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On Transportation & Shaping Landscapes, Cities, & Lives
Wednesday, November 22, 2006 at 02:00PM 
What does the interstate have to do with your house or apartment and the food in your fridge? What does the widened state highway down the block have to do with the shape of your town or city? What does the automobile have to do with where kids hang out on the weekend? Why are bus routes a reflection of the quality of social justice? It is these and other questions I have been thinking about while traveling the country for the past few months, checking out cities and towns and seeing how people get around. And I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but you should know right off that even though the word “transportation” might make your head fall toward to the pillow or make you roll your tired-from-commuting eyes, there’s nothing that could be more elemental to the state of your community (or to the lack thereof). The roads—and the routes and the paths, the trails and the rights-of-way—take us away and they bring us home. They make us who we are and they make the places where we live.So on this, my very first excursion, I am off into the past, kind of—to think about where we have been, as corny as it sounds. And then to come back, to return home, in this case to the city, in my case New York. In the morning, I climb into the family station wagon, and in a time-machine kind of way, I set out into the east, to New England’s (and America’s) oldest highways. For help in road explication, my destination on this roads-for-roads’-sake day is a little town in Connecticut—Guilford, the home of Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, and the author of such books as Redesigning the American Dream and Building Suburbia. She is a kind of naturalist of modern road-inspired building, especially with her latest book, A Field Guide to Sprawl. “Words such as city, suburb, and countryside no longer capture the reality of real estate development in the United States,” she writes. Thus, she has given us a list of new ones: logo building, sitcom suburb, zoomburb.
As I set out—in a very tame Kerouacian kind of way—to meet this New England–based diviner of meaning in the interstate existence, I am on a side street in New York City, a street run with row houses, delis, little stores, and restaurants, a street laid out for streetcars and horses, and taken over by the auto. Then on Atlantic Avenue, I touch the border of Brooklyn Heights, the first commuter development in New York City, an 1820s precursor of the suburb—and then in a few blocks I head onto an interstate highway, I-278, a.k.a. the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a.k.a. the BQE. My soundtrack is the news radio station, blaring the traffic report that is the traffic report of all America, the car unifying us as rush-hour beings: “jammed… backed up… starting to move… bumper to bumper.” I drive north, toward the Bronx, to the beginning of what in the mind of many road historians is the first modern roadway, the road that led to the interstate—the Bronx River Parkway.
The Bronx River: How not-at-all bucolic it must sound to the non–New Yorkers of America today, mostly because of the word “Bronx,” a word that is derived from the name Bronck, as in Jonas Bronck, who arrived in the 17th century, and which for many years has been a synonym for urban decay and blight, in many ways because of the interstate highway system. Rest assured that when the Bronx River Parkway was begun, in 1907, it was a bucolic experience, a kind of fancy hike without any hiking. The parkway—like the parkways that would subsequently be built all around the Eastern Seaboard and then in the west—was exactly that: a way through a park, a trip along the banks of the Bronx River, an outing.
The parkway still feels bucolic, if small for a modern car. After a few minutes, I pull off to cut through a suburb, the likes of which are all over the outskirts of cities in America: see Lakewood near Cleveland, or Newton in Boston, the older suburbs that set up along the first train lines out of an old downtown. The Hutchinson Parkway, the next place I am not stopping, was built wider than the Bronx River Parkway, since roads began to kill thousands of people in the 1930s. It is almost a freeway, for the ’30s were also the time of the first freeways, as in free to not stop. The “free” replaced the “park” in terminology and in fact.
As I cross the border into Connecticut, the Hutchinson becomes the Merritt Parkway. The Merritt was built partly to relieve the traffic on Route 1, the old road from Boston to Philadelphia—the oldest road, actually, officially so designated in 1673, when the main mode of travel, aside from foot, was horse. But the Merritt was also built to encourage real estate development: When the area’s property values were faltering, developers believed highways were the answer to their prayers. I stop at a little stone house rest stop befitting a highway that is a National Register of Historic Places; buy coffee from Africa via Vermont; cruise north for a few miles along the Merritt—the banked curves! the beautiful trees! the joy of cruising! the intoxicating and addictive rush!—and then cut through Westport, Connecticut, the sometime-home of Martha Stewart, to reach I-95. I-95 is so not Martha Stewart. I-95 is the longest north-to-south interstate—1,927 miles long, passing from Maine to Florida—and one of the most heavily traveled roads in America. Its rest stops, fast-food places with bathrooms larger than those in most public schools, are the loneliest places in the world.
“Well, I don’t know how you felt driving up I-95,” says Dolores Hayden, just after she pulls up to the Guilford Green, “but I often feel just so dreadfully sad.” She is happy-seeming now, setting out on the green. But then the green is a jewel, a mood-lifting eight-acre plot of public lawn that dates from the town’s founding in 1639. The first Guilfordians, a group of Puritans from England, grazed cattle communally and lived in thatched-roofed houses along the green, a nearly medieval America. Today, to live in Guilford is mostly to commute.
But the green, crisscrossed with paths and dotted with monuments, still works, Hayden points out. High-school graduations are held on the green, and in the fall there is an agricultural fair and a parade of farmers and trades, an actual medieval remnant. “That’s what makes the green seem very important in people’s lives,” she says. “In other towns they’d take a piece to widen an intersection. They’d take a piece to do something else. Here they don’t.” In the very center of the green, you can look past Ben Franklin’s Post Road, past houses from nearly every decade and a strip mall that was added in the ’90s, and you can see the concrete overpass of the interstate, with traffic racing by obliviously. “Sometimes when the wind is just right you can hear it,” Hayden says of I-95, and she sets off on a little walk, a mile or so long, to see what roads have done and are still doing. It’s a walk to where you can’t walk anymore.
We turn on Fair Street, an original street, which is fair. In sight: an 18th-century house with a 19th-century addition and a factory from the 1800s, when labor was close to consumption, when it was close to the labor force, distances that are today crossed by highways and container ships. “It’s condos now,” Hayden says, “and I think [the conversion] worked pretty well.” On Fair Street, the older the house, the closer it is to the road. Once, people wanted to be near the road.
This is a neighborhood that Hayden has photographed from the sky; aerial photography illustrates the pressure the highway puts on a town. “One of the better shots is looking at the size of this strip mall versus the size of these houses. The town has not been as aggressive as I would like in terms of giving people support for structures in the historic district,” she says.
You can hear the suddenly speedy traffic at the corner, and see it on the old Post Road, only two lanes but fast, a race. “Okay,” she says, “now here’s where we get to the point where it starts to come apart. This is where you feel like, if you’re not in your car, you’re making a mistake.”
Here at Route 1 and Fair Street, Fair Street is no longer so fair. On the side marked “historic” is the 17th-century home of Thomas Cooke, still used, the plaque by the door noting that he arrived in 1639 by ship. Kitty-corner is a Sunoco and a Deli Unlimited, then an old school being condoized, then Tommy’s Tanning in the strip mall. “You see, it’s not like everything is going to disappear in one night,” Hayden says. “It tends to just wear away at old neighborhoods. The cars and the trucks invade serenity and change its scale. It’s relentless pressure. This is not an edge to be treated lightly,” she says. “I-95, once you come off it, it bleeds into the town.”
