10th anniversary post: Dark Age Ahead (And Maybe Closer?)

 

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead. New York: Random House, 2004, 241 pp.

Jane Jacobs wrote this "gloomy but a hopeful book" (p. 3) late in her life, and I read it ten years later. Now, ten more years later, I am reading it again. Not much seems to have changed: American society still seems poised at the fork in the road described by the passage I quoted back then:

Is suburban sprawl, with its murders of communities and wastes of land, time, and energy, a sign of decay? Or is rising interest in means of overcoming sprawl a sign of vigor and adaptability in North American culture? Arguably, either could turn out to be true. (169-170)

I was probably more inclined to the hopeful option in 2014 than I am today. As a student of American politics, I've seen so many unforced errors and so much willful delusion in the last ten years that it's hard to be very hopeful. 

🌞

Dark Age takes its title from the name commonly given to the period of European history following the fall of the Roman Empire, but she points out the numerous cultures in human history have collapsed and "become literally lost" (4). Yes, the Middle Ages had Charlemagne and Thomas Aquinas, but 11th century French peasants were literally eating dirt and dying young.

So much had been forgotten in the forgetful centuries: the Romans' use of legumes in crop rotation to restore the soil; how to mine and smelt iron and make and transport picks for miners, and hammers and anvils for smiths... In districts where even slaves had been well clothed, most people wore filthy rags.... Citizenship gave way to serfdom; old Roman cities and towns were largely deserted and their underpopulated remnants sank into poverty and squalor; their former amenities, such as public baths and theatrical performances, became not even a memory. (7-8)

As challenges arise, feedback is ignored, and knowledge stabilizing forces is also ignored if not actively suppressed. "I have written this cautionary book in hopeful expectation that time remains for corrective actions," she concludes in the introductory chapter, and proceeds with a series of warnings about five "pillars of our culture" (24). Core problems, like racism, environmental destruction, crime, political alienation, and surging inequality, arguably flow from the decline of these pillars.

Chapter 2 on families notes "Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities" (37). Families are stressed by car-dependency--which is as strong as ever in most of the country--as well as the price of housing. Twenty years ago, when the book was published, the median housing price-to-household income ratio in the U.S. exceeded 6.0 for the first time since the 1950s. It peaked at 6.81 two years later, and then resumed climbing in 2012. It is now 7.70 (longtermtrends.net; data are from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the U.S. Census Bureau), which is scary.

Chapter 3 on higher education argues that it has become a matter of "credentialing, not educating... This is not in the interest of employers in the long run," but it provides hiring agents with a quick-and-dirty indicator of success (44-45). Remarkably, in my own career I have encountered dozens of students who come with their own thirst for knowledge, but alas, there are not enough of them to keep the college's doors open. If anything, the demographic cliff faced by colleges, along with the suspicion of independent knowledge fostered by powerful interests discussed in Chapter 4, have exacerbated the credentialing obsession. So good teachers are "despairing" (62), but more crucially, our culture loses the "critical capacities and depth of understanding" needed to make stabilizing corrections (63).

Chapter 4 on science talks about the widespread failure to study problems by observing, gathering and drawing conclusions from evidence, as opposed to fitting everything into accepted dogma. Happily for urbanists many of the examples have to do with automobile traffic. And of course, we're still arguing about climate change, with disasters crashing all around us.

Chapter 5 on taxation discusses how federalism in Canada as well as the U.S. has left cities without the autonomy to solve their own problems. In 2004 Toronto was getting slapped down by Ontario in the name of laissez-faire economics; these days the State of Iowa uses preemption against cities as blood sport for any reason at all. (We can't even prevent the sale of fireworks within the city limits.) And not just Iowa, of course, given the State of New York's last-minute veto against New York City's congestion pricing plan is still fresh in our minds. Most people, and most of the economy, lives in cities, but their residents can't negotiate the terms by which they will live together.

Chapter 6 on the failures of professional self-policing brings to mind the waste in federal anti-recession grants in 2008-10 and 2020-21. I remember commentary to the effect that President Obama was so naive to expect that corporate recipients of bailout money would use the largesse for the good of the economy rather than for the good of themselves, since of course businesses were supposed to focus on their own bottom lines rather than any public purpose. Today, nobody trusts anyone to handle artificial intelligence technology well. Of course, in politics, we've seen the repeated failures of the Republican Party to discipline or even restrain the egregious Donald Trump. (For the failures of both parties in this presidential election, see Levin 2024.)

