they've had some bad things happen to them. They had some terrible housing projects built in Toronto, although we learned later how to do it right.
That's mostly true about Canadian cities, but it's not all peaches and cream. It's really surprising how few creative, important cities Canada has for its size, its population, and its great human potential and attributes. There's a whole region of Canada, the Atlantic Provinces, that has a lot of pleasant little places but doesn't have one single really significant creative city. And the whole area is very poor as a consequence. It would be like a Third World country, that whole area, if it wasn't getting transfer payments and grants of various kinds from the rest of Canada.
Reason: But Canada didn't have the urban renewal problem that America did?
Jacobs: It had a little of it. It also had what Marshall McLuhan called "an early warning system." Urban renewal came to America earlier, so Canada had the advantage of seeing what the mistakes were and could be cautious. Canada had an urban renewal agency for a while, and it did just as badly as the one in the U.S. But it didn't last long, because as soon as the Canadian government saw what a mess it was making, how many fights it was causing, and how much opposition was arising, it just demolished the whole department.
That was the difference. All these troubles were becoming recognized in the U.S., but the government there didn't seem to be able to think, "This is a mistake. Out with it."
Reason: I know some businesspeople begged you to come to Pittsburgh and help fight a big City Hall redevelopment project that would have wiped out two city streets downtown. [See "Death by Wrecking Ball," June 2000.] The huge project has ended, so it's sort of a happy ending. But I'm wondering if, in a general sense, you think the people who control cities have learned the lessons of the '60s?
Jacobs: In that case, they certainly hadn't. That attitude—that you can sacrifice small things, young things, and a diversity of things for some great big success—is sad. That's the kind of attitude that killed Pittsburgh as an innovator.
Reason: And it comes from people who either have the power or the money or both to have their way?
Jacobs: Well, they have their way with the powers of eminent domain, government powers that were intended for things like schools and roads and public things, and are used instead for the benefit of private organizations and individuals.
That's one of the worst things about urban renewal. It introduced that idea that you could use those government powers to benefit private organizations. The courts never have given the kind of overview to this that they should. The time it went to the Supreme Court, back in the 1950s, the decision was that to make a place beautiful or more orderly or helpful, government could do what it pleased with eminent domain. That just left the door open. As one New York state official said at the time, "If Macy's wants to condemn Gimbel's, it can do it if Moses gives the word."
Reason: Robert Moses, the New York City planner and infamous power broker.
Jacobs: Yes. He's an extreme example, but in effect that's what the shift in eminent domain law did. But even before that, it was being done unofficially when what had grown big and successful was used to eat up, or wipe away, or starve what was not. You might as well have no birth rate and then wonder why there aren't people. If you don't have an entrepreneurial birth rate, you don't have new industries and new chances for other successes.
Reason: It seems virtually impossible for the biggest, clumsiest, most unenlightened government to squelch innovation and new growth. It might not come up in the middle of downtown Pittsburgh, but it will come up somewhere else, whether they like it or not.
Jacobs: Sure. Look at the big automobile companies in America and how they didn't make smaller cars, more economical ones that would run farther on gasoline. It took Japanese cars coming in, and German cars coming in. There was a market for them. But they were not being produced and designed by the big, rich, much more successful American companies. Then, when they saw what competition they had, the U.S. auto makers began to produce compact cars. But it sure was innovation from a long way off.
Reason: Do you think that the people who run American cities have learned what to do and what not to do?
Jacobs: I think some of them have learned a lot. There are quite a few cities that are more vigorous and more attractive than they were 10 or 20 years ago. A lot of good things are being done, but it's not universal.
Reason: Can you give me an example?
Jacobs: In Portland, a lot of good things are being done. Same with Seattle. San Francisco has done many attractive things.
Reason: What is it that you like about Portland?
Jacobs: People in Portland love Portland. That's the most important thing. They really like to see it improved. The waterfront is getting improved, and not with a lot of gimmicks, but with good, intelligent reuses of the old buildings. They're good at rehabilitation. As far as their parks are concerned, they've got some wonderful parks with water flows in them. It's fascinating. People enjoy it and paddle in it. They're unusual parks. The amount of space they take and what they deliver is just terrific.
They're pretty good on their transit too. It's not any one splashy thing. It's the ensemble that I think is so pleasant.
Reason: You are against regional planning and metropolitanism, yet isn't an important part of what's going on in Portland the pretty strong powers given to a regional planning authority?
Jacobs: I don't know. You're probably better informed than I am on that. I'm talking about the city of Portland itself.
Reason: The criticisms of Portland are these: By fixing boundaries and limiting growth by government fiat, they are guaranteeing that prices of housing will go up higher within the boundaries of Portland and that traffic will get worse. And this has happened.
Jacobs: Well, my goodness. Portland is not a dense city and never was. Whoever made that prediction, that densifying the city itself would have all those bad consequences, they don't know anything about it.
Reason: I lived in Los Angeles for 12 years. When I moved there in 1977, I just loved it immediately. It was so open and free and full of life and vitality. Not only the people, but there seemed to be a lot fewer rules and regulations about what you could do and couldn't do. Peter Hall says in Cities in Civilization that L.A. was built on freedom, and when I read that, I thought, "That makes sense to me."
Jacobs: Well, it does if you are able to drive a car and have enough money. But only in those cases.
