Cities
This is an essay on cities. There are uploads of
images from Winnipeg and a few local shots of a baseball game and an interesting
street post in the U-District. The essay is 5,817 words, so you're forewarned.
It is an - essay - a subject-driven exposition usually shorter than a treatise.
A treatise implies more form and method than an essay, but may fall short of the
fullness and completeness of a systematic exposition. Don't believe it for a
minute. I cover a lot of ground and explain where I'm coming from and make some
observations, which to me, are self-evident - and may be to you as well. Feel
free to comment on these thoughts either on the comment forms here or directly to
me.
Cities...
I've now been around and about North America enough, minus Mexico which I've not travelled yet, to have seen pretty nearly all the major cities and metros and probably even more of the mid-sized cities and small towns. Partly this is because I eschew traveling the Interstate system for a couple of reasons. One, it's actually NOT more dangerous since there are more deaths per-mile on the non-Interstate system than on the Interstate system but even with that statistic I personally believe that there are far fewer crazies on the old US highways and state roads than there are on the Interstates. It's an extremely rare day if I'm on an Interstate where some loon doesn't go by me at close to 100 miles per hour or weaves in and out of traffic like some snake chasing a rabbit. That means that kind of behavior is actually normal on Interstates - it's NOT normal on the other highway systems.
So, despite the statistics, I prefer the non-Interstates for safety reasons. And, the other reason is that the non-Interstates don't bypass the cities and towns, they actually become the main streets through them. This gives me a real opportunity to see strings of cities and towns in a day and several different kinds of and styles of cities and towns in any given trip.
Since the remaining upload images I've got to do are basically Canadian city shots, it dawned on me that I could write an essay on cities commenting on American and Canadian cities and maybe making some individual points about specific cities.
Which brings us to the topical heading - Cities...
I love them. I do like to back pack and spend long moments or days or even occasional weeks in the wilderness or very low-density areas of a place but when truth comes to shove, I'm probably the definitive urban rat. I like people. I like human inventiveness. I like the constructs of our imagination. I like the arts and the sciences and the results of individual and collective groups of artists and scientists. I like endeavor and manufacture and expressions of triumph. As humans we're faced with a world which is so much bigger than we are that it was only natural for us to bond and begin to work together to first eke out a living and then, perhaps, tame the "wild," and probably the result of our genetic code, place our hand-mark upon the land. It's probably fair to say that in some areas at this point in our evolution we've gone too far and need to back up a bit lest our mark come back to haunt us. But, in general, humans have done more in their own way than the birds and badgers and beavers and spiders and wasps and mice and rats have in terms of fitting the environment we've got to our tastes or needs. We will also always be reminded, by some random event, that no matter how profound our structure or clever our engineering or witty and insightful our vision, some of our constructs will be the waste of forces truly beyond our grasp. It's hard to imagine humans ever being able to stop the plate motion on our mantle, for instance, or diverting the course of a tornado or hurricane or abruptly squashing a tsunami. Heck, the best we can do with the charges in our atmosphere is try and cleverly divert massive jolts of electricity and hope our system works yet one more time.
The penultimate expression of all these aspects which draw my interest in humans is in the cities we create and evolve and re-create. It's where we gather, for comfort, for security, for company, and for easy access to our kind, be that kind similar-thinking types or the necessary diversity of skills it takes to create an enterprise, whether that enterprise is a company of engineers and craftspeople who build things or a company of dancers who delight and prance to the music of another company of people who play things which make pleasing noises. And so on.
I've had the good fortune to be in some pretty remote locations of this planet - Alaska, Norway's west coast, the Straits of Magellan. In all these locations, removed from the rest of the world by hours and hours of air travel, there are settlements. I was located in these settlements for the duration of my stay in these remote areas, which ranged from nearly half a year to repeating sets of several months, By any other standard, all these settlements would be characterized as minor cities of which most countries have score to hundreds. The distinguishing feature to me of each of these settlements - Anchorage, Stavanger, Punta Arenas - was not their small size, each is on the order of a quarter-million inhabitants, but how even in a small settlement in today's social, economic, and technical ecology these small settlements were nearly self-contained. True, some materials were required to be shipped from other locations and, on occasion, some skill sets were required to be sent for. But by and large these settlements had one each of everything which is required for a settlement to constitute a "city" in today's reading of what a city is. Each had a set of individuals looking out for the local random and dangerous events, each had a set of individuals working for the commonweal, each had a collection of merchants and craftspeople and artisans who responded to the local opportunities and maintained a balance between wants, needs and possibilities. Each also had some set of individuals who were engaged in the unique opportunities of that remote location and each had a set of individuals whose responsibility and license allowed them to relate the unique elements of the location to the larger elements of the rest of the cities of the world.
What this means is that without much compromise I was able to fill all the gaps in my urban requirement block in each of these locations. I found the basics and the extras which urban rats tick off when they think about desert island living conditions. What I think this means is that for those of us who chose to live in urban conditions, there's some baseline set of ecological conditions which must be met before we collectively agree that the local environment is - in fact - a city. Everyone has a set of lists like this and one could recite examples: music, theater, cinema, food, imbibements, sport, information collection and dissemination, tinker-toy things and ephemeral things. When something is missing there seem to be individuals or sets of individuals who respond to the absence and provide whatever can be created locally to fill that void. We say that nature abhors a vacuum but in fact it's humans who abhor a vacuum - at least the urban rat human.
As mentioned, I've spent many weeks by myself in some pretty solitary locations deliberately. There are lots of reasons to want to absent oneself from other humans. Mostly my reasons have been to remove humans from the equation and place myself in the location as an observer of the planet when the human element is missing. I've learned and discovered a great deal about the land, the creatures who go on without us, the impact of the weather on the land and those creatures and the interaction of all of the above. I've always been struck, at some point in these solitary forays, by how magnificent the living planet is without us. Earth, in fact the Universe, doesn't need us. But, when we're in it, it presents so many diverse elements each of which mesh together to form such a larger whole that - as a human - it's nearly beyond comprehension and definitely beyond my ability to appreciate all together. It's these moments, when my insides are truly bursting with joy and overwhelmed by beauty, that I realize why there are cities. It's not just that we need each other to get anything done given the scale of our world and the nearly unfathomable scale of the Universe. It's because we can't cope with our inability to express our own joy without another member of our species. This is also true for different moments when the wild setting is so beyond one's control that complete collapse or surrender are the only options. What can one do in the middle of a desert, for instance, when a sudden and violent thunderstorm rages and blows one's tent down and drenches everything one has. Nothing. Commiserate is what we do but that requires a fellow human.
By the time I'm ready to return from my solitude, what I want most is the company of others so I can relate everything I've seen, heard, learned and discovered. I'm ready to return to the city and share or create.
Granted, there will always be those humans who do not feel this way and whose lives can be completely whole and fulfilling without the company of others. With any population base, and we've got six billion of us now, there will always be the loners and those who seek singular and unrelated lives. Fortunately we've got a planet which is large enough that both the urban rat and the lone ranger can find an appropriate home.