Walking no longer a good idea, we get in Hayden’s car and drive down Route 1, to the land where no one walks, the land that looks like everywhere, the mood changing. We drive into another strip mall, to see the expanding supermarket alongside a Dunkin’ Donuts and various chains. Hayden surveys, sadness creeping into her voice, into her professorial tone. Her car’s blinker is blinking and her head is shaking as she opines about the year the federal government changed the tax code to encourage edge-of-town development and the year that the edge-of-town-development-feeding interstate program was begun, 1954 and 1956, respectively—arcane-seeming dates that made monumental changes to the American landscape. “It [was a] direct response to feeling that the production of suburban housing might be slowing down a little bit,” she says. “And instead of saying, Okay, let’s do more public housing, let’s do more inner-city preservation, they pumped money straight to the greenfield construction of supermarkets, fast-food places, chain hotels. So that’s the worst possible choice in terms of obsolescence, and in terms of moving economic activity out to beyond where the tract houses are and letting everything else go, and the roads just enhance it. That’s what was subsidized. I mean, out of all the money that could have been spent on community planning and decent architecture—it went to bogus, banal, cheap architecture.”
“Yes,” she says, using the words that fill her Field Guide, “the big-box, category-killer, strip-mall office-park stuff just bears down on everything. Once a community that has been around for 300 years has been ripped apart, it’s pretty fragile,” she continues. “It’s gone. You see other towns that are gone, and you see how fragile they can be. A few more gas stations and big-box stores, the scale is gone and there’s nothing left to hold onto, no sense of place—and you can see towns like that all over.”
From Connecticut, or anywhere in New England—or anywhere in the U.S., for that matter—there are a couple of highways to choose from if you are returning (literally or metaphorically) back to New York City, back to the present. You can take the FDR Drive, which cruises down the east side of Manhattan—a multilaned expressway that isn’t always express, due to the number of cars. Or you can take the West Side Highway. The West Side Highway was supposed to be an interstate; in plans it was I-478 and referred to as Westway, but then in the ’80s, when the tide was turning against new interstates and people were protesting what interstates had already done, it was killed. After decades of squabbling, the West Side Highway was made into a different kind of highway—a Lessway, as it is sometimes called. And it is near the corner of the West Side Highway and Gansevoort Street that I meet Andy Wiley-Schwartz, vice president for transportation of Project for Public Places, who is out of the car and who will cross the West Side Highway on foot, and on purpose. “I have some nice things to say about that highway,” he told me on the phone a day before. When I meet him downtown, he stands in the stream of Chelsea pedestrians and is, as a result, cheery.
In fact, I meet him a block away from the highway, at the intersection of Gansevoort and Ninth Avenue, which happens to intersect as well with Little West 12th Street, in a cobblestone square, an accidental piazza that has Wiley-Schwartz pretty revved up—he is an evangelist of the foot. “Isn’t this great?” he says. He’s talking about the place, the street, the intersection. “Watch this,” he continues. “The sidewalk is here but the desire line is there.” “Desire line” is Wiley-Schwartz’s term for the way people really want to walk, despite what traffic engineers suggest. He points from the far corner and draws an imaginary line across the cobblestones at the end of Ninth Avenue, from the French restaurant toward the haute-cool Hotel Gansevoort.
Wiley-Schwartz is an intellectual descendant of William H. Whyte, a writer and researcher who, in the late ’60s, began to study the way people used streets and public places. Whyte analyzed jaywalking, for instance, and the way people greeted each other on the streets, the so-called schmooze—work with charts and time-lapse photography that eventually led to his book City: Rediscovering the Center. “What attracts people most, it would appear, is other people,” Whyte wrote. Today, the Project for Public Spaces brings Whyte’s tools and thinking to cities around the country: to consider parking in Buffalo (where more than half of downtown space had been allocated for parking lots and garages); to the rethinking and reformulation of El Camino Real in San Mateo, California; and to Bryant Park, once a drug dealer’s paradise in Midtown Manhattan, now a lunchtime pedestrian’s oasis. “Organization has been made by man; it can be changed by man,” Whyte said.
“So the sidewalk should be out here,” where he’s walking, explains Wiley-Schwartz. At that, a woman walks from the south, walks the same exact way. “You know, you don’t have to elevate the automobile,” he says. “If you can just get [drivers] to come through here on your terms, then they’ll make eye contact with all the pedestrians and everything will be much safer.” Wiley-Schwartz then makes a point that is the oppo-
site of what the first interstate highway builders had in mind. “The street needs to be designed for all users,” he says. “A street is a public space.”
Wiley-Schwartz comes prepared in cap and windbreaker, toting a biography of famed historian and urban theorist Lewis Mumford, which he has been reading on the subway. And as we stand at the corner of Horatio Street and the West Side Highway, cars are rushing past at 50 miles an hour. “Right here, it doesn’t feel like it,” Wiley-Schwartz says, over the wind, “but I think this is major progress.”
The traffic light changes. He crosses. Three lanes, landscaping, three lanes, another landscaped berm, then a bike trail, a pedestrian trail, a ribbon of parks, and the water. “Of course, it takes a big draw to get people across the highway,” he continues, “and that’s this park.” We face the Hudson River.
For the record, Wiley-Schwartz is not anti-car. He drives. But he likes the West Side Highway for the way it tempts drivers with non-car-related activity. “You have to create an experience for drivers as well, where they understand their part of the bargain,” he says. “People make decisions about mode. Transportation designers think that people are always going to choose their cars. People aren’t given choices. But the thing is, I don’t always drive the shortest way.”
We walk a few blocks south, the Hudson River sparkling on our right, the roadway moving on our left. While critics insist that the West Side Highway will have to be rebuilt to accommodate future traffic needs, Wiley-Schwartz argues that traffic needs are created by the creation of roads and parking. In his Brooklyn neighborhood he visits neighborhood groups who think that the way to solve parking problems is to add parking—this in what he calls “the most walkable city in the world.” “People just don’t get that if you build faster roads and you build more parking, there will be faster roads and more parking,” he says.
We cross the highway, in front of the recently built Richard Meier glass towers on Charles Street. The architecture of the road is banal box stores; the architecture of a park full of pedestrians is beautiful buildings. “Without the park, these buildings would not be here,” Wiley-Schwartz says. From Meier’s own description: “The relative narrowness of the Charles Street site dictates a more contained approach.”
Then we head to Wiley-Schwartz’s office, on Broadway, part of that same pre-I-95 Route 1 that Ben Franklin ran to Connecticut. We cross the Village on Bleecker, businesses thriving in the run of people and slow-moving cars. And then, after another block, and then a left and a right, as the blocks and the streets continue to shrink and nearly hug the walker—i.e., me—we come into the opening at the end of Fifth Avenue, which is Washington Square Park. Wiley-Schwartz stops, points, and I realize my trip into the history of roads is over. “You know, there used to be a street right there,” he says. He is pointing to a wide park entry, to what is now a way to walk, the ghost of the dead street bookended by old fountains. “It went away and the world didn’t stop,” he says.
Stepping out just before dawn in Detroit as the first traffic is assembling on the Edsel Ford Freeway, I am a lonely pedestrian in the city of cars, walking down Woodward Avenue to the center of downtown.