🌞

Jacobs concludes with some advice on how to recognize and reverse Dark Age "spirals." Unwinding, the title of chapter 7, requires clear thinking, informed self-confidence, adequate capital, and "redundancy of mentors and examples" for broad diffusion of essential skills (159). Again, urbanists will be pleased to see her use housing as an example, as she traces the roots of our current difficulty from years of underinvestment during the Depression and war through exclusionary zoning to the waste of suburban sprawl (also exclusionary). She did not live to see the 2007 housing market collapse but clearly saw it coming. She also did not live to see Peter Calthorpe evangelizing for grand boulevards, but cites The Boulevard Book by Allen B. Jacobs and co-authors (MIT Press, 2002) as possessing insight into how to achieve the "densification" we still need (149ff.).

I am slowly steeling myself to the realization that cultural conservatives will dominate American politics in the near term (cf. Draeger 2024). Jacobs's perspective on the imminence of a cultural Dark Age shows that they are not wrong to fear the imminent loss of something essential in our country. Unfortunately, their nostalgia-fueled misperception of what that is has led them to espouse reaction and social control instead of imagining a "beneficient spiral" that corrects cultural weakness. That's going to be too bad. I hope I don't have to eat dirt.

Jane Jacobs goes to Greene Square

 

Entering Greene Square from 3rd Av by the rr tracks

Greene Square occupies one block in the core of Cedar Rapids, between 3rd and 4th Avenues SE, and between 5th Street and the railroad track. Our city's oldest park (1897), it received a gigantic makeover in 2015. Numerous trees were removed, and new landscaping and benches were added. Cindy Hadish's Homegrown Iowan blog has excellent coverage of the planning stages as well as photographs of Greene Square in the before times. I chimed in with this October 2014 post. I wondered then if I was being overwrought, and I certainly was, but my regrets about the removal of play equipment from the original proposal remains.

The park that emerged in 2015 is rather simple and open, as you can see in the pictures above and elsewhere in this post. It's a handy place for special events like the downtown farmers' markets, the Christmas tree lighting, and occasional presidential candidates.

Tom Steyer speaks in Greene Square, August 2019

It got some play that one summer (2017?) Pokemon Go was popular. The Cedar River Trail awkwardly straddles the railroad track alongside the wall of the parking garage. And on fine summer days you can see professionals eating lunch, though in the absence of much shade they probably miss the trees that got removed.

Mostly, though, it's underused. My 2014 fears that it would become an attraction for visitors at the expense of residents turned out to be silly; visitors don't use it much either. Mostly Greene Square is utilized by clusters of homeless people that make use of the benches and the shade from the parking garage.

Clutch of belongings on a January morning

II

I don't know that Greene Square is a problem, so much as underutilized potential. I believe that better days are ahead, although there might be things we could do to facilitate them.

Some mighty long trains run on the track

To understand what's happening and not happening in Greene Square, we turn to the "mother of us all," Jane Jacobs (1916-2006). Chapter five of her landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library, [1961] 2011) is about city parks. Granted, her attention is to large cities like New York rather than small cities like Cedar Rapids, and she's considering parks on a much larger scale than our one-square-block Greene Square. Still, I think she can provide, or provoke, some insights.

Noting that people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners or designers wish they would (117), she compares four parks in downtown Philadelphia that date from the  colonial era but met "wildly different" fates (120). 

Why are there so often no people where the parks are and no parks where the people are? Unpopular parks are troubling not only because of the waste and missed opportunities they imply, but also because of their frequent negative effects. They have the same problems as streets without eyes, and their dangers spill over into the area surrounding, so that streets along such parks become known as danger places too and are avoided. (123)

Does that sound familiar, Cedar Rapids? If it does not, then I'm talking to myself, but if it does, read on!

What is the key difference between well-used, successful parks and parks that are empty and/or scary? It's their surroundings, and how they interact with them. Any park...

