A view of the city

Quote of the day

One of the reasons that Americans are so anxious to get away on a holiday weekend from the places where they live is because we did such a perfect job the past fifty years turning our home-places into utterly unrewarding, graceless nowheres, where the private realm of the beige houses is saturated in monotony, and the public realm has been reduced to the berm between the WalMart and the strip mall. Now, we barely have the gasoline to run all this stuff, let alone escape from it for a weekend.  [emphasis added]

-- James Howard Kunstler, author and urbanist, at kunstler.com

What's wrong with this picture?

Let's play a game from The Mini Page:  How many things can you find wrong with this picture?

(UPDATE:  See possible answers below)

1. First of all, the building has no windows.  How weird is that.

2. At street level, there is only one opening to the building, and it has been surrounded by a fortress-like security enclosure.  The darkened security glass and concrete stanchions give off the atmosphere of a military checkpoint and are unnerving to pedestrians.

3.  Part of Nash Square Park was lopped off to give more room to motor vehicles.  At the left side of the picture, note the mismatch between the curb edge in the foreground and the continuation of the street in the background.  The sidewalks do not line up.  The street has been widened, taking about an 11-foot strip off the east side of Nash Square (just to the left of the foreground). 

The aerial view reveals that all four sides of the park were lopped off at some point to make more room for motor vehicles.  (See the visible evidence at each corner:  the misalignment of the curb edge with adjacent blocks, and the white crosswalk stripes that are cattywompus instead of perpendicular.)

4.   The city street has been transformed into a high-speed throughway for heavy traffic. This part of McDowell Street has four lanes of through-traffic and two lanes of parking.  The one-way designation and multiple lanes are traffic-engineering methods to allow higher volumes to pass through at higher speeds.  This approach treats downtown as if it were the background territory around an expressway.

This list will be continued.  In the meantime, can you spot more problems?

Raleigh alley

How many functions does this Raleigh alley serve?

Gratuitous dooryard picture

Onion headline: "Growth fails to pay for self"

The News and Observer reports that Wake County faces a budget gap of $51.5 million.

The biggest source of the shortfall is school costs:  "The biggest increase comes from the Wake County school board, which has requested $54.7 million more in county funding."

The paper reports that "Johnna Rogers, the county budget director, said she has never seen a budget gap as big as the current $51.5 million."

What's going on here?  The developers and builders said that growth would pay for itself!

Gratuitous dooryard picture

Psychotic episode

The Comprehensive Planning process has overwhelmed us with its spirit of continual civic improvement, and in that vein we wish to point out some very, very low-hanging fruit: 

Change the city code so that the following can NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. 

We are assuredly not the first, nor even the ten-thousand-and-first, to compare the 1970s to a psychotic episode.  But where pride of place -- so to speak -- is concerned, the development of this site (the State Employees Credit Union on St. Mary's Street) must surely take the cake for Worst Streetscape Interface In Raleigh History. 

What gives this building its je ne sais quoi? 

Is it the compressed-gas holding tank, screened in such an original fashion from the adjacent sidewalk by the circlet of prickly bushes?  ("An opaque vegetative buffer!" exclaimed the critics of the time -- "surely a solution never before conceived by the mind of Landscape Architecture!")  But Modernism is nothing if not innovative.

Is it the semi-subterranean automated doors on the parking-garage vomitoria, which risk the lives of pedestrians at not just one, but even a generous two, junctions with the sidewalk? 

Is it the malign apertures in the Death-Star pillbox of a parking deck that forms the structure's principal streetwall, whether to enable the launching of Phlogiston Bolts By Lockheed-Martin (TM) or simply to facilitate the entry and exit of the personal flying commutercraft of the future?

Is it the pinkish-orange cast of the sodium-vapor illumination in the Vehicular Storage Basement, which, in the nighttime, casts outward through the rectangular gun-ports a baleful and corrupted light, shedding doom and disorder on its surroundings -- a lantern of darkness -- a modernist inversion of medieval stained glass -- spreading spiritual desolation, as if the entire construction were an inside-out York Minster? 

And yet these features do not fully exhaust the potential of the site to shock and dismay.  Indeed, horrified reader, there is more!   

We have yet examined only one-half of one side of this triple-frontage lot.

Stay tuned, if you dare, for the rest.

Quote of the day

From the comments at "Downtown Developments Compete for Residents" on wral.com:

If you work in downtown Raleigh think of the gas $$$$ saved and no more wasted time stuck in traffic. $3.00 a gallon, $3.50 this summer maybe $4.00. Oh yea you can get house in johnston county listening to your neighbors five dogs bark or you can walk to Glenwood South.

Gratuitous dooryard picture

What's the "big idea"?

"I can't help but think that workshops at Irish pubs about creating rivers that will need to flow uphill are just intentional diversions so that the homefolk don't notice the developers down the street in the Cardinal Club cooking up the meat and potatoes of the comprehensive plan."

-- Lunsford Lane, April 30, 2008, in response to No panaceas