The Lived-in CityBy Jane Holtz Kay Author Jane Holtz Kay maintains that above all (if oxymoronically), "livable cities" are lived-in cities, cities that have worn well over time, as this historian, critic, and author writes. Boston, the quintessential walking city, known for its diversity in time and places, suffers the assaults of our car-bound-over-consumptive era but survives as a spry symbol of the urbanity essential to global survival.
"Robert," or rather "Robairrrrrr," as even our monolingual lunch-goers managed to say, rolling his French forename with the same care he devoted to our sandwiches, was the host of our lunch hour. Endowed with the memory to recall three preferences while slicing and dicing a fourth, he was the maitre d' of our neighborhood. ("So are you turkey rollup today or..." he would prompt one customer as he minced onions for a second, while joshing along yet a third). Time after time, he would jive us geographic provincials with a really bad joke about a trip he had just taken to his native Haiti...to play hockey, enlisting the assembled flock in his riff as the lines grew longer.
In his stead, the next day, strangers handed out free sandwiches with every drink purchase, plastic-wrapped fare, thin and meager next to Robert's oozing composite sandwiches, customized for our daytime quarters. And the neighborhood he created missed more than the food. More than the eating, the absence was in the serving, the rock 'n' rolling repartee - the power to unite us odd-lot Bostonians: more folks of color, more mix in income than any other eatery around this Downtown edge, from stiff-jawed suits to slackers jiving with idle chatter. More nodding and smiling customers than I had found before, or would again in its sanitized reincarnation. And the absence went beyond the loss within our strange but powerful semi-demi neighborhood of city life. For what was lacking in the aftermath was what defines cities: the everyday urbanity that exists no other place. So it ended, one day in late June, and, by now, the bustling "before" has become a sterile "after," as empty of life as the lost memory of our casual comrades in line those many months. Well, not quite comrades. For the urbanity that this corner collage boasted was based on the anonymity that defines a city. Oasis, unlike Cheers, was actually the place where nobody knows your name. And that was just fine, thank you. We knew each others faces, the banter, the menu, of course, but not much beyond. And as a city lover, delighting in the absentminded but congenial anonymity that is Downtown's hallmark, I say thank god for that: sing a hymn to the hammering, clambering non-ring of the city's impersonal connections. Casual discourse, casual multiracial, mixed-income elbowing of our neighbors is at a zero in most suburbs (and, admittedly, in parts of this town). So is walking, even talking. Here, we mingled and moved, rubbed elbows casually, not nervously, in anonymous urbanity. And that was fine, too. For the strange permanence of the city's everyday, predictable flux was the very definition of the serious city: mixing ephemeral ease in everlasting surroundings, the lived-in city shares space as naturally as it does the centuries. Need I stress, then, that lived-in cities like Boston are not the place "where everybody knows your name"? That, in fact, they can be proud fortresses of not knowing your name. Only real cities can teach us the meaning of place and time that is the opposite of television's "have-a-good- day" non-places like the faux Cheer, now a tourist replica offering t-shirts and trinkets tucked into the ground floor of an otherwise elegant Beacon Hill rowhouse--a faux tourist place, even more faux than television.
Not all American cities are the inheritors of four centuries of comings and goings as Boston is, of course, but they have time on their side. Serious time. And it is that sense of permanence and flux, growth and instability, tolerance and suspicion visible on their worn streets and sidewalks that lends character. Diversity in place and time is just one of many partnerships in the city, of course. City life is the sharing of space with absentminded courtesy--the chance encounters of strangers and neighbors. (Check the subways to see how we suffer crowds politely, if not happily. Check the city, but not the suburbs, for acceptance of the Other, cheek to jowl, backpack to briefcase.) Urbanity is about mingling and hanging back, about civility and bellicosity, quirkiness and constancy. Above all, serious cities actively decline uniformity despite the Gaps--in both senses-- that mar our streets: their flanks and facades offer an eclectic mingling that stands in contrast to the uniformity of the malls and supermalls that bloat the landscape in our new suburbs and outburbs. Suburbanity, so to speak, is about another kind of civility, I concede: the civility of good schools and good roads, of manicured lawns and well-groomed street trees. It is, alas, about how the lopsided subsidies of our federal government have fed urban flight, promoting the pattern of settlement that breeds suburban wealth and urban poverty as Washington subsidized the highway exodus from downtown and dug our nation's Great Divide--urban v. suburban, maintained for a half century or more. Doubt it? Think, then: no one has yet to strive "toward a livable Suburb." Strangely, even those who struggle for a livable planet, intermingling the built and natural environments in these days of global malaise and environmental activism, have yet to turn to the lived-in city to ally the green and the grid - the country and the city --as did our ancestors. Few follow the 150-year-old tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted's masterworks of naturalizing the city and urbanizing the planet's biological systems; fewer peruse the more recent classics Design with Nature and Granite Garden, invoking the need for whole earth systems in our urban zones. Is the city cacophonous? Irritating? Disrupted? Yes. Is the glass half full? Half empty? Yes, of course, both, and at the same time. Name it what you will, but add one thing: it is also this fragile planet's last, best hope... the only alternative to settling on the ever-contracting fringes, consuming the last chance landscape, extinguishing resources and species. If we are ever to become ecofluent, as the green warriors put it, the strengthening of our lived-in cities is where it must take place.
