utterly opinionated

Four hours and forty-one minutes outside Pittsburgh, anger slapped me in the face.  How ridiculous is this, I thought.  Only two hundred and thirty-three point eight miles in four hours and forty-one minutes?  If I were flying, I’d almost be in Paris.

While we fuss about better transportation inside our city, we are missing the boat (or the high-speed train).  Who cares about a slightly better connection between Downtown and Oakland?   We need a better connection between us and the rest of the world.  Right now it takes a startling twelve hours to go by train from Pittsburgh to New York.

A train that moves at just one hundred miles per hour would not only make it possible to get to New York, DC or Philadelphia faster, but would also open a flood of opportunities for Pittsburgh.  More jobs for those who live in our region, spread over a wider geographic area.  More opportunities for businesses located in Pittsburgh, with ready, fast connections to other places.  More.

Come on now.   Who’s working on this?

I was disappointed.   And then I wasn’t.

Every month Kim, Sara & I host a cityLIVE! event.  We are interested, as we believe our audience is, in understanding issues that impact our city and region.  We are interested in holding a forum that allows everyone to attend.  And we are most interested in nurturing a thoughtful exchange of ideas.

And so last night I was disappointed.  Some people came to our event with their minds made up.   They intended not to listen to others.  They did not intend to exchange ideas.  The resulting conversation was bitter and cruel.   “Answer the question” they shouted when they didn’t like the answer they were given.  Some even challenged the location of the venue, the legitimacy of the panel and the sincerity of the speakers.

Admittedly, the topic we chose was an emotional one — the fate of Pittsburgh’s Civic Arena.  Should the Igloo be demolished or should it be saved? This iconic building, a spectacular remnant of the Modern Movement, has a sordid history.  It was built where a vibrant neighborhood once was.  It left behind it a wake of blight and devastation as big as a Tsunami wave.  The Hill District, a predominately African American neighborhood, still lies in ruins sixty years later.  Lingering bitterness and mistrust accompany the physical devastation.  Mistrust of black for white.  Mistrust of everyone’s motives.  MISTRUST.  I did not understand this clearly until last night.

The event and the tense exchanges left me feeling unsettled, as if somehow the questions we’d asked, the issues we’d raised, the panel we had so carefully selected were irrelevant next to this much bigger issue.   I felt like an impostor in the room.  I heard clearly that I had no right as a white woman to have a say about the fate of the Igloo.

This thought rankled with me.

How can a civic building belong to one neighborhood or to one group of people?  How can it’s future lay in the hands of politicians who will soon be gone?  This building and it’s history is far bigger than that.  Its fate should be decided by Pittsburgh’s people – ALL of them.   As the event came to a close I felt very alone with these thoughts.

Then something remarkable happened. A steady stream of people came to thank me.  Emails followed.  How unfortunate that not everyone understood the nature of the event, they said.  The Igloo is important to us too.   We want an opportunity to be educated, to help decide.   We want to hear other perspectives .  We want to be involved.

So many voices, thinking just what I had.  And with every voice, the disappointment faded.

The next time someone tells you that Pittsburgh is losing population, yell at them.

For the first time in 19 years the Census reports that the number of people migrating into the Pittsburgh region in 2009 exceeded the number migrating out.  The remaining tiny population loss of 434 people last year is accounted for by more people dying than being born.  We are still a very old region.

So get busy.  Lets young up and shake that “really old” title as well.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a weekend bicyclist, “might consider keeping his head down and his helmet on” suggests the Huffington Post this morning.  ”A backlash is brewing over his new bicycling policy.”

LaHood blogged that he is ending the era of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.   “The new policy has vaulted LaHood to superstar status in the bicycling world. Bike blogs are bubbling with praise. A post on Ridemonkey.com calls him “cycling’s man of the century.” The Adventure Cycling Association’s Web site calls LaHood “our hero.” says Huffington.

He’s my hero too.