Reason: Los Angeles wasn't too bad for money. My daughter is a lawyer and she had to leave San Francisco because she couldn't afford living there.
Jacobs: It's gotten so popular….
Reason: I remember interviewing the head of regional planning in Los Angeles. He shocked me, because I had grown up thinking Los Angeles was the best example of bad city planning. That it was sprawled all over the place, and it was just a mess, and nobody was in charge or anything. This was 1984, and this guy told me, "Now I have people coming from around the world to Los Angeles to see how we did it, how we established a city that had so many city centers—and not just two or three big centers, but 18." The answer was that no one planned it, obviously. It just happened that way and there is not any way to arrange it to happen in this way.
Jacobs: That's what I say: Every city is different. But don't think that because Los Angeles can do that, and it turned out that way, that every city can be a Los Angeles.
Reason: Some people say cities are destined to become workplaces by day and entertainment centers by night and weekend. Do you think that's true?
Jacobs: To a certain extent. Cities have always had a lot of leisure things that people use after work hours. But there are a lot of people who don't work during the day. Children have short working hours, you might say. There are seniors who don't have a lot of work during the day. I think it's important that there be recreational places during the day, too. Places where people can swim. Community centers. Places where they can bicycle.
Reason: In the city center area?
Jacobs: All over the city. The idea of this strict segregation of hours is fairly ridiculous. There are also more and more people who are working at night. Especially people who work at home.
Reason: A couple of years ago, Jesse Walker, an associate editor of REASON, wrote that your ideas are being seized by the sustainability crowd and are being abused. He wrote, "To the extent that they have digested Jacobs, they have romanticized her vision, bastardizing her empirical observations of how cities work into a formula they want to impose not just on cities but on suburbs and small towns as well."
Jacobs: I think there's a lot of truth to that. For example, the New Urbanists want to have lively centers in the places that they develop, where people run into each other doing errands and that sort of thing. And yet, from what I've seen of their plans and the places they have built, they don't seem to have a sense of the anatomy of these hearts, these centers. They've placed them as if they were shopping centers. They don't connect. In a real city or a real town, the lively heart always has two or more well-used pedestrian thoroughfares that meet. In traditional towns, often it's a triangular piece of land. Sometimes it's made into a park.
Reason: What kind of traditional towns?
Jacobs: You can see it in old Irish towns. You can also see it in towns in Illinois. The reason for it is that the action so often was where three well-traveled routes came together and made a Y. There are also T-intersections and also X-intersections. But they're always intersections that are well-traveled on foot. People speak about the local hangout, the corner bar. The important word there is corner.
Reason: Corner store, corner bar. They're illegal in most places today—certainly in the suburbs.
Jacobs: Yes. The corner is important. It's of all different scales. For instance, big cities have a lot of main squares where the action is, and which will be the most valuable for stores and that kind of thing. They're often good places for a public building—a landmark. But they're always where there's a crossing or a convergence. You can't stop a hub from developing in such a place. You can't make it develop if you don't have such a place. And I don't think the New Urbanists understand this kind of thing. They think you just put it where you want.
Reason: And that people will go there, as opposed to what's really happening—that people are already going there? You're just giving them a place to stop and congregate?
Jacobs: That's right. It occurs naturally. Now it also has the advantage that it can expand or contract without destroying the rest of the place. Because the natural place for such a heart to expand is along those well-used thoroughfares.
Reason: What do the people who run cities have to do now to make their cities into more livable, more interesting places? Is it to remove some of the things they've done in the last 50 years, or just keep their hands off completely?
Jacobs: It's much less a matter of removing things than adding things, I think. For instance, here in Toronto there were two areas of the downtown that were dying. They were in very good locations but they were old industrial buildings that were becoming vacant. Manufacturing was moving out to where they had more room and where it wasn't as expensive. There were a lot of small developers who saw that these nice old buildings were just ideal for converting into apartments. They were lofts, mostly, and you know how popular they've become. But they were blocked from doing anything about it because of use zoning that said it should be industrial. So you can change that use zoning and allow residential.
Reason: But aren't you then just removing an impediment? Some people say zoning is the big problem.
Jacobs: Wait a minute, I haven't finished. It didn't help to change that use because, again, there were so many impediments that went with it. There were rules and regulations about dwellings—especially parking places. And the ground coverage in these areas was high, and you couldn't make basements under these nice old buildings. You couldn't satisfy the parking requirements without fairly well destroying what was really nice about the areas and also making it just too expensive. So no matter what happened, they were blocked.
We had a very intelligent mayor at that time, and she listened to what they were saying. And she wanted to remove those impediments. She talked to everybody who had an interest in the area and they agreed that these buildings should be put to the additional use. But they were all so stymied in their thinking about, How do you make it practical?
Well, you're smart. You've already jumped to the conclusion of what makes it practical—you remove the impediments. The mayor's hardest job was re-educating the planning department, but she did it. They added one new rule, and you might not like this. But it was a very important rule to add: None of the sound old buildings could be destroyed. That was to prevent environmental and aesthetic waste. Otherwise, except for the safety and fire codes, which apply to all the buildings, just about all the old regulations were removed.
Reason: And what happened?
Jacobs: It's magical, it's wondrous, how fast those areas have been blossoming and coming to life again.
