Rov_Scam
1d ago
Firstly, monetary damages cannot be irreperable harm, and this is a settled legal principle for hundreds of years.
This is a general principle, but there are always exceptions. Most of these involve judgment-proof defendants. Say Fred and Sam are having a dispute over a driveway Sam uses to access his business. Fred puts up concrete barricades on the disputed right-of-way, denying access to Sam or any customers, preventing use of the business. Sam cannot operate his business and sues Fred for trespass. Sam may be able to calculate that he's losing $5,000/day in revenue while the barricades are up; under the rule, he wouldn't be entitled to a TRO. Except any court would grant him one, because if the case takes a year to resolve, it's unlikely that fred will be able to come up with $1.8 million in damages.
This example is based on a case I actually dealt with a couple years ago except the defendant wasn't some random guy but a railroad (it was a dispute over a crossing agreement). I was still able to get a TRO, not because there was any question of the railroad's ability to pay damages but because I convinced the judge that my client couldn't afford the mortgage and ongoing maintenance costs to the property without the property generating any revenue. Damages would be cold comfort if the property were foreclosed on and he were forced into bankruptcy.
Another case I was peripherally involved with during my time in oil and gas involved a contractual dispute between Warren Steel and a coal company whose name I can't remember. (This is a grossly oversimplified version) Warren had an ongoing contract with the company that required them to deliver coal to the mill a few times a week. They were way behind on payments and owed hundreds of thousands of dollars. The coal company said they weren't getting any more shipments until they paid what was overdue. Warren sued the coal company for breach of contract arguing that future deliveries weren't conditioned on payment for prior deliveries. From here it gets a bit complicated. The typical remedy here would be for Warren to buy coal on the spot market and collect the price difference from the breaching coal company. Warren argued that their financial position was precarious (there was no denying this based on their payment history) and that they would be unable to secure credit to buy at sharply inflated spot market prices. If the coal company didn't make their next scheduled shipment, they wouldn't be able to make any steel, would have to shut down the mill, and any hope of them remaining operational would be gone. the court issued the TRO and told the coal company to make the delivery. In any event, Warren Steel filed for bankruptcy a few days later.
And who could forget the man himself, Donald Trump. If you remember, last year he was on the wrong end of a nine-figure civil judgment, and was told that if he wanted to stay the judgment pending appeal he would have to post a bond of $450 million within 30 days. This is about as clear-cut as it gets—he had $450 million in assets. If he posted the bond and won the appeal, he'd get the money back. So what's the problem? He successfully argued that since no insurance company would take real estate as collateral, he would have to liquidate it at fire sale prices, causing irreparable harm. The judge agreed and reduced the bond to something an insurance company could manage.
Secondly, a TRO must have an end date. That's part of what makes a TRO temporary.
Most court orders aren't written by the court. If I'm asking for a TRO, I have a copy of the order with me and I hand it to the judge to sign if she decides to grant it. In most cases, you're asking for the TRO in motions court early in the process before the case is listed for trial and assigned a judge.After that it has to go to calendar control for them to schedule a hearing for a preliminary injunction. By law that hearing has to be within 14 days, but the judge who's signing it doesn't know when that's going to be; the upshot is that we put the 14 day max in the order.
In this case, the judge who issued the TRO wrote the order herself after the hearing had already been scheduled. She's hearing arguments tomorrow, after which, she'll either lift the order entirely or grant an injunction. There was no reason to put a specific expiration date because it's implied that she's going to lift it after the hearing.
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Series Index:
Part 5: The Hill District, Continued
The entry on the Lower Hill from a couple weeks ago was really more of an appetizer than a main course, since the area discussed hasn't been a developed neighborhood since the early 1950s. Today, we'll move into the Hill District proper, discussing the neighborhoods officially designated as Crawford-Roberts and Middle Hill, which make up the bulk of the old Hill District. In future installments we'll look at Bedford Dwellings and Terrace Village, two project neighborhoods that merit their own discussion, and Uptown, The Upper Hill (Sugar Top), and Polish Hill, three very different neighborhoods that are on the periphery of the Hill District but are nonetheless historically bound to it.
As we discussed last time, much of the Lower Hill was razed in the 1950s for an urban renewal project that never fully came to fruition. Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus name city planners gave to the rump section of the Lower Hill that wasn't demolished wholesale. In the section on Downtown I mentioned that Pittsburgh came out of the Second World War with a serious image problem, and was desperate to shed its image as a smog-choked industrial town. Adding to the problem was that one of the poorest, most run-down and overcrowded parts of the city immediately abutted downtown to the east. When Federal money for slum clearance became available in the 1940s, the city moved forward with plans to build a civic auditorium, arts center, symphony hall, lots of tower in the park housing, and other amenities like hotels and restaurants.
In the end, it stopped with a single apartment tower and the civic auditorium, which lasted for nearly 50 years but was only briefly used for its intended purpose. The rest of the old neighborhood became a sea of parking lots. The Hill District was Pittsburgh's original dumping ground for blacks, Jews, Italians, and other undesirables, who initially settled in the Lower Hill close to Downtown, but gradually moved up the hill as they became more prosperous. By the 1950s, the Lower Hill was the poorest section but also the most racially diverse. The Middle and Upper parts of the Hill were blacker but also more prosperous—the Middle Hill was 80%–90% black by 1940, but was inhabited by industrial workers and others with steady employment. Beyond that was the small community of black professionals on Sugar Top.
During the Lower Hill redevelopment process, the black community in the Middle and Upper Hill was reasonably supportive of the Urban Redevelopment Authority' goals. There as hope that the demolition of a disreputable area would strengthen the link between the Middle Hill and Downtown, and the poorest of the poor would be moved out of overcrowded, unsanitary, dilapidated housing and into gleaming new apartment houses. That they were overoptimistic at best or naïve at worst became apparent shortly after the wrecking balls started swinging in 1956. Changes in Federal housing policy meant that the new projects had not materialized, and displaced residents found themselves with nowhere to go. The Italians went in one direction, the Jews in another, and the blacks went wherever they could. Some went to Homewood or Beltzhoover or other far-flung parts of the city, but the majority just moved deeper into the Hill District.
By the time the Civic Arena was completed in 1961, housing policy was the least of the reasons Middle Hill residents had for concern. While they may have hoped that the redevelopment of the Lower Hill would lead to a revitalization of the Middle Hill, the city fathers didn't see it that way. To them, the Middle Hill was no less a slum than the Lower Hill, and it didn't help that it was increasingly occupied by the same undesirables they had just kicked out. It turned out that selling modern luxury apartments on the edge of a black area was a tough sell to wealthy whites in the 1960s, and the benefactors of the arts didn't want to soil their shoes walking through a neighborhood that, to them, was as much of a slum as it had been years before. The center for the arts, which was to be modeled after Lincoln Center in New York and include a symphony hall, repertory theater, restaurant, exposition hall, apartment building, huge underground parking garage, and maybe even a modern art museum, was the centerpiece of the next phase of development, but the financial backers, particularly the H.J. Heinz Foundation, thought it illogical to pay huge sums for a cultural acropolis without eliminating the neighboring blight. They made it clear to the city that no more money would be forthcoming unless another 50 blocks were cleared east of Crawford St.
The city, apparently realizing that the calls for additional demolition weren't going to stop, did the private backers one better. They responded with a plan to clear an unspecified plot of land for a public park, built a wall along the western side of Crawford St. to protect cultural center patrons from disagreeable views, and build new residential high rises that would obscure the rest of the Hill and cut it off from the redeveloped area. By 1963 the total redevelopment area had expanded to 900 acres, practically the entire Hill District. While publications from the Planning Commission and URA spoke in lofty terms about the need for citizen input and community engagement, the ideas were not presented as proposals but as done deals, even though this was far from the truth. The city seemed bound and determined to clear out an inconvenient neighborhood and have a clear, glistening new corridor between Downtown and Oakland. Whatever revitalization Hill residents had hoped to see ten years earlier was now a distant memory, and they were effectively being told that revitalization was contingent on their leaving. Urban Renewal had become Negro Removal.
The community, previously supportive of redevelopment efforts, turned hard against any further encroachments on the neighborhood, and vowed to hold the line at Crawford St. As the URA sought to make the proposals official, neighborhood residents erected a billboard at the corner of Crawford St. and Center Ave. which read "Attention: City Hall and the URA, No Redevelopment Beyond This Point." From this intersection, renamed Freedom Corner, Hill district residents marched downtown despite death threats from white Pittsburghers and demanded that redevelopment stop — "Not another inch!" This sentiment wasn't limited to the Hill District; by 1965 opposition had galvanized among residents of neighborhoods throughout the city that were the subject of proposed renewal projects. But while the city may have treated these proposals as inevitabilities, the specifics presented were always vague. There were rumors, general recommendations, and the occasional artist's rendering, but these were all theoretical in nature; there was nothing close to any concrete plans or drawings for the Hill District. Despite residents' fears, any redevelopment beyond Crawford Ave. was at the bottom of a long list of projects already in the hopper. As community opposition grew, the city, while stil formally recommending slum clearance, admitted, in an apparent attempt to relieve the pressure, that the plans would take decades to realize.
