So I fought the man this weekend. Or, at least, I walked in sympathy of those who do. While wandering around, looking for a late lunch (what does one do if they want to eat at 5:PM on a weekend in this town?), I heard sounds of commotion that most certainly weren’t those of a Law & Order shoot (so, you know, this won’t be reported on Gothamist).
Walking down the block, I thought, “oh, it’s just another East Village protest” wondering what sliver of injustice was being contested. But, you know, I’ve lived in the East Village for quite a while, and I really haven’t seen that many protests. When you can you last remember seeing what you might call “an East Village protest” (and if you can’t conjure up what precisely this is, you aren’t eligible for playing; go to the back of the line for brunch at Clinton Street Baking)?
It was the music that drew me in. I suspected it was the Hungry Marching Band. Which was easy, because how many excellent marching bands do you know that show up at protests? There was a single, inexplicable banner on display, and on the other side of the, well, bulky might be the best term, since it wasn’t overwhelming, but enough to clog the streets, crowd was the police presence.
So I didn’t know what was being protested. Which hardly mattered to me. I’m sure I agreed with it in principle, even as I probably found fault with the means proposed, and ended up feeling standoffish, particularly if I actually spoke to any of the leading agents for change.
The crowd was earnest men of indeterminate age, often presenting a confused message, since the details of their carriage and varied accoutrement, fighting medals, as they were, bespoke of a proud history of East Village protest and dirty hippie girl scamming. And, of course, there was the dirty hippie girl contingent, except they were cleaned up. And had kids. Yah, nothing makes you feel middle aged like a protest filled with strollers. But, really, that’s just a change of pace. The history of leftist rabble rousing has always featured children. It was only the export to Midwest college campuses that made them more age exclusive.
So I’m standing there, really enjoying the music, thinking, “I hope this is a protest to protest how fucking dull protests have been for the past ten years”. It’s not a small point.. Red state evangelicals grasped the notion of culture war pretty quickly and successfully, while all us overgrown socialists thought class war was somehow going to stick, even as the majority of our compatriots hailed from families that would have been at the top of our list were we successful. The weird thing is, everyone loves our culture. Really. It might be only a Mardi Gras moment of disgorging repression, but isn’t this, abstractly and literally, the lifestyle people pursue? So why can’t well sell it better (okay, sure, Maureen Dowd notwithstanding — but you know what’s weird, people really like her everywhere else)?
What we probably need to do is send the Hungry Marching Band on a national tour. Aside from the low key and generally positive (free of the fringe punks who run with these crowds just so they can vandalize things or start fights) vibe, the music made all the difference. People joined up for a block or two, and many who were clearly uninterested in the politics of the gathering, danced in communion we passed by. And it turns out the police presence was a single cruiser following behind, as much keeping traffic from overtaking as it was harassing.
What I was thinking was, if we really were that cool, we would have parades every couple weeks, just to jive with the band. Everyone loves a marching band, right? And I thought, if this were Paris or London, they would probably have some sort of arts funding, but since it’s New York, it would have to be the inevitable EV BID (probably started by EU), and the whole fucking thing would be sponsored by UNIQLO. Then I got bitter and gave up, and decided to just walk along side and enjoy the music on what was probably the last great evening of the year.
The odd thing was, I kept to the sidewalk. I think walking in the street is always a good thing. Exciting, liberating, and, unless officially sanctioned, dangerous. But nothing beats slowing cars by dancing down the street. But I didn’t join because I didn’t know enough about what was going on. It’s slicing things a bit thin, but that’s what balkanized leftist politics are all about, baby. Maybe they were pro-vegan, but not anti-fur. Where did they stand on Fair Trade policies? So I did my part for splintering and hung back.
So what was the protest about? Not so much a protest, but a memorial rally march for Brad Will, who was killed last month in Oaxaca while reporting on fighting between paramilitaries and group seeking to oust the governor of the region, whom they claim illegally manipulated an election.