It wasn't just removing impediments. It was a use that was missing in the mixture. It didn't replace all the working places. A lot of the working places hadn't disappeared yet, and new ones have come in and been allowed to be added. Also, there are other things that the people who now live there, in combination with the people who work there, can support. The main thing missing in the mixture was added. The same principle you can apply to languishing bedroom communities. What's missing there is workplaces. Here's why I don't like segregation into night things and day things: You don't get the additional things that the workers and the people living there support jointly.
Reason: Such as?
Jacobs: Parking is one of them. No parking lot was built for the big baseball stadium here in Toronto, the one with the retractable roof, because it was figured that there were enough parking places for workers that weren't being used while the games were on. So why build more parking places?
Reason: You would agree that that is a smart way to do it?
Jacobs: Yes. The same thing applies to eating places. People who want to eat out in the evening can use the same places as working people who eat at lunchtime.
Reason: People complain that suburbanites are too dependent on cars. Yet the newest suburbs—the car suburbs, not the trolley suburbs—are so heavily zoned and so carefully laid out. The uses are segregated so much—you live here, you work there, you shop here, you play there, you go to school over here. If you didn't have a car, you couldn't possibly live in the suburbs—because of the way they're laid out.
Jacobs: That's right. Your children couldn't get to school. And they couldn't get to their dancing lessons or whatever else they do. You're absolutely dependent on a car. It's very expensive for people, especially if they need a couple of cars. It's a terrific burden. It costs about—somebody figured it out fairly recently—it costs about $7,000 a year for one car. That's a lot of money, you know.
Reason: I'm a five-minute drive from all the shopping I need, but I couldn't walk it.
Jacobs: Sure, you want to defend the car in those cases. It's a lifeline. It's as important as your water tap.
Reason: You aren't anti-car, are you?
Jacobs: No. I do think that we need to have a lot more public transit. But you can't have public transit in the situation you're talking about.
Reason: You don't literally mean publicly owned transit?
Jacobs: No. All forms of transit. It can be taxis, privately run jitneys, whatever. Things that people don't have to own themselves and can pay a fare for.
Reason: You're not an enemy of free-market transportation.
Jacobs: No. I wish we had more of it. I wish we didn't have the notion that you had to have monopoly franchise transit. I wish it were competitive—in the kinds of vehicles that it uses, in the fares that it charges, in the routes that it goes, in the times of day that it goes. I've seen this on poor little Caribbean islands. They have good jitney service, because it's dictated by the users.
I wish we could do more of that. But we have so much history against it, and so many institutional things already in place against it. The idea that you have to use great big behemoths of vehicles, when the service actually would be better in station-wagon size. It shows how unnatural and foolish monopolies are. The only thing that saves the situation is when illegal things begin to break the monopoly.
Reason: You've said it's a fallacy that jobs are coming out to the suburbs. What about the edge cities that Joel Garreau talks about? Hasn't it changed somewhat?
Jacobs: It has, but it's very uneven as to where the people live who go to that work. The old Garden City idea was that the jobs would be there in the suburbs, in the Garden City. That very seldom happened. For one thing, if you have two breadwinners or more in the same family, they aren't likely to work in the same place. People change their jobs in the course of their life. If they're confined geographically to just the selection there is in their little town, it's tough. It's one reason people move to cities or move to suburbs where they can commute into cities.
It's a fallacy to think that you can eliminate travel by putting people close to their work. In a few cases, they will be. But all the accounts I've ever seen, especially after a lapse of time, they aren't working and living in the same place.
Reason: I remember reading that the hub-and-spoke kind of movement of commuters is not as common in cities. People live in one suburb and work in another, not downtown.
Jacobs: That's right, they can work in another suburb. Exactly.
Reason: Is it a straw man to say that if you live in a suburb, you should work in that suburb? Is that what they really wanted people to do?
Jacobs: That's how they were justified, often, especially the ones that were considered model towns. You really can cut down the need to travel and the dependency on a car, or on public transit, in suburbs. But it's not by trying to hope, much less dictate, that people will work close to where they live. It's by their errands. There's an awful lot of unnecessary travel. If people want to get a quart of milk, they have to get in the car and get it. This is especially hard on children, too, who don't have freedom, even when they are old enough to go on foot to this place and that. It could easily be arranged that you could do almost all your errands on foot. But not so, if—again the question of monopoly comes up—you have to have these monopolies called shopping malls.
Reason: And they are monopolies that are protected by zoning in many cases, right?
Jacobs: Yes, and also at the behest of their developers.
Reason: The fix is in between the developers and the local government?
Jacobs: Yeah, and people have gotten afraid to have commerce get outside of these monopoly prisons.
Reason: Do you think suburbs will evolve into cities?
Jacobs: They'll evolve into something, but I don't know what you'll call them and I don't know exactly how they'll resolve. But they'll thicken up, get denser.
Reason: That solves a lot of problems, I guess.
Jacobs: Sure it does. And that's why those people are crazy when they said what would happen to Portland. It was an argument. They were trying to stop it and they said any kind of baloney.
Reason: There are suburbs in Pittsburgh where the people who run the township, the zoning officers, despise commerce. It's virtually 100 percent residential use—big homes, mostly. And of course there are no granny flats, no corner stores, no duplexes. I don't know if people want to change that. People are happy to be living there. They are some of the wealthiest people in Pittsburgh.