...is the creature of its surroundings and of the way its surroundings generate mutual support from diverse uses, or fail to generate such support.... A generalized neighborhood park that is not headquarters for the leisured indigent can become populated naturally and casually only by situated very close indeed to where active and different currents of life and function come to a focus. If downtown, it must get shoppers, visitors and strollers as well as downtown workers. If not downtown, it must still be where life swirls--where there is work, cultural, residential and commercial activity--as much as possible of everything different that cities can offer. The main problem of neighborhood park planning boils down to nurturing diversified neighborhoods capable of using and supporting parks. (128, 131)

Greene Square is surrounded by institutional buildings. I love the institutions and the buildings that face three of the four sides of the park, but they are used for only a small part of the day and week. They do not of themselves provide enough activity to infuse the park with life. 

View of the 5th Street and 4th Avenue boundaries

The most hopeful of the four is the Cedar Rapids Public Library, across 4th Avenue, which is open until 8 p.m. four days a week, and until 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Across 5th Street are historic First Presbyterian Church (Sunday services and free meals, some weekday events) and Waypoint Services (including child care which has some potential).

View of the trackside and 3rd Avenue boundaries

Across 3rd Avenue is the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, of which I am a proud member, but which is open only 30 hours a week, mostly in the early afternoon. Next to the museum is a vacant parking lot formerly used by Guaranty National Bank. Across the tracks and trail from the park is a parking garage, built in the early 1960s on the site of the old train station; it is hard to imagine a deader contribution than this. Greene Square is surrounded by great institutions, but which cannot and do not provide the energy to support the park--certainly not in the numbers to overcome its current "skid row" feel.

III

We may not have to wait long for that energy, though. Look again at the picture of the park, with First Presbyterian Church at the left and the Cedar Rapids Public Library to the right. In between them, across the intersection of 4th Avenue and 5th Street, is the newly-built Annex on the Square, with 224 apartments and (possibly) first-floor retail. In the surrounding blocks, more apartments have been or are being built, and some downtown office buildings are being converted to residences as well. The downtown population of Cedar Rapids has gradually increased since the 2008 flood, without much dramatic impact on the area, but the surge in construction promises to do more. We may be approaching a 24-hour downtown, with daily needs within walking distance, and a variety of foot traffic throughout the day. This will change how and by whom Greene Square is used.

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. (145)

This is a positive development, and it seems inevitable that what's around the park will improve Greene Square, but I'll bet we could augment that energy with some attention to what's in the park. Jacobs refers to intricacy, which

...is related to the variety of reasons for which people come to neighborhood parks. Even the same person comes for different reasons at different times; sometimes to sit tiredly, sometimes to play or to watch a game, sometimes to read or work, sometimes to show off... sometimes to keep a child occupied, sometimes simply to see what [it] offers, and almost always to be entertained by the sight of other people. (135)

That's easier to imagine in a vast expanse like New York's Central Park, but Greene Square is begging for some reason to go there. Playground equipment could serve those child care kiddos, as well as anyone with small children living nearby. A few more trees could get us all through summers that are getting longer and hotter, and would add some texture to what is now pretty much open space.  Checkers? Charging stations? A food cart? Buskers? We all have imaginations... let's use them!

 

ADDED 2/16/2024: 1910 view across Greene Square Park from r/cedarrapids

Another rainy day in New York City

 

6th Avenue outside West 4th Street station

"Are you local?" asked the man at the coffee shop. "No," I said. "Do you work locally?" he asked. "No," I said, "I'm from Iowa." "Where is that?" he asked. From an array of potential responses, I chose, "Central US."

When I left for New York City on this long weekend, I knew (1) my best opportunity to immerse myself in Greenwich Village would be Monday, and (2) the weather forecast for Monday called for rain all day, so (3) I would be able to test out the urbanist maxim that walkable areas work in all kinds of weather because if your destination's close enough the weather simply doesn't matter.

6th Avenue at 9th Street

Reader, the maxim is true. (It helped that Monday was somewhere between light rain and drizzle, not the bouncing-off-the-pavement precipitation we often get in the "Central US.") Everywhere I walked in the West Village I encountered other walkers, some with children, many with dogs, as well as cyclists (mostly e-bikes). Life goes on, even in the rain, and it can go on just fine without a car if the design is supportive.