What does this have to do with cities? It's simple, really, the cities we've created are expressions of these human requirements and with six billion of us having been doing this for six-to-a-dozen-thousand years now, we've got a huge variety of cities. It's not so much that each one is that different from the next. It's more like each one is shaped by both the landform upon which it's set and the ideas and requirements of those who first created that settlement. That, and the evolution of those who followed for however long any particular settlement has been around. We've got this huge range of human expression now and cities constitute some collection of those expressions. Some cities have more of one expression and others have more of another. And, some cities - New York, Tokyo, London, Delhi, Shanghai, the list could go on - have every expression possible and are seen by outsiders as either cacophonic or appetent.
There are also, given the fantastic geology this planet has, a range of natural environments, landscapes, weathers, seasonal upheavals, elevations, latitudes and longitudes, even night skies which are available for one's choice in an urban home. Using a collective appreciation for personal surveys I've done over the past four decades, it seems to me that individuals choose a location for their home based on one of the following simple and demanding reasons: 1) It's where they have a job (where job is any endeavor of importance to the individual); 2) It's where they have friends or family; or 3) It's where they like the non-urban or urban (or both) environment. There's a default reason which I've also discovered which may constitute the largest number of individuals and that is because 4) It's where they're stuck at the moment.
Not many of us, again based on my low-level but constantly-refreshed survey data, seem to want to uproot ourselves from any given location even if we have compelling reasons why we are not pleased with where we are at the time. I guess the reclama is that humans don't like change and even those like me who seem to relish change only really relish change in certain areas. I like to hear new music but I don't like to change toothpaste, for example. I like new roads to explore but I don't change the way I drive them, for another. We open up our environmental variables a little at a time and we maintain the rest within a narrow band of comfort or accommodation.
Each time I go on one of these multi-week forays out into the world - or my world which is mostly North America above the Rio Grande - I encounter new places, new geography and new geology and sometimes even new weather. I always encounter new towns and on occasion new cities. One of the things which always goes through my mind when I'm in such a situation - exploring a new town or eating in the heart of a new city - is whether this new urban entity is one which fits my sensibilities. Could I live here? I mean, yes, we all can live anywhere and make do, but would I be happy? Would the things which engage me and which make me think and which delight me and move or egg me on to other discoveries or endeavors or creations be present in this new place?
There are not that many cities in North America which meet the entire list of such requirements I've compiled. At first, when I was working my first job or moving about with my mom and dad as a younger person, these things didn't matter so much because I was preoccupied with the then more important elements of my life - being raised, finding my own way, just the basics of spreading my wings as it were. It was only later, after my first job and after traveling about the country on my first - personally motivated - trip of discovery that I began to think about these things. Gee, this place has a nicer downtown with more stores; or, Wow, look at all the mountains surrounding this town's parks; or, Gosh, I really like the music and open atmosphere of the people here. Of course, by then, I was beginning to get locked into a particular location because of requirement 1) above, my job happened to be located there. This essay isn't going to change my life and it's probably not going to change anyone else's either, but it might cite a few instances of some things I've seen, learned, thought about and concluded about the places I've been to in such a way that someone might then either visit or explore or otherwise expand their own world.
The cities of North America were developed long after the original inhabitants of this land had created their own settlements. Many of our cities are located in exactly the same location as the settlements of the tribal members of the Native Americans, the First Nations, or the Aboriginals, depending on how you want to view those who were first here - the Pre-Columbian Americans. Once we had the Old World invaders settling into places in the New World, the Old World settlers brought their Old World ways with them and we had the creation of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English towns sited in a New World setting. We had the development of the Old World industries and endeavors set upon the opportunities of the New World resources. There's a lot of bad sociology which occurred which I won't dwell on since that is a truism of humans and would have been the case no matter who the Post-Columbians were. It's also the case that a great many of the settlements on this planet have not always been the best for the local ecology, but that somewhere along the timeline, the locals recognized that and have worked to make amends. It's also the case with humans that we have, as a species, been exploitative of our environment and that subsequent generations may or may not have made attempts to correct the ruined ecology or resurrect the original ecology. Again, that just appears to be the way we are and I'll ignore those elements as that's part of the history of the species and not relevant since it's a recurring theme and apparently not amenable to being changed.
I like the French-developed cities more than I do the Spanish or English on this continent. I've only seen one instance of a Portuguese-developed city and don't have much of a base of comparison. I like the French cities because the French method of siting roadways and towns is such that the intersections with bodies of water or rivers is always perpendicular - the road leads "to" the water feature - and the "along" path follows the general shoreline of the body of water. This is not untrue of the Spanish and English except that the latter seemed more inclined to overlay their topical town grid on top of the local geography in such a way there there were always streets which ended abruptly or towns which were physically separated from the local geologic or hydrologic feature rather than integrated with it. It's also true that the Spanish and English were creating more fortified villages than the French, who had more of a mind to create a village and then a separate fortification. At this same time in Europe there were a number of nobles who were under the employ of the ruling class to bring some order to a wide-ranging set of towns, gardens, royal preserves and the like.
Thus began the notion of "planned" urban environments. These ideas were brought to the New World by many of the later nobles who had charters from the conquering nation. In 1863 William Penn, for instance, laid out Philadelphia between the two rivers - the Delaware and the Schukyll - on a grid with intersecting grand avenues. Not that different in many ways from the plans which Haussmann used for Paris, nearly 170 years later. In many ways William Penn was the first true urban planner, both of the Old World and of the New World. Penn brought his ideas to fruition with a New World city which would both appeal to the nobles he hoped would build manors in his new town and for the tradespeople and craftspeople he knew would have to work and live there. He also overlaid his new town on top of the tilled soil which the Finns, Swedes, Dutch and English farmers who came before his charter had worked. Because of the central and pivotal position Philadelphia played in the New World politic, Penn's ideas were spread relatively easily and in other places took root as well. The planned urban expression of the New World was a relatively incumbent element of life on these shores at the earliest moments of the Post-Columbian development phase.
In 1785 the young Congress passed an act called "The Land Ordinance of 1785," which essentially created the six-square-mile grid which is the ubiquitious urban feature laid upon today's United States. In 1803 the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, and the new lands were overlaid with the 1785 grid system and - bingo - the urban grid structure of the United States was off and running. With the vanguard planned city of Philadelphia already well established and the grid system in place, the ubiquity of the American City grid system was cinched.
Luckily, by 1785, there had already been a number of French-developed urban settlements, including Montreal, Quebec, New Orleans, and others up and down the Mississippi River, along the St. Lawrence River and seaway, throughout the Great Lakes area and in the plains west of the Canadian Shield. These cities now have grids overlaid on them but the original alongside and perpendicular rivershore and lakeshore streets continue as a primordial element of the evolved modern city. The Spanish settlements were more typically grids with a municipal and theological center at opposite ends of a center square with radial and peripheral roadways further defining the central square. The English settlements more typically had the grid as defined by Penn overlaid on whatever geology or geography was at hand with streets defined more for their purpose such as "Dock" street or "Market" street or "Post" road.