One can date the end of the Pittsburgh Renaissance not just to the decade, or the year, but to the minute. At 10:30 pm on May 20, 1969, councilman and mayoral candidate Pete Flaherty was having a spaghetti dinner with his wife and two sons when he received a telephone call from his campaign headquarters that his opponent, Judge Harry Kramer, had conceded the nomination. Since the Democratic party had taken over city government in 1934, machine politics, or "The Organization", as it was called, had dominated. Flaherty won a council seat in 1965 and quickly became the heir apparent but increasingly found himself at odds with the administration. In early 1969, before incumbent mayor Joseph Barr decided whether he'd be seeking a third term, Flaherty announced he was entering the race. The Organization was stunned; if Barr retired and Flaherty kept his mouth shut, he could have had the nomination handed to him on a silver platter, but he wanted to earn it instead. More importantly, he felt reform was needed and couldn't make a credible case for it as a machine selection. With Barr deciding he was done and Flaherty turning coat, The Organization tapped Judge Kramer, convincing him to resign a cushy seat on the Probate bench for what should have been a guaranteed position as mayor.
But while Kramer's commitment to public service was honorable, his political skills left much to be desired. He had no response to Flaherty when it came to policy and resorted to incoherent personal attacks that accused him of being a far left kook on the one hand and a "Republocrat" on the other. More importantly, the city employees and councilmen who constituted The Organization's rank and file took Flaherty's concerns to heart and broke ranks. Still, Kramer's loss came as a shock. The organization that had seen the city through the Depression and World War II, and that had transformed it smog-choked backwater to one of the most beautiful places in the nation was done. The remaining loyalists were forced to back Flaherty in the general election, as any Republican would allow governor Raymond Shafer to run wild in the city. While Flaherty would see to completion the projects that were already construction, no new proposals would be forthcoming, and any existing ones would die a quiet death. To him, these were nothing more than expensive boondoggles, and he'd focus his administration on unsexy things like paving, street lighting, fiscal responsibility, and labor agreements. The era of machine politics in Pittsburgh was over.
For the Hill, though, it was too little too late. While the Middle Hill's Center Ave. business district was unaffected by urban renewal, it would not survive the riots that erupted in the wake of Dr. King's assassination in 1968. While these affected several city neighborhoods, the Hill District was the hardest hit. What was left of the Lower Hill continued to deteriorate following the initial demolition, as the promised revival never came. Without a functional business district, and with little hope of rebuilding Center Ave., the remaining black middle class decamped for elsewhere, and the neighborhood slowly began to empty. While narcotics had been an increasing problem since the early 1960s, the arrival of the crack epidemic in the 1980s brought gang warfare at a scale never before seen. The population of the Hill District, which sat at over 50,000 in 1950, had been reduced to only 15,000 by 1990. For all of the Hill's problems, overcrowding was no longer one of them.
5B. Crawford-Roberts
Crawford-Roberts is a semi-bogus neighborhood designation that nobody uses in real life, but it warrants separate treatment here as it comprises the rump portion of the old Lower Hill that was spared demolition. Aerial photographs show that it was starting to suffer from demolition by 1967, and by 1993 it was almost completely vacant. Suburban style split-level houses were built in the 1970s in an attempt to retain middle class residents. While this had some degree of success—these are all owned by long-time residents, many original owners—they are incongruous in an urban neighborhood close to a major downtown. While they thankfully aren't building these anymore, what's been going in instead hasn't been much better. In the late 1980s, the URA began an early New Urbanist project called Crawford Square that sought to redevelop what had been lost to blight. It was touted as a "contextualist" development that was meant to blend in with the historic character of the neighborhood. Compromises were made to "reflect the reality of the automobile", and there was no apparent attempt to obtain any variance from contemporary zoning codes. The topography made it difficult to build alleys in some places, so the result was old-style houses with front loading garages and deep setbacks. It isn't horrible, but it stands in stark contrast with the historic structures that remain. The townhomes at the heart of the development have an [antiseptic feel] that evokes a senior living community more than an urban neighborhood; I call it "soft urbanism" because it tries to conform to the large-scale descriptors of urbanism—density, traditional styles, etc.—without actually bothering to see what the existing built form actually looks like. Luckily, the more recent developments do a much better job.
One thing that has been successful is the crime reduction. The first phase of Crawford Square was finished in 1993, and in the decades since the area went from being one of the most dangerous parts of the Hill to one of the safest. This is despite half of the rentals being subsidized "affordable" units, though it should be mentioned that even the for-sale units and new single family homes are also subsidized, but in a different way—the city offers ten year property tax abatements on new construction homes in designated redevelopment areas, giving middle class people financial incentive to buy in the hood and in turn giving developers incentive to build there. For all the outward success, though, this has been an incredibly slow process. While the development was officially completed in 2000, it was only in the past few years that the URA was finally able to unload the last 6 parcels in the development area. So while the Lower Hill has been showing signs of life, the pace of construction isn't exactly frenetic, and what has been built has required significant government nudging.
Neighborhood Grade: Stable. 15 years ago you could have made the argument that this was gentrifying, but that was merely in anticipation of development at the old arena site. Two things hold it back. First, the built form isn't particularly appealing. It wasn't originally designed to be trendy to outsiders but to retain middle class blacks who would otherwise leave the neighborhood; hence the concessions to the suburban lifestyle and aesthetic that is anathema to any self-respecting urban pioneer. More importantly, the old Wylie Ave. business district that was destroyed in the 1950s is still vacant, and the Center Ave. business district in the neighboring Middle Hill isn't doing too hot. Beyond that, there aren't any walkable amenities. If the arena site development ever comes to fruition and is able to attract sufficient ground-level retail, this could change, but I don't see this becoming a trendy area any time soon.
5C. Middle Hill
This was the heart of the old Hill District and remains the heart of the current Hill District. The boundary between the Lower and Middle Hill was always indistinct, but the Middle Hill starts around the beginning of the Center Ave. business district and includes everything up to Herron Ave. that isn't part of a housing project. See map. If the Crawford-Roberts area is the part of the hill that the city wants you to see, then the Middle Hill is the part it doesn’t want you to see. There is a significant amount of neglect, abandonment, and, ultimately, demolition. There are plenty of historic structures scattered throughout the neighborhood, and occasionally enough remains intact to give you an idea of what the neighborhood looked like in its heyday. There are also a couple of weird suburban enclaves like Midtown Square and Francis Court that have held up well. But this part of the Hill is mostly vacant lots, with some streets only having a single, vacant structure remaining. Keeping in mind that the Hill once had a population density of over 80,000 people per square mile, comparable to the denser parts of Brooklyn, this is an odd, sad fate. While most of Wylie and Center avenues are technically zoned commercial, there is often not enough left to tell where the business district even was, though there are plenty of businesses scattered throughout the neighborhood. While the Lower Hill is more celebrated, the Middle Hill was always more the center of black life in Pittsburgh. The fame of the Lower Hill comes primarily from its notoriety as a rowdy nightlife district, where too many jazz greats to list cut their teeth and many more played when visiting. But it was the Middle Hill where residents went to take care of the boring, functional, everyday things. While displacement of low-income residents is the big issue that’s always brought up when discussing gentrification, I suspect that a large part of the issue is also that gentrified business districts tend to cater to the kind of chi-chi things that primarily appeal to rich white people. There's some cultural signaling involved here; when the first businesses that move into a moribund area are microbreweries and art galleries, but nothing that appeals to the immediate needs of existing residents, it doesn't help them in the short term and signals to landlords that it's time to start renovating their properties and raising rents. There's some level of understanding that these kinds of things are necessary to attract business from outside the neighborhood, but they'd prefer that to happen after the business district can satisfy their basic needs.
Nothing illustrates this dynamic better than the Hill's decades-long grocery store issue. In the 1970s, part of the attempt to stabilize the Hill by suburbanizing it was the construction of an auto-oriented shopping plaza, anchored by a grocery store. That store was gone by the mid-80s, as the Hill continued its decline. The lack of a grocery store rose to political prominence as the plans for a new arena were coming to fruition. For all the grand redevelopment plans being discussed, Hill groups just wanted a grocery store on the site, or, barring that, anywhere else in the Hill. Most white Pittsburghers saw this as nothing more than whining, to the extent they paid attention to it at all. There was no grocery store because the Hill can't support one, and we aren't spending tax dollars to prop up an unprofitable business just so you have a shorter bus ride.
Hill House was a community organization that had existed since the 1960s to provide after school programs, music lessons, and the like to Hill residents, as well as general community activism. Changes to the nonprofit landscape had them scrambling for program funding by the 2000s. In 2008, with the Civic Arena on the demolition block and redevelopment talks in the works, the Penguins and the URA signed a community benefit agreement that included several groups, with Hill House named as fiduciary representative for the community. The deal included 1 million dollars to put toward a grocery store. They found a tenant, secured the property, and began construction in 2011.
Things went sideways almost immediately. The contractor didn't post a bond. Architectural plans proved unworkable, necessitating a last-minute redesign. Overages abounded. Hill House took out massive loans to cover fundraising shortages. Nonetheless, a Shop-n-Save opened in 2013 to much fanfare. It wouldn't last the decade. For background, Shop-n-Save is a regional chain that is more or less the marketing arm of wholesale distributor SuperValu, the stores themselves being independently owned. This is in contrast to Giant Eagle, the regional flagship, that owns the vast majority of its stores outright. Giant Eagle is perceived as overpriced by most people in Pittsburgh. Anyway, the local NPR affiliate ran a story about a year after opening that said the store was doing about $25,000/week in total sales. By contrast, a typical suburban Aldi does about $350,000/week despite a smaller footprint and lower prices. Initial projections were dependent on the redevelopment of the old arena site, and, as we saw last time, we're still waiting for this to happen.