Jacobs: Yes, but now consider what happens with the change of generations. Remember how people despised Victorian buildings earlier in this century? They were just ruthless with them. They were just thought to be automatically ugly and disgusting. Many wonderful, wonderful buildings were destroyed. Well, that was a big rejection of Victorianism. Not just the buildings. There was the feeling that it was stuffy, it was repressive.
There'll come a time when the standard suburbs that you're talking about—even the wealthiest ones—will change. Look at what has happened to very wealthy areas within cities where great mansions turned into funeral parlors, and so on. It'll happen. Just when, I don't know. I'm very suspicious of prophesizing, because life is full of surprises, but I think we are seeing the precursors of the very beginning of the change in the suburbs.
Reason: My parents are still in a 1950s suburban tract home. When we were growing up, we didn't want to live in an old house. Now you'd have to pay me to live in my parents' house, which is just a suburban box.
Jacobs: Exactly. And when this happens, people get absolutely ruthless with the old stuff. Too ruthless, I think, because I don't like waste, and I don't like thoughtlessness.
Reason: When the change comes, if it is an incremental, slowly evolving, uncontrolled sort of natural change, it's easy for society to accommodate that, isn't it?
Jacobs: Yes it is. But if all that zoning is kept, that can't happen.
Reason: This is why I'm one of the few people you've met who likes Houston, because it has no zoning.
Jacobs: It has no zoning. But all the same, it looks like all the places that do have zoning. Because the same developers and bankers who deal with places that do have zoning carry their same ideas when they finance or build something in Houston.
Reason: There are not enough Houstons to change the way things are built or developed?
Jacobs: Right. In fact, places where change does happen are where people face it and really start to overhaul and rethink these things. That's what holds back change—when people don't overhaul and rethink. People are awfully scared of changes in zoning, because they think the neighborhood will go to the dogs and it will ruin their property values.
I mentioned before about this anatomy of the streets, and how if you have the streets that are good pedestrian thoroughfares as part of the anatomy of the heart, those are the logical places to convert from residences, say, to businesses. If the place is really an economic success, that's going to happen. That's not a bad thing to happen, the expansion of the commerce and the working places.
Reason: It's a good sign, right?
Jacobs: It's a very good sign. But you see, if it's in places where that hasn't been thought of, the commerce begins to intrude on the parts of the community that were just meant for residences. Sometimes these conversions are very charming, but usually not. They are ugly and they are like a smear that begins to spread. People look at it and say the neighborhood is going to the dogs. And they're scared of this. But actually, if you have these busy streets that have the kind of buildings on them that can easily be converted back and forth to different uses…the place doesn't go to the dogs.
Reason: The problem is when you lock yourself into one use and never allow it to change, or make it so impossible to change that it'll never happen.
Jacobs: Yes, or that it'll just be an ugly smear if it does happen. I don't think the New Urbanists are thinking of those things.
Reason: Have you been to any of these new towns they're building, like Disney's Celebration in Florida?
Jacobs: I've been to one outside Toronto.
Reason: What did you think?
Jacobs: I was disappointed. The town center is very much a constricted thing unto itself, located as if it were a shopping center. It doesn't have this anatomy. Instead of having parking lots around it, it has a good-sized park, but all the residential streets that impinge upon it are very residential and not at all part of the anatomy of the center.
Reason: The perfect towns we think of, the kind of towns that New Urbanists are trying to reproduce from on high, were developed 100 years ago all across America with very little official kind of planning. How is it people seemed to be more sensible about how towns were not made, but allowed to grow, 100 or 150 years ago, then lost it? What is the secret they knew then that we have forgotten? Or am I romanticizing?
Jacobs: No, that's a very interesting question. They weren't being as ruthless, for one thing. A lot of these towns were ruined, you know. You can see these just awful strip developments.
Reason: I don't know if you think of yourself in these terms, but when they list the 100 most important American intellectuals of this century, your name is on that list.
Jacobs: (Laughs.) It's a little early to say. Usually those things don't mean much until a couple centuries have passed.
Reason: What do you think you'll be remembered for most? You were the one who stood up to the federal bulldozers and the urban renewal people and said they were destroying the lifeblood of these cities. Is that what it will be?
Jacobs: No. If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century, the most important thing I've contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen. This is something that has puzzled people always. I think I've figured out what it is.
Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing, from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes. Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.
I've gone at it two different ways. Way back when I wrote The Economy of Cities, I wrote about import replacing and how that expands, not just the economy of the place where it occurs, but economic life altogether. As a city replaces imports, it shifts its imports. It doesn't import less. And yet it has everything it had before.
Reason: It's not a zero-sum game. It's a bigger, growing pie.
Jacobs: That's the actual mechanism of it. The theory of it is what I explain in The Nature of Economies. I equate it to what happens with biomass, the sum total of all flora and fauna in an area. The energy, the material that's involved in this, doesn't just escape the community as an export. It continues being used in a community, just as in a rainforest the waste from certain organisms and various plants and animals gets used by other ones in the place.
Reason: It becomes denser and more diverse.
Jacobs: That's right, and it is linked with new development, because the new kinds of things that are being contrived are able to feed off of each other. The trouble is, people have always been trying to put development and expansion together as one thing. They're very closely related. They need each other. But they aren't the same thing and they aren't caused by the same thing. I think that's the most important thing I've worked out. And if I am thought of as a great thinker, that will be why.