The reason for the march through the EV, and the seemingly arbitrary stop on 5th Street (where I first encountered it), was his history in the neighborhood, which, while extensive, is most notable for a standoff (in 1997) at the site of the former squat on 5th Street. Single-handedly forestalling city bulldozers by taking the roof, his act resulted in a settlement with the city that preserved a number of squat sites (though that particular location was destroyed under the cover of night).
See, this is the part where my wanting to stay on the sidewalk comes in. I haven’t liked most of the people I’ve met that were squatters. It’s unfortunate because their attitude about land ownership parallels my own, and many can claim precedent of reclaiming land when the area was legitimately downtrodden. That they did not move to gain control sooner (as there a plenty of former squats in the EV that were successfully converted into owner occupancy building under terms that any housing idealist would approve) speaks to either some ideological purity, or perhaps a failure of will due to general flakiness or the impossibility of existing on the fringe of the fringe. And that’s not the whole story, I know. But it also demeans the precepts of squatting and community ownership, since, as anyone who has travelled in these margins knows that not a small percentage of adherents think “community ownership” means “free shit for me”.
But this is unfair to Brad Will. By all accounts, he was a decent man who worked hard to call attention to the struggle against the unfair application of power, legitimate or not. And though it’s the wonderful people that populate places like Fox News that proclaim otherwise, civilized societies respect the right of the journalist and the doctor, regardless of the source of strife. As he had for most of his career, he was just trying to tell someone else’s story. That we were able to remember this with little interference, and, thanks to the musical accompaniment, some joy at what he had done, showing that in some pockets, we can celebrate our civilization without descending into stereotypes or violence, fittingly for a man who, though he died amidst violence, had never been arrested for a violent crime in his life.
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So, did you miss me? I was going to bother writing some clever, pithy (you know, two things I’m usually not) explanation of why things got so slow, or how they were going to change. But y’all are going to read it or you won’t. All I’ll say, as I always do, is that is not an architecture blog (nor has it ever been). I don’t have an better explanation at the moment, so hopefully it will become evident as things evolve once again. Oh, and there’s going to be a new coat of paint, applied in fits and starts. So forgive if it looks a little messy around here.
Don’t even think of progress here.
The mayor really is an all kinds of smoke out of doors kind of guy. The man who has sold the idea that the Republican model of ‘smaller government’ is best expressed by telling you not to eat at Dunkin’ Donuts. Of course, everyone one loves to tout the sheep in wolf’s clothing argument. If that is the case, then kudos to Mike’s clever interpretation of the liberal model of progressive taxation is renters subsidize homeowners.
But I digress. Why mention Mike when we should really be talking about Uncle Joe Bruno? Just because it’s congestion week, and Ken Livingston has the biggest cojones in congestion pricing these days, don’t expect diminutive Mike Bloomberg to throw down. This is, after all, a man who won’t fly commercial to his Caribbean hideway. But before you get all exercised thinking our mayor wouldn’t take on a limey, remember, he’s not afraid of the serious opponents. Like the Chinese. Particularly those selling Chow Fun.
Since Streetsblog has written all you need to know about congestion pricing, and I don’t care how expensive they make it to drive into Manhattan — except to note, whatever it is, it ain’t enough, since all of New Jersey parks on my block on the weekend — I decided take a skeptic’s position, but not because I enjoy being a jerk (a pleasure I pursue for its own rewards), but to try to establish some possible remedies that we can do without resorting to the sort of utopian bitterness that pervades so many car-free tracts.
First, a very provocative observation: Manhattan isn’t that congested. It’s true. For all the complaints about subsidized on street parking, and productivity lost, you can still travel a large percentage (if not majority) of the streets of Manhattan most of the day with about the same ease of any large metropolitan area, and find about as much parking.
“You obviously never take a cab up 6th Avenue at 5PM,” you shout over the blare of honking horns. True, I do not. “And you never try to park downtown,” you also counter. Also true: I don’t work for the city, so parking on sidewalks all over downtown is a perk unknown to me.