Obviously, I'm creating a superset of smaller realities and applying an overarching historical perspective on the development of the North American city north of the Rio Grande. If you grant this aggregate assimilation of evolutions and the basic causes for the principal, originating, factor what we have is a set of urban entities in north North America which now make some form of development sense. There are an endless array of cities which have identical, or nearly identical, or similar, or mirror features to each other. Major differences being defined more by the surrounding landscape and intrinsic weather than any differences of urban development opinion. We have minor differences being defined by particular instances of local originality or application of specific solutions to strictly local environmental conditions or even the largesse of individuals or the oversight of groups involved in the episodic evolution of that urban entity. Examples of the latter would be the MacMillan Commission's plans to finally finish Pierre L'Enfants' original plans for the city of Washington, DC, and the subsequent, 1926 Public Buildings Act of Congress, which created the space and structures which constitute the Federal Triangle. Even later was the 1965 Commission on Pennsylvania Avenue. Each of these were responsive acts which harkened back to the original grand vision for the Nation's Capitol where the local ecology had taken a more organic city development route.
Not every north North American city has had such beneficence. On the other hand, every once in a while there's an individual or set of individuals whose mark upon the landscape is larger and more inclusive than would seem possible. For the American urban landscape there are two different sets of individuals whose mark is undeniable. The first is Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his brother John Charles Olmsted, who in 1855 designed a set of enhancements for New York City's Central Park which created the new school of landscape architecture. Following that success, the brothers were in much demand by urban entities as widely disparate as Boston, Charlotte, Louisville, Seattle, Washington, DC, Newport, Detroit, Buffalo, Boulder, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and the list goes on and on. The greenery of Philadelphia was the work of William Penn and was, perhaps, a unique vision which was overrun by the demands of commerce and trade in the then evolving Colonial cities. The work of the Olmsted brothers was an evolutionary response by the many cities they worked for to correct the negative effects of that trade and commerce evolution and to evolve the city to something more akin to Penn's original vision of a green urban landscape.
The other individual act was the invention in 1852 by Elisha Graves Otis of the safety elevator and the subsequent continuation by his sons, Charles and Norton - Otis Brothers & Company - of the evolution and emplacement of the modern elevator starting first with hydralic and by 1889 direct-drive electric motor powered systems. That invention spawned the Chicago School of Architecture and America's skyscraper urban landscape was ensconced.
All of these historical elements constitute the fabric from which our cities have evolved and is why they are both alike and different. Several more elements of evolution are necessary, though, to further enhance our understanding of where we find ourselves today. The first is probably the situation which evolved from the discovery of oil, the evolution of the automotive form of transportation, and the economic boost which Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Akron and Toledo provided by their manufacture of cars, buses, trucks, tires and fuel and by the concurrent economy provided by the firms which made road-making equipment and those who used it to build new roads for an America suddenly in love with internal-combustion-powered vehicles. By the 1930's most of the urban trolley systems of the country had been replaced through a series of conniving and at the time convincing arguments from these industries and most American cities had bus systems and most individuals had or had access to automobiles. The lead-up to World War II only enhanced the notion of a Nation of Wheels. At the end of the Second World War, the returning solders and their new brides were greeted by a thankful nation and what turned into a globally-significant economic engine. Suddenly, Americans had access to wealth beyond the dreams of their forebears, many of whom had been first-generation immigrants from Europe. To respond, the American home construction industry created a new form of housing - tract housing. By taking the farmlands adjacent to the cities and grazing them over, platting new streets and cul-de-sacs, and then constructing affordable homes, the nation suddenly had a new population of "suburbanites." The houses were affordable because of learned economies of mass-production, learned in response to the war effort, and the earliest spin-offs of some of the new tools which had been invented to go into the warplanes and warships and mobile armies we fielded during the years of WWII. The replicated homes were easy to build, simply flip the floor plan every other house and they appeared unique. There were no Craftsman applications, none needed. It all fit together and an entire generation grew up with access to an individual home not adjacent to their neighbor but with access to a car. Shopping centers came into being to accommodate the newly mobile family and drive-in theaters sprang up across farm fields everywhere. There were still urban dwellers and those who wanted to live in the city core but now there was a set of choices. Factories and suburban office parks began to spring up in response to the mobility of the Post-WWII employee. Downtown no longer was the only place where things were located. Drive-in and drive-through stores and restaurants began to respond to the mobility factor and we were off and running in our new Oldsmobiles.
The next was the revelation by Dwight D. Eisenhower, when as a general in charge of moving a convoy across America, that there was no easy way to traverse this great land easily and without congestion. That led him as president, in 1956, to sign legislation to create the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways," which at the time envisioned forty-one thousand new miles of limited access, multiple lane highway. In 2002 there were 46,726 miles of Interstate highway in the United States and thousands of additional miles of limited access, multiple-lane, divided highway built by states in and around their urban entities. Because the system was designed to facilitate the interstate travel by motor vehicle (or convoy) the route structure created a series of loops, or circumferential highways, around all the major metropolitan areas in its traverse from coast-to-coast and border-to-border.
The final element necessary to comprehend today's American city is the Civil Rights activities of the 1960's and the incredible impact that has had on this nation's urban fabric. Upset by and frightened of the many activities which were going on at the time, a very large proportion of White-Anglo-Saxon descendants, who happened to be living in core urban villages in nearly every American city or town at the time, fled to the newly developing suburbs. They abandoned the city in favor of the suburb because they could chose their neighbors selectively. It would take nearly a decade of Civil Rights legislation to reverse the trend favored by developers and banks at that time to discriminate on the basis of skin color or ethnic origin.
The urban riots which some cities experienced in the later years of the sixties decade didn't help either because it enforced the security image of the suburbs. This, of course, led to the final flight of even more Anglo-Saxons and the urban cores of most of America's cities were left as emptying shells with a population, in many cases, of indigent individuals with very little opportunity and even less chance of escaping.
So now, at least in the United States, we had a huge number of formerly dense urban entities which were surrounded by newly-dense suburbs but which had no inner core of people. Naturally, the merchants and tradespeople and craftspeople and employing economic engines followed suite, leaving in their wake cities with buildings but no commerce or manufacturing capabilities. Because of the fear factor, many companies chose to re-site their headquarters or manufacturing facilities outside their historic home. Pursue this thread long enough and you encounter the Northern and Midwestern industrial belt abandonment of the 1970's where whole industries moved, en masse, from the labor union intense towns they grew up in to the free-market new towns in the South and West. By then the urban definition of core city with rich opportunities inside the core had been replaced with the notion of low density suburban homes interspersed with office parks or factory islands and shopping centers and strip plazas.
This is where we find the American urban landscape of the Twenty-First Century. And it's a sad condition, indeed. There are multiple efforts across nearly all the states to reverse this trend - to densify, to return to a rich-urban-core state of existence. Some of these activities are like the ones of the past where the evolutionary mistakes of decades-ago are now recognized and attempting to be corrected. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, even Houston are all cities which have devolved their downtown core but which are now in the process of re-densifying with the help of legislation, developer incentives, homeowner incentives, and in all the cases cited, new and appropriate urban mass transit trolley systems.
That being said, the one major difference between Canadian cities and American cities is the simple fact that the Canadian cities did not go through the Civil Rights events America did and their urban residents did not undertake a suburban flight. That and the precursor reality that there is no Canadian equivalent of the Interstate system. Yes, there are urban expressways which ring and interconnect some of their larger cities and which connect those cities to each other and the myriad towns which now surround them. But there is no equivalent of the barrier which some of the US highways have created between the urban core and the less-dense surrounding towns. In a sense, the Canadian city has evolved missing one or two major components of the evolution which American cities have gone through. To be sure, not all American cities went through all phases of these evolutionary elements. But enough of them have such that our city fabric is relatively and fundamentally different from the urban fabric of Canada.