The bigger problem was theft. It's expected that a store in a low-income location is going to have an above-average amount of shrinkage. It's not expected that the manager of the store will be responsible for most of that shrinkage. The guy was taking cases of product before it could even go on the shelves and selling it himself. Able to read the room, store employees followed suit, loading up after a shift and heading to the bars and street corners where they'd unload it at a discount to passersby. Given the general vibe of the place, there was no motivation among employees or management to prevent customers from doing the same thing; the store was a block away from a police station, the police assured the owners that they were committed to preventing theft, but no one ever bothered to report anything. Combine the theft with a small, low-income customer base and it was bound to fail.
When the Shop-n-save closed in 2019, it took Hill House down with it. The store debacle was far from their only problem, but the rent couldn't cover ongoing building maintenance. In a supreme twist of irony, the final straw came when the URA cut off their line of credit. Hill House had been borrowing money to cover maintenance costs, but the URA said that enough was enough. Hill House was able to avoid bankruptcy, but only by selling off real estate as a prelude to dissolution. Without an anchor tenant, however, they couldn't find a buyer for the shopping complex, and the URA was forced to assume ownership.
The failure of the Shop-n-Save didn't end the Hill District's bid to get a grocery store. The URA was desperate to unsaddle itself from the building maintenance, and offered 1.5 million in incentives for anyone who wanted the property, provided they had a plan for a grocery store. Four prospective bidders came forward, and the winner was Salem Abdullah, the owner of a successful Halal grocer in the Strip District. Salem's was popular but had outgrown its location. The crux of the plan seems to have been twofold. First, a destination store with an established customer base would make it so he wasn't relying on Hill residents alone to make ends meet. Second, the larger location would allow him to expand his core operations while also expanding into a full-service store. No one doubted his dedication to the project, as he sunk 5 million of his own money into it on top of what the URA gave him.
Last week, he announced that the store would suspend operations indefinitely. But this time, attitudes range from indifference to good riddance. The entire reason Hill District residence wanted a grocery store so badly was because they didn't want to deal with the inconvenience of going elsewhere to shop, and since they're a low-income community, the store would have to have competitive prices that allowed them to stretch their dollar. Salem's did neither. To the first point, although it was ostensibly a full-service grocery store, an observant Muslim isn't allowed to sell anything that isn't Halal. The lack of pork products should have been a showstopper in and of itself, but few realized how far this went. Canned soups, boxed stuffing mixes, ramen noodles, pop tarts, broth, gravy mix, wine vinegar of any kind, corn bread—and the list goes on. Other items beyond his normal scope of operations were limited and inconsistent. The produce selection was about half of a normal grocery and frequently was out of key items like apples and cantaloupe, white bread sold out quickly and was slow to be replaced, and deli selection was limited. There was no tobacco, lottery, or money orders.
In short, it was a larger version of his specialty store in the Strip with a limited selection of grocery items and a limited deli. And since he didn't have the buying power of a chain, he was effectively paying retail for everything. If people have to go to another store to get produce, or pork, or whatever, they're going to do all of their shopping at the other store. If the other store also has significantly better prices, you can't compete, period. If it's both more economical and more convenient to pay a jitney ten bucks to take you to the South Side Giant Eagle, that's what people are going to do, especially if that's what they've been doing for the past 30 years.
I don't think that Salem Abdullah is a bad dude or that this was some kind of URA cash grab boondoggle. The 1.5 million he got was mostly loans, and he put another 5.5 million of his own money into the project. His idea was bad, but it was the only one on the table that was remotely feasible. There were three other bids. Two were from idealistic groups with visions of saving the community from food desertdom by offering high-quality, healthy options. These were discarded pretty easily, since neither group had any experience running a grocery store and came across as disorganized. The other bid was from a national chain of Asian markets, who put the bid in at the last minute and didn't bother to clarify that they sold non-Asian items. Salem's was local and had the money. He just completely misread the needs of the community.
Neighborhood Grade: Ghetto. Between the urban prairie and fragmented remnants of what was once a huge business district, the area is bleak. Crime is still high, though the gang warfare is over and most of this is spillover from nearby housing projects. But the stigma is still there, and any new business has a hard time attracting customers from outside the neighborhood. Pittsburgh's ghettos are more "have street smarts and avoid known drug areas" than "make a beeline for the highway and don't stop at any red lights". It also has a prime position between downtown and the University of Pittsburgh that's had city planners salivating for decades.
That being said, there are a few factors weighing against a turnaround happening any time soon. First, the city and the URA have officially committed to developing the Hill District from "the bottom up". So far, that's meant that development has been focused on the Crawford-Roberts area and whatever the hell they're doing at the old arena site. There's been some limited development in the Middle Hill—a YMCA on Center Ave., townhomes and a senior living complex on Wylie, a few single family homes, and a new library. All this development, though, has been limited to the western third of the neighborhood. It seems highly unlikely that it will extend beyond Kirkpatrick St. in the foreseeable future, let alone fill out the neighborhood.
Adding to the problem is that the centrality of its location is deceiving. On a street map, it appears to be in the middle of everything. But it's hard to actually get to unless you're really trying. Access from Downtown is hindered by I-579 and the gaping maw that is the old arena site. The northern edge of the neighborhood is a steep hillside with no road access even possible. The only direct access to Oakland is via Center Ave., which dives into a valley somewhat apart from the main neighborhood before going up over another hill, and even then it only spits you out into an odd corner of Oakland far from the Pitt campus and main business district. Access is somewhat better from the south, but that's only by turning off of 5th or Forbes Ave. in Uptown, which is a peripheral part of the Hill with its own business district that already acts as the main thoroughfare between the two neighborhoods. And, as we shall see in a few weeks, even it has a ways to go.
And then there's the red tape. A disproportionate share of the available land is owned by the URA or the city, which means that any developer has to go through them and by extension Marimba Milliones her ilk who will insist that you provide affordable housing guarantees on the one hand but tell you they don't want a housing project on the other. What's their actual vision for the future? Based on the reports they've commissioned in the past 15 years, it's mostly a pie in the sky vision of a diverse yet African-American-centered community full of improbable businesses like an African Diaspora Food Hall, an automotive shop that gets cheap rent in exchange for motorcycle repair classes, a pop-up mini golf course, a late night music venue that looks like an unsanctioned rave even though it isn't—you know, the kind of stuff that attracts rich white people but isn't too obvious about it.
I don't think this is going to happen. What I think will happen is one of two things. The most likely scenario is that the URA's slow but steady march continues and the neighborhood continues to be a lower-income black area with newer housing and new storefronts that can't find commercial tenants. There's also the possibility that the gentrification wave slowly percolating in Uptown shoots up the hillside faster than anyone's ability to control it. I guess a third possibility is that the neighborhood eventually empties out so completely that there's no base of political power left and the URA gives developers a blank check, but I wouldn't count on that happening. The best case scenario is that Center Ave. turns into something akin to the U Street Corridor in Washington DC. I think things will eventually turn around, but I wouldn't venture a guess as to when that will happen. The only question is whether, when that day arrives, anything of the old neighborhood will be left standing.
Rov_Scam
3d ago
They don't do this because the information isn't readily available and there's no call for it. It may be easy to find run times for movies and music, but few people pay much attention to these, the only real exception being if a movie is unusually long. Consumers generally don't need down-to-the-minute information about how long things take; if I'm book shopping, forget even page counts, how thick the book is is usually a close enough approximation. Publishers know this, too, so they will often make the kind of formatting decisions you mentioned above with that in mind, whether to add extra bulk to a slim volume or condense a longer work down so it doesn't look too intimidating.
But suppose they did start publishing word counts. What of it? If a book says that it contains 100,000 words it means absolutely nothing to me the way it does if an albums says it's 38 minutes long. I vaguely remember learning in 9th grade that a novel was anything longer than 60,000 words, but I couldn't tell you how long most novels actually are. And I couldn't translate this into how long it will take to read because I have no idea how fast I read, other than that I read faster than most people, though even then I'm sure there's variation based on how tired I am, how engaged I am with the material, etc.
Complicating this even further is the fact that people rarely read an entire book in one sitting. In judging how "long" a book will take to read I'm usually thinking more in terms of days or weeks than in hours or minutes. If a movie is listed at two hours I can say easily that if I start watching it at 8 pm I'll finish watching it at 10 and plan my evening accordingly. If a book says it's 90,000 words then I have to divide that by my average reading speed to get the total time in minutes, then divide that by 60 to get hours and an approximation of minutes, then figure out how much time per day I anticipate having to dedicate to reading, and only then can I figure out how long it will take to finish it. Most people aren't doing this calculation.
And word count isn't as cut and dried as running time. For most fiction, there isn't much superfluous text, but in nonfiction this gets sticky, since a lot of the material included isn't really intended to be "read", per se. Do you include the preface and foreward? Probably. The acknowledgements? Most people skip these but the author wants you to read them. Appendixes? Depends on what's in them; is it supplementary text or a collection of facts and figures? Call that a maybe. Footnotes? Depends on whether they're explanatory or bibliographic, though many are a combination of both. The index? Almost certainly not. We can quibble over where to draw the line, but the word count the publisher is using includes all of the above, because they have to print all of it regardless. And then there's the variation on how different software programs count words. So the same book could have a huge variation depending on whether they're using the count from the manuscript as submitted in Word (the stingiest program) or the InDesign count for the entire published text, that counts every numeral in the index as a separate word. This could be solved by industry standardization, by why develop such a standard when there's simply no call for it?