The post City Views appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>To Pittsburgh's powerbrokers, Lee is just another insufficiently upscale retailer in the city's slowly dying shopping core. It doesn't matter that his store's category-killing excellence attracts customers from around the country. It doesn't matter that a hat shop has been at Headgear's address since Grover Cleveland was president. Lee and the building he leases are blocking City Hall's latest vision. Therefore, they must go.
Local officials call their plan "Market Place at Fifth and Forbes," after the two city streets it would destroy and then rebuild. They intend to tear down a gauntlet of pager shops, wig stores, discount drugstores, and homegrown retailers, and erect a $480-million-plus retail/entertainment center, with 40 high-end national retailers like J. Crew and Virgin Records, with classy restaurants, with chain nightclubs like the House of Blues, with a fancy 18-screen AMC movie theater, and with 1,000 underground parking spots. The aim is to attract suburbanites back downtown to shop and play. About $100 million of the money will come from taxpayers.
This is only the latest plan to redevelop what locals know as the Golden Triangle, the wedge of office towers and older buildings squeezed between the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers right before they meet to form the Ohio. For 50 years, as the region's steel industry collapsed and the city's population fell by half, City Hall has been mounting such projects. Most, like this one, were passed under the cover of blight removal. Most, like this one, threatened to deploy the city's power of eminent domain. And most, like this one, took private property not for public use, as the U.S. Constitution prescribes, but for use by other private entities: developers, professional ball teams, corporate giants looking for a new skyscraper base.
Pittsburgh has no monopoly on what the posters on Charles Lee's windows call "eminent domain abuse." Detroit is using eminent domain law to replace a poor residential area with a more upscale neighborhood. In Indiana, 51 homes have been condemned so General Motors can build a factory to make Hummers. In Kansas City, Kansas, 150 families had to make way for a new race-car speedway. In East St. Louis, Illinois, a perfectly good auto-shredding plant may be destroyed so a nearby racetrack can enlarge its parking lot. In San Diego, property around the Padres' new ball yard is being seized from someone who wanted to build a hotel on it. Who's getting it now? A hotel company.
But Pittsburgh's planners seem to be in a class of their own. City Hall is on a $2 billion redevelopment rampage, and four eminent domain cases now loom. Pittsburgh is way too small to have so many cases, according to Dana Berliner of the Institute for Justice, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest law firm that intends to help local businesses fight the plan if City Hall makes good on its threat to use eminent domain. "Four cases is just ridiculous," Berliner says. "It shows how a willingness to trample on individual rights can completely wreak havoc on a single city."
Behind the plan stand Mayor Murphy and Deputy Mayor Tom Cox, who argue that it's the best way to improve the fortunes of Pittsburgh's demographically challenged retail shopping core. To complete the project by the target date of 2002, they say, the city has to act quickly, buying the existing area, razing the buildings, and selling the clear-cut neighborhood to a single big developer: Chicago-based Urban Retail Properties.
The Fifth and Forbes district is indeed shabby, aesthetically impaired, and at times uncivilized. But it is not a commercial slum: 95 percent of it is occupied, and its sidewalks bustle with activity during the day. Without romanticizing them, and without glossing over their tawdry aspects, Fifth and Forbes are two of the Golden Triangle's last real old-time shopping streets.
At noontime during the week, when office workers fill the Triangle, Fifth and Forbes' sidewalks host a socioeconomic swirl of black and white, poor and rich, old and young, dirty and clean, sane and disturbed. Mothers carrying kids mix with lawyers carrying briefcases. A vendor or two hawk flowers or hats, carefully standing on private property. Vending has been outlawed on the public sidewalks. Add a bum in a doorway, a pusher making his rounds, and a bellowing street preacher, and it's easy to see why suburban shoppers prefer the safety and predictability of their well-regulated malls.
In pre-mall days, Fifth Avenue was greater Pittsburgh's classiest shopping corridor. Not so now. Its businesses survive by serving an unusual customer mix–well-to-do downtown office workers and low-income city dwellers who arrive by public bus and jitney. Its parallel sister street, Forbes, is far funkier–and scarier to suburbanites–thanks to a small but highly visible collection of drug addicts, drug dealers, and homeless misfits. Its crumbled curbs and cracked sidewalks attest to decades of malign neglect by City Hall.
When people say the area's retail mix isn't up to par, they're usually referring to Fifth Avenue's wig shops, pager stores, and gold shops. Those are the expendable enterprises, stores that provoke snickers from everyone with class and taste. Of course, the shops' owners and customers see things differently.
Sook Kay owns Eastern Wigs, one of three doomed downtown wig stores. For 25 years she's made her living selling wigs and women's accessories on Fifth. Her poor-to-middle-class customers come from across western Pennsylvania; as with most other stores on Fifth and Forbes, her clientele is split about evenly between blacks and whites. Half buy accessories, half buy wigs–and no, they're not all transvestites. Many, for example, are women undergoing chemotherapy. "People think wigs are not necessary," says Kay. "But if they don't have hair, they really need one."