It shows. Canadian cities, even the smaller ones, have a vibrancy and level of activity which is unmatched in any equivalent-sized American city. It takes an American city - in my experience and estimate - of nearly four times the size to match the inner city life of a Canadian city. This is not a "good" thing or a "bad" thing. It's an observation of the differences between the two cultures. There are plenty of American cities which I'm always pleased to be in - and lots and lots of small American towns which never cease to delight me nor solicit my return. It's just that given any random Canadian city I've not visited before and any random American city I've not visited before, chances are more likely that I'll like more of what I find and have more to do in the random Canadian city. Not every American city of a quarter-million population (metro or not, it doesn't matter) is going to have a vibrant downtown or a core of civic amenities within walking distance. Some do, Sioux City, Iowa, for instance, has every semblance of being a Canadian city by these definitions. So does Minot, North Dakota, and Bozeman and Missoula, Montana. So does Duluth, Minnesota. On a larger scale, Des Moines, Iowa, though smaller than Omaha, Nebraska, has much more to do within walking distance downtown and presents itself in a much more likeable manner. So did Louisville, Kentucky, and Wilmington, North Carolina. Once you pass a certain population aggregate there's no reason to not find something worth occupying one's time in a city. That aggregate is probably a million in the United States. Interestingly enough and representative of what I have found, the equivalent aggregate in Canada is about a quarter-million population. Saskatoon and Regina, Saskatchewan, are of that size as is Lethbridge, Alberta, and yet there was as much to see and do in those Canadian towns as there was in Des Moines and Louisville.
I haven't yet been in either Minneapolis nor St. Paul, Minnesota, and am certainly looking forward to exploring those cities. Neither yet have I been to Detroit nor MIlwaukee. That's it for the large American cities. The rest I've been to many times. For the lesser cities I've not yet been to Quebec nor Ottawa nor Gaspe and would leap at the chance to explore those Quebec and Ontario cities. In the US, I've not yet been to Reno, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Rochester, Asheville, Fairbanks, Juneau, HIlo, or Honolulu. I have been to San Juan and Mayaguez but not Ponce.
Which means I can't say with complete certainty that my major thesis is 100 percent valid 100 percent of the time. But I can say that us Americans need to continue with our efforts to recapture our cities and remake our urban fabric because when we do we have some of the nicest and most interesting and most people-friendly cities I've come across. We're making good progress across the land, that much is for sure. I've been to a great number of these US cities over decades' worth of time and the recapture is underway. Some of our lesser cities benefited from being out of the mainstream when one or more of these evolution whirlwinds swept through the American urban fabric. Consequently the rip in those cities' fabric was less deep. Other cities have such a rag-like structure from which they are trying to reconstitute the fabric that much more time will be needed but the reparation process has begun.
One good thing about evolution, whether it be of people or cities, is that new generations bring fresh ideas and lose old ideas. The notion of living in the suburbs, removed from one's neighbors and from the amenities and necessities of life, is - it seems - a passing thread in the American social fabric. To continue the metaphor, the new generation is growing up with a desire to live close in, to engage in their urban existence throughout more hours of the day, in a sense to sew more seams into their lives using the urban fabric around them.
You may feel free to disagree with any of my tenets or the thesis in general. I present this on the basis of an enduring love of humanity and our expression of ourselves through our cities and towns and the general sociological expression of ourselves in our urban fabric.
And now, the Manitoba images followed by some Seattle images.
These are a set of images taken enroute to Winnipeg while driving West across the Canadian Shield. Notice the contrail
is casting a shadow up against the clouds. There were a few of these we encountered and the best I could figure out is
they were originating from Chicago O'Hare Airport and were Great Circle routes on their way to somewhere in the Far East.
A panorama of downtown Winnipeg taken along Portage Avenue, one of the major east-west thoroughfares in the city. It's also one
of the oldest streets in the town and emanates from the area, further east, in the city where the Assiniboine, Seine and Red Rivers converge.
It's called the Red River of the North to distinguish between it and the other "Red" River, which begins in New Mexico, flows through
Texas and empties into the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Red River of the North begins in North Dakota, flows
east through Minnesota and then north through Manitoba, emptying into Lake Winnipeg.
This is another panorama along Portage Avenue and is at the intersection with Memorial Drive (in center) which leads to the
Manitoba legislative buildings and the Capitol. Downtown Winnipeg is riddled with covered walkways extending over the
streets and interior walkways connecting buildings on adjacent blocks. From November through March, the average
daily temperature in Winnipeg is between -5 and -20 Celsius which is 23 to -4 Degrees Fahrenheit. And windy, too. Wind
chill effects can lower those temperatures another 20 degrees.
Near the the confluence of the three rivers is the original downtown area
of the city. Like so many other North American cities, Winnipeg experienced
an explosive growth during the turn of the 19th into the 20th Century and
has a set of early blocks representative of the Industrial Age architecture.
Some of the downtown street furniture has a decidedly
"Western" appearance. These two images are from the
same streetlight control panel. Most of the similar panels
in the downtown area were festooned with a Winnipeg
motif of some form - either native culture or native fauna.
One side Summer, the other side Winter.
Kinda spooky if you ask me. This was the main church in the older
section of the original downtown and looks like it was built sometime in
the early 1920's. This was taken on a Wednesday evening around
9:00 pm and there were no signs of life near the church save the neon.
A closer look at the entrance on the church's newer side,
an addition which looked like it had been added sometime
in the late 1950's or early 1960's. Strangely enough, for
an inner-city church of this age, there were no signs of
a bread or soup kitchen or actually of any other charitable
activities sponsored by the church. Why neon and no food?
Here neon makes sense. This is the storefront sign for a business in the
older section of town near The Forks, the convergence of the three rivers.
The Neon Factory's lobby, at night and after hours.
Not just signs - but clocks too. I suppose if I had no end
of financial resources I'd bedeck my house with all manner
of neon appliances, clocks, sculptures, widgets which just
blink in different colors. They're not as cheap as LEDs
nor are they as cheap to operate but they sure do come in
a wider variety of colors and shapes and sizes.
Finally, the neon sign of the Winnipeg downtown Goodwill Industries
storefront behind plate glass which is reflecting the across-the-street
Neon Factory's sign.
This was also on a side street in the old section of Winnipeg.
Not sure what was behind this door but the original lock,
the rusty one second down from the top, apparently was
not good enough and whoever owns this door just decided
he or she wasn't going to take any more gruff from strangers.
And now for some random shots around Seattle......
Try and make sense of this parking sign on Brooklyn Avenue NE in the U-District, one block
north of NE 45th Street. Not only is the sign completely obscured, but traffic is one-way
in the direction the sign is facing away from, which is to say that in looking straight at this
sign I'm also looking into the headlights of oncoming cars. Huh? What was Seattle's
Department of Transportation thinking - or what was Seattle's City Light thinking. Or were
either of them thinking at all?