And yet, the Anyplace USA establishments proliferate more rapidly than ever before: in the Franco-fake Bon Pain, the Starbucks and Wendy's, undercutting diversity, destroying vivacity, while neighborhood by neighborhood, we fight the good fight. Since Staples superstore came downtown, stationery stores have dwindled. A month-at-a-glance pocket calendar is nowhere to be found nor the chance to buy one pen, one pad of paper, one anything, it sometimes seems. In the Back Bay rowhouse world where I live, empty storefronts have succumbed to soap and cell phone shops as rents rise and the economy slides. An eyeglass shop papered over with neon images stares like empty eyes. Chain stores sit in the old Prince School while the nearby Exeter Theatre, once the Spiritualist Temple, has fallen from grace over the years: a Friday's sits on one of its corners, an internet company in the space above. And every site seems tentative. Perhaps they always have. In the time line of the historic city, change is the constant. Yet the loss of flavor and the larger-scaled anonymity seem more rampant these days...the pace faster, bigger.... the city planners more laissez-faire, the renters greedier here now, as across the country. A Shakespeare and Company bookstore bowing to a New York Barnes and Noble has its counterparts, and, across the ocean cities in "Old" Europe cities and old everyplace fail to ward off the monopolies in the sprawling, ever-globalizing world. Change, as history teaches us, can be good and bad alike. The grand design of Paris by its great builder, Baron Von Haussmann, caused the ferocious leveling of its medieval, quirky, charming streets for the grand boulevards which we also love. So, too, the filling of Boston's murky Back Bay following Von Haussmann's lead in splendid avenues would never pass an environmental impact statement. The planners who filled the bay with pilings to create the mile-long stretch of streets, shaped splendid structures on the French model, as they had created English housing modes atop Beacon Hill. Again, is the cup of city change half full or half empty? One must always ask. Today, truth be told, the cup seems overflowing. The pace has quickened, and change - rightfully--alarms us. The props for greedy growth are strong, the planning weak, the scale of building grandiose. For all the landmark legislation and historic cache that make these surroundings livable, neither neighbors nor activists can ward off the construction booms that turn land to unminted gold and money to "serious money" for serious building - building too serious to fret about architecture's ease and accommodation with its surroundings. As pernicious as any suburban subdivider, today's city builders focus on the bottomline, caring little for proper fit and public process in a city where planning is a lost art and politicians pay back the piper. And so a new generation builds. Chunky, pricey postmodern buildings rise, stage sets of history for architectural appeasement flourish, and the tall towers for the rich rise above the church steeples where the homeless take an icy night's winter sleep beneath timeless porticoes. In the lived-in, not always livable city, such issues become visible. That is the joy, and trial, of their heft and density. The city, as always, reflects "the times that try men's souls," and in these times of terror and increasing economic inequality, social malaise is manifest on its streets. The newly refurbished Bulfinch State House, with its 1789 golden dome and rolling front lawn partake of troubled times as they hide the security cameras that pry into passing sounds and sights. The fear of terrorist attack combines with privatism to virtually bar access to the landmark Custom House tower whose once-public balcony offered a splendid view of the city's wraparound world of water. Downtown, the alliance of politics and money dictates, and the city skyline soars. Towers break through barriers to appropriate the sky. Human scale is lost while the winds they churn affront walkers. Blank-walled facades squeeze out shops below and rising property values threaten old ethnic neighborhoods like Chinatown with highrise holdouts for the rich. The hot spot seaport sites in South Boston are being sliced and diced to serve the upper income, not the longtime artists. And yet, the paradox of urban life defies its shortcomings as restored buildings enliven main streets and bustling neighborhoods thrive with new ethnic vitality. The city survives with a novelty and energy that baffle expectations. For all our days deploring slapdash change, a visit to the area once dubbed the "Combat Zone," offers a new/old Downtown in a new after-hour world. Plunging through the streets of the newly-named "Ladder Blocks" we seek a meal in Restaurant Land's new digs and find one: FELT (so-called) dazzles our eyes. Across from old Washington Street's decay, we enter a black, cavernous space, dazzled by designer lights and silver mirrors. Lofty ceilings rise high, offering images of James Bond to the Great God of Retro Chic...and good food. On the second and third floors above, billiard tables explain the "felt" nomenclature and more glitz offers the décor du jour. Soon, the floor above will echo to dancing bands. The crowd's average age is not much beyond the twenties. A mini-miracle. How did this hip factor return again to the tired streets of the moribund picture palace world that headlined "Banned in Boston" one upon a time? The endless city will survive a new generation, and surprise an old one. Robert will survive, as well. His Oasis stand-ins say he has found work. In fact, from time to time, I have seen him in the Back Bay, driving by the Clarendon Street Baptist Church with his family, one of many immigrant and ethnic parishioners who have rescued this old Yankee edifice. In the shifting, lived-in city, the Back Bay's volume