Black is de rigeur in Paris

Black coats, black boots, big black scarves, and even black hair.  Black is as certain as the methodical parade of grey stone buildings on every Parisian street. Paris wears black well.  Tres chic.

At home the exuberance of individuality is as messy as the backdrop of our chaotic buildings and streets.  Black hair is eclipsed by blond, red and even purple strand.  Colorful clothing abounds.  Gaudy sneakers encase happy feet.

The elegance of Paris and its inhabitants pleases me.  The exuberance of my fellow Americans puts a smile on my face.

Remember this story?   Mon dieu!  You don’t have to spend $1010 on a trash can.

I love the pragmatic simplicity of Parisian trash cans.  A short steel post, with a ring at the top, bolted to the sidewalk with a plate.   The bag is held in place by an enormous, sturdy, bungee cord.

Get a local manufacturer to make these and I’ll bet they won’t cost much more than $50 a piece.  In Paris, you don’t have to walk much further than a block or two to find one.   They don’t take up much space, and the bag is simple to replace.

When did we start to believe that trash needed an architectural masterpiece to house it?     Admittedly, this solution was born as a safety measure, after trash cans became a great hiding place for bombs.  I love this solution.  Bombs can’t hide in clear plastic bags.

Bring it on!

Its my third coffee shop of the day and I’ve overdosed on coffee so this time I ordered tea.  Tea and a palmier.   I sat down around 4:30 and by 4;45 the coffee shop was packed.  Teatime, coffee time, snack time.  There is no other time as busy as this.  This is when the stores shut for a few hours and everyone takes a break before the evening rush.  Very civilized.

Unlike coffee shops in Pittsburgh, mine is the only computer in sight.  Parisians take their breaks seriously.   And unlike coffee shops in Pittsburgh this one caters to everyone.  The youngest person I see is 1 and the oldest is probably pushing 80.

Paris is a dense city.  There is not much space here.   Streets are narrow and crammed with cars.

A typical parking space in Pittsburgh measures twenty feet long by eight and a half feet wide.   This smart car fits into a space just nine feet long.  I measured it.   Fill a city with tiny cars and there’ll be twice as many parking spaces.

I’ve been sleeping through the winter.  Paris has woken me up.

24 hours ago I arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport, caught the RER metro into central Paris and settled into my tres petite chambre a coucher.   Tres petite.   Very un-American.  Lured here by a free room and a cheap ticket I thought what better way to emerge from the winter, but five days in Paris?

When I travel to a city I always promise myself that I will hit several museums and the important sights, but I should know myself better.  Once I start walking I am lost in the streets and there is no stopping me.   I cannot help myself.   Time inside seems time wasted.

On this trip I decided to focus on Le Marais, on the right bank of the Seine, and perhaps one of Paris’ most interesting neighborhoods.   My Eyewitness travel guide says this about Le Marais.  “ A place of royal residence for centuries, it was abandoned to the people during the Revolution and descended into an architectural wasteland, before  being rescued in the 1960s”.   Such a description cannot keep me away.  It takes an hour to walk there from my hotel and an hour back, but the journey is part of the adventure and it helps to burn off the endless food temptations along the way.  Tomato and mozarella pressed “sandwichs”,  crepes filled with nutella and wrapped in paper and lots of cafe creme.  Past the Jardin du Luxembourg and a school with children screaming in the playground, past scooter stands, markets, through the streets of the Left Bank, across the Ile de la Cite and then I am almost there.

This morning I set out after eating my petit dejeuner of french bread, croissant and hot coffee.  As I walked I absorbed the simple adaptions to life that Parisians have made in this very dense city.

We can learn from this.

Read on …

cityLAB is going to pop Pittsburgh up in some other cities.  We are hosting a one-day creative event (a charrette) at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture in Pittsburgh. Designers, architects, artists and wanna-be artists will work in teams to design a pop up that describes Pittsburgh best.

Not sure what a pop up is?   Come and find out at 10 am.

Creative and itching to design?  Stay on and we’ll assign you to a creative team.