Hudson St approaching Perry St

The West Village, besides being spectacularly walkable, is spectacularly historic. Inexcusably, neither of our guidebooks mentions Jane Jacobs, who lived at 555 Hudson Street while writing her ur-urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 

555 Hudson Street

Her home is now a realty office, possibly some revenge for Robert Moses, but at least it's not a Dunkin' Donuts. 

plaque by the big front window

If your children are too young to appreciate Death and Life, they could start on this...

...available along with much else for all ages at the Tenement Museum, not far away on the Lower East Side, and whose side hustle may be one of the greatest bookstores I've ever been in.

The West Village is also the spiritual birthplace of gay rights. 

Stonewall Inn, 53 Christopher Street

Across Christopher Street from the Stonewall is Christopher Park...

where the gay rights movement is commemorated. 

Scant blocks away is Julius'...

159 West 10th Street
(Note that other than the main drags, streets are about 16 feet wide)

...where a few years before Stonewall, patrons invited reporters and police to witness their illegal imbibing, which events became known as "sipins."

Now that gays can congregate freely in bars and even receive packages by FedEx, it can be easy to remember that freedom was neither automatic nor easy.

The West Village also has considerable artistic heritage. The realtors in Jane Jacobs's house work within a 5-minute walk to folk music history...

Woody Guthrie lived at 74 Charles Street

theater...

Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street

theater history...

Playwrights Sidewalk on Christopher Street

jazz...

Village Vanguard Jazz Club, 178 7th Avenue S
(2010 photo of younger humble blogger with humble son Robbie)

and film!

IFC Center, 323 6th Avenue

There is also 94 Charles Street, for hipster baseball card collectors:

And there's 25 Charles Street...

...where my friend Mark Dunn lived in the 90s while trying to make a go of playwrighting.

Farther east, Cafe Wha?...

115 MacDougal Street

...is featured on the cover of Rhino's Troubadours of the Folk Era collection.

Sitting in the coffeeshop on a "slow" Monday (free WiFi, restroom, steady entrance of customers, $4.75 for a 12 ounce drip coffee)...

787 Coffee, 208 West 10th St

...I feel comfortable and at home here. I don't even want to go back to my hotel in Midtown! 

Is it amazing that all this ferment is happening in a relatively tiny geographical space? Yes, it is, but then again, no, it isn't. It's really only when people live with each other, encountering each other on a daily basis while negotiating space and difference, that such sparks fly and magic happens. When people retreat to enclaves, we get commercialized values and the politics of fear.

While I've been in New York, presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has been in Iowa, and word just came that President Biden is opening more of the Arctic for oil extraction. The West Village shows us that we can live well without either one.

Jefferson Market Library and Garden, 10 Greenwich Avenue

I suppose if I did live here, and visited Iowa, I would be blown away by all the personal space available, the cheap real estate and acres of free parking--all that chafes at me now--and the free refills. The grass is always greener... Would I then be encouraged to vote for Ron DeSantis to make America Florida (or, more attainably, Iowa)? 

SEE ALSO: Mike Katz and Crispin Scott, The Rock and Roll Explorer Guide to New York City (Globe Pequot, 2018)

The Future of Downtown Cedar Rapids

 

Bullish views of downtown Cedar Rapids were expressed by a public-private partnership of a panel Tuesday morning, sponsored by the Cedar Rapids Gazette. Mayor Tiffany O'Donnell, Jesse Thoeming of the Cedar Rapids Metro Economic Alliance, and two business owners applauded the vast increase in downtown housing and the flood protection that has enabled it, while hoping for more ideas to sustain downtown growth.

Construction underway on the "banjo block":
A game-changer I can get behind

Darryl High, a property developer and also chair of the Downtown Self-Supported Municipal Improvement District (SSMID), said downtown was at last "becoming an urban neighborhood." High cited much new construction as well as conversions of office space, concluding it will serve to "bring more people" which will eventually lead to service providers. Mayor O'Donnell anticipates a wider variety of housing that will lead to "people walking their dogs downtown." This vision of a 24-hour downtown has taken awhile to emerge, but is good to hear. 

Andy Schumacher, co-owner of Cobble Hill restaurant downtown as well as Caucho in New Bohemia, says he's noticed since Cobble Hill opened in February 2013 that office workers go home after work, and that a different crowd comes out to dinner in the evening, if it indeed it appears at all. A residential population might well be the key to sustaining downtown energy, particularly if a wider set of housing choices could allow for more "lower-middle-class vibe" than the pricey condos that have led development for the past few years. 