The following sequence is taken from the 35th Avenue SW and Avalon Way SW
bus stop, overlooking the West Seattle Stadium on a friday night.
Next set of images will be Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Edmonton, Alberta. Next journal
entry will be.....
Chas
I've now been around and about North America enough, minus Mexico which I've not travelled yet, to have seen pretty nearly all the major cities and metros and probably even more of the mid-sized cities and small towns. Partly this is because I eschew traveling the Interstate system for a couple of reasons. One, it's actually NOT more dangerous since there are more deaths per-mile on the non-Interstate system than on the Interstate system but even with that statistic I personally believe that there are far fewer crazies on the old US highways and state roads than there are on the Interstates. It's an extremely rare day if I'm on an Interstate where some loon doesn't go by me at close to 100 miles per hour or weaves in and out of traffic like some snake chasing a rabbit. That means that kind of behavior is actually normal on Interstates - it's NOT normal on the other highway systems.
So, despite the statistics, I prefer the non-Interstates for safety reasons. And, the other reason is that the non-Interstates don't bypass the cities and towns, they actually become the main streets through them. This gives me a real opportunity to see strings of cities and towns in a day and several different kinds of and styles of cities and towns in any given trip.
Since the remaining upload images I've got to do are basically Canadian city shots, it dawned on me that I could write an essay on cities commenting on American and Canadian cities and maybe making some individual points about specific cities.
Which brings us to the topical heading - Cities...
I love them. I do like to back pack and spend long moments or days or even occasional weeks in the wilderness or very low-density areas of a place but when truth comes to shove, I'm probably the definitive urban rat. I like people. I like human inventiveness. I like the constructs of our imagination. I like the arts and the sciences and the results of individual and collective groups of artists and scientists. I like endeavor and manufacture and expressions of triumph. As humans we're faced with a world which is so much bigger than we are that it was only natural for us to bond and begin to work together to first eke out a living and then, perhaps, tame the "wild," and probably the result of our genetic code, place our hand-mark upon the land. It's probably fair to say that in some areas at this point in our evolution we've gone too far and need to back up a bit lest our mark come back to haunt us. But, in general, humans have done more in their own way than the birds and badgers and beavers and spiders and wasps and mice and rats have in terms of fitting the environment we've got to our tastes or needs. We will also always be reminded, by some random event, that no matter how profound our structure or clever our engineering or witty and insightful our vision, some of our constructs will be the waste of forces truly beyond our grasp. It's hard to imagine humans ever being able to stop the plate motion on our mantle, for instance, or diverting the course of a tornado or hurricane or abruptly squashing a tsunami. Heck, the best we can do with the charges in our atmosphere is try and cleverly divert massive jolts of electricity and hope our system works yet one more time.
The penultimate expression of all these aspects which draw my interest in humans is in the cities we create and evolve and re-create. It's where we gather, for comfort, for security, for company, and for easy access to our kind, be that kind similar-thinking types or the necessary diversity of skills it takes to create an enterprise, whether that enterprise is a company of engineers and craftspeople who build things or a company of dancers who delight and prance to the music of another company of people who play things which make pleasing noises. And so on.
I've had the good fortune to be in some pretty remote locations of this planet - Alaska, Norway's west coast, the Straits of Magellan. In all these locations, removed from the rest of the world by hours and hours of air travel, there are settlements. I was located in these settlements for the duration of my stay in these remote areas, which ranged from nearly half a year to repeating sets of several months, By any other standard, all these settlements would be characterized as minor cities of which most countries have score to hundreds. The distinguishing feature to me of each of these settlements - Anchorage, Stavanger, Punta Arenas - was not their small size, each is on the order of a quarter-million inhabitants, but how even in a small settlement in today's social, economic, and technical ecology these small settlements were nearly self-contained. True, some materials were required to be shipped from other locations and, on occasion, some skill sets were required to be sent for. But by and large these settlements had one each of everything which is required for a settlement to constitute a "city" in today's reading of what a city is. Each had a set of individuals looking out for the local random and dangerous events, each had a set of individuals working for the commonweal, each had a collection of merchants and craftspeople and artisans who responded to the local opportunities and maintained a balance between wants, needs and possibilities. Each also had some set of individuals who were engaged in the unique opportunities of that remote location and each had a set of individuals whose responsibility and license allowed them to relate the unique elements of the location to the larger elements of the rest of the cities of the world.
What this means is that without much compromise I was able to fill all the gaps in my urban requirement block in each of these locations. I found the basics and the extras which urban rats tick off when they think about desert island living conditions. What I think this means is that for those of us who chose to live in urban conditions, there's some baseline set of ecological conditions which must be met before we collectively agree that the local environment is - in fact - a city. Everyone has a set of lists like this and one could recite examples: music, theater, cinema, food, imbibements, sport, information collection and dissemination, tinker-toy things and ephemeral things. When something is missing there seem to be individuals or sets of individuals who respond to the absence and provide whatever can be created locally to fill that void. We say that nature abhors a vacuum but in fact it's humans who abhor a vacuum - at least the urban rat human.
As mentioned, I've spent many weeks by myself in some pretty solitary locations deliberately. There are lots of reasons to want to absent oneself from other humans. Mostly my reasons have been to remove humans from the equation and place myself in the location as an observer of the planet when the human element is missing. I've learned and discovered a great deal about the land, the creatures who go on without us, the impact of the weather on the land and those creatures and the interaction of all of the above. I've always been struck, at some point in these solitary forays, by how magnificent the living planet is without us. Earth, in fact the Universe, doesn't need us. But, when we're in it, it presents so many diverse elements each of which mesh together to form such a larger whole that - as a human - it's nearly beyond comprehension and definitely beyond my ability to appreciate all together. It's these moments, when my insides are truly bursting with joy and overwhelmed by beauty, that I realize why there are cities. It's not just that we need each other to get anything done given the scale of our world and the nearly unfathomable scale of the Universe. It's because we can't cope with our inability to express our own joy without another member of our species. This is also true for different moments when the wild setting is so beyond one's control that complete collapse or surrender are the only options. What can one do in the middle of a desert, for instance, when a sudden and violent thunderstorm rages and blows one's tent down and drenches everything one has. Nothing. Commiserate is what we do but that requires a fellow human.
By the time I'm ready to return from my solitude, what I want most is the company of others so I can relate everything I've seen, heard, learned and discovered. I'm ready to return to the city and share or create.
Granted, there will always be those humans who do not feel this way and whose lives can be completely whole and fulfilling without the company of others. With any population base, and we've got six billion of us now, there will always be the loners and those who seek singular and unrelated lives. Fortunately we've got a planet which is large enough that both the urban rat and the lone ranger can find an appropriate home.
What does this have to do with cities? It's simple, really, the cities we've created are expressions of these human requirements and with six billion of us having been doing this for six-to-a-dozen-thousand years now, we've got a huge variety of cities. It's not so much that each one is that different from the next. It's more like each one is shaped by both the landform upon which it's set and the ideas and requirements of those who first created that settlement. That, and the evolution of those who followed for however long any particular settlement has been around. We've got this huge range of human expression now and cities constitute some collection of those expressions. Some cities have more of one expression and others have more of another. And, some cities - New York, Tokyo, London, Delhi, Shanghai, the list could go on - have every expression possible and are seen by outsiders as either cacophonic or appetent.