The gold shops are equally friendless. No one cares for them–except for their steady customers. David Kashi, owner of Golden Triangle Jewelers, has five or six competitors on both sides of the street, all selling discount gold chains and clunky hoop earrings. But he has obviously figured out how to please his market, which is almost 80 percent black. He's been in business for 12 years, somehow surviving City Hall's street-discombobulating, two-and-a-half-year repair job on Fifth Avenue's road surface and sidewalks, which some merchants suspect was deliberately protracted in order to kill off as many unwanted businesses as possible and make redevelopment seem even more necessary.
Kashi, an Israeli immigrant, can tell you why his business has lasted: "I am the only jewelry store that fixes jewelry on the spot. I am the only one that does body piercing. I sell pagers. I do dental gold cups." Kashi isn't afraid to adapt to change, and he doesn't care what he's selling, as long as he sells. City Hall wants him to move his shop, but there's nowhere else he can go. "It's an established clientele, and after years of trying you are forced to give it up," he says. "You are the bad guy because you are not rich enough."
Then there are Aaron and Bonnie Klein, the first merchants to contact the Institute for Justice. They run Camera Repair, a 60-year-old downtown business doomed by the city's plan. They also own the well-maintained building their shop resides in, near Market Square. The Kleins, who rent their upper floors to a beauty salon and a dental office, were outraged to learn that City Hall planned to use eminent domain to take the building they had bought as an investment for their kids' college educations. The city hasn't even made them–or any other property owner–an offer yet.
"It's amazing," Bonnie says. "Someone can pay a mortgage and pay taxes on a building they think they own, and all of a sudden the city can come in and decide they can claim your building. I think it's a disgrace."
The city's plan offends the district's shoppers as well as its shop owners, adding a current of racial politics to the issue. If you visit the National Record Mart, G.C. Murphy, or Revco Drugs, you'll find the racial mix is about 50-50. The window displays at Bradley's Book Cellar always include the latest books by black authors. The Card Center carries the entire Mahogany line of greeting cards to serve its black customers.
At Headgear, about 70 percent of the customers are black. They are Fifth Avenue regulars like James Hill, a tall, dapper, 32-year-old clotheshorse who lives in the city and rarely shops at suburban malls. When I met him, the radio ad salesman was wearing about $900 worth of clothing, most of which he bought at Fifth Avenue thread shops like Mo-Gear, a short walk or bus ride from his apartment.
Hill says the mayor's plan to attract choice high-end retailers like Nordstrom (which will reportedly demand upwards of $40 million in city money before it comes) and Lord & Taylor (which has already gotten $12 million of city dough) makes no sense. "There is no reason to take away something that has been here and is a tradition," he says. "You don't have to have totally upscale. It means you only want one kind of person downtown. That is discrimination against the underclass."
Unfortunately, neither the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People nor black councilman Sala Udin has stood up for the black victims of City Hall's plan. Udin's district includes downtown Pittsburgh and several of the neighborhoods its black shoppers live in. Asked why he and other minority leaders aren't raising a fuss about the plan's racial implications, Udin hints that it's "a racist misconception" and "stereotypical" to assume that black people want to shop at jewel and wig shops but not at Nordstrom or J. Crew.
Udin says he's willing to risk the mayor's plan, as long as the process is slow and "responsible" and includes as much input as possible from all corners of the public. As for eminent domain, Udin "dislikes displacing one private interest for another private interest." But he also thinks "there are times when the city has to move forward in the public interest."
In its bulldozing simplicity and arrogant certainty, the city's redevelopment scheme sounds suspiciously like the urban renewal disasters of the '50s and '60s. Since 1950, the local Urban Redevelopment Authority has leveled more than 1,500 acres of land. Any Pittsburgher over 40 can name the three poor and/or black neighborhoods that the bulldozers revitalized nearly to death: the Lower Hill District, East Liberty Circle, Allegheny Center. Urban renewal reduced hundreds of acres of these once-vital communities to sterile concrete wastelands, a condition that remains four decades later.
Less well-known projects have damaged nearly 70 acres at the tip of the Golden Triangle. In what are known locally as Renaissances I and II, City Hall and its mostly Republican friends in the area's corporate power structure erected modern office plazas, such as Gateway Center, and city-block-eating monoliths, such as Fifth Avenue Place. They look great on postcards and when Pittsburgh's muscular skyline appears on Monday Night Football. But they also turned huge chunks of organic city into artificial office parks devoid of human street life and retail commerce. History-drenched blocks filled with priceless old buildings were destroyed, along with railroad tracks and warehouses. Hotels, restaurants, scores of small businesses, and hundreds of residences were wiped out.
What's more, the Golden Triangle's streets were ripped up or blocked off for several years in the early '80s while the authorities built the T, the city's absurd three-stop subway and suburban light-rail system. Patty Maloney, whose family has owned several greeting card shops downtown for nearly five decades, claims that the turmoil caused by subway construction was what finally killed off downtown shopping. Stores that once stayed open until 8 or 9 p.m. started closing at 5 or 6.
The Maloneys have spent their lives playing dodgeball with City Hall's demolition experts. Four years ago, for instance, one of their stores was forced to move from Fifth Avenue, where it had been for 38 years, to a building they bought on Wood Street, a road that intersects both Fifth and Forbes. The shop was one of seven booted to make way for a $78 million Lazarus store that City Hall built as a virtual gift for its owners, Federated Department Stores. (Federated got $48 million in public funds, plus a secret sweetheart rent deal based on future sales for the store. This, City Hall hoped, would jump-start Fifth Avenue's retail rejuvenation.) So the Maloneys spent $350,000 refurbishing their new property–and now it's doomed by the Fifth and Forbes plan.