Rov_Scam
4d ago
Alright, the weekend is over, so for the vanishingly small number of people — @curious_straight_ca, @DoctorMonarch, @sarker — who expressed interest, here are the answers:
AAB-FAB: Aggravated Assault & Battery / Felony Assault & Battery
RS Goods: Receiving Stolen Goods
VUFA: Violation of the Uniform Firearms Act (this is still police lingo for an illegal weapons violation)
KA House: Keeping an Assignation House (Brothel or no-tell motel)
CP: Common Prostitute
Pandering: Would probably be categorized as "promoting prostitution" under current law.
VA House: Visiting an assignation house
KD House: Keeping a disorderly house. This is still on the books, though this is usually a municipal ordinance rather than a state-level criminal offense. College towns will use these to put pressure on students who frequently throw loud parties, and urban areas will use them to cite owners of crack houses and the like. Nuisance bar laws are closely related. Basically, being in control of any building with excessive police calls for things like noise, fighting, drug use, or other things that make it a public nuisance will make you liable for this.
VD House: Visiting a disorderly house. These days, when the cops break up a party for noise and arrest everyone inside, this is what they get charged with if they don't have grounds for an underage drinking charge. Not commonly charged.
KG House: Keeping a gaming house.
VG House: Visiting a gaming house.
Rov_Scam
5d ago
There's no returning what was never owned by the states to begin with. Either way, it's not practical. The average rancher is going to have a coronary when he finds out that he has to buy a grazing permit for every cow that might wander into another state or risk fines.
Rov_Scam
7d ago
I stumbled across some old annual reports from the Pittsburgh Police and when they listed the arrests by crime there were a few old-timey ones that aren't immediately apparent,. particularly ones involving various types of house of ill fame or loose ethics. See how many of these you can get:
AAB-FAB
RS Goods
VUFA
KA House
CP
Pandering
VA House
KD House
VD House
KG House
VG House
Rov_Scam
8d ago
I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
They can go after your savings account and put liens on your property. Depending on the state, they may be able to garnish wages.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
Bankruptcy discharges medical debt. When I was doing bankruptcies it was a pretty common reason for filing.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
If I had to make a prediction; if Trump manages to cut this gordian knot, it's going to be because he gets Saudi Arabia (or perhaps a Muslim partnership) to take ownership over at least Gaza. They will get a corridor which is either theirs or granted to them in order to project power and material by land from Saudi Arabia to Gaza.
In what world would Saudi Arabia, or any other country, agree to this? Israel already tried to give Gaza to the Egyptians, and they didn't want it. Gaza is nothing more than a headache for any country with the misfortune of having sovereignty over them. Hell, Saudi Arabia doesn't even have any formal relations with Israel and doesn't recognize them, yet Israel is supposed to grant their military unlimited transit across their territory? Not to mention that Jordan would have to agree to this as well.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Sort of both. Social Security is a Federal program, and most employees (e.g., if you work at the Social Security office) are Federal employees, but disability determinations were done by the state Department of Labor, so I was employed by the state, but was administering a Federal program. I'm in Pennsylvania, which pays its employees more than other states, and if I had been doing financial determinations on the SSA side my salary and benefits would have been similar. I didn't mean to imply that you couldn't do reasonably well working for the government, just that these jobs aren't cushy by any stretch of the imagination. Like anything else in life, there are tradeoffs, and when Republicans talk about eliminating the advantages of Federal employment without addressing any of the disadvantages I think they're making an unfounded assumption that this is going to make things more efficient.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
I don't know what makes you think these jobs are cushy. The benefits are good and it's hard to get fired, but the pay is low and there's a certain rigidity compared to the private sector. As I recently mentioned in a prior post, I worked for the state when I first got out of law school, and it wasn't for me. The pay is decent enough that you're not going to starve, and if you save your pennies you can put your kids through college, but if you want to see Europe, it better be on your television set. You can look at the schedule provided with your orientation materials and know how much you'll be making every year for the rest of your career, which may give a certain peace of mind but also resigns you to knowing that there is absolutely zero chance you'll ever make more than that. Want to make 100k? You'd better be a doctor or have some other highly specialized degree where you could easily make double what the state's paying you on the outside without them looking twice at your resume, or have a title like "Senior Administrator" or "Director" and I'm talking like running an entire state agency. You can of course work your way up the ranks through promotion, but unless you get that every few years you're taking a pay cut, since you start out at the bottom of the scale again. When I left and went to the private sector my pay increased by 50% despite having no experience in the field I was going into.
But the real bitch of it is the lack of flexibility. As a normal salaried employee, no one pays too much attention to where I am as long as I get my work done. With the government, I had to sign in at the beginning and end of each day, and when I left for lunch. If I was more than 15 minutes late, I'd get vacation time docked. When I first started, I didn't have enough leave accrued to take two days off and my request for unpaid leave had to be approved by the HR people in Harrisburg. Every aspect of your work is micromanaged. They monitor internet usage. If you don't have any work to do they actually make you pretend to look busy, which is true of everybody when they first start and don't have a high caseload. The pointless drudgery weighs on you more when the government is involved; if a client insists I do something pointless now at least I can take pleasure in the fact that they're willing to pay by the hour for it and I can use the work to pad my billables and get a nice bonus. When I had to do it for the government it was because it was part of some internal policy memo that no one has actually looked at in 20 years but has become customary to the point that not doing it is a fireable offense.
This may seem like the exact kind of inefficiency that Musk et al. are trying to prevent, but it's a balancing act. If a private company wants to make a business decision that the constant logging calls and diary entries and filling out timesheets is a waste of time that prevents employees from being productive, it's one thing. But if it's not done then the DOGE people come right back at you with the opposite argument of asking you to justify what you do all day and them saying "how does it take all day to do that", and politicians wondering how taxpayer money is being spent, and the people claiming disability wondering why their claim was denied, and Elon Musk wondering why the other claim was approved, so it's better to just have a bunch of comprehensive reporting requirements so that when people ask questions you actually have answers.
Like I said, it's annoying, and it wasn't for me, but some people like the stability and predictability of government employment. By threatening that stability what they're doing is removing all the advantage of government employment. If you want government workers to be like private sector workers, now you'd better plan on paying them like private sector workers, since you can no longer convince them that they have their jobs for life unless they seriously fuck up. If this goes as far as Trump seems like he wants to take it, you may pare down the Federal workforce, but there are still critical jobs to be done, and the only people willing to do them will be the kind of people who are willing to work for a fraction of the going rate and don't care if they get fired in four years.
Rov_Scam
17d ago
It's independent in the sense that it's not part of the Executive Branch. Similar to how FDIC is always described as an independent agency because it isn't part of the Treasury Department (or any other department), or how the US Forest Service is described as part of the Department of Agriculture. Being under "guidance" of the SoS isn't the same as being part of the State Department. Rubio is acting administrator, but there's usually a separate administrator who doesn't take orders from the State Department, just advice.
Rov_Scam
18d ago
I actually have to deal with these tables for work, and you'd calculate by 78 or their stated age. At least that's how the professional economists do it for expert reports. If you graph it it's easy to see why — the probability doesn't follow a set function but wanders based on extrinsic factors and random variation. For example, a newborn's chances of dying in the next year are the equivalent of a 50 year old man's. But it drops sharply after one year and continues dropping until age 8, when it starts permanently rising. There's then a jump around age 16, probably due to driving (and poorly at that), etc. In other words, it's derived from actual data. And the actual data can't be granular down to the day because it would be a nightmare to calculate and would probably end up wonky because of limited sample size (how many people aged 17 and 301 days die in a given year?) So they base the data on anyone who is a given age, even if they may be nearly a year apart. So if you're 78 and 240 days then your probability is what it is for 78, full stop, no rounding up. On your 79th birthday you use the higher number.
Rov_Scam
19d ago
What, you think that cartels are going to pay tariffs on imported Fentanyl?
Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait
Part 5: The Hill District*
Immediately to the east of Downtown, the land begins sloping upward, gradually at first, then more decisively. This hill includes virtually everything east of Downtown until Oakland, with the exception of the Strip District, from which it is separated by a steep dropoff. On the Monongahela side, the riverfront is devoid of any kind of strip-like neighborhood, as the cliffs begin only 100 yards or so from the shoreline. Officially, this area includes part of the Downtown, Bluff, Crawford-Roberts, Middle Hill, Bedford Dwellings, Terrace Village, Upper Hill, and Polish Hill neighborhoods. As a housekeeping measure, I would note that the Downtown, Polish Hill, and Bluff sections aren't normally considered part of the Hill, the Upper Hill section is debatable, and small parts of Oakland may or may not be considered part of the Hill District based on how old you are. As a said when I began this series, the official neighborhood lines are based on census tracts, which may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. That being said, there are good reasons to treat each of these areas individually, so that's what I will be doing.
The Hill District, in general, is Pittsburgh's Harlem, even if in reputation more than in reality. This was the part of the city where the first black migrants settled in the early 1800s, when the area was nothing more than log cabins on the hillside overlooking the point. As the century wore on, it became the dumping ground for various ethnic groups that couldn't get housing anywhere else, not just blacks but also Jews, Syrians, Italians, and Poles. They each divided into their own little enclaves, so for a while you had Jew's Hill, Italian Hill, etc. Eventually these distinctions eroded, and we were just left with the Hill.