The Iowa Building (1914) is being retrofitted for housing
(Google Street View screen capture)

Schumacher's comments echo those of Jane Jacobs, who in a long, lyrical passage in The Death and Life of Great American Cities [Modern Library, (1961) 2011: 65-71] described the ballet of the good city sidewalk... in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. This dance happened in the course of every day--without needing special festivals or events to get people there!

Jane Jacobs

On Hudson Street in New York's Greenwich Village sixty years ago, the ballet began with residents leaving for work, businesses opening their doors, and middle school students walking to school.

I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I enjoy my part, my little clang, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage dropping candy wrappers. (How do they eat so much candy so early in the morning?) (68)

Over the course of the day, the sidewalk sees elementary school students, commuters emerging from subways and taxis, shoppers, the lunchtime crowd, workers on break, children released from school, people stopping to shop on the way home, diners, and nighttime dog walkers. Her writing is so lovely, particularly considering her actual purpose is to make an argument, that I can hardly resist quoting the whole six pages. You should read them for yourself... along with the rest of this timeless book! 

Fair question: Will Downtown residents shop at corner stores
when there's a 67000 square foot Hy-Vee six minutes' drive away?

Schumacher noted the ease of auto-commuting in the Cedar Rapids metro area means that a mobile population isn't necessarily going to stay in the downtown area. How a "vibrant, growing downtown" (High) develops within "a very suburban town" (Schumacher) is a perplexing question--really worth thinking about as the conversation shifts, as it inevitably does, to what attractions the downtown should seek. ("What are workers looking for?" asks the mayor.) 

• It is possible that Cedar Rapids' core will grow through in-migration of telecommuters looking for a less expensive but still urban version of their current cities. ("Look at us! We're cheap... and kinda urban... just don't pay attention to the legislature, lol!!") Thoeming suggested doing the riverfront right could make us stand out to would-be digital nomads. 
• It is possible that the much-talked-about big regional attraction, which Mayor O'Donnell thankfully has repackaged as "an entertainment complex with a casino in it," will draw residents as well as encouraging visitors to check out other downtown establishments. (Schumacher called this "a question I don't have the answer to.") 

Market After Dark promo, from Cedar Rapids
Downtown Farmers Market Facebook page

• It is possible that Downtown will mostly draw people in for big events, like the farmers' market and outdoor movies, or "closing 2nd Street every once in awhile" (the mayor).

Do we need to provide the rest of the region with reasons to "come visit downtown" (Darryl High), or do we follow Strong Towns' dictum that...

Drive-in visitors will need places to park, of course, crowding residents and leading to the vast swaths of parking lots that already plague the core of our town. Check out my town, or your town, at the interactive map created by Katya Kisin (2022). All that parking creates space that increases the distance between destinations, so walking is less convenient and the land less productive.

Darryl High said that Downtown has been in contact with other SSMIDs like the MedQuarter and New Bohemia on having a trolley route around the area. This would be great, if frequent enough, augmenting public transportation in an important way. Overall, as Brent Toderian argues, development of core areas needs to emphasize alternatives to cars:

[I]t has to be multimodal. In fact, it has to have active transport priority: walking, biking and transit have to be emphasized. If you try to design density around cars, it's a recipe for failure. You have to make walking, biking and transit not just available, but delightful. (quoted in Roberts 2017) 

An hour's discussion is hardly enough to touch on all the facets of downtown development, but I would have like to have seen more attention to socioeconomic inclusion/equity. The restauranteur Andy Schumacher, whom I quoted above, did call for greater variety of housing types and prices within the downtown area. 

There was no discussion, however, in response to the moderators' question about connectivity, of connections to core residential neighborhoods like Wellington Heights, Oak Hill Jackson, and the Taylor Area. As of now downtown is surrounded by a gigantic doughnut of emptiness that separates it from all other parts of town. If we could close some of that, and create seamless connections to the city's most densely populated and diverse areas, it would do wonders for individual economic opportunity, and the resilience of the local economy, not to mention vibe.

8th Street SE bisects an "empty quarter" between 
Downtown and Wellington Heights
(Google Street View screen capture from May 2022)

Another issue would be how to assist locally-owned, small businesses to populate the downtown area. (See my report on a talk by Ellen Shepherd of Community Allies, or the array of evidence aggregated by Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.)