It’s lonely even as the sun begins to rise, partly because of the time of day, partly because everyone knows what Detroit has been through: riots, fires, razings, attempt after attempt to reassemble the city, all mostly failed. You can feel its great automotive success and its civic failures just looking down the struggling avenue, seeing the still-standing core a mile or two down, like Oz. Woodward Avenue—wide and car-loving, an eight-lane tribute to the convenience of the automobile, the device that made Detroit famous around the world, that once made it strong—is lined with monuments to the greatness of the city, along with boarded-up memories of the past, empty lots, scars. Transportation invented the place and, as the power of the car industry faded, as interstates shut off cities and drained their populations, transportation, or the lack thereof, critically injured them too.
A stranger in Detroit might be a little nervous, setting out on foot in the almost dark, given all that’s written and said about the city, given what you see on TV and hear in Eminem songs, but a stranger might also happen to meet a resident who is all revved up, happy to give directions to the downtown square, just ahead a few miles down Woodward. “Oh, you can ice skate there and in the summer they have movies—oh, it’s really neat down there,” she says. “Wait till you see!”
It’s almost a surprise to see new construction in Detroit, but there is the Max M. Fisher Music Center by Diamond + Schmitt Architects, a sparkling modern outpost of the Detroit Symphony, and, just adjacent, there are modern apartment houses going up, glass-and-brick construction that could be in Boulder or San Francisco or Atlanta but are in Detroit. Still, even Detroit residents seem to wonder why I am on foot and not waiting for a bus or a ride of some kind, surrounded as I am by four freeways within about a mile of each other: the Lodge, the Ford, the Chrysler, the Fisher. I pass the site of the old Motown office, at 2457 Woodward, and then crossing the Fisher—a.k.a. I-75—I enter downtown at last, and it’s as if I am entering a heart that has undergone bypass surgery. Some of the most beautiful old skyscrapers in America stand next to nothing at all.
Comerica Park, the relatively new Tigers baseball field, and Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, seem bigger than most ballparks, given their paucity of neighbors. And the car ads seem bigger too: huge building-sized advertisements that fill up office tower–free space, without irony. General Motors, a few blocks away, moved back downtown a few years ago, and it seems both courageous and courteous, I am thinking, when finally I come to Campus Martius, the new centerpiece of downtown Detroit, the center square.
Campus Martius, built in 2004, is everything Detroit wants to be, a magnet, a crossroads, a reenvisioned and reinvigorated public place. It is a brand-new civic space or maybe even an American piazza, though with an Au Bon Pain and a lot of poured concrete, it’s more plaza than piazza. Previously, two dozen or so lanes of traffic flowed freely through here. Now, there is a two-acre oval park that is the centerpiece of the redeveloping downtown—a place for movies in the summer, skating in the winter, for gatherings, for schmoozing—the schmooze being the act upon which all great public spaces are built. Around it stands a tentative collection of old and new and planned but not yet built office buildings. Among them is the new 15-story tower housing Compuware, the software developer that moved to downtown Detroit from the suburbs, as well as those businesses that recognize a good thing when someone else sees it: a Borders, a Hard Rock Cafe, a Ben & Jerry’s.
And right behind it is the People Mover, a two-car monorail-like futuristic train, decorated, when I saw it, with advertising for automobiles, like a joke out of The Simpsons. And the People Mover carries pretty much nobody around the Detroit downtown—more a tourist attraction than anything to do with actual mass transit. Since it opened in 1987, the People Mover has pretty much been the sum total of Detroit’s public-transit system and a metaphor for a city ruined by urban blight, a train that circles over a city no one wants to be in, a train for which people would never, ever trade their car.
The Inn on Ferry Street is a complex of six buildings in the Queen Anne and Romanesque-revival style that sit silently in a neighborhood that was once filled with such homes, and it is here, a few hours later, that I meet Keith Schneider, deputy director and founder of the Michigan Land Use Institute. The Land Use Institute is a nonprofit, grassroots organization that is fighting sprawl in Michigan and attempting to shape development by supporting and quasi-evangelizing everything from watershed protection to farmers’ markets to wind power. It wants to do for Detroit and the state, and even to interested states and counties around the country, what the Marshall Plan did for Europe after World War II—rebuild it. Schneider has just driven a long way, some four hours, for a morning meeting at the Detroit chamber of commerce at One Woodward Avenue.
Though the prosperous and even not-so-prosperous counties of Michigan might not want to hear it, Detroit is, in some ways, the state writ large. It’s a former industrial powerhouse that saw a lot of industrial jobs leave in the ’70s and continuing off and on until now. It’s a state where, as far as regional planning went, highway development was emphasized over nearly everything else—which in turn spawned the growth of tract housing, of development gone amok, of cheaply built though not always affordable development far away from the downtowns that, because of the loss of jobs and the rise of suburbs and exurbs, were emptying out anyway. For that matter, Michigan is like the United States, crisscrossed with roads, its productivity, its environmental health and the health of its populace, its quality of life threatened by past land-use policies based not on sustainable limits but on the idea that a bigger and faster road will make the world a better place.
“You wouldn’t believe how different this place was three years ago,” Schneider says, referring to downtown Detroit. He’s running a little late for the meeting, as he pulls onto Woodward. We pass Campus Martius—the place is filled with people, strolling, coffee-ing, talking. We park, walk two blocks to One Woodward, a 28-story tower built in 1963 by Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of New York’s World Trade Center. The design of One Woodward is so similar to the Trade Center, in fact, that in the big lobby, with the tall glass windows, you can feel the Trade Center lobby in your bones. At a table on the 19th floor, there is a group of Detroiters enjoying coffee and bagels—a couple of Schneider’s colleagues from the institute, a legislative specialist, a professor, a fundraiser, a member of the regional chamber of commerce, a developer with an eye for affordable housing; the former mayor of Grand Rapids is on the phone. They’re talking statewide strategy for smart growth—the creation of the Michigan Transportation Alliance.
It’s a discussion concerning development between Ann Arbor and Detroit. It’s a discussion about the proposed widening of I-75 and I-94, proposals they oppose. It’s a discussion about defining the in-city projects they approve of. “Environmental integrity, social equity, economic development—you have to have a balance,” explains Colin Hubbell, a local developer. The ideas for the city, for the state, for the region all have to do not with getting rid of the car but modulating it, reimagining it as one type of transportation among several.
“The big changes in quality of life come when transportation is ahead of land use,” Schneider adds.
After the meeting, Schneider drives me around to see the lofts converted by Hubbell—a note of modernism in the middle of not much. We drive back through an old, beat-up neighborhood close to downtown where Hubbell has built some less chic but affordable housing: two-family condos rising like spring wildflowers through the snow.
Schneider’s vision for a new Midwest, which he continues to elaborate on as we whip through the city, is based not on fast food and freeways, but on emphasizing itself as a regionally distinct place—a place where, for example, as the institute states, “sales of local farm products [are] a normal part of everyday business … a means to invigorate the local economy, preserve farmland, and highlight the region’s bounty.” Because, as Schneider’s fond of saying, “If roads and highways were the keys to success, Detroit would be Paris.”
In Schneider’s mind, the fate of Michigan has a lot to do with the fate of Detroit. But can changing Detroit into a more transportationally diverse metropolis really make a difference in a state so car focused? For an answer, Schneider and his colleagues point me to Grand Rapids, which is where I am headed that evening. On my way out of the Motor City, though, I get lost on an interstate, miss an exit, find the beautifully reengineered Ford River Rouge plant, discover I am too late for a tour, drive out past more auto plants—some of them still alive, some of them dying—then through more suburbs. I stop late at night for coffee, first at Burger King, then McDonald’s, the only places I can find.