The Hill was never a desirable area. Industry needs rivers and flat land, and the Hill had neither. In an era when foot travel was the only option for the working class, proximity to jobs was of utmost importance, and for all the pollution and squalor of the South Side and the Strip, they at least had that. The Hill District had all of the problems but none of the benefits. The only thing in its factor was that it was at least immune from the catastrophic floods that were common before the rivers were under control, but that's about it. All that being said, the residents made the most of the situation, and from the 1920s until the 1950s the Hill had somewhat of a golden age as the centerpiece of the city's black community. For reasons that will be discussed below, the Hill went into decline beginning in the 1950s, and hasn't recovered.
I've attached a map that includes all the neighborhoods in the Hill I'll be discussing, but I've never done that before so we'll see how it goes. Worst case I'll upload a copy to Imagur and include a link like before.
5A. The Lower Hill: Ground Zero
A few years ago I did a similar writeup back on Reddit so I apologize if this covers the same ground, but I think it's worth a fresh look. As I mentioned in the installment about Downtown, city leadership had a vision of Renaissance beginning in the 1940s that culminated with the wildly successful Point developments. When it came to the city's other attempts at urban renewal, though, things didn't go as swimmingly, and the first of these was the destruction of the Lower Hill. The Lower Hill District was roughly the area between where I-579 sits today on the west, 5th Ave. on the South, Bigelow Blvd. on the north, and Crawford Ave. on the east. Wylie Ave. was the main commercial thoroughfare, and the neighborhood, while notably black, had a healthy concentration of Jews and Italians as well. But it was also poor and run down. The housing was old and dilapidated, with many residences lacking running water. Beds were crammed as tightly as possible into rooming houses, where tenants slept in shifts. It was rife with seedy bars and pool halls, and prostitutes and policy makers roamed the streets. In other words, it was a slum, and in a city desperately trying to clean up its image as well as its air, the presence of such an area directly adjacent to Downtown was unacceptable. So a plan was hatched in the name of slum clearance. An expressway would be built connecting the Liberty Bridge to a planned bridge and highway heading north. A new arena with a retractable roof would be built to accommodate the Civic Light Opera, who were sick of being rained out at Pitt Stadium. A new cultural center would be built for the Pittsburgh Symphony and various other groups, modeled after Lincoln Center in New York. And there would be lots of tower-in-the park luxury housing. Beginning in 1956, the entire neighborhood was razed. 1,000 buildings were destroyed, displacing 8,000 people with no immediate housing prospects. The street grid was eliminated entirely. To add insult to injury, most of the planned development never happened. The Civic Arena was the obvious centerpiece in all of this, but it too had a rocky history before the Penguins were established; the acoustics inside were so bad that the Civic Light Opera moved out after a few years. The cultural center never materialized, on the grounds of cost, and the residential construction was limited to a single building, though it was designed by I.M. Pei. For decades, the neighborhood mostly consisted of the Civic Arena, surrounded by a sea of parking lots, with I-579 forming a formidable barrier with Downtown.
In 2006, the possibility of a revival loomed large. The Penguins had spent years trying to get a new arena, and a savior appeared in the form of Isle of Capri, a casino company. Pennsylvania had recently legalized slots, but restricted the licenses, of which Pittsburgh would only get one. Three contenders appeared: Bally's who wanted to build a casino at Station Square, Barden, who wanted to build one by the stadiums, and Isle of Capri, who wanted to build theirs on the old arena site. To sweeten the deal, they offered to build an arena for the Penguins, and redevelop the old neighborhood, in exchange for the development rights. The bid ultimately failed. The gaming commission's decision to award the license to Barden seemed perplexing at the time (and moreso after Barden went bankrupt), the joke being that Isle of Capri didn't get to build the arena for free because Ed Rendell wanted to pay for one, but in retrospect the plan wouldn't have worked. Hill residents were largely opposed to a casino coming to what they felt was still part of their neighborhood, making the political implications too volatile, and there were other problems with the site, like parking, that simply weren't an issue on the North Side. Add in giving away development rights to an entire neighborhood and the cost was just too high.
One thing the Isle of Capri debacle did, though, was get more people talking about redevelopment once the Civic Arena was gone. The Penguins ended up securing financing to build a new arena on an old hospital site they had purchased with the cash proceeds of the Jaromir Jagr trade (which is more appropriately in Uptown but still adjacent) and were given some kind of redevelopment rights to the old arena site as a consolation prize. And then nothing happened. The arena deal was announced in early 2007, and construction was completed in time for the 2010–2011 season. The prudent move would have been to spend the ensuing three years putting a development plan in place, start tearing down the old arena as soon as the new one was ready, and begin the first phase of redevelopment about 6 months later, once demolition was complete. Instead, the demolition of the old arena was delayed a year while a group of morons tried to get it registered as a historic landmark. It was only once demolition was complete that anyone even started working on a plan for redevelopment. (It's 2012 by now if anyone is paying attention). We didn't see anything until late 2014, when US Steel proposed moving their HQ there once their lease in the Steel Building ran out; those plans were scrapped when US Steel decided to stay put. A couple years later some Danish firm proposed a wacky plan that looked more like something an architecture student designs for their portfolio than something intended to actually be built. Needless to say, that idea went nowhere.
Up to this point I haven't included many pictures, so here's a clip from Street View. You'll see City View apartments and the Cambria Hotel next door. Rotate around and you'll see the new FNB Tower as it nears construction, and Flag Plaza off in the distance. Include that and all the empty space and that's all she wrote. Every other building is in an adjacent neighborhood. This is all officially part of Downtown, but I've broken it off into its own neighborhood for historical reasons and because it deserves its own installment due to how fucked up the whole thing is. But I digress.
A big part of the reason development has been slow to take off is due to community opposition, in particular that of Marimba Milliones of the Hill Community Development Corporation. The HCDC has no actual power, but they have enough pull with the powers that be to make things difficult. The actual land is owned by the Urban Redevelopment Authority, but they also have to contend with the Sports and Exhibition Authority, the Planning Commission, the Penguins, and any number of other agencies. Given the controversial history of the area, the URA made it clear early on that they wouldn't approve any development that didn't include a Community Benefit Agreement that they found acceptable. The HCDC became the prime arbiter concerning what was acceptable to the community, and they've made it hell to get anything built. The biggest sticking point has been about affordable housing for the proposed residential development. The HCDC and the Penguins argue about what an acceptable percentage of affordable units is. Then they argue that the Penguins definition of affordable excludes those of "very low and extremely low income". Then they argue about how much money the developer is going to pony up for Milliones' pet projects in other parts of the Hill. The Penguins' original grant of development rights required them to have the entire parcel developed within 11 years from the demolition of the old arena, with a minimum of 2 acres of new development per year. In that 11 years the Penguins did virtually nothing but build a few more parking lots, but they've able to successfully use Milliones' antics to get extension after extension.
The current site developer, Buccini Pollin, took a novel approach — they hired Kimberly Ellis, a Hill resident and community activist who opposed the Isle of Capri proposal, to act as point person for negotiations with Milliones. The initial idea behind this move was that someone with an existing working relationship with HCDC would make things go more smoothly and convince Hill residents that they weren't being railroaded. The actual result was quite different; Ellis and Milliones went to war. Milliones suggested that the developer only hired Ellis so they could slip a fast one past the community. Ellis said that Milliones apparently didn't understand how capitalism worked and that the developer wasn't a cash machine. David Buccini eventually stepped in and told the URA that this was as good a deal as they were going to get and if they didn't want to approve their proposal then the land was likely to sit vacant for another 20 years.
Needless to say, the gambit worked, though by this point the URA didn't have to worry about being called racist by anyone except the HCDC, since the city as a whole was now willing to blame anyone and everyone for the huge gap west of Downtown; Ellis gave the URA cover from Milliones, but they had no cover if they turned the deal down. And so, in 2021, construction began on the first phase of redevelopment, a 26-story skyscraper that is to be the new corporate headquarters for First National Bank. It's par for the course at this point for the first phase of the development to be a new office tower being constructed during one of the worst commercial real estate markets in history, but in FNB's defense, this was a done deal before the pandemic, when Downtown office space was at a premium. Furthermore, they aren't building it because they particular need that much office space, they're building it because they need a huge visible erect penis to attract the likes of Chase and Wells Fargo for the kind of multi-billion dollar merger that doesn't happen to companies headquartered in suburban office parks.
The next phase is a bit more practical, a concert venue built for the promoter Live Nation. For a while, a common thing to bitch about was the city's lack of a mid-size concert venue that was supposedly preventing some touring acts from stopping in Pittsburgh. This was rectified years ago with the construction of Stage AE (5,500 outdoor, 2,400 indoor) on the North Shore, but for some reason a new 4,500 seat venue is supposed to solve the same alleged "problem". As for the rest, who the hell knows. There's supposed to be a bunch more residential with ground floor commercial but since the URA is approving this a block at a time Buccini Pollin is going to have to deal with Marimba Milliones at every step of the way. Not that they've been any better; they just got URA approval to bifurcate the Live Nation development, which was also supposed to include a parking garage and an EMS center. Given that the EMS center was one of the concessions Milliones won in negatiations, she's back at it screaming that the developer is acting in bad faith, also citing some other commitments that they supposedly haven't met. Not to mention that the delay in parking garage construction supposedly means that the new venue will cause parking problems in the Hill District, never mind that the whole area is currently nothing but lots and that the homes closest to the area all have off-street parking anyway.