[Personal note: As I bicycled to get coffee before the webinar, 25 cars went by me on 3rd Avenue SE. Only seven were headed towards downtown; 17 were outbound, and one was doing the funky cross at 14th Street. This is only one 1.5 mile data point on one morning, but it is interesting and might signify broader trends?] 

The panel was moderated by Gazette columnist Michael Chevy Castranova and reporter Marissa Payne.

SEE ALSO: 

     Marissa Payne, "Cedar Rapids Looks to Re-Imagine Downtown, Shifting from Office Center to Entertainment," Cedar Rapids Gazette, 26 June 2022

     Rick Reinhard and Chris Elisara, "A Call to Rethink Dying Houses of Worship," Public Square: A CNU Journal, 7 June 2022. [By my count, only five churches remain in the Downtown Cedar Rapids area: Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, First Presbyterian, Grace Episcopal, St. John the Baptist Greek Orthodox, and Veritas; only the aging but thriving First Presbyterian has a substantial physical footprint. Getting into the MedQuarter and Wellington Heights is a different story.]

PREVIOUSLY ON HOLY MOUNTAIN:

"Cedar Rapids Mayoral Runoff 2021," 22 November 2021

"Envisioning CR I: A 24-Hour Downtown," 1 March 2015

"News from Downtowns," 23 June 2017

The future of religious spaces (VI)

 

Every year about this time, Faith and Form produces its worldwide survey of the best in religious art and architecture--mostly architecture, because "[f]or the second year in a row, the jury was concerned about the low number of Religious Art entries" (Crosbie 2019). It's fascinating, eye-catching, and an opportunity to reflect on the roles religion and religious places play in our common life.

It's also the time when Christians like me celebrate the birth of Jesus. We have appropriated Jewish prophecy like that of Isaiah, who may or may not have been discussing the Messiah when he wrote:

A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.... He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear; but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked. (Isaiah 11:1, 3b-4, NRSV)

Hearing these familiar verses again this year, I was struck by the seemingly casual reference to the killing that needed to happen to achieve the peace and justice of the "holy mountain" eventually proclaimed in verse 9. Again with the killing! which seems to be a prerequisite for Biblical promises. God's ways are beyond the scope of this blog, but it altogether too tempting to believe that things will be great once we (the hands of God?) first get rid of all the wicked/idiots/haters/evildoers. This is a prime example of what philosopher Martha Nussbaum (The Monarchy of Fear, Simon & Schuster, 2018, pp. 81-84) calls the "just world hypothesis"--the belief that I would get what I want if I weren't thwarted by bad guys--a worldview that leads to destructive, retributive anger. Instead of anger we need to affirm a common life, right this very minute, to deal with all humanity has to deal with. Excising the other only saps our energy and most likely adds to the evil instead of solving it.

The Christian apostle Paul offers us a rhetorical way out of this trap. In his letter to the Roman church, he writes of the believer dying to sin (see esp. ch. 6). How this death is accomplished seems to be a combination of divine grace, individual effort, and good old-fashioned Christian orthodoxy (see O'Brien 2012). That need not detain us here; we need only to accept that religious language about killing the wicked can apply to the evil within each of us, rather than some definitive expulsion of some individuals for the ultimate happiness of others.

Back to this year's award-winners. Leaving judgments about art and architecture to the professionals, and recognizing that what happens within places is as important as how they're designed, we urbanists can ask: How do the physical features of religious places help us achieve connection in a disconnected world?

One way is to bring us, for a time, away from the world into a place apart. Spectacular sanctuaries, like Boston's Cathedral of the Holy Cross, can achieve that by creating its own world of wonder.

Cathedral of the Holy Cross won an award for renovation

Usually these grand sanctuaries have spectacular acoustics as well, so those who raise their voices in song or prayer become part of a greater whole. Through our encounter with the divine, we are re-centered for life in the world.

Another way is to arrange seating in a circle around the altar, rather than having everyone in the congregation facing the same direction, as in Seattle's St. Anne Church.