“I’ll go days without ever driving,” Andy Guy, the Michigan Land Use Institute’s point man in Grand Rapids, says excitedly as he sets out with me to walk through downtown. “Grand Rapids is really kind of the model in Michigan right now, of urban revitalization, of transit-oriented planning,” he notes. In 2001, Grand Rapids—once home to trappers and missionaries and the Ottawa Indians and which distinguished itself from
the rest of Michigan, and the rest of the United States, as home to the finest furniture makers in the world—was called one of the most sprawling major metropolitan areas in the country by USA Today. Now, Guy points out the walkability, the new pedestrian signs, and, additionally, what he describes proudly as “the affordable beer.”
Though Michigan has the fourth highest jobless rate in the U.S., the Michigan Land Use Institute sees opportunity in the economic downturn: Attract new jobs near population centers, and build a public transit–oriented infrastructure on which a recovery and a 21st-century economy can grow.
We walk through downtown, with Monroe Avenue full of people, a warehouse district full of remodeled factories and lofts, and up on the hill a huge new medical complex under construction signaling Grand Rapids’ intent to attract health-industry jobs. “The way that we develop is essential to how we compete in the global marketplace,” Guy says. “If we just look like anyplace else, who’s going to want to live here?”
We cross a street, and walk toward the Grand River, which is filled with fishermen today. In a matter of minutes we arrive at the brand-new transit center, Rapid Central Station, with its well-lit, white-tented top. Guy points out the bus routes, noting the system’s strengths and weaknesses—it does not go to the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, for instance, an incredible greenspace. “There are still some pretty significant cultural amenities that we can’t get to on a bus,” he says. He points to the map. “This is a pretty serious highway, and you’d have to be crazy to cross it.”
We walk some more, crossing the river where once there were rapids, passing the fishermen, seeing the new YMCA, a circle of glass; Guy waves to a friend. We walk to the library, where he is greeted by a librarian and chats a while. We walk to the local bookstore. We look at the construction site for the new medical complex. “I can sit here with a can of beer and just watch,” he says, clearly relishing the fact that in Grand Rapids you can feel the future—or at the very least a future. It may be wishful thinking, but as you walk through town, following the new signs, seeing the new buses, noticing the people on the street who are out of their cars—and even those still in them—you feel an actual change in the air, a place becoming a place again.
On to Chicago, the capital of the Midwest! Drive and drive and drive through Michigan and across Indiana, on a toll road that the governor has just leased to a private company since the state, he says, can’t manage the costs. I drive through Gary, Indiana, its neoclassical public buildings on one side, its old black factories on the other. I drive through the swamps and marshes and deserted industrial outposts that are the borderland between Chicago and the rest of the world. I drive for a while on the old four-lane road from Gary to Chicago, now desolate, except for a few strip malls, and think: Slow isn’t so bad.
I wake up early the next morning, in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood, to run the three blocks to the lakeside trails, watch the dawn burn the fog, buy a coffee and the papers, and, two L stops to the north, have breakfast with Mandy Burrell, a writer who works with the Metropolitan Planning Council, who lives in this L-based neighborhood.
“There’s a ton of interest in living downtown now,” she says, walking in off Addison and Southport, a two-minute walk from the L line. And so much of the interest is based on what Chicago has—and has had since 1888 and the rest of the country now appears to want, or something like it, anyway: the L, short for elevated, as in elevated trains. Today, the lines are being rebuilt by a city government constantly pushed by a population that is craving alternative forms of transit, and the neighborhoods in the city near the stations are desirable because of those stations. “We’re starting to see a lot of hot neighborhoods,” Burrell says.
After coffee, we walk down Southport, joined by one of Burrell’s colleagues, Heather Gleason, who studied housing for the council and is currently a zoning expert employed by the city.
Chicago is a city that gets it, as far as urban planners see it. Or is getting it, anyway. For instance, what Carl Sandburg once called the “stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders” is now seeming very green, right down to the top of City Hall, which is covered with grass, since the mayor planted a field of green on top in 2001, the year Boeing moved its headquarters from Seattle, after Boeing officials described Chicago as a place they wanted to live. Walking through a neighborhood like Lakeview, you can see why an executive would like it and why a nonexecutive would too. There are new shops and nice old bars, fancy coffee places and an old restaurant, boutiques and a bar/Laundromat, surrounded by new and old buildings and still-affordable apartments; the housing is two and three stories high, the residential street an antidote to the tall skyscrapers downtown. The new townhouses are adjacent to the 100-year-old ones and neither appears to mind.
“They’ve managed to blend new buildings in,” Campbell says. “You don’t notice it right away. You don’t say, ‘This is new brick.’ Now, there’s three new buildings in a row.” These structures built right next to the L are not the most beautiful buildings ever constructed, but then again, you don’t have to be Frank Lloyd Wright to build in such a vibrant place. The city throws you into the mix; your work is improved by association, a point made as well by the desolate new buildings in Detroit.
The L isn’t just something that gets you through the city; it is a way you experience it. “I’ve sort of charted my understanding of the city by how many lines I’ve been on,” Burrell says.
We climb to the line, the train, the rickety wooden platform that feels like Chicago, where we part ways. To stand on the platform, to look over the neighbohood, to see the Midwest sky: The L seems like such a relic, a thing from an old painting or documentary photograph from the ’20s. It’s easy to imagine that people would want to sit in an air-conditioned car rather than rumble along in work-destined groups. But people flock together semi-willingly that morning and every morning for that matter: Chicagoans seem to love their old L. But Chicagoans also love their new L, like the Rem Koolhaas–transformed L stop at the Illinois Institute of Technology, now a futuristic passageway, a glass-and-steel halo over the everyday experience, over the trip to work and school and, nearby, the White Sox. That’s the thing about transportation: The new can seem very old very quickly, but if you go back to it, if you tweak it and spruce it up just a little, if you concentrate on what really worked and go back to it once more, then the old isn’t old anymore. It’s new all over again.
After the car, after the train and even the subway or the elevated or the various variations on the train theme, we Americans are frequent fliers, and our airports, it seems safe to say, define us as much as our highways do. We fly all the time, no big deal, even if it is amazing, when you think about it, and flying in America, not to mention the world, has also meant an airport lifestyle, an alternate transportational world that is like an alternate universe to the everyday driving lives we lead.
And what do we have to show for it? Not a lot, aside from stacks of concrete in the form of terminals and airport parking lots. We have long halls of polished floors and wall-to-wall carpet along which we find fast food. We have long lines of passengers-in-waiting, people pushing each other past ticket takers, where they race to squeeze into small seats only to wait again. There are, though, a few bright spots, which is why I’m flying to Austin—in particular Bergstrom International Airport, an airport that in trying to be a public space the public can be proud of, in attempting to be a place that has something to do with Austin rather than no particular place at all, shows what most other airports are doing wrong.