Given my tone, you may suspect that I don't have much sympathy for Milliones and would side with the developer, but that's not entirely true. While I don't much care for her antics, I understand where she's coming from. The original clearance of the Lower Hill promised all sorts of benefits that never materialized, and it's her job to make sure that developers don't run roughshod over the area again, and at least make sure that they get as much out of it as possible. The development agreements aren't with her, but with the URA, and her influence on the project only extends as far as the URA allows. More importantly, what they want to put here is crap. For all we've supposedly learned about urban planning since the '50s, the current proposal looks suspiciously like what was originally proposed for the site. The renderings show a design with all the charm of a suburban office park, complete with huge setbacks and "green space" that nobody will use. The old Lower Hill may have been a slum, but it had character, and is remembered fondly. My own proposals would be to either: 1. Using old photographs and building plans, try and recreate the old neighborhood to the extent that is practicable for modern uses, or 2. Give the development rights, and possibly the property itself, to the HCDC. I suspect that if Milliones had actual skin in the game then she wouldn't be in any position to keep making demands. She could use the proceeds to fund whatever pet projects she wants. If nothing else, it would be a better way to get money flowing into the rest of the Hill than their current strategy of hoping for Federal grants. And if the property sits vacant for 20 years because of her intransigence then hey, it's her prerogative, though I think she'd eventually be forced out of her position if she let things go too long.
There's some suggestion among conservatives that the razing of the Lower Hill was actually a good thing, that the concerns of the city about substandard buildings and overall dereliction were well-placed. In a darker sense, they say that rather than contribute to the decline of the rest of the Hill it at least insulated Downtown from it. Trying to examine a historical counterfactual is an exercise in futility; there are so many downstream effects something has that have to be untangled that things quickly become impossible to predict. So I'm not going to pretend that things would be all sunshine and roses had the Lower Hill remained extant. I will, however, say this: Dense neighborhoods adjacent to Downtowns are usually the first to gentrify. Think Boston's North End, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, Fell's Point in Baltimore, Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati, etc. Judging by old photographs, it was mostly the kind of late-19th and early-20th brick structures that are in high demand today. People like being able to wake up in their row house and stroll to their job downtown. On the other hand, this kind of revitalization didn't start happening until the '80s, and I don't see it happening in Pittsburgh until the '90s — who knows how much of the neighborhood would have been left by that point? One thing I can say is that the idea that Downtown was somehow inoculated from the decline of the Hill District is bullshit. In my first installment, I talked about how in the '90s and '2000s Tom Murphy fought tooth and nail to kick out the low income merchants on Fifth and Forbes in the name of "revitalization". Well, those businesses would have stayed out of Downtown if the Lower Hill's business district wouldn't have been razed, turning Downtown into the most convenient place for Hill residents to shop. As far as a neighborhood grade, this obviously doesn't get one. It was gradable long before I was born, and will hopefully be gradable in the future, but right now there's nothing to grade.
If you've made it this far, you're probably wondering where these have been, and why they've been absent while I've continued to post other things. When I first started this series, it was intended to be a series of neighborhood snapshots where I'd give a description, maybe a little history, and a rating, and then come back in the end and seen what we'd learned. Well, it quickly became apparent that there was plenty of material for culture war discussion somewhat different from the usual and I wanted to use some examples, and for the first segment, on Downtown, I wanted to talk about the whole Fifth and Forbes fiasco. Well, I was going off of what I remembered from 25 years ago, a time in my life when I wasn't paying particularly close attention to these things, so I figured I'd need to get my facts straight. Except there is very little that's easily accessible and before I knew it I was perusing archived articles from 2001 just so I could get a timeline and figure out if my memories of the public perception were in line with what people were actually saying. Again and again this happened, with me saying that I was going to make it quick and only talk about stuff I remember but even then I'm constantly checking myself for accuracy. So the long and the short of it is that I do intend to see this through to completion. The pace may be slow because there are still quite a few "big ones", so to speak, that have a lot to talk about, but in the meantime, I'd like to thank everyone who's still with me and who has commented in the past.
Prior installments:
Rov_Scam
21d ago
Delco isn't the best example because it's Philadelphia any way you slice it. It would be more of a judgment call than anything else, though it only really applies to places with allegiances to teams in two different cities (neither city being the place itself), and in my experience those are usually pretty weak allegiances. For instance, I was chatting with locals at a bar in Clinton County many years ago, and I asked this exact question. The answer I got was "If there's any baseball team people follow here it's the Yankees, but we don't really follow hockey. Steelers definitely." So I'd include them in Pittsburgh and not New York because he made it sound like the Steelers were bigger there than the Yankees, even though there's no way I'd have previously considered it part of the Pittsburgh co-prosperity sphere.
That being said, I'm also taking the position that not all places have allegiances to all sports. People who make those maps try to include everywhere, but I can tell you right now that Pittsburgh does not have an NBA team. The maps lump us in with the Cavs, but the only sense that anyone here is a Cavs fan is that we might root for them if they're in the championship, and they'll play a poorly-attended exhibition game here once every decade or two. But it's not like the Post-Gazette has a Cavs beat writer or they regularly show highlights on the local news.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
I agree with what you're saying here, but I'm not sure what you're getting at in your initial post. I had the interview on in the background as I was getting ready for work, and it came across more as whining than anything else. He said that they never involved him in the process and the campaign just did their own thing. He also said that the local Democratic committee did what they could. Yeah, I grant that it's a political mistake not to at least talk to the chair of the committee in the biggest city in an important battleground state,but it's hard for me to imagine what he could have actually done. Was there something he wanted to do but needed to coordinate with the campaign? Did he want to offer his sage advice?
If your contention is that the reason Harris lost Pennsylvania is because her campaign didn't play ball with local party leaders and they punished her by not rigging the vote, a look at the actual numbers makes it pretty clear that it isn't the case. Kamala Harris got about 35,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden did, and Trump got about 10,000 more than in 2020. If that difference is solely attributed to ballot box stuffing, it suggests that Brady can manufacture somewhere between 25,000 and 35,000 votes. Except Trump lost by 80,000 votes in 2020, and won by 120,000 in 2024. A machine like this could have accounted for, at most, 20% of the difference, if we're as charitable as possible and assume he didn't max out his fraud capabilities in 2020.
Other counties don't help us either. The only other county that can be alleged to have a Democratic Machine akin to Philadelphia's is Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), and Harris and Trump both got about the same number of votes there as they did in 2020. And that's if you take the naive view that there's some monolithic machine because Democrats have won every election since the 1930s. If you were actually paying attention you'd know that the Allegheny County Democratic Committee wasn't exactly a model of functionality heading into 2020, and that the progressive wing of the party had taken over city and county government plus key state and US rep positions. In other words, the people in charge in 2024 were not the same as in 2020, and the new people couldn't credibly be said to be part of any machine. Outside of Philadelphia and Allegheny, you're looking at counties that are either too small or too Republican to have machines. In any event, the most votes you're talking about is a few thousand, and in some places Kamala actually got more votes than Biden.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
In my first Pittsburgh post I mentioned a "greater co-prosperity sphere". I feel like if we're creating states based on metro areas we need to include the entire greater co-prosperity sphere. I'm not from the area, but I've visited often enough to have a pretty good handle on things, and it definitely feels like Fredericksburg is where the gravitational pull shifts from DC to Richmond, and the idea that Leesburg wouldn't be part of DC seems ridiculous. Front Royal is another matter entirely. There's definitely some pull, but it's a weak pull, and it feels closer to places like Roanoke and Harrisonburg which I wouldn't call part of DC at all.
But if you're worried about politics I'll offer a compromise — all the parts of Northern Virginia that you don't want under the yoke of the People's Republic of Douglass can become part of West Virginia.
Rov_Scam
21d ago
If he's worried about keeping metros intact, the best way to do this is by pro sports allegiance. Just look at the local media in every area, and see which teams from the NFL, NHL, MLB, and NBA they cover. Then make a map of as many states as you want, reserving the right to break out rural areas where allegiances might not be as strong.
Wynton Marsalis and Donald Trump
A couple of months ago, a poster whose username I won't attempt to spell published a post on Laufey and McManstions on the main site, which prompted a discussion on aesthetics, Kenny G, Thomas Kinkade, and other topics only peripherally related to the culture war that we don't discuss here much. Earlier still, I published a tongue-in-cheek post about John Coltrane and why you should vote for Cornel West that somehow got selected as an AAQC. For a while, now, I have wanted to present a more serious discussion on aesthetics and public policy, and Trump's reinstatement of his Beautiful Architecture EO has provided occasion for it. But first, we need a little context.
I. Modernism and the Death of Jazz
In the earlier post, I discuss how 1959 was a watershed year in music history. Like most watershed moments however, while it pointed toward the future, it was in other ways the beginning of the end. I mentioned albums by John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. Saxophonists Coleman and Coltrane, along with pianist Cecil Taylor, were the three biggest figures in the development of Free Jazz. From its inception, Jazz had been about improvisational freedom, in contrast to the dictatorial prescriptions of Classical music, and over the decades, musicians sought to push the limits of that freedom. If Modal Jazz could soloists from the tyranny of chord progressions by embracing modes, Free Jazz could do away with harmony altogether, allowing soloists to be totally unconstrained. The three main progenitors of the movement, however, came from three very different backgrounds.