Many of the property owners on Fifth and Forbes are happy to sell out to the city. After all, property values have jumped since the city's plans were announced. These owners will be getting their just compensation, and most will be happy to settle.
But Maloney won't. She's leading a new organization of doomed businesses that has commissioned a gentler plan to spruce up the district without blowing everything up. Nor will landlord Gerald Schiller voluntarily sell out. The Schillers bought three buildings on the corner of Forbes and Wood more than 30 years ago as a long-term investment. The rental income from the buildings, which are now paid off, was to provide them with a stream of annuities and money for college educations. The money they'll get if they're forced to sell won't begin to provide that kind of financial security.
Mayor Murphy hopes he won't actually have to use the city's powers of eminent domain to get the Kleins, the Maloneys, and the rest to move. Usually, he gets his way just by threatening to bring in the law. That's what he did last year to try to force the Pittsburgh Wool Co. to sell its land to H.J. Heinz Co., so Heinz could expand its large warehouse and distribution center (and so the mayor could take credit for keeping about 1,200 jobs here). He's threatened eminent domain proceedings so often, in fact, that he's attracted the ire of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, which doesn't usually concern itself with Pittsburgh's local politics. And it's worked: In his seven years in office, Murphy has had to pull the trigger only once. (In that case, the victim was an adult movie theater that mounted a stiff First Amendment defense. The court battle continues to this day.)
How does the city get away with this? In large part, it's because Pennsylvania's courts have consistently allowed local governments to give private property to other private entities, as long as it's part of an effort to eradicate "blight." And the courts generally trust the judgment of the local authorities when it comes to what qualifies for that designation. As broadly defined by the state's 1945 redevelopment law, blight is essentially in the eye of the beholder: It can be everything from dilapidated buildings to inadequately planned streets to substandard lot sizes. In the last half-century, Pittsburgh has declared virtually the entire downtown blighted.
Bill Robinson, the state legislator who represents downtown Pittsburgh, is pushing a bill that would amend the redevelopment law to include "a more precise definition of blight." His carefully worded amendment includes the sentence, "In no event may private real property acquired by an authority through eminent domain proceedings be sold, leased or otherwise transferred to a private person."
It's easy to get support for gentrifying Fifth and Forbes from suburban editorial writers and others who don't shop on the streets now. To them, Fifth and Forbes are too messy, too ugly–too urban. City Hall and its downtown allies agree. They're too busy patting themselves on the back to notice the damage their wrecking balls have been doing.
But City Hall's plans have opponents from across the political spectrum. There is Rep. Robinson, and there are businessfolk like Maloney. There are historical preservationists, including Arthur Ziegler, the nationally known developer behind Station Square, the former train terminal that is the city's top tourist destination. Ziegler says the Fifth and Forbes plan is "the 1950s revisited" and predicts that relying solely on national retailers is guaranteed to fail. Trying to make the best of a bad situation, he had his influential Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation commission a New York architect to draw up a more sophisticated, commercially diverse, and street-life-friendly alternative. It too would use eminent domain to remove unwilling property owners, and only about 25 percent of the existing businesses would be able to stay. It saves more buildings and adds about 700 residences above the stores; as a bonus, it includes a new Market Hall over Market Square that would be home to food stalls and a rooftop skating rink. Thus far, Urban Retail Properties has ignored these ideas.
A more hard-core opponent is the Allegheny Institute, a pro-market Pennsylvania think tank that's less interested in designing a more livable plan than in stopping the city's power to impose such plans at all. Funded by local billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife (of Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy fame), the institute has organized rallies against the mayor's eminent domain abuse. Scaife's Pittsburgh Tribune Review has also railed against the plan, in contrast to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's relentless editorial cheerleading. The city's two alternative weeklies also strongly oppose the plan.
There are even a few opponents within the city government. By January, the Urban Redevelopment Authority, the City Planning Commission, and the Historic Review Commission–all of whose members are appointed by the mayor–had approved the plan with no squeaks of dissent. Most people expected the all-Democrat City Council to rubber-stamp the plan as well. It's been less compliant than expected, though, with leftist councilman James Ferlo mounting the fiercest fight.
Ferlo believes he can scrape together a 5-4 vote to stop the Fifth and Forbes project. Few insiders agree. They predict most council members will cut private political deals with Mayor Murphy. As of late March, it's too early to tell whether Ferlo will prevail, or if soon only the lawyers will stand between the district and the wrecking ball.
Assuming that the city gets the go-ahead, there's at least one more problem with the Fifth and Forbes plan: It probably won't work. Since the malls came, Pittsburghers have shown a deepening disinterest in the Golden Triangle: About 125,000 people work there by day, but virtually no one but the opera-and-symphony crowd goes there regularly at night. Pittsburgh's nightlife is on the South Side and the Strip District–two neighborhoods largely untouched by city planning. A rebuilt Fifth and Forbes shopping and entertainment playground would have to compete with those districts, with new developments planned for Station Square, and with the urge simply to head home to the suburbs after work. Furthermore, though serious, predatory crime is rare, the bums, pushers, and prostitutes who haunt the area's sidewalks can't be ignored. Their numbers are small, but they are visible enough to drive most suburbanites away.