Curious and got a point of view?  Come to the presentations at 2:30 pm and join in the critique.

Questions?   Email me at eve@citylabpgh.org.  We’ll be working in the College of Fine Arts Building at CMU, Room 214.

Everyone is welcome!

Our bus stop shelters are as dreary as January in Pittsburgh.  While they may be utilitarian they are quite pedestrian and uninspired.   The essential bus stop sign hasn’t even been integrated into the shelter.   It stands all alone, attached to a nearby post or pole, an afterthought.  What a shameful solution for a bus system that has more riders than most other cities in the US.

Santa Monica, on the other hand, is celebrating its bus system   Last year their Big Blue Bus Agency awarded Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects and Bruce Mau Design the Big Blue Bus Architectural and Branding Package.   These two internationally recognized firms were charged with the job of exploring how public transportation has the potential to cultivate, enrich and connect the community.

Their joyful solution, “The Blue Spots” takes the dreary out of bus stops.  Eventually, these flexible blue shelters will be implemented at 360 stops.

Ours or theirs?   You pick.

Every city needs its angels, and Los Angeles has plenty of them.

It has been several weeks since I returned from Los Angeles.   My trip there as a panelist for an American Institute of Architects SDAT was a rich, if exhausting, experience.  Three intense days there bred a familiarity I will never shake off.  I know downtown Los Angeles now.

Whenever I make one of these trips I expect to discover a city that is somehow better off than Pittsburgh.  I expect to find a city that somehow has its act together. Los Angeles, after all, is the second largest city in the United States covering almost 500 square miles.  In 2008, it was named the world’s eighth most powerful city by Forbes.com. Full of significant architecture, with a rapidly growing residential population it is easy to imagine that downtown Los Angeles should be the envy of every other city.

And yet, like most other American cities, it is rotten at its core.   It is the hole in the donut.  It has some serious problems to overcome.

Politics keep its nine districts distinctly divided, reinforcing the already existing and striking differences between them in both architecture and population. A civic center with great building stock, historic Broadway with a vibrant ethnic community, Skid Row with a sad and unwanted population and a manufacturing district, unheard of in most downtowns, essentially all ignore each other.   Its streets are wide, fast and disruptive, a convict population continues to be discharged at alarming rates into the city center, and the economy has stalled the growing residential population and is endangering the vitality of historic Broadway.

Like every other city one needs to look beyond these physical issues to really understand it.   Here, just like in Pittsburgh, I met a group of passionate and hopeful people all working tirelessly towards improving their downtown.   They are not elected officials.  They will not be paid for their work.   This is their neighborhood and they have claimed it.  They are the city’s angels.

Who knows better than them what the problems are?   Who knows better than them what the potential is? If I were Mayor of Los Angeles I would let them rise up, craft their vision and give them the resources to fulfill it.

I came home happily, eager to see Pittsburgh’s beautiful downtown again.   Our problems seem small now compared to Los Angeles.  Yet one is the same.  Our angels, plentiful and passionate, are all too often ignored.

Just back from Australia, with my internal time clock still off kilter, I’ve turned around and headed back to Los Angeles for an intense, but fun, three day project.  The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has invited me to participate as a panelist in an SDAT in Downtown Los Angeles.  What an honor.

The SDAT program is a national community assistance program sponsored by the AIA that focuses on the principles of sustainability.  SDATs bring teams of volunteer professionals together to work with community decision-makers and stakeholders to help them develop a vision and framework for a sustainable future.

For me, this is more fun than a vacation.  I get to spend 3 days in a city I don’t know well and discover every corner of it.  And then I get to think about how to make it better.

Our panel is peppered with smart and interesting people.    An architect and preservation specialist from New York, a neighborhood and governance expert from Seattle, a downtown manager from Oklahoma City, Washington State’s bike/pedestrian/transportation planner, a streetscape and open space designer from Seattle and me, urban guru from Pittsburgh.