Coleman was from Texas, and came up on the Rhythm and Blues circuit in the 1950s. By the middle of the decade he had made his way to California and joined up with his own crew of like-minded oddballs and in 1959 released The Shape of Jazz to Come. The music was still relatively structured, but most of his contemporaries thought Coleman was completely unhinged. As an R&B player, he wasn't afraid to honk and squeak, and his music, though unusual, still showed a deep sense of the blues. He'd continue in a similar vein for a couple more albums until completely knocking the door down with the genre-defining Free Jazz in 1961 (Coleman was nothing if not literal).
The modernist sensibilities at play here were not subtle. Modernist art sought to free painting from the slavery of the representational form. Paintings didn't have to be evaluated on the basis of how closely they looked like the things they were supposed to look like; they could be reduced to mere elements. Color, shape, line, form, etc. could be appreciated for what they were. Painting as painting, not painting as narrative. For jazz, the sentiment was similar. The underlying essence of the music was still there; it was improvised, it swung, it was clearly based in the blues. But it didn't follow any established form. It only had jazz elements because that was the idiom with which the players were familiar; otherwise it was just sound for the sake of sound. The Jackson Pollock painting on the cover is no accident.
It would be several years, though, before Coleman's style took over jazz, though its influence would creep in in fits and starts. Cecil Taylor was Coleman's polar opposite. He was classically trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was familiar with the European Avant-Garde. As such, his music is much more deliberately modern than Coleman's. It actually sounds more deliberate in general, as if he knows what he wants to do before he actually does it. 1966's [Unit Structures] is his signature piece. And then there's Coltrane, the only one of the three to come from a conventional jazz background. After redefining harmony on Giant Steps he began to move more and more toward the avant-garde until finally reaching it on a plane of advanced consciousness us mere mortals can only dream of. Ascension, from 1965, was the watershed moment when he finally let go of his past and embraced the future.
IA. Populism and the Death of Jazz
Miles Davis never embraced Free Jazz. This wasn't because he was stubbornly clinging to the past, quite the contrary, he just wasn't ready to take that leap. Instead, he'd take the spirit of '59 and roll with it into the sixties. This wasn't a bold move; it's what most jazz musicians were doing prior to 1965, and what a few would continue to do after. One you've freed yourself from the yoke of traditional harmony, Free Jazz isn't the only place left to go. It turns out, the infinite vastness of the harmonic spectrum provides plenty of opportunity for innovation without burning the whole house down. So even in 1967, when Free Jazz had captured the imagination of every thinking man in the Jazz world, Davis could put out albums like [Sorcerer] that didn't challenge your patience and still get credit for being innovative.
The problem for Miles, though, was that mildly impressing a few white jazz critics and the dwindling number of people who bought his albums wasn't enough to convince him that he was still on the cutting edge of music. And Davis needed to be on the cutting edge. Most musicians are bad. Some are good. Some are great. A vanishingly small number are involved in revolutions, and even fewer are at the forefront of those revolutions. Davis, at this point in his career, was 42 years old, and had already caused three revolutions on his own and was heavily involved in two more. And he was ready to start the next one.
Davis had realized that the black youth of the 1960s weren't interested in what he was doing, or what Coltrane was doing, or what any other jazz musician was doing. They were interested in James Brown and Sly & the Family Stone. So he did what any normal person in the 1960s would do if they were trying to appeal to a younger audience: He went electric. On paper this sounds like it was bound to be a disaster — an aging jazz musician trying to play rock and R&B in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. But Miles was no mere aging musician but an all-time genius. After a few tentative steps towards Jazz-Rock he'd release [Bitches Brew] in 1970 and prove that he was the one and only Prince of Darkness.
IB. Status Quo: The 1970s
The result of these twin revolutions of the 1960s was that, by 1975, anything that resembled what Miles Davis was doing in 1967 had ceased to be relevant. On the one hand you had the avant-garde. The new generation was able to combine Coltrane's jazz credentials, Coleman's weirdness, and Taylor's classical pretention to create bold new music that seemed optimized to alienate everyone except the five people who would show up for their concerts. The Davis wing fared better commercially, but whether or not this was a good thing is debatable. The main Davis strain drifted more in the direction of rock music before basically becoming indistinguishable from it. A funkier, more R&B oriented strain did fine for a while, but eventually suffered from its own artistic decline. Jazz-Rock became Jazz-Fusion, or fusion, and by the time Kenny G rolled around in the 80s it had devolved into Fuzak, a pejorative portmanteau of fusion and Muzak.
This is the point where a lot of traditional jazz histories get off the train. "Serious" jazz was dying a slow, lonely death. Fusion was being swallowed up by mainstream pop, and would culminate in Kenny G. Iconic jazz clubs were either closing due to lack of interest or converting into discos. The only people interested in playing straightahead 60s jazz were Woody Shaw and a few exiles in Europe. Most of the 60s holdovers had made the switch to fusion as soon as they saw how successful Davis was with it, for better or worse. But then, in the late 1970s, things slowly began to change. In 1976, Dexter Gordon returned from Europe, to wide acclaim. Herbie Hancock started playing acoustic jazz again in 1977, the same year Joe Henderson was back to playing acoustic hard bop. Ricky Ford already had a number of fine acoustic hard bop records under his belt, starting in 1977, as did several other younger players. Johnny Griffin's return to the US was in 1978. Steps (soon to be Steps Ahead) had already been jamming in New York to acclaim, and had recorded its debut in 1979. A nascent revival was beginning to take shape.
II. Wynton Marsalis
When he emerged in the 1980s, no one in jazz had ever seen a figure like Wynton Marsalis before. He came with impeccable credentials; born in a strong New Orleans musical family, he had gone to Julliard, Tanglewood, and a tour with Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. He was a jazz musician with an uncommonly beautiful sound and elegant ideas, as well as a classical musician of exceptional taste. But he also had the fire of a reformer in him: He was a defender of tradition with the will, energy, and intelligence to reaffirm the values associated with what he saw as a music (and a society) that had been corrupted by charlatans for the last forty years. Sometimes he seemed to be attempting to recreate another Harlem Renaissance; other times, he seemed to be like Matthew Arnold, calling for the best that had ever been played to be honored and savored. Or again, his task seemed to be the scholarly one of rewriting American cultural history, or evel the lay preacher's role of strengthening the country's moral fiber. In any event, once he was appointed artistic director of the new jazz program at Lincoln Center in 1988, he was in a unique position to shape the most powerful effort ever made to turn jazz into an institution.
By the 1980s, while fusion continued to prosper in certain circles, the more mainstream stuff was cast aside into the realm of the pop world. Two camps began to emerge. The first was that of the neotraditionalists. These were those raised in the free jazz avant garde, but who found it a stylistic dead end. While they were still jazz musicians at their cores, they rejected the idea that jazz history was a progression of sequential improvements. This may not seem like that big a deal, but it had the effect of liberating the music even further; rather than be forced to explore what little uncharted territory was left, they now had the entire history of jazz at their disposal. The music was still avant-garde, no doubt, but it could incorporate whatever influence it wanted. The watershed album here is Air Lore by the trio Air, because if you're going to embrace the history of jazz, why not go back to the very beginning? Jazz had become postmodern.
Countering this were the traditionalists, with Marsalis at the forefront. When he signed with Columbia and released his debut in 1982, it sold 100,000 copies, more than any traditional jazz album had in a long time. But from the outset, Marsalis was controversial. At one time or another he has suggested that jazz developed on a different plane than European music and that in its musical world, innovation is not a mark of progress, since the earliest jazz has never become dated; indeed, it may even be more modern than today's. He has claimed that jazz performances are so long that they bore audiences, that the highest of all jazz achievement's, the improvised solo, might need to yield to ensemble playing as it did in early jazz; he has said that there are no true jazz styles, but rather only master musicians whose individual developments show us the progress of the music; or that the seriousness of the jazz project must be reinforced to drive out the dehumanizing forces or popular culture (which long ago surrendered to base instincts and the avant-garde, the dark side of Europe).
If there is one thing that is certain about Marsalis's traditionalism, though, it's that it is openly hostile towards free jazz and jazz-rock, the two styles that came out of the 1960s. And with his position at Lincoln Center secure, he would spend the 90s preaching it on PBS, NPR, and in high school band rooms all across the country. With respect to this latter point, pretty much every band director in America had a hard-on for Marsalis. This was partially because he spent a lot of his early career as America's Premiere Jazz Educator working with schools, whose jazz programs at the time seemed gear towards preparing students to play in white big bands run by the likes of Woody Herman and Buddy Rich. Marsalis focused on the rich history of New Orleans and the swing era. It also helped tremendously that he was an accomplished classical musician who made recordings of all the "Trumpet Player's Pieces" that we all have played for juries and auditions and the like but were impossible to find recordings of in the past. You couldn't just walk into borders and find Arban's ["Variations on the Carnival of Venice"] (watching that video was deeply nostalgic, as I've played that so many times the fingereings are coming back to me for every note).
But his ubiquity combined with his inherent conservatism led to a backlash. While he was heralded by the boomers who were paying for our music lessons as kids, the millennial generation who grew up with him has quite a different take. Throughout the 90s, he made occasional TV and radio appearances, released albums, and did master classes at schools, and if he limited himself to this, he'd be controversial, but wouldn't draw nearly the same amount of ire. But then Ken Burns' Jazz came out. Jazz isn't a bad documentary; it's excellent for the information it contains. The problem is that it's misrepresentative and woefully incomplete; in ten-parts and 1,140-minutes it dedicates one full episode to 1938 and 1939 alone, while dedicating another episode to the period from 1961 to the present. They spend very little time talking about free jazz, jazz fusion, or really anything that happened after 1965 save for Louis Armstrong dying, and what they do say about it essentially dismisses it. And as America's Premiere Jazz Educator, Marsalis was behind it all, guiding Burns' presentation from front to back, appearing in more recorded interview segments than anyone else and confidently describing how Buddy Bolden sounded even though Bolden died in 1931 and was never recorded. And behind Marsalis, acting as hatchet man, was Stanley Crouch, a jazz critic of similar bent, whose story is made all the more rich by the fact that he was a free jazz drummer who turned to writing when he couldn't hack it.