After some coffee and the paper and a talk with a flight attendant who recalled driving across the country ahead of Hurricane Katrina, dark rain clouds never quite catching her, the plane descends into a gray day, the green of Texas’s Hill Country suddenly surprising me from behind the clouds. We land and taxi slowly. When I deplane, I hear music on the airport’s public address system, just as I pass a poster in the jetway: “Welcome to Austin, Live Music Capital of the World.”
The natural light of a cloudy day fills the terminal, shifting as the smoky cumulus shifts. The dark industrial windowpanes are offset by light wooden panels. “The city council wanted lots of glass,” says Charles L. Tilley, an architect with PageSoutherlandPage, who worked on the airport in 1993, as he walks with me through the place. “They wanted it to be friendly, open to the skies. And of course the airlines didn’t want that at all.”
The other thing about the terminal is that you, the passenger, can see where you are going—all the way from check-in to gate. “That’s how it was designed,” Tilley says. “It’s called intuitive wayfinding.”
We pass an American Airlines flight to St. Louis while walking down the corridor and then a Continental flight from Vermont. And, naturally, we pass food. But this is not LAX with a choice between McDonald’s and something similar; this is not Dallas and Pittsburgh and La Guardia with Au Bon Pain. This is Austin’s airport, where chain stores are not allowed.
At the Hill Country Bar & Grill I meet two city employees who work at the airport, Nancy Coplin, the airport music coordinator, and Matt Coldwell, the coordinator of the airport’s public art.
“When it comes to traveling, this place has the ambience,” Coldwell proclaims proudly. “This airport makes traveling by air a pleasure.”
“We don’t have elevator music,” Coplin says, explaining the abundant pleasures of Bergstrom International.
“And another thing we don’t have,” Coldwell says, “is carts.” He stops talking, and we listen. “You haven’t heard a large cart beeping. This is designed more like a train station. This is my idea of the St. Louis train station in the 1920s.”
And like St. Louis in the ’20s, Austin is a city at its peak. Thus, Austin’s airport succeeds not because of how fast you get through it, but because while passing quickly through it, you want to be slowed down for just a minute. There is the efficiency of intuitive wayfinding coupled with the desire to linger, as if the train won’t be boarding for a while, as if it were a time of restaurants, as opposed to take-away counters and cafeterias.
The public art, as Coldwell will attest, is the other part of the draw. The work of local artisans has been incorporated into the construction of the airport: There are the forged steel handrails by Lars Stanley, for instance; the terrazzo tile floor in baggage claim that maps the streets of Austin and the rivers of the state by the Lawrence W. Speck Studio. There’s Jimmy Jalapeeno’s oil paintings of the Austin-area wilderness, on the main concourse, near the security checkpoint. And most spectacularly, there is Thomas Evans’ Hill of the Medicine Man, a 100-foot-long mural that can knock you over in the early dawn, when you haven’t had enough coffee and you are wondering about the land outside the windows. It’s a painting of an Austin landmark that was a landmark long before Austin was there. It’s a kind of direct artistic flight to Enchanted Rock, a giant batholith just outside of town.
Austin is treating the airport as a public space—and as a kind of town center, as opposed to a back door—and recognizing that our public spaces are less about standing still and more about movement, or transportation. “We are the front door to Austin, and we’re supposed to show the character and nature of Austin,” Coplin says.
“I feel the fabric of life in Austin at the airport,” Coldwell says.
“It’s mingled,” says Coplin. “It’s intertwined.”
“We almost choose to have an airport lifestyle,” Coldwell continues. “People come here more than the library. In some ways, this is an airport town.”
Air travel is up about 10 percent recently—a record-breaking 743,000 passengers traveled through Bergstrom in June—so there is a three-person-long line when I eat lunch at the Salt Lick, great barbecued chicken. I just barely avoid having a second helping of Amy’s Ice Cream, ice-cream-sandwich flavor. Down near gate 21, I listen to Joe and Ellen, brother and sister musicians and new arrivals to Austin from Tulsa; they are set up in the corner playing a set on one of the airport’s three stages. “We’re going to do one more original song and then a ballad and then we’re going to take a short break,” says Ellen. “We hope you have a safe flight today.”
A more primitive transportation alternative to airplanes is the auto and more primitive to that is the bike. In Austin, I board a plane with my bike helmet in hand on my way to go biking in Albuquerque, an award-winning bike town, biking being a non-car mode of transportation that planners are pushing more and more in cities, towns, and even suburbs. To bike, I am boarding a Southwest Airlines flight. It’s my first time, and the open seating and slightly cheaper ticket prices feel a little like market capitalism meets a cattle call, though cattle are served food—the seating is like the pack at the Tour de France. At some point, I feel like wearing my bike helmet.
We are soon up and looking back on Austin, the hills flattening to the Great Plains, with a threatening storm ahead. We land in Albuquerque and I take a cab downtown to the Hotel Blue, where I wake up early the next day to walk the streets of the city center, old buildings and lots surrounded by renovated storefronts and brand-new apartment buildings. The Southwestern style is partly a result of the vernacular adobe architecture and partly a remnant of railroad and tourism boosters in the early 1900s, who sought to lure Americans to an exotic vacation spot, “an American Orient.”
I take a bike rack–equipped bus up the old Route 66—bus number 66, not coincidentally. The bus is clean, and the bus driver patient with a visitor’s fare questions. People nod hello, and near my seat, I notice a small compartment, sponsored by the public library, meant to hold books to read while riding. I get off a mile or so up from downtown, in front of the Frontier Restaurant, an Albuquerque landmark adjacent to the University of New Mexico, where I sit for a few minutes with Chris Wilson, the J. B. Jackson Professor of Cultural Landscape Studies at the School of Architecture and Planning.
Albuquerque is, according to Wilson, the service center to Santa Fe’s entertainment zone, the local architecture taking influences from the mythic Southwestern past and from the economic desires based on health care and high-tech. “There’s been a real quickening of public debate over how the area’s developing,” Wilson tells me. And it is developing a lot, downtown being something of a poster child for New Urbanism. Though, as a breakfast with Wilson will tell you, New Urbanism has its roots in old urbanism: The old plazas are what the new ones want to be, full of people working, shopping, hanging out.
Wilson, it should be noted, generally bikes to work, and Albuquerque, it should also be noted, generally gets good marks from bikers. And though Albuquerque is spread out, and though it gets (very) hot in the summer, it is a great bike town, as is attested to by Julie Luna, the president of BikeABQ, whom I also meet at the Frontier. By nine, with Wilson headed to the school of architecture’s ceremonial groundbreaking, Luna and I are headed downtown, me borrowing her boyfriend’s bicycle. “I just think you see the city in a different way,” Luna says.
The different way you see the city is slowly, and riding with an everyday biker is like riding with one of the city’s best friends. Bikers are instant architectural critics, accidental experts in urban planning. They feel the success of a street’s design; their legs appreciate a city’s geography. “No other neighborhood in Albuquerque has houses quite like this,” Luna says, as we cruise down Edith Boulevard, a designated bike route: some touches of adobe, some 1950s tract, some 1990s garage-obsessed designs, all meticulously kept, the street draped with shade trees. Just a few cars pass us cautiously when we stop at Copper and Edith to look at these particularly Southwestern-seeming Craftsman houses, part wood, part brick, and, at the crest of an arroyo, a modern home of glass and poured concrete—sometimes, it’s tough to tell whether the neighborhood makes for the bikeability, or bikeability makes the neighborhood the way it is.