But the salient point here is that destination based driving (I want to go shop in SoHo! I need to drive to work so I can pick my kids from soccer on the way home!) is the source of most of our car-based congestion. It mirrors a set of behaviors learned in the suburbs: that cars are the best way to get somewhere, and, once there, parking must be absurdly proximate to the final destination. How many people think they can actually park within a block of the Apple Store in SoHo? I don’t want to know.
New Yorkers don’t drive much for a couple reasons: we live here, we know driving isn’t typically the fastest way to get somewhere, and we don’t own cars. Oh, and driving is fucking expensive. So charging people 10 bucks to drive to SoHo on a Saturday (even the most expensive congestion pricing in London tops out at $15) isn’t much of a deterrent, particularly when it costs $6 for the tunnel and $20 to park for an hour.
True deterrence would require managing all Manhattan entries south of the GWB, and treating everything south of 185th Street as a congestion zone, because there are strange race/class components to this — though much of northern Manhattan is more easily traversed by car, there are plenty of bottleneck points up there. Do you want to explain why time and money is invested in making Houston Street passable on a Saturday night, but not 125th Street on a Saturday afternoon (and more practically, to deal with the overflow of people going up perimeter avenues to avoid the FDR). To say nothing of outer borough boulevards.
And that isn’t possible. Not because it isn’t a good idea, but because of Uncle Joe. Even with Spitzer looking to be a somewhat rational — sorry, we’re comparing him to Pataki: make that sentient — human being, the two-headed devil of Silver/Bruno, coupled with the yokel upstate attitude evidenced by the state DOT (which controls most our street/traffic management) create the pitch perfect ode to shitty governing.
So we aren’t going to get congestion based tolls, or fares for entering zones (and I don’t know that such an idea even can be worked out). And we still have the prospect of nodal congestion issues (commuting, tunnel approaches, and some destination based driving — Times Square, the EV weekend, etc.). So what can we do with the tools we have? My skeptic’s approach sees three options: cops, cops and parking meters:
First, cops: stop them from parking all over downtown. Well, not just them. Everyone. No more parking exemptions for city employees. No more lax enforcement of the above (mini-congestion management, since it would reduce a large number of river crossings daily).
Second, cops: let’s enforce the laws we have. Getting in and out of Manhattan at rush hour sucks. We can always make it worse by aggressively enforcing the laws we already have. Double parking, intersection blocking, multiple turning cars, speeding. All these things add to congestion and danger. If we can’t make it more expensive in money to get into the city, we can make it more time consumptive. It might not be so pleasant for those living on Hudson Street in the short term, but eventually it might improve. And if it doesn’t, DeNiro can buy them all dinner, since he probably suckered them into moving there in the first place. And, most crucially, start ticketing assholes who use the horn. It’s on the books, it’s a healthy fine, and it would make such a quality of life difference for residents.
Third, parking meters: Get rid of them. There’s no way you can make it practical to have meters reflect the value of parking. Are you going to put 24 quarters in a meter for 30 minutes? Who uses those meters anyway? Um, people driving into Manhattan, right? Anyone living here certainly won’t be giving up a street spot to drive across town.
Sure, there will be some fools who think they can commute to Manhattan with free all day parking available, but it will only take about a month for everyone with a car in a garage to get rid of it, take up residency on a curb and never move. Then, after a morning or two of circling for two hours for a spot, they will get the message. Get rid of all curbside parking on avenues and main cross streets (save delivery vehicles), and any meters on side streets (most of them are meter-free anyway).
Will this make Manhattan a pedestrian paradise? Probably not, but I hate most pedestrians too, so whatever. But put up breathalyzer checkpoints at the main exit routes of Manhattan for several consecutive weekends, and you would radically change the driving patterns in Manhattan. What would all this congestion improvement get us anyway? I don’t really care if everyone going home to Jersey suffers every night. And if they actually tore up some streets once we were so deliriously car free, they would only fill them with condos from Scarano and Kondylis.