There are also, given the fantastic geology this planet has, a range of natural environments, landscapes, weathers, seasonal upheavals, elevations, latitudes and longitudes, even night skies which are available for one's choice in an urban home. Using a collective appreciation for personal surveys I've done over the past four decades, it seems to me that individuals choose a location for their home based on one of the following simple and demanding reasons: 1) It's where they have a job (where job is any endeavor of importance to the individual); 2) It's where they have friends or family; or 3) It's where they like the non-urban or urban (or both) environment. There's a default reason which I've also discovered which may constitute the largest number of individuals and that is because 4) It's where they're stuck at the moment.
Not many of us, again based on my low-level but constantly-refreshed survey data, seem to want to uproot ourselves from any given location even if we have compelling reasons why we are not pleased with where we are at the time. I guess the reclama is that humans don't like change and even those like me who seem to relish change only really relish change in certain areas. I like to hear new music but I don't like to change toothpaste, for example. I like new roads to explore but I don't change the way I drive them, for another. We open up our environmental variables a little at a time and we maintain the rest within a narrow band of comfort or accommodation.
Each time I go on one of these multi-week forays out into the world - or my world which is mostly North America above the Rio Grande - I encounter new places, new geography and new geology and sometimes even new weather. I always encounter new towns and on occasion new cities. One of the things which always goes through my mind when I'm in such a situation - exploring a new town or eating in the heart of a new city - is whether this new urban entity is one which fits my sensibilities. Could I live here? I mean, yes, we all can live anywhere and make do, but would I be happy? Would the things which engage me and which make me think and which delight me and move or egg me on to other discoveries or endeavors or creations be present in this new place?
There are not that many cities in North America which meet the entire list of such requirements I've compiled. At first, when I was working my first job or moving about with my mom and dad as a younger person, these things didn't matter so much because I was preoccupied with the then more important elements of my life - being raised, finding my own way, just the basics of spreading my wings as it were. It was only later, after my first job and after traveling about the country on my first - personally motivated - trip of discovery that I began to think about these things. Gee, this place has a nicer downtown with more stores; or, Wow, look at all the mountains surrounding this town's parks; or, Gosh, I really like the music and open atmosphere of the people here. Of course, by then, I was beginning to get locked into a particular location because of requirement 1) above, my job happened to be located there. This essay isn't going to change my life and it's probably not going to change anyone else's either, but it might cite a few instances of some things I've seen, learned, thought about and concluded about the places I've been to in such a way that someone might then either visit or explore or otherwise expand their own world.
The cities of North America were developed long after the original inhabitants of this land had created their own settlements. Many of our cities are located in exactly the same location as the settlements of the tribal members of the Native Americans, the First Nations, or the Aboriginals, depending on how you want to view those who were first here - the Pre-Columbian Americans. Once we had the Old World invaders settling into places in the New World, the Old World settlers brought their Old World ways with them and we had the creation of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English towns sited in a New World setting. We had the development of the Old World industries and endeavors set upon the opportunities of the New World resources. There's a lot of bad sociology which occurred which I won't dwell on since that is a truism of humans and would have been the case no matter who the Post-Columbians were. It's also the case that a great many of the settlements on this planet have not always been the best for the local ecology, but that somewhere along the timeline, the locals recognized that and have worked to make amends. It's also the case with humans that we have, as a species, been exploitative of our environment and that subsequent generations may or may not have made attempts to correct the ruined ecology or resurrect the original ecology. Again, that just appears to be the way we are and I'll ignore those elements as that's part of the history of the species and not relevant since it's a recurring theme and apparently not amenable to being changed.
I like the French-developed cities more than I do the Spanish or English on this continent. I've only seen one instance of a Portuguese-developed city and don't have much of a base of comparison. I like the French cities because the French method of siting roadways and towns is such that the intersections with bodies of water or rivers is always perpendicular - the road leads "to" the water feature - and the "along" path follows the general shoreline of the body of water. This is not untrue of the Spanish and English except that the latter seemed more inclined to overlay their topical town grid on top of the local geography in such a way there there were always streets which ended abruptly or towns which were physically separated from the local geologic or hydrologic feature rather than integrated with it. It's also true that the Spanish and English were creating more fortified villages than the French, who had more of a mind to create a village and then a separate fortification. At this same time in Europe there were a number of nobles who were under the employ of the ruling class to bring some order to a wide-ranging set of towns, gardens, royal preserves and the like.
Thus began the notion of "planned" urban environments. These ideas were brought to the New World by many of the later nobles who had charters from the conquering nation. In 1863 William Penn, for instance, laid out Philadelphia between the two rivers - the Delaware and the Schukyll - on a grid with intersecting grand avenues. Not that different in many ways from the plans which Haussmann used for Paris, nearly 170 years later. In many ways William Penn was the first true urban planner, both of the Old World and of the New World. Penn brought his ideas to fruition with a New World city which would both appeal to the nobles he hoped would build manors in his new town and for the tradespeople and craftspeople he knew would have to work and live there. He also overlaid his new town on top of the tilled soil which the Finns, Swedes, Dutch and English farmers who came before his charter had worked. Because of the central and pivotal position Philadelphia played in the New World politic, Penn's ideas were spread relatively easily and in other places took root as well. The planned urban expression of the New World was a relatively incumbent element of life on these shores at the earliest moments of the Post-Columbian development phase.
In 1785 the young Congress passed an act called "The Land Ordinance of 1785," which essentially created the six-square-mile grid which is the ubiquitious urban feature laid upon today's United States. In 1803 the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, and the new lands were overlaid with the 1785 grid system and - bingo - the urban grid structure of the United States was off and running. With the vanguard planned city of Philadelphia already well established and the grid system in place, the ubiquity of the American City grid system was cinched.
Luckily, by 1785, there had already been a number of French-developed urban settlements, including Montreal, Quebec, New Orleans, and others up and down the Mississippi River, along the St. Lawrence River and seaway, throughout the Great Lakes area and in the plains west of the Canadian Shield. These cities now have grids overlaid on them but the original alongside and perpendicular rivershore and lakeshore streets continue as a primordial element of the evolved modern city. The Spanish settlements were more typically grids with a municipal and theological center at opposite ends of a center square with radial and peripheral roadways further defining the central square. The English settlements more typically had the grid as defined by Penn overlaid on whatever geology or geography was at hand with streets defined more for their purpose such as "Dock" street or "Market" street or "Post" road.
Obviously, I'm creating a superset of smaller realities and applying an overarching historical perspective on the development of the North American city north of the Rio Grande. If you grant this aggregate assimilation of evolutions and the basic causes for the principal, originating, factor what we have is a set of urban entities in north North America which now make some form of development sense. There are an endless array of cities which have identical, or nearly identical, or similar, or mirror features to each other. Major differences being defined more by the surrounding landscape and intrinsic weather than any differences of urban development opinion. We have minor differences being defined by particular instances of local originality or application of specific solutions to strictly local environmental conditions or even the largesse of individuals or the oversight of groups involved in the episodic evolution of that urban entity. Examples of the latter would be the MacMillan Commission's plans to finally finish Pierre L'Enfants' original plans for the city of Washington, DC, and the subsequent, 1926 Public Buildings Act of Congress, which created the space and structures which constitute the Federal Triangle. Even later was the 1965 Commission on Pennsylvania Avenue. Each of these were responsive acts which harkened back to the original grand vision for the Nation's Capitol where the local ecology had taken a more organic city development route.