St. Anne Church won an award for renovation

Author James F. White (Protestant Worship and Church Architecture, Oxford University Press, 1964) argues this older form, abandoned for awhile, emphasizes communal worship rather than individual emotional reaction in a hierarchical setting. (See especially chapters 4 and 5.) Shifting from my experience to our action also re-orients us to a world of diverse people.

Most urbanist of all is the religious building that is accessible to the street, such as St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, which fronts directly onto Park Avenue in Manhattan--a block from the #6 subway line.

St. Bart's Church won a restoration award for its dome, which is not relevant to this post

This is the "meaningful destination easily accessible on foot" commended by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zybeck and Jeff Speck (Suburban Nation, North Point Press, 2010 rev. ed., p. 64). In fact, it contributes to all four of their prerequisites for the street life--meaningful destinations, safe streets, comfortable streets, interesting neighborhood--needed to support community. Contrast that with the award-winning new church, St. Luke the Evangelist in suburban Ankeny, Iowa...

St. Luke the Evangelist Catholic Church

...which opens onto a parking lot accessible from Weigel Drive only by a long driveway. Neither it nor the school next door will ever be walkable. (It's not even clear how you would walk from one to the other.) No one will ever happen by.

Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, [1961] 1993, pp.72-73) waxed eloquent about the social utility of public spaces like sidewalks that are building blocks of connected neighborhoods.

They bring together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion....

The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts. It grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop, eying the girls while waiting to be called for dinner, admonishing the children, hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist, admiring the new babies and sympathizing over the way a coat faded....

The sum of such casual public contact at a local level--most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone--is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.

The intentional design of religious places, new and old, architectural wondrous and humbly utilitarian, can contribute substantially to the public identity that will sustain us all through whatever lies ahead. Or not.

Primary Source: Michael J. Crosbie (ed), "2019 International Awards Program for Religious Art and Architecture," Faith and Form 52:4 (2019). All photos are from the article, and are used without permission.

Last Year's Model: "The Future of Religious Spaces (V)," 28 December 2018

Developing Redmond Park, avoiding type ii error

A group of residents in the Wellington Heights neighborhood, led by my friend and fellow urbanist Phillip Platz, have ambitions for Redmond Park, which occupies a half-block-sized triangle of land (1.22 acres) along 3rd Avenue, Park Avenue and 16th Street SE. It has a playground, splash pad, and picnic tables. When I studied park access five summers ago (cited below), I noted afternoon use by adults and children. I noted "Both days small groups of adults used the park as a picnic ground or meeting place." The park also serves as a path from surrounding residences to the Hy-Vee Food Store across 1st Avenue.

Could a more attractive Redmond Park serve as more of a community gathering place? The group describes its goal as "leveraging innovative programming and the arts to improve the safety, livability, and potential of the Wellington Heights neighborhood" (Redmond Park 2019). They're hitting the ground running this summer with "Stop the Violence" picnics on the last Sunday of each month, and a Back to Summer Party celebrating the end of the school year. I want to see anything that anyone can dream of, happening, Phillip told CBS2 News. But I know we gotta start small... and I know we have to start with what's the right fit (Anderson 2019).

Source: redmondpark.org

The racial and economic mix around Redmond Park provides both obstacles and opportunities. Redmond Park is located in  CR census tract 17, which is also more-or-less triangular, bounded on the east by Forest Drive, and on the south by Mt. Vernon Road; its northwest boundary is a diagonal going roughly from McKinley Middle School to Washington High School. Data from this census tract mask a huge range of socio-economic status--the eastern half, above 19th Street, is very different from the western half where the park is located--but here goes:

• Its roughly one square mile area holds 5806 residents; at 5519 people per square mile it is unusually dense for Cedar Rapids. It lost 627 residents and 178 housing units between 2010 and 2016. It is 22 percent nonwhite, roughly divided between black and mixed-race, high for Cedar Rapids and especially high for Iowa. 
• The unemployment rate is 7.6 percent; the poverty rate is 15.7 percent. Its median annual household income is $63472, low for the area but at about the national median. 
• 80.8 percent of homes are single-family detached, 76.1 percent of residents live in homes they own, 75.1 percent drive to work alone; these figures are also low for CR but closer to the national median. The median age of housing units is an amazing 80 years (i.e. construction in 1939). 

Bottom line: the area directly around Redmond Park is a working class neighborhood with cells of poverty, but with upper-middle-class neighborhoods close by.