of nineteenth century churches is a loose-leaf scrapbook of change. Its "proper Bostonian" members drifted off to the suburbs long ago, leaving fraying carpets, crumbling brownstone facades and shrinking budgets. Today's urban influx brings a fascinating miscellany of new members --secular condo dwellers, social do-gooders, and a colorful congregation of immigrants. Five earlier incarnations of the Baptist assemblage and more than 300 years stand between the first Clarendon Street Church and its ethnic rainbow of newcomers who fill the chambers Sundays and celebrate their weddings in spring and summer as the celebratory stretch limos line the block and flower-strewn brides in white gowns reflect the world's outposts, from Haiti to Vietnam. To me, a sometime historian of this evanescent city, the city is a tale to be twice or thrice told, depending on willing audiences, and this peripatetic church that finally lit here in 1872 is one of my favorites. Decidedly, the very early work of two geniuses, Henry Hobbs Richardson and Frédéric Auguste Bartoldi, its design is decidedly the best of neither. Richardson, the great architect of nineteenth-century America, launched his career here, and the marginal and not altogether pleasing proportions of the church show his unsure hand. Ah, that lumbering campanile. Bartoldi, too, better known (and better accomplished elsewhere) at the Statue of Liberty, arrived in 1871 and created the sculpture adorning its peak with dubious success. Alike, the Richardson building and the Bartoldi figure tooting its horn in an ungainly pose caused the locals to dub the structure the Church of the Holy Beanblower The name stuck.
Still, God loses out to Mammon, that Syrian deity, in the embattled city and even ecclesiastical masterpieces are not safe from his claims. In fact, a soaring 20th century version dedicated to the latter --the 100-foot high glass John Hancock tower--famously just about undid the former, Trinity Church. Designed by Richardson, who, by a mathematical irony, began creating his masterpiece there in 1872, exactly a century before the insurance company did, the tower suffered assaults from the new building from the start. The glass rhomboid seemed hell bound from the beginning, despite (because of?) its proud and prestigious architect, I.M. Pei. As a young architecture critic for the Boston Globe, I deplored (still do) the overweening height of the sixty two-story structure looming over Copley Square, whiplashing its famous public space, creating hostile wind tunnels for pedestrians, and diminishing surrounding architectural marvels including the magnificent Boston Public Library by McKim, Mead and White. What ego! What arrogance, I thought to break the barrier of this low rise landscape; to create this antisocial climate change. And more, for suddenly it seemed that the sky-breaking building had caused yet one other phenomena: the sun reflected in its mirror-glass walls was glaring at Mass. Turnpike drivers from miles away, blinding them. A hue. A stew. A cry. An article. But first, of course, a call to the public relations staff about what the new "sunset" was doing to the accident rate. Did a building have the right? I asked. "Would you ask God to stop the sunsets?" came the reply. Not even the Fountainhead school of ego architecture had prepared me for the arrogance of equating an act of the Almighty with an insurance company's phallic gesture. It was a first but not a last. Worse luck, the glass windows began to pop, and wooden panels replaced them. A strange patchwork, indeed. "The U.S. Plywood Building," they called it, as lawyers scrapped and engineers hemmed and hawed and failed for a long time, a very long time, to fix it. Worse still, the wooden foundations that secured the adjacent Trinity Church's foundations in solid soil below its watery bed began to quiver and shake split from the insurance company's construction work while the elegant Copley Plaza hotel, on the other side, next door was wobbling...and... To cut to the chase: they did it with dollars. You can say that a city is where everything has a price and nothing has a value, where everything is negotiated, not planned, but this was remarkable even in the annals of urban myths. After suits and a newspaper splash nationally, the Hancock's wealthy insurance folks bought the Copley to salve the suit and forked out the funds to fix up the church. But not quickly. Only now, decades later, has the church opened its basement to reveal the repaired foundations and take tourists through the site...just in time, it seems, for the flagging insurance folks to put their failing business up for sale in--ahhh, the indignity of it!--a package with other relatively dwarfed buildings they owned totaling perhaps a billion dollars. Ego rises, ego falls...likewise architecture in the lived-in city. Is it that nothing is sacred in the striving city? Or, more positively, that the city is - happily and by definition - a striving city: the place of all places where we try...and try ...to get it right? Incredibly, too, Copley Square where these structures sit has also gone through three lives in the same time span. The square's nineteenth-century shape, an erratic and triangular landscape in early postcards, became a subterranean plaza in the 1970s ...which, in turn, became the local subterranean "needle park" ...which was, then, more positively, raised and fountained and tree-filled form and paved with a potpourri of brick patterns, statuary, and grass. And, yet again in the restless, lived-in city, as summer nears, the square is being enlarged. A portion of a road that straddles its western side will expand the space this summer. With any luck, we could live through still more evolutions by folks who think they've really, finally, definitely, absolutely got it right this time, in the endlessly striving, endlessly lived-in city.