Not every north North American city has had such beneficence. On the other hand, every once in a while there's an individual or set of individuals whose mark upon the landscape is larger and more inclusive than would seem possible. For the American urban landscape there are two different sets of individuals whose mark is undeniable. The first is Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and his brother John Charles Olmsted, who in 1855 designed a set of enhancements for New York City's Central Park which created the new school of landscape architecture. Following that success, the brothers were in much demand by urban entities as widely disparate as Boston, Charlotte, Louisville, Seattle, Washington, DC, Newport, Detroit, Buffalo, Boulder, Pittsburgh, Rochester, and the list goes on and on. The greenery of Philadelphia was the work of William Penn and was, perhaps, a unique vision which was overrun by the demands of commerce and trade in the then evolving Colonial cities. The work of the Olmsted brothers was an evolutionary response by the many cities they worked for to correct the negative effects of that trade and commerce evolution and to evolve the city to something more akin to Penn's original vision of a green urban landscape.
The other individual act was the invention in 1852 by Elisha Graves Otis of the safety elevator and the subsequent continuation by his sons, Charles and Norton - Otis Brothers & Company - of the evolution and emplacement of the modern elevator starting first with hydralic and by 1889 direct-drive electric motor powered systems. That invention spawned the Chicago School of Architecture and America's skyscraper urban landscape was ensconced.
All of these historical elements constitute the fabric from which our cities have evolved and is why they are both alike and different. Several more elements of evolution are necessary, though, to further enhance our understanding of where we find ourselves today. The first is probably the situation which evolved from the discovery of oil, the evolution of the automotive form of transportation, and the economic boost which Houston, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Detroit, Akron and Toledo provided by their manufacture of cars, buses, trucks, tires and fuel and by the concurrent economy provided by the firms which made road-making equipment and those who used it to build new roads for an America suddenly in love with internal-combustion-powered vehicles. By the 1930's most of the urban trolley systems of the country had been replaced through a series of conniving and at the time convincing arguments from these industries and most American cities had bus systems and most individuals had or had access to automobiles. The lead-up to World War II only enhanced the notion of a Nation of Wheels. At the end of the Second World War, the returning solders and their new brides were greeted by a thankful nation and what turned into a globally-significant economic engine. Suddenly, Americans had access to wealth beyond the dreams of their forebears, many of whom had been first-generation immigrants from Europe. To respond, the American home construction industry created a new form of housing - tract housing. By taking the farmlands adjacent to the cities and grazing them over, platting new streets and cul-de-sacs, and then constructing affordable homes, the nation suddenly had a new population of "suburbanites." The houses were affordable because of learned economies of mass-production, learned in response to the war effort, and the earliest spin-offs of some of the new tools which had been invented to go into the warplanes and warships and mobile armies we fielded during the years of WWII. The replicated homes were easy to build, simply flip the floor plan every other house and they appeared unique. There were no Craftsman applications, none needed. It all fit together and an entire generation grew up with access to an individual home not adjacent to their neighbor but with access to a car. Shopping centers came into being to accommodate the newly mobile family and drive-in theaters sprang up across farm fields everywhere. There were still urban dwellers and those who wanted to live in the city core but now there was a set of choices. Factories and suburban office parks began to spring up in response to the mobility of the Post-WWII employee. Downtown no longer was the only place where things were located. Drive-in and drive-through stores and restaurants began to respond to the mobility factor and we were off and running in our new Oldsmobiles.
The next was the revelation by Dwight D. Eisenhower, when as a general in charge of moving a convoy across America, that there was no easy way to traverse this great land easily and without congestion. That led him as president, in 1956, to sign legislation to create the "National System of Interstate and Defense Highways," which at the time envisioned forty-one thousand new miles of limited access, multiple lane highway. In 2002 there were 46,726 miles of Interstate highway in the United States and thousands of additional miles of limited access, multiple-lane, divided highway built by states in and around their urban entities. Because the system was designed to facilitate the interstate travel by motor vehicle (or convoy) the route structure created a series of loops, or circumferential highways, around all the major metropolitan areas in its traverse from coast-to-coast and border-to-border.
The final element necessary to comprehend today's American city is the Civil Rights activities of the 1960's and the incredible impact that has had on this nation's urban fabric. Upset by and frightened of the many activities which were going on at the time, a very large proportion of White-Anglo-Saxon descendants, who happened to be living in core urban villages in nearly every American city or town at the time, fled to the newly developing suburbs. They abandoned the city in favor of the suburb because they could chose their neighbors selectively. It would take nearly a decade of Civil Rights legislation to reverse the trend favored by developers and banks at that time to discriminate on the basis of skin color or ethnic origin.
The urban riots which some cities experienced in the later years of the sixties decade didn't help either because it enforced the security image of the suburbs. This, of course, led to the final flight of even more Anglo-Saxons and the urban cores of most of America's cities were left as emptying shells with a population, in many cases, of indigent individuals with very little opportunity and even less chance of escaping.
So now, at least in the United States, we had a huge number of formerly dense urban entities which were surrounded by newly-dense suburbs but which had no inner core of people. Naturally, the merchants and tradespeople and craftspeople and employing economic engines followed suite, leaving in their wake cities with buildings but no commerce or manufacturing capabilities. Because of the fear factor, many companies chose to re-site their headquarters or manufacturing facilities outside their historic home. Pursue this thread long enough and you encounter the Northern and Midwestern industrial belt abandonment of the 1970's where whole industries moved, en masse, from the labor union intense towns they grew up in to the free-market new towns in the South and West. By then the urban definition of core city with rich opportunities inside the core had been replaced with the notion of low density suburban homes interspersed with office parks or factory islands and shopping centers and strip plazas.
This is where we find the American urban landscape of the Twenty-First Century. And it's a sad condition, indeed. There are multiple efforts across nearly all the states to reverse this trend - to densify, to return to a rich-urban-core state of existence. Some of these activities are like the ones of the past where the evolutionary mistakes of decades-ago are now recognized and attempting to be corrected. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, even Houston are all cities which have devolved their downtown core but which are now in the process of re-densifying with the help of legislation, developer incentives, homeowner incentives, and in all the cases cited, new and appropriate urban mass transit trolley systems.
That being said, the one major difference between Canadian cities and American cities is the simple fact that the Canadian cities did not go through the Civil Rights events America did and their urban residents did not undertake a suburban flight. That and the precursor reality that there is no Canadian equivalent of the Interstate system. Yes, there are urban expressways which ring and interconnect some of their larger cities and which connect those cities to each other and the myriad towns which now surround them. But there is no equivalent of the barrier which some of the US highways have created between the urban core and the less-dense surrounding towns. In a sense, the Canadian city has evolved missing one or two major components of the evolution which American cities have gone through. To be sure, not all American cities went through all phases of these evolutionary elements. But enough of them have such that our city fabric is relatively and fundamentally different from the urban fabric of Canada.