We coast down another arroyo, crossing under the railroad tracks into the heart of downtown. Luna takes me to the new transit center, and shouts with excitement when we see the new commuter train being tested—a line that will soon link Albuquerque and Santa Fe, a double-decker train, with wireless Internet, with coffee, with access for bikers. Around the country, a city’s attention to bikes seems to mark its attention to transit in general. We head back toward the zoo and the city park, along the Rio Grande, and look in at the old train yards, ruins where rumors say a movie studio might end up, and back in the neighborhood of small, low houses, little yards decorated with plants and sculpture.
“Whenever I drive,” Luna says, “I can’t believe how different the city seems. You go by everything on the main arterials, and everything moves by so fast. When I’m biking, I get to be in the little neighborhoods and on the side streets and go slow.”
She comments on the need for more bike racks as we lock up in front of city hall, where she takes me up to the office of Jim Arrowsmith, the city’s bike planner.
Arrowsmith is tall with a relaxed smile, and he rides to work on most days, a six-mile trip from south of the city along a recreational bike trail, called the Riverside Trail. “I try to do a leisurely pace,” he says. Arrowsmith tours me through the bike programs, bike maps, bike-awareness programs, plans for new trails. New building developments are required to conform to city bike standards. There is a street-sweeping machine dedicated to bike lanes. The city maintains a bike locker program. “Primarily, what we’re trying to do with our bikeway system is connect the neighborhoods and the residential areas with our employment areas,” he explains.
Arrowsmith wants to show me more of the system than I can ride, so we throw my borrowed bike in the back of his car and drive. We circle the city and peruse the bike trails, and eventually come into the north Valley, through a mix of expensive ranches and small farms and old houses with beautifully ramshackle, handmade coyote fence. A field of lavender waves in the breeze from the Los Poblanos Inn. We get out of the car at the Paseo del Bosque recreation trail, a popular trail along the Rio Grande, which trickles through town; even on a weekday it’s full of bikers and the occasional walker. And you can sense just from these people passing by that this stretch is where people want to be and, if possible, live—the trail means a lot to them. Trails can do that.
Imagine if, in the near future, you could fly to Indianapolis, capital of car-racing America, and abandon your vehicle and tour the city just on foot, on purpose. Imagine if the city built a hiking trail not off into the woods or out to the city park, but right through downtown. It’s an idea that is so radical as far as civic transportation goes that it sounds a little crazy, but that’s what Indianapolis is building, an eight-mile bike and pedestrian trail that circles, in a zigzaggy way, in and through downtown Indianapolis—a trail that links neighborhoods and business districts, that would allow you to hike in the street. This is the plan, and this is the trail that is in the first stages of planning, a separate trail out in the street that is not quite a sidewalk, not quite a traffic lane, a $50 million redesign of how people might use a street. When Brian Payne, president of the Central Indiana Community Foundation, a nonprofit community group that is the lead partner on the trail, imagines the trail, he knows that the transportational stakes are high, since no city has tried this before, since they will be redesigning the downtown of the third-largest Midwestern city. “If you screw it up, you’re going to set everybody back by 30 years,” he says.
Touring the trail is an act of imagination at the moment: You have to imagine the markers, the pavement that is tiled or patterned somehow, the path as it is engineered through busy intersections—which is why Payne picks me up at the airport and drives me the ten minutes to downtown. The wide highway carries us onto equally wide downtown streets. “One of our problems is that we do too good a job of getting people out of town,” he says. “They’re going too fast to notice anything. I’m one of those people who does 50. No one does 25, because the capacity is there to do 50.”
But then, in one right turn, we are in a small neighborhood of Victorian houses and cobblestoned streets, a neighborhood that I have, on previous trips to Indianapolis, completely missed—the kind of neighborhood Payne hopes that the trail will help highlight. “Too often Midwestern cities look to the west and east and say, ‘What do we need to copy?’ Well, we don’t need to copy anything—we don’t want to copy. We want to be unique. I mean, we’ve got to concentrate on what’s unique. That’s what New York and Chicago do so well.”
As we park at his office, Payne describes his eureka moment, the day he was walking the Monan Trail, a hugely successful rails-to-trails project that runs on an old rail line out of Indianapolis to the north. “I was walking the Monan,” he says, “and I thought, We could build an urban version of this right downtown!” At his desk, we pore over a map of downtown, and he shows how the trail would link neighborhoods—it’s as if there would be a hiking path through SoHo, then onto the East Village and down to Chinatown.
With Gail Swanstrom, the director of marketing and communications for the Central Indiana Community Foundation, we start out near the American Legion headquarters, a vast mall in the center of the city, a beautiful war memorial that is like a miniature of the Mall in Washington, D.C. (The downtown of Indianapolis was designed by Alexander Ralston, who as an apprentice helped French-born architect Pierre L’Enfant design D.C.) When Payne takes people around, he is amazed at how many people have never seen this Beaux Arts view of their own place. “I grew up in San Diego, lived in Santa Cruz. I’ve studied cities most of my life. And we’ve got a great downtown. And yet the rest of the world doesn’t know anything about us.”
We head down Walnut Street, to see the old church about to change—to go co-op, to condoize. “People are selling condos,” he says, “on the basis of being on the trail.” I ask if the trail’s potential success kill people’s chances to afford to live near it. Payne points to Fall Creek Place, a downtown neighborhood with an affordable mix of historic and new housing, where residents agree to stay for five years and not turn the place over for sale. “Indianapolis is a community that watches over itself,” he says.
The centerpiece of the trail—and the town and my trip—is Monument Circle, the very center of the city, as designed by Ralston, and bustling with people and cars. The soldier on the 284-foot-high war monument faces south, to troops returning, and around him are buildings of all eras, from chain stores to the symphony’s headquarters, the Art Deco office building, the old Christ Church Cathedral.
In completing the loop, we move along a straightaway section of the proposed trail to Fountain Square, a neighborhood full of vintage stores and old sandwich places and artist’s studios and small galleries that have lately closed quickly upon opening. “Things start up and they get going but then they can’t keep it up and they close down,” says Payne. He sees the trail as helping gallery owners stay open—outside the main square, it feels beat up, cut off from the city center by an interstate. At lunch at a Greek restaurant, Payne talks about his hopes for the trail as an economic development tool and as a tourist destination. He talks about how he envisions it being used. “Eighty percent of all users will be walkers,” he says.
We end up downtown on Massachusetts Avenue. We pass by galleries and shops and pass through a little alley through which the trail will be built. We end up at the beginning of the Monan Trail, where the idea first hit Payne. I’m amazed at how determined he is and at how much he enjoys touring his own city, without any car at all. I’m amazed at how much I really like Indianapolis, after previously having only driven through it. I’m appreciative of him taking time off to tour what is not yet there.
California is the West, and on the metaphorical road to America, the West is the future: The West is the place that the United States has always been heading for. That’s why after spending a few months traveling around America looking at transportation and at how it has affected and is affecting the way we live, I head at last to California and the West Coast to think a little about transportation’s future.