In the early morning hours, I hear a tinny rattle in the alley five flights below my bedroom window. A man with very white sneakers beneath a ragtag outfit and a silver shopping bag dangling from his hand has hit the heap of trash in the parking space beneath the ailanthus. It is very very cold and as I watch him make his way through our rejects, I calculate the rentals for such alley parking lots. The premium to rent this paved plot is three hundred dollars a month, about the same sum to bed and board this trash picker shuffling below the weed tree; the price to buy it is an astounding $129,000, offensive, "profane," as the sixties had it. The city throws such inequities before public eyes, but not the suburbs. Is that why the deepest inhumanity, the inhumanity of indifference, lies in the isolated homes behind the greenest lawns in those affluent outposts? You can run but you can't hide in the lived-in city. There is color as well as sorrow here, I think as I survey the sad scene amidst the beauty and the affluence. For even the weed trees shade the brick buildings in the summer and blush their alleys with bounteous red berries in the fall. Another morning, roused early by the airplanes that have returned to full flight since 9/11, I head to the eastern windows of my apartment. Now, as always, it is an almost cloyingly beautiful view, a saccharine sunrise turning the dim sky orange, a backdrop to the banal high-rises of downtown. To the south, I glimpse a plane heading west, bright lights to either end of its wingtips, one red, one white, passing between me and the John Hancock high-rise, visible through other windows. A glass target if ever there was one. The view of the 100-foot structure with the planes skittling before its mirrored image, a lookalike silhouette embedded in the national memory from the World Trade Center's demise, gave me a start for months and provokes strange visual echoes still, in these combative days. As I pause in writing this, the message comes over cyberspace and I am asked (yet again) to sign a petition against a war with Iraq that would be, I suspect, an urban war. Where else are the people, i.e. the targets, for terrorists? The new era of war across our borders was launched in a city, New York, and will be played out in the cities: ourselves destroying Baghdad, as terrorists would hit our own populated cores. What a strange cycle this is. Once, ironically, we--our builders--ravaged these very cities out of pride and arrogance that we could do better by flattening and building anew. In the sixties, the federal government, ill-advised and enchanted with the new, despoiled the old. Boston's West End, home of immigrants and their descendants, fell before the bulldozers of urban renewal, for "the better," we were told. Among the "renewed" was my father's West End neighborhood where he had lived behind the store his mother ran. Later, he would defend their beleaguered heirs. Urban renewal destroyed the life of the cities. Yet, Americans came just that urban life, its sidewalks, its low-rise buildings, its small shops, its engaged and engaging neighborhoods. They re-wrote the pages of the urban planning books. The lived-in city endures. Still, cities themselves rise and fall in time, on the small scale - the loss of Robert to the neighborhood, I think--and on the large as well, I muse, contemplating the rising sea levels that could wash over my neighborhood on its watery pilings. The city's sunrise is over in a minute in the long span of planetary life. Ephemeral or not, I cling to the belief that cities are the finest record of human will and human creativity. In flux, yes, and flawed, but lived-in, they link their living neighbors and long-gone ancestors in a way that confirms our sense of community and the genius of humanity to create art from habitat. This essay appeared in Toward the Livable City, published in 2003 by Milkweed Editions.
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Now, our spirited chef, our slicer-dicer, our Haitian-born master of ceremonies has left, was let go: axed with the speed of his dancing sandwich knife, it seemed. In a day, the deli counter at the 24-store where he worked was swiftly sanitized, all signs of unwrapped foodstuffs swept away. The gleaming silver counter was gone, the food trays vanished. Just a shelf of neon-toned bottles, snapplekracklepop drinks parading behind the vacant cook n' serve space. And the Oasis store was on to slicker things.