It shows. Canadian cities, even the smaller ones, have a vibrancy and level of activity which is unmatched in any equivalent-sized American city. It takes an American city - in my experience and estimate - of nearly four times the size to match the inner city life of a Canadian city. This is not a "good" thing or a "bad" thing. It's an observation of the differences between the two cultures. There are plenty of American cities which I'm always pleased to be in - and lots and lots of small American towns which never cease to delight me nor solicit my return. It's just that given any random Canadian city I've not visited before and any random American city I've not visited before, chances are more likely that I'll like more of what I find and have more to do in the random Canadian city. Not every American city of a quarter-million population (metro or not, it doesn't matter) is going to have a vibrant downtown or a core of civic amenities within walking distance. Some do, Sioux City, Iowa, for instance, has every semblance of being a Canadian city by these definitions. So does Minot, North Dakota, and Bozeman and Missoula, Montana. So does Duluth, Minnesota. On a larger scale, Des Moines, Iowa, though smaller than Omaha, Nebraska, has much more to do within walking distance downtown and presents itself in a much more likeable manner. So did Louisville, Kentucky, and Wilmington, North Carolina. Once you pass a certain population aggregate there's no reason to not find something worth occupying one's time in a city. That aggregate is probably a million in the United States. Interestingly enough and representative of what I have found, the equivalent aggregate in Canada is about a quarter-million population. Saskatoon and Regina, Saskatchewan, are of that size as is Lethbridge, Alberta, and yet there was as much to see and do in those Canadian towns as there was in Des Moines and Louisville.
I haven't yet been in either Minneapolis nor St. Paul, Minnesota, and am certainly looking forward to exploring those cities. Neither yet have I been to Detroit nor MIlwaukee. That's it for the large American cities. The rest I've been to many times. For the lesser cities I've not yet been to Quebec nor Ottawa nor Gaspe and would leap at the chance to explore those Quebec and Ontario cities. In the US, I've not yet been to Reno, Sacramento, Tallahassee, Rochester, Asheville, Fairbanks, Juneau, HIlo, or Honolulu. I have been to San Juan and Mayaguez but not Ponce.
Which means I can't say with complete certainty that my major thesis is 100 percent valid 100 percent of the time. But I can say that us Americans need to continue with our efforts to recapture our cities and remake our urban fabric because when we do we have some of the nicest and most interesting and most people-friendly cities I've come across. We're making good progress across the land, that much is for sure. I've been to a great number of these US cities over decades' worth of time and the recapture is underway. Some of our lesser cities benefited from being out of the mainstream when one or more of these evolution whirlwinds swept through the American urban fabric. Consequently the rip in those cities' fabric was less deep. Other cities have such a rag-like structure from which they are trying to reconstitute the fabric that much more time will be needed but the reparation process has begun.
One good thing about evolution, whether it be of people or cities, is that new generations bring fresh ideas and lose old ideas. The notion of living in the suburbs, removed from one's neighbors and from the amenities and necessities of life, is - it seems - a passing thread in the American social fabric. To continue the metaphor, the new generation is growing up with a desire to live close in, to engage in their urban existence throughout more hours of the day, in a sense to sew more seams into their lives using the urban fabric around them.
You may feel free to disagree with any of my tenets or the thesis in general. I present this on the basis of an enduring love of humanity and our expression of ourselves through our cities and towns and the general sociological expression of ourselves in our urban fabric.
And now, the Manitoba images followed by some Seattle images.
These are a set of images taken enroute to Winnipeg while driving West across the Canadian Shield. Notice the contrail
is casting a shadow up against the clouds. There were a few of these we encountered and the best I could figure out is
they were originating from Chicago O'Hare Airport and were Great Circle routes on their way to somewhere in the Far East.
A panorama of downtown Winnipeg taken along Portage Avenue, one of the major east-west thoroughfares in the city. It's also one
of the oldest streets in the town and emanates from the area, further east, in the city where the Assiniboine, Seine and Red Rivers converge.
It's called the Red River of the North to distinguish between it and the other "Red" River, which begins in New Mexico, flows through
Texas and empties into the Mississippi River near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The Red River of the North begins in North Dakota, flows
east through Minnesota and then north through Manitoba, emptying into Lake Winnipeg.
This is another panorama along Portage Avenue and is at the intersection with Memorial Drive (in center) which leads to the
Manitoba legislative buildings and the Capitol. Downtown Winnipeg is riddled with covered walkways extending over the
streets and interior walkways connecting buildings on adjacent blocks. From November through March, the average
daily temperature in Winnipeg is between -5 and -20 Celsius which is 23 to -4 Degrees Fahrenheit. And windy, too. Wind
chill effects can lower those temperatures another 20 degrees.
Near the the confluence of the three rivers is the original downtown area
of the city. Like so many other North American cities, Winnipeg experienced
an explosive growth during the turn of the 19th into the 20th Century and
has a set of early blocks representative of the Industrial Age architecture.
Some of the downtown street furniture has a decidedly
"Western" appearance. These two images are from the
same streetlight control panel. Most of the similar panels
in the downtown area were festooned with a Winnipeg
motif of some form - either native culture or native fauna.
One side Summer, the other side Winter.
Kinda spooky if you ask me. This was the main church in the older
section of the original downtown and looks like it was built sometime in
the early 1920's. This was taken on a Wednesday evening around
9:00 pm and there were no signs of life near the church save the neon.
A closer look at the entrance on the church's newer side,
an addition which looked like it had been added sometime
in the late 1950's or early 1960's. Strangely enough, for
an inner-city church of this age, there were no signs of
a bread or soup kitchen or actually of any other charitable
activities sponsored by the church. Why neon and no food?
Here neon makes sense. This is the storefront sign for a business in the
older section of town near The Forks, the convergence of the three rivers.
The Neon Factory's lobby, at night and after hours.
Not just signs - but clocks too. I suppose if I had no end
of financial resources I'd bedeck my house with all manner
of neon appliances, clocks, sculptures, widgets which just
blink in different colors. They're not as cheap as LEDs
nor are they as cheap to operate but they sure do come in
a wider variety of colors and shapes and sizes.
Finally, the neon sign of the Winnipeg downtown Goodwill Industries
storefront behind plate glass which is reflecting the across-the-street
Neon Factory's sign.
This was also on a side street in the old section of Winnipeg.
Not sure what was behind this door but the original lock,
the rusty one second down from the top, apparently was
not good enough and whoever owns this door just decided
he or she wasn't going to take any more gruff from strangers.
And now for some random shots around Seattle......
Try and make sense of this parking sign on Brooklyn Avenue NE in the U-District, one block
north of NE 45th Street. Not only is the sign completely obscured, but traffic is one-way
in the direction the sign is facing away from, which is to say that in looking straight at this
sign I'm also looking into the headlights of oncoming cars. Huh? What was Seattle's
Department of Transportation thinking - or what was Seattle's City Light thinking. Or were
either of them thinking at all?
The following sequence is taken from the 35th Avenue SW and Avalon Way SW
bus stop, overlooking the West Seattle Stadium on a friday night.
Next set of images will be Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and Edmonton, Alberta. Next journal
entry will be.....
Chas
Posted: Sun - October 17, 2004 at 04:12 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM
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Published On: Jul 04, 2005 05:41 PM