DJing the Stop the Violence party Sunday 5/26

Redmond Park is accessible by car or bus. 3rd Avenue SE is currently one-way out of downtown, with a 2017 average daily traffic count of 3260, down from 3750 in 2013. 2nd Avenue averages 2060; this may redistribute when 3rd Avenue becomes two-way later this year. At least traffic speeds should decrease at that time to a neigborly level, which will improve pedestrian access. Cedar Rapids bus line #3 runs by the park on its outbound run; routes #2 (4th/5th Aves) and #5 (1st Ave) are nearby.

Those in the neighborhood seem more interested in developing the park as a gathering space rather than a city destination, which is fine. Here are a couple ways urbanism can help. First, draw on the experiences and wishes of everyone in the neighborhood, white and black, newcomers and long-term residents. The community and economic benefits of a successful park (Cox and Streeter 2019, Florida 2019) only accrue to the whole community if the whole community is included. In a neighborhood where change is being driven by newer white residents, the thoughts of Pete Saunders (cited below) on the broader conundrum of gentrification are pertinent:

The essential ingredient [in gentrification management] is engagement. Residents in potentially gentrifying communities can no longer afford to simply pass each other by. If newcomers seek to retain the authentic character of the community that attracted them, and longtime residents are to obtain the amenities they desire to become a complete community once again, dialogue is a necessity.

(Some time ago I read, I forget where, about a neighborhood in another town that worked to get the city to build a play area in a local park for their many dogs. Then they noticed that only white residents were using it. Someone asked a black person walking a dog across the street whether they ever used the park, and she said, "Oh no, that's the white people's park.")

Secondly, successful parks depend as much on what's around the park as on what's in it. Jane Jacobs recommends a mixed-use neighborhood that "directly produces for the park a mixture of users who enter and leave the park at different times" (1961: 125). Are there opportunities for commercial development near the park that could create synergies, like Jacobs's hypothetical cafe across the street from the skating pond, or the Washington market cited by Cox and Streeter? I'm not suggesting knocking down any of the houses around the park, but what about allowing or even encouraging in-home businesses? What about making better use of nearby open space a block away at Park Court and 2nd Avenue, as well as at 16th and Washington? Johnson School is only a block away, too, though obviously its basketball hoops and playground equipment are going to be spoken for a good bit of the time.

It may seem uncontroversial to wish for a better, more vibrant park; doing what it takes will require a lot of tough conversations. At the Wellington Heights Neighborhood Association meeting earlier this month, there was considerable interest in park development. At the same time, there was concern about people who might cause problems: youth with guns, the homeless, car traffic speeding down residential streets. (Park Avenue SE is currently one-way west along the south end of the park; when the city announced plans to make it two-way, there was sufficient outcry from residents that those plans were cancelled. Quite a few people at the meeting seemed to think this was a good outcome.)

In an ideal world, enhancing Redmond Park would attract more and more of the "right" people, and none of the "wrong" people. In the real world, though, we usually have to choose between Type I and Type II error. You choose the error you most want to avoid, with the understanding that it will increase the chance of making the other kind of error. Features and activities that make the park more attractive to the "right" people will inevitaby draw some of the "wrong" crowd (Type I error). Tactics to keep the "wrong" people away will make the park less welcoming to the "right" people (Type II error), and then so much for building community. I'm not saying they should put up a banner saying "Welcome Gang Members and Drunks." I'm saying if that keeping undesirables away becomes the primary concern, the chance to make Redmond Park a gathering space for the neighborhood will be missed.

SOURCES:
Daniel Cox and Ryan Streeter, "Having a Library or Cafe Down the Block Could Change Your Life," CityLab, 20 May 2019
Richard Florida, "The Beauty Premium: How Urban Beauty Affects Cities' Economic Growth," CityLab, 15 May 2019
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961)
Chantelle Navarro, "Block Party Aims to Show Kids Early On There's More to Life Than Gun Violence," KCRG, 26 May 2019
Pete Saunders, "CSY Repost: The Gentrification Management System," Corner Side Yard, 10 May 2019

OLDER POSTS:
"Role of Parks: Cedar Rapids," 30 August 2018
"Is 3rd Avenue a Barrier to Redmond Park?" 25 June 2014