For three intense days we will immerse ourselves in the good and bad of downtown LA.  One day will be spent outside, touring, seeing and absorbing.  Another day will be spent meeting with downtown stakeholders -  advocacy organizations, government departments, politicians, neighborhood groups, the transportation sector and plenty more.  A veritable sea of faces.

And on Friday, from early morning until our evening presentation to the public, we’ll prepare our report here and hope that our efforts will have been worthwhile.

Sleepless in LA, but loving it.

Richard Florida ranks it as a  city “where the kids are heading”.  Melbourne, the second most populous city in Australia, with 4,000,000 residents, has also been ranked one of the top three most livable cities in the world by the Economist Group’s Intelligence unit, since 2002.

The most Important criteria for ranking cities on this list are safety, education, hygiene, recreation, political-economic stability and public transportation.  I’m not sure I’d choose to live in a city based on these rankings.  My criteria might look a little different, and certainly, right at the top, would be cuisine.

More than any other metric, the fact that 34.8% of Melbourne’s population was born overseas has the biggest impact on this city.  This is the reason I’d choose it as a place to live.  This percentage far exceeds the national average, already high at 23.1%.  It’s easy to guess this.  The by-product of this percentage is the large number of ethnic restaurants, clustered in every neighborhood and flavoring every street corner.

Flavoring my trips home.

Visits with family members are interspersed here with visits to restaurants and food markets.  Lebanese, malaysian,  vietnamese, turkish and greek food, each meal better than the last.  Fresh food readily available in abundance from every corner of the world.  A melting pot of food and people that is hard to imagine. With the diversity of people comes a diversity of talent.  Once you have lived it, it is difficult to live without.

This week I fly back to my adopted home, Pittsburgh.  Only 5% of our population was born overseas.  We are missing out, big time.

While I write this at four in the afternoon, in Pittsburgh the day I have just enjoyed has not yet dawned.

A week ago I made my way half way across the world.  First, bright-eyed,  from Pittsburgh through Minneapolis St. Paul to Los Angeles.   Then, bleary-eyed from LA to Melbourne in Australia.  Every time I make this journey I am determined to spend the horrendously long travel time well and at first I do.  I read, I write and I work.   By the end of the first fifteen hours, when I board the plane from LA to Melbourne, my resolve crumbles and the remaining hours are spent dozing while watching bad movies.

When I arrive I fight my way through the fog of jet lag (ferocious since the time difference is sixteen hours) to reconnect with my parents, my sisters and my nephew.  Family visits crammed into two weeks always leave me feeling dissatisfied.  They are both too short and too long.  I vow I won’t eat too much so I don’t have to wrestle the pounds back off when I get home.  But the food is a reminder of the home I grew up in. For two weeks I am tempted by the tastes that I cannot take home with me.  Milk bars, laksa, licorice, ginger beer, turkish bread and tropical fruit are all stronger than me.

Although I am Australian by birth, by now I have spent half my life in America and I am caught forever in between.  My strange half Australian half American accent  marks me.  Interesting in my adopted town.  A defector in my country of birth.  Quizzical looks wherever I go.

A few years ago I set about finding a way to fit in on these visits to Melbourne.   The trail that runs beside my sister’s house loops its way through and around the city.  This has become the starting point for my visits.  Two days after I arrive, my head still slightly foggy, I pull out her ancient bike and cautiously ride down the trail that was once unfamiliar but now belongs to me.  Here I fit right in. On a bike my strange accent is barely noticeable.

Here, on the trail, I am surrounded by people of every ethnicity.  This is where the people of the city congregate, on its trails and in its parks.  This is where differences fade away.  Just like in Pittsburgh.

This weekend I helped a relative move into a pretty little house in Cranberry.  She had finally found a home just 2.5 miles from her job.   Since she likes to walk  I assumed her days of commuting by car were over.  But I had forgotten this fundamental thing about the suburbs.  There are no sidewalks.

 “I’ll drive” she said.