I first travel to Los Angeles to explore the future of the car with a Californian who loves his cars—Syd Mead, the eminent industrial designer and futurist, who after working in Detroit for Ford, designed vehicles for the films Blade Runner, Aliens, and Tron. To say that Mead cherishes cars is an understatement. For instance, he has recently reacquired (thanks to a fan) the 1972 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron four-door hardtop that he first drove from Detroit to California. “This is style,” he says, referring to the LeBaron. “Of course, gas was then about 35 cents a gallon, people didn’t drive such long distances to work, and the whole economy was actually logical.”
As a guy who loves his car, Mead is in the right country. In the U.S. the number of cars now exceeds the number of humans in a household. Even if you don’t own one, cars matter, given that our country is at war in the middle of the oil-producing portion of the world, and that cars severely pollute as well as drain limited and politically costly resources. So it’s baffling that, in terms of gas consumption, cars have barely changed in almost a century. (The Natural Resources Defense Council notes that the Model T got about 25 miles to the gallon when it started out; in 2002, the fleet of American-made cars averaged 24.6 miles to the gallon.) Which is why the state of California has partnered with fuel and car-manufacturing companies in the California Fuel Cell Partnership, or CaFCP, an organization of the Big Three car manufacturers, government agencies, and energy and fuel-cell technology companies working together to bring cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells to the market.
“All cars had style,” Mead goes on to say, as we drive away from his home in the Pasadena hills. “A Pontiac never looked like a Buick. Cars today are commodities.” We are in his 2005 Cadillac, a car he considers technically advanced and “a joy to drive.” “The ‘styling’ insults the term,” he continues. “It is an absolutely bland, commodified approach to enclosing up-to-date technology in an obscure, arbitrary shell.” We’re driving to the Long Beach Convention Center for a hydrogen convention—hydrogen being an element that the car industry (as well as the Bush administration) is betting will be an antidote to the world’s impending oil shortage. At the Hydrogen Expo, we will be test driving tomorrow’s hydrogen car.
On the floor of the expo, Mead and I first see a hydrogen-powered Honda, which looks a lot like a regular Honda, except that when you open the cover of the gas tank, you see a connection that looks like something on the back of your computer: an electric nipple. In electrolysis, electricity is used to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen; in hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, electricity is produced during an electrochemical reaction between hydrogen from a tank and oxygen from the air, water vapor being the only by-product released by the exhaust pipe. “Nothing’s free,” a hydrogen-fuel-pump salesman explains. “You put energy in and you get another form of energy out.”
It sounds clean, and it is clean. The problem is isolating the hydrogen, an element found everywhere but, problematically, always attached to something else. Thus, hydrogen fuel is either made by electrolysis with water (a lot of water, though not as much as the petroleum industry uses to produce gasoline, pro-hydrogenists argue), or by running super-heated steam through natural gas or methane gas, which breaks the molecular bonds and allows the hydrogen to be released and stored. The result is hydrogen as a compressed gas that you’d keep in a canister in the back of your car. This is the reason that all the gas and chemical companies are at the Hydrogen Expo, as well as the reason that Mead and I spend a lot of time talking to the guy selling the new kind of hydrogen pump.
A hydrogen car is not difficult to imagine: just an Hµ tank under the backseat. Hydrogen pumps, however, are more complicated, and here in Long Beach there are conflicting visions. In 1956, in Cloquet, Minnesota, Frank Lloyd Wright built a gas station that doubled as a civic center, thinking that gas stations would be community hubs in the 21st century and not seeing that, with only speed in mind, we would want only coffee and pastries. With hydrogen, the fueling station might become a solar-powered electrolysis operation sitting in the middle of a cul-de-sac, fueling an entire neighborhood.
“I can see a condominium complex having one of your units for all the members,” says Mead.
“Yes, yes!” says the hydrogen-fueling-station salesman. Stations that run on natural gas are being used experimentally in New York state to fuel cars. “People were not satisfied with electric cars,” a Honda hydrogen-car salesman tells us. “On the flip side, they loved filling up at home. They liked doing it while they slept.”
Out in the lot, Mead is generally unimpressed with the hydrogen cars, which look like gas-fueled cars. “Technology has to go into it in a value-added way,” he says. “The style here is besides the point.” We drive a Nissan SUV, which looks like a regular Nissan SUV. It is smooth and quiet, like an electric car but more powerful. We drive the Audi, which feels great, fantastic really. “This is the fastest one out there,” says an Audi employee.
“Well, the torque curve is very good,” says Mead, which impresses me because I don’t know much about torque.
“I like the Mercedes,” Mead says. It’s my favorite too, as we zip around downtown Long Beach a few more times then head back out in Mead’s Cadillac, to wait longer still for the car of the future. On my way to the airport, in a tinny rental car, I stop at one of those gas stations that makes me feel like I am holding it up: The modern L.A. gas station is all about speed and security. Topping off the tank, I feel hopeful for the future, even if it’s not a hydrogen future. I feel good about the possibility of communal fuel supply, of a shared hydrogen fuel pump in the neighborhood, powered perhaps by a solar panel, the residual power used by the community for heating or hot water. We can’t reverse the environmental damage caused by cars, but maybe we can reverse the community-destroying aspect. Maybe we’ll all be sharing fuel and vehicles one day, which brings me to the future of the giant city and transportation therein.
When hydrogen cars have at last arrived, or electric cars have taken over, the city—or the idea of it at least—will expand. Currently, land is developing seven times faster than the population is increasing, and by 2050 it is thought that 307 million Americans will live
in eight “super cities.” And whether people want it or not, whether we have clean cars or dirty ones, this unbridled urban sprawl will require more mass transit, like BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit system.
I enter the BART station on Powell Street in San Francisco and head to Berkeley. The ride is nothing like that of the elevated trains in Chicago; the spacious, carpeted interior seems luxurious to a New Yorker, though it is loud to the uninitiated, along the lines of a small jet. On my right, a guy in black pants and a white dress shirt reviews papers. To my left two teenagers are talking and laughing—about the ride!
We arrive at the Downtown Berkeley station and I exit to the street. I’ve come to Berkeley to meet with Elizabeth Deakin, the co-director of the Center for Global Metropolitan Studies and the director of the University of California Transportation Center, and she knows enough about land use and transportation that it really means something when she praises BART’s essential fabric-of-life success. Part of its success, Deakin explains, is the acceptance of the idea of dense and diverse populations in the Bay Area—in a country where density is often disparaged. “You have to think about cities as big, vital places and places you want to have,” she says.
Development is happening in cities all around the country. Condos are going up everywhere, but most are expensive to the average income earner. “We’ve got to make it possible for people to live with us and not just slink off somewhere after work,” Deakin says. And it’s not just BART that makes the system. Buses connect neighborhoods, linking employees and employers and intertwining income levels. Deakin calls the bus “the real workhorse and backbone of any transit system.” She asks: “How do you make transit work for everyone?”
As BART extends into the Northern California countryside, planners are attempting to encourage transit-oriented development, but it doesn’t always work. Deakin sends me off to see where it has—first northeast, to Walnut Creek, then southeast to Oakland’s Fruitvale stop. On my way, I keep thinking of Deakin’s parting words, spoken along the stream that runs through the small woods in Berkeley’s campus: “More and more, to have an urban policy you have to have a rural policy.”