Even if the Fifth and Forbes project succeeds in resurrecting downtown–a wild crapshoot at best–its costs will be high and many. The middle of the Golden Triangle will be torn up for another three years. At least 62 old buildings, some of them architecturally precious, will be lost forever. Pittsburgh will lose the only shopping market in the center city for poor people and people dependent on public transportation. As many as 1,000 jobs will be lost. And scores of small and medium-size businesses will have to move.
Assuming, that is, that they can find a place to move to, in this downtown that's been steadily stripped of its character and vitality by government planners and their demolition crews.
Bill Steigerwald (bsteige@stargate.net) is a feature writer, reporter, and columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
The post Death by Wrecking Ball appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The children's magazine market is equally vital. Twenty-two national magazines, such as National Geographic World and Boys' Life, exist for preteens, with eight of them having appeared in the last six years. If you include church-and classroom-related periodicals, the number is 75, according to a 1981 article in American Libraries.
Interestingly, the book and magazine industries are near-absolute free markets, thanks largely to their First Amendment protections. There's no government authority that licenses book and magazine publishers, making sure that they serve the children's market or lose their right to make money entertaining and edifying.
Yet a free market in the television industry is the last thing wanted by those who worry about the quantity and quality of kids' TV. When the Federal Communications Commission, regulator of the broadcasting industry in the United States, decided last December to reject mandatory programming requirements for children's TV, kids' TV forces weren't cheering.
They say that allowing a free market to exist in the television industry is tantamount to child abuse. Strict government supervision is necessary, they insist, because "the marketplace doesn't work" for children because "there's no profit in kids." They argue that kids' TV already is nearly extinct on the networks and that it will disappear altogether if the commission isn't around.
It's a laudable goal, more and better programs for children. But kidvid activists have assumed without questions that regulation is the way to secure that goal. They have won some battles through the years, but lately it looks as if they're losing the war.
The current FCC, under free-market-minded Chairman Mark Fowler, is busy "unregulating" the whole communications field. Congress appears to be in a similar deregulatory mood; Sen. Robert Packwood (R–Ore.) introduced a bill last year to recognize the same First Amendment rights for the electronic media as the print media enjoy.
Philosophically, Fowler holds that the government has no right to cajole, threaten, coerce—or favor—broadcasters or cable, that even the purveyors of The Dukes of Hazard have First Amendment rights. Practically, Fowler believes that when given the chance, a free television market can determine and satisfy consumers' TV needs—kids' included—much more efficiently than can lawmakers or bureaucrats.
In agitating for government regulation to continue, kids' TV interests fail to appreciate how the government regulatory system itself has been over the years the major determinant of the quality of television fare. It was the FCC that set up and perpetuated the original three-channel commercial television wasteland. Until recently, the agency often shaped its rules and regulations to protect the economic interests of broadcast networks (so-called free TV) from competition from upstarts such as cable and pay TV.
With such protection from competition, why would the big-three networks scramble to satisfy consumers? In fact, they didn't do much scrambling. The "TV marketplace" that kids' forces claim has failed children was never a real marketplace, and not much about the ability of the industry to meet children's needs should be drawn from past history.
Thankfully, that ancient TV world is gone forever. The returns, in television in general and in children's TV, are rolling in.
Since 1975, when the FCC first started to deregulate the television marketplace, new technologies and entrepreneurs have brought consumers a taste of cable's long-heralded diversity. Today, there are more than 30 satellite-fed basic cable services and 10 national pay-TV channels, with about 30 other networks announced or proposed. Low-power TV, satellite TV, and other known and unknown video forms lie ahead.
There are lots of good kids' shows on TV already. (The problem is that kids—who watch just about anything at any time—won't watch them.) Independent stations air kids' shows; PBS offers more than 30 hours a week; and on cable, the medium best suited in the long run to providing children and other viewing minorities with shows, USA Network carries Calliope and HBO offers Muppet-master Jim Henson's Fraggle Rock. Nickelodeon, with 10-million-plus cable homes, and the Disney Channel, a pay channel, both are whole channels devoted to children's programming.
But children's TV activists seem unimpressed by these early blessings of the video revolution. They narrow their vision to the shortcomings of the networks—those mass-minded dinosaurs-in-decline who've cut back to occasional after-school specials and universally decried Saturday-morning cartoons.
They discount cable because it goes to only 40 percent of all households. Or because it's too expensive (although about $20 a month buys basic cable plus one pay channel such as HBO or the Disney Channel). But does every kid need to have access to the same shows? Then why not the same children's books or magazines or video cassettes?
Television today is no nirvana of "narrowcasting" for kids or adults, and it never will be, with or without an FCC. We'll probably never get enough of the kind of shows that the kidvid interests want or think we ought to have, but it's not clear that we really want or need that many anyway.
The free market—with all its change and complexity and surprises, with all its winners and losers—meets children's needs in books and magazines and recordings and toys and clothes. It can work the same "miracle" for kids in television, if we let it.
Bill Steigerwald has three kids. He is a copy editor for the Los Angeles Times's arts and entertainment section, where a version of this article was published recently.
The post Life & Liberty: A Happy Ending for Kids' TV? appeared first on Reason.com.
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