I thought about this as I drove short hops through Cranberry that day.  My errand list required me to drive from one shop to another.  As I became more and more frustrated at my inability to walk even the shortest distance to the next one, I recalled that not every home I have lived in has had a sidewalk in front of it.  Once I was complacent about this issue.  As I have aged I have demanded this simple necessity.  I can’t live my life without a sidewalk.

My sidewalk connects my front door (and me) to so many things that are necessary to my life.  I can walk from my door to a bus stop, or to a supermarket, a drug store or a department store.  When the traffic is too vicious I can ride my bike on a sidewalk to feel just a little safer.  When my children were young I could wheel their stroller on my sidewalk.  I taught them to ride their trikes and bikes there too.

My sidewalk is a place where no vehicles are allowed.  I can feel safe there.  I walk to my mailbox at night with the street lights overhead lighting my way.   Trees, planted at regular intervals, shield me from the sun during the day.  Sometimes my sidewalk will have newspapers for sale, or a bike rack, a bus stop or a cab stand.  My sidewalk, in downtown Pittsburgh, is so very used, and so very full of life and so very connected to everything.

Cranberry has no sidewalks.

This, I venture to say, is the way that the majority of Americans live.  Without a sidewalk.  

Perhaps the path to sustainability is simply a concrete one.

Scott Bricker of Bike Pitsburgh at Union Station

DC loves its bike commuters.  

Four million dollars were spent to build this stunning, all glass, “smart building” right outside Union Station.   A membership parking garage, the facility will house 130 bicycles in 1600 s.f. of space that includes lockers, changing areas, a retail shop and bike repair and is heated and cooled passively.  Members will have 24/7 access and the station will be staffed 66 hours per week.    

If you live outside DC, you can park your bike at the station, commute in and troll around town on your bike.   

I want one of these in Pittsburgh. 

We deserve it, don’t we?

What’s different about President Obama from any president who has come before him?  It’s a difference that has influenced him profoundly.  It’s a difference that will influence the future of this country profoundly.  

This President lived on a city block and returns to one when he leaves the White House.  It’s not a ranch or a secluded compound.  That the city is our country’s future is an important idea to this President, and plays a role in the policies that are being crafted by the White House today.  

I heard this today from Michael Strautmanis, Chief of Staff in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and Public Engagement.  He told us that we had caught the President’s attention.  

That’s no surprise for an urban President.  The “we” is CEOs for Cities.  I’ve been in DC for its annual Urban Leaders Summit, a wonderful gathering of like-minded urban advocates, led by Carol Coletta.  Ours is an urban agenda.   We are a group of urban change makers, thrilled that we have a President in the White House who gets it.

All is quiet this morning. Police are purposefully assembling for the G20 protest march that is expected to come through Downtown Pittsburgh at 2 pm this afternoon. Some small groups of protesters are scattered here and there. People are gathering and lounging on the jersey barriers. It’s a strange scene – armed forces and tourists, side by side.

I’ve had the good fortune to meet the unabashedly pro-urban Enrique Penalosa.

A former Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, Peñalosa was responsible for numerous radical improvements to the city during his term. He prioritized access for children and public spaces and restricted private car use. He built hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks, bicycle paths, pedestrian streets, greenways, and parks. And he organized Car-Free Day in 2000, for which he was awarded the Stockholm Challenge Award and rewarded by a referendum vote endorsing an annual car-free day and the elimination of all cars from Bogota streets during rush hours from 2015 onwards.

This is radical urbanism at its best!

The Franktuary  has the right idea.  The Business Times reports that they plan to stay open as much as possible through the G-20 Summit.  They are located just a couple of blocks from the epicenter of the event.  Their employees will sleep in cots in the cathedral if necessary.  They will peddle their yummy hot dogs to dignitaries and protesters alike.  In fact, they sent a personal invitation to the President himself.  

This is spirit I admire.  They understand that there may be an opportunity here, that this is an historic moment, and they want to be part of it.  Can the rest of Downtown Pittsburgh listen up? 