At the Rockridge station, I hop on a northbound train, which races along the middle of the highway, bypassing heavy afternoon traffic, and cuts through the Berkeley hills. As I leave the urban-seeming stations of Oakland, I begin to pass stations set up in what not too long ago was farmland—the BART stops at Orinda and Lafayette seem to be nothing more than giant parking lots. The BART system began in 1964 and has now become a tool for coordinating the megacity, to make way for more Chicago-like neighborhoods throughout Northern California, rather than cover it all with cul-de-sacs, or strip malls and parking lots, as has been done in so many places between San Jose and San Francisco.
When I first get to Walnut Creek, I think that I am in for another park-and-ride experience, but the little town, a BART-accessible village in a pretty, still-green valley, shows the surest sign of people rushing and communing: a hot dog stand. Crossing a Walnut Creek street is not like crossing the street in downtown Berkeley, which is pedestrian friendly, but it’s doable, if a little lonely. As I stand at a traffic light alongside a gas station whose shrubs are in the shape of the letters “USA,” I am joined by two men in work boots, speaking Spanish. When the light changes we only have a few seconds. “Loco,” one of the guys says, as we jog to beat the lanes of anxious cars. The semi-modern transit-oriented downtown is a little desolate at times, but for the most part feels alive: Cars park at an angle, traffic moves slowly, side-street restaurants thrive, pedestrians wander, posters at the Arts Center advertise the weekend’s events.
South on the train to Fruitvale, which was once a blown-out section of Oakland but now—as evinced by a soccer game and its many spectators—is happening. At the station, people are everywhere, and there’s a brand-new commercial development, linking a plaza and the adjacent business districts, via Avenida de la Fuente. It’s a Hispanic neighborhood: Around me, everyone is speaking Spanish. “Curandera y consejera” says the psychic’s sign. Old bars and pawn shops stand warily alongside new development; across the street are a busy dental clinic, a nonchain pharmacy, and a luggage store. The station is full of people, so that it’s sad to leave. If a stranger feels camaraderie in a place he’s never been, imagine how the place might feel for a local! And it’s amazing how different my perception of this BART stop is, given that it is all just a different configuration of concrete and roadway, of wallboard and windows. The BART train nourishes the human activity, the pedestrian drama, which in turn inspires more of the drama, making me feel as though good places can be made, making me want to stay for the farmer’s market.
But I have to catch a plane north, to Oregon. BART takes me right to the San Francisco airport, hills populated by houses that, despite what the old song says, don’t seem so ticky-tacky.
For the last leg of the transportation road, I grab the light rail from the Portland International Airport into the city’s downtown, a place that has been revised over the past few decades with transportation in mind. Portland’s light rail works great, though never has a transportation system done so much to the scorn of so many. The light rail in Portland is a beacon of hope for cities and their planners. Yet anti–public transit experts continue to argue that Portland’s light rail does not work, that it is riderless and ineffective, and that its development is irrelevant. These people have obviously never lived in Portland. This evening, the MAX train, as it is locally known, is pleasantly (if you ask me) crowded as we pass through fields and an undeveloped station toward the highway, where we’ll ride alongside the interstate into downtown. In the morning, I catch a bus near Pioneer Courthouse Square, the 17.
You can put your bike on the front of a bus in Portland, which is a good way to get to a farm, which is where I’m headed, Elizabeth Deakin’s words still ringing in my head: “More and more, to have an urban policy you have to have a rural policy.” The bus traverses through Northwest Portland, an area made famous by Gus Van Sant’s film Drugstore Cowboy. The industrial district remains such, and out beyond more factories, the bus picks up St. Helens Road, named for Portland’s still-active volcano. To my right is the Willamette River and to my left, Forest Park, a vast inner-city park that connects the downtown woods to the mountains and serves as a corridor of water and unpaved life, a highway for things nonhuman. There’s a gas station and a feed store, and farms are now visible to the right, still only ten minutes from hyperdesigned urban espresso shops and grocery stores. The bus drops a biker off at the bridge to Sauvie Island, a big island in the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers, and it’s just a few country miles past farms of all kind to Ford Farms. Here, if you are lucky, Kristin Ford, who sells beef to Portland restaurants and cider around the country, arrives in either her Ford truck or her farm-dirty Mercedes, fresh from a delivery—at which point she walks you out into a field to meet the cows, which are grazing a little less than 15 miles from downtown.
There is no statistic that celebrates this farm-to-city proximity, no number that points to farm-to-city-center convenience in an area that, according to the U.S. Census, grew by a modest 4 percent between 2000 and 2004, though there are lots of other accolades. Portland has been showered with superlatives of all kind: Bicycling magazine named it the best biking city. AmericanStyle called it the tenth-best arts city in the country. Forbes called it the 20th-best place to do business in the U.S. It’s the best city in America to have a baby according to FitPregnancy.com (even if the school system was nearly defunded in the ’90s). It’s the best walking city in America, as per Prevention magazine, and a group studying sustainability called it one of the best cities equipped to handle an energy crisis. But if I were handing out awards, I would compliment Portland on its accessibility to farms via public transit.
The city and the country are linked—this is what I see again, here at the end of the road—the mutual relationship. At the moment, 18 percent of all farmland in the U.S. is located within metropolitan areas. Urban threatens rural, even though rural keeps urban alive. Portland has worked to control growth, the reason, in part, for a whole new small city in the Pearl District: The city’s Urban Growth Boundary, as the regional government calls it, has come under fire by building interests, who want it moved out, who say the influx of population needs more, who argue that planners just like the look of farms, that it’s an elitist choice. But after you tour the country for a year or more, you see that a healthy connection between the city and farms is not just for the aesthetic benefit of the city dweller who wants to take a long bike ride past a country farm, or the rural cider maker who wants to go to a play or have a drink. The city’s survival depends on the survival of its greenways and watersheds, for its food supply, for life.
“I hope it’s always like this here,” Ford says. But of course, there is a good chance that it won’t be. Farmland in the U.S. is disappearing at a rate of two acres per minute, by one estimate. And why? For roads. And homes near new roads. And roads that will spawn new road-needing homes. And yet, the last time someone worked out the math, the average item on the average American dinner table travels 1,300 miles from farm to plate. According to the GrassRoots Action Center for the Environment, 17 percent of all fossil fuel used in the U.S. is consumed by the food-production system. Then there are the pollution issues associated with the increase in amount of packaging to send food traveling, not to mention that farmers generally make less selling hundreds of miles away than they do locally. With all our connections, with all our highways, we remain disconnected.
In the past ten years, Portland has expanded, engorged, put all its goodness at risk. Traffic’s bad—no question—and congestion has increased. But for all that you can still drive (or bike) out of town on the weekends and get to the mountains, which are not completely condominiumed, thanks to regional planning, thanks to governors who cared. It seems absolutely clear to me that the place would be a mess had there been no public transit in place. Portland is like everywhere in the U.S. where there is uncontrolled growth and more affordable houses that come at a cost not listed in the closing papers—in commuting hours and gas prices, in watershed destruction, in the loss of local farms, the ultimate price of which is health and sustenance.
In the end, the way you get around, the way you get your food, the way you commute has everything to do with the place you live. For a lot of years, we have been so preoccupied with getting there, with building an interstate system and then building our local roads to look like I-80, that we forgot about what we were leaving behind. Our jobs, our safety, the physical happiness involved in going for a walk around the block have in many places just disappeared. Fortunately, it’s not all gone, and we’re starting to realize that we can’t get there faster or even at all if there’s no place left to go.
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