Over the last month I’ve been interviewed by a stream of reporters.  They all ask the same boring questions.  Are we closing our doors for the week of the G-20 Summit?   Are we preparing for the brief storm that will be?  Are we frightened?  What do we think will happen?

I’m bewildered by these questions.  How much time does one need to prepare for a 48 hour blizzard?   Not long at all.  We’ll make sure there are some tools handy so that repairs can be made to our downtown buildings.  We’ll make sure our tenants make sensible plans and move their cars a little further away if they need to drive.  We’ll make sure we shop for food the weekend before, just like we always do.  Is there anything else we can do?  

While the media throws fat on the fire and ensures that the fear festers, I find myself excited and unafraid, just like the Franktuary.  Here is an opportunity to be seized. While hosting the G-20 Summit may not markedly change Pittsburgh’s slow and steady transformation, it might ignite something.  The world will be watching and they will not see what they have been expecting to see.  They will be astounded by views of  an architecturally significant and beautiful Downtown  cradled between rivers, river trails and green hillsides.  

Surely we don’t want them to see a ghost town.

I’m staying.  Will you?

cityLIVE! Pittsburgh is celebrating the start of it’s third season.  Three seasons of excellent panelists, engaging topics, delightful networking and free wine. Come hobnob with some of our funders and panelists at my loft downtown on September 16, from 6 – 8 pm.  Help us to build a fantastic third season.  $100!   It will go a long way.  

RSVP to eve@nowall.com

Yesterday I blew my diet, big time, at Big Mama’s House of Soul.   

For several years the bright yellow House of Soul in Pittsburgh’s Strip District has screamed BBQ at me.  Shame on me for not stopping sooner.  On Tuesday I finally did.   Big Mama was there, but “Oh honey” she said “ I need a rest on Monday and Tuesday.  The ribs will be cooking again tomorrow morning”.  

And so yesterday I went back for Big Mama’s ribs all cooked from scratch.   The dining table is a big picnic table outside, tented to protect you from rain.  Street noise fills in for background music.  Ronel, Big Mama’s grandson, helps her out in the kitchen and says she is the sweetest woman alive.  No amount of coaxing would get him to divulge his grandma’s secret twenty-seven spice jerk chicken recipe.  He tells me that Big Mama’s recipes have been handed down in his family for one hundred years.    One hundred years in Pittsburgh.

One hundred delicious years.

I overate.   My hands were sticky with BBQ sauce.   I’m sure I weigh five pounds more today.   Damn, it was worth it.

It’s heating up in Pittsburgh.   Hot and sweaty, I curse the fact that I have moved from a city with a beach to a city without one.   When I read this story in the New York Times in July,  I wasn’t hot enough to care.   But now it’s tantalizing.  Dumpster dipping.  Not dipping into a dumpster for treasure.  Lining a dumpster with a big black trash bag, filling it with water and dipping your body into it.    

Hot in New York City, some enterprising developers came up with this “lo-fi” version of the country club on a rented lot. The ultimate low cost swimming pool, dumpster dipping is accessible to everyone with a plastic bag.  This is the mark of a great and creative city.  Ideas that would be laughed at in small towns are revered here in New York.

Plans for Pittsburgh’s G-20 Summit are heating up as well.  This week I learned that dumpster fires are a G-20 Summit sport.  I pondered the fate of the 30 or more dumpsters lining the alley behind my downtown home.  My home, by the way, is inside the G-20 security zone.   Ever cognizant of security risks, Pittsburgh is considering locking all of the dumpsters or hauling them away.    But wait!  If we filled them all with water there’d be no chance of fire, and we’d have a pool party in the making.

I know you think I’m being silly.    The point I’m trying to make is this.  We are aspiring to be a great city.  Great cities are full of creative people with innovative ideas.   Great cities do not shut down when the G-20 comes to town.  Great cities are not afraid of dumpster fires.   Great cities use their creative talent to find creative solutions that will make a lasting impression on everyone who comes here.  

Let’s be great.

Photo by Yana Paskova for The New York Times