It was always possible to detect Marsalis's conservative undertones before, but after viewing a 19-hour-long exposition of his ethos, most of us were ready to get off the train. You play music because you want to be creative, you want to express yourself. You listen to people like John Coltrane and Miles Davis because you're impressed by their genius and you hope that one day, you too can create something as innovative and earth-shattering as they can. And then some guy who's barely even old enough to be your father tells you essentially that all that's finished and you'll never be half the trumpet player Louis Armstrong was and if you try to do anything new then it's just "self-indulgent bullshit" or "playing tennis without a net" so you better just spend your life paying tribute to the greats by making inferior copies of their music. And then you look at his recording career, and realize that that's exactly what he's done. His best album, *Black Codes (From the Underground) was hilariously (and accurately) described on Reddit as "a very good 1962 Miles Davis album".
Beyond that, though, Jazz reached an audience that had no particular love for or experience with the music, and was a golden opportunity to get the public to engage with it. Jazz has no social cachet. It's not likely to have succeeded, but Jazz could have changed the public's negative perception of the music by presenting it as a vibrant artistic force building on a rich history. Instead it was presented as a museum piece, something that happened and ended 40 years ago and the best we can do now is cherish the memory. Jazz music had become classical music.
III: Donald Trump and the Death of Architecture
So what about Trump's EO reasserting his preference for "traditional" architecture? I'm not going to make the argument that this is some low-key tribute to Albert Speer, or that it represents an overarching conservative aversion to change or desire to reclaim some kind of lost glory or to assert some sort of homegrown nationalism. As far as I can tell, there are only two things at play here:
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Trump's aesthetic preferences
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Trump's perception of the public's aesthetic preferences
"Beautiful public buildings"; it says it all right there. The real question is whether these preferences actually exist. I've seen the sentiment echoed regularly on here: Modern architecture is bad. Postmodern architecture is bad. Traditional styles are preferable. This isn't limited to here, or to conservatives, or to people outside the art world; there seems to be a general sentiment that buildings just looked better before 1945. But do people really feel this way, or do they just say they feel this way? I suspect this perception has become so widespread that people express this preference without stopping to think about the full implications.
First, there's Trump himself. I am assuming that Trump does not harbor any sort of categorical dislike of modern architecture, insofar as he understands what the term actually means, considering the property with which he is most closely associated, Trump Tower, is unabashedly modern. Ditto for Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York, the building of the same name in Las Vegas, the one in Chicago, Trump Plaza Residences in Jersey City, Trump Tower in Mumbai, and at this point I'm sick of looking. I find it highly unusual that, considering that the guy is known as a real estate developer, no one has pointed that for his supposed contempt for modern architecture he sure is responsible for a lot of it. And the public must like it as well, or else Trump would be indulging in his personal preferences at the risk of his business. In any event, while I could be wrong, I couldn't find any evidence of Trump erecting a new building in any of the traditional styles he implies are prerequisite to beauty.
Second, there is the perception of the public, which isn't nearly as hostile to modern architecture as is made out to be. I live in Pittsburgh, and the most beloved building is PPG Place. Okay, it's technically postmodern, but this isn't a distinction I hear too many people making. The US Steel Tower is probably number two. In fact, most of the downtown skyline dates from 1950 or later, and I don't hear too much hate for any of the buildings, even if there are a few I could personally do without. So when I look at a new Federal building done in a more modern style, like the 2016 Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles I wonder "Do people really find this objectionable?", and, if so, what do they find so objectionable about it? Why is it that Trump will happily sign off on whatever the architect presents to him when it comes to his personal properties but suddenly finds religion when it comes to public buildings?
The argument can be made that public architecture is different and that government buildings should be constructed in a distinctive, unified style, but that doesn't make sense for a number of reasons. First, that horse has already left the barn, so any attempt at uniformity will be ad hoc at best. Second, a uniform style would suggest more detailed guidance than what the EO suggests we'll end up getting. The original 2020 EO emphasized "traditional" styles, citing Greek Revival, Federal, and Gothic Revival as examples. Well, those are three very different styles; so much for a distinctive look. And even if we were to settle on an official national style, does it make sense to do so? One of the things that makes buildings bad is that they don't fit with their surroundings. Some discontinuity is acceptable, but the building better be an absolute banger. Building an otherwise unobjectionable but unspectacular building where it doesn't belong will make it an eyesore. I don't have the confidence that every post office and visitor's center built between now and whenever the EO is rescinded will be of that kind of quality. Even the surrounding landscape is important. Mary Colter's buildings at Grand Canyon National Park are national treasures, but they wouldn't be had they been built in an incongruous Greek Revival style.
IIIA. That Which Is Left Unmentioned
First, we need to dispense with the myth that there's something inherent to prewar styles that makes them more aesthetically pleasing on some base level. There isn't. Every day I drive past hundreds if not thousands of prewar buildings that everyone agrees are ugly. As I said in the introductory post to my Pittsburgh series, one of the common house types in the area is what I refer to as a Mill House; these were frame houses built for industrial workers beginning around the 1870s and into the first couple decades of the 20th Century. In the city of Pittsburgh itself these tend to predominate in hilly areas, with rowhouses predominating in flatter areas, but in outlying areas and throughout the Rust Belt these are the norm in neighborhoods that were built out in that era. In a similar vein is the Patch House, company housing for coal miners in the isolated company towns that popped up near mines in the region. Neither of these styles is desirable to own. When suburbs began to surround the old coal patches in the 1950s, the patches remained the poorest, least desirable areas, and continue to do so to this day. Almost every Pittsburgh suburb, no matter how prosperous, contains one or two of these; they exist like backwaters that the municipal government likes to pretend don't exist. One of the things that will become apparent as my Pittsburgh series continues (I know it's been a while but more is on the way soon, I promise) is that housing stock like this is often an impediment to gentrification — it's easy to blame the ugliness of these buildings on the inability of the owners to invest in them, but they simply aren't attractive to people who do have money to invest.
Of course, that's just houses, and in particular, it's houses built for working class people that was never meant to be beautiful. What about civic and commercial buildings? I will admit that yes, the median prewar commercial structure tends to look better than the median postwar commercial structure. But does that really tell us anything? Years ago I worked in this building, as the firm on the nameplate leased space to the firm I worked for. It was built in 1905 and renovated in 1984 in the yuppie loft chic style with exposed brickwork that was popular at the time. Then the firm we were leasing off of built a new, larger building and we followed them there. In the months leading up to the move, everyone knew it was coming eventually, but we didn't know when, and it wasn't made out to be a big deal. No one was passing renderings around the office or driving out to look at the construction site; on the appointed day we just showed up at a different address. And everyone was impressed. One of the partners in my division was taking pictures and sending them to friends and family, even despite the fact that her new office was significantly smaller and didn't have the stunning view of Downtown that her old one did. While most people were more reserved, they did agree that it was a big improvement.
People may bemoan the newer building as having a bland corporate aesthetic that seems to be redecorating our cities with glass and prefabricated exterior paneling, but what are they bemoaning, exactly? Consider it's neighbors: A better prewar building (the Warhol Museum, 1913), a worse, newer building (One North Shore Center, 1982)], and a better, newer building (Alcoa headquarters, 1999). What is it about my old office that makes it inherently better? The use of brick? The 1982 building has plenty of brick. Ornamentation? There's very little ornamentation on the 1905 building, especially compared to the Warhol. the biggest complaint I'd anticipate against the 2017 building is that it's homogenized corporate crap, replete with plenty of glass and prefabricated panels, indistinguishable from hundreds of other commercial buildings foisted on us by developers trying to convince the public that cheap is beautiful, its own neighbors not excepted. But the same argument could be made of my old office back in 1905. It was just another unexceptional building without so much as a congruent architectural style and little ornamentation built to fit in with its surroundings. It wasn't built the way it was because it fulfilled the architect's vision (the architect has been lost to history), it was built that way because in 1905 that was the default option in an era without a lot of options to begin with.
But even still, aesthetic preferences are personal taste. Couldn't the firm have achieved the same effect by simply renovating the existing building? After all, what my coworkers and I were reacting to probably wasn't so much the outside of the building but the inside, going from a deteriorated 30-year-old renovation to a new construction. Yes, this was probably 90% of it. But that leads me to my main point, which no one seems to ever bring up: Our aesthetic appreciation of old architecture is almost always limited to exteriors. At first, there seems to be something ironic about this, as it flies in the face of traditional critiques of modernist architecture that still pop up from time to time: "Yeah, the building may look cool, but you don't have to live or work there. It's easy to admire something aesthetically you don't have to use." This was largely a response to the fact that the works of Mies van der Rohe and le Corbusier were designed based on a theory of living that did not work out in real life. Le Corbusier's towers in the park led to the development of massive public housing projects that quickly turned into hell on earth, leading architectural critics to spend the next several decades explaining why they were a bad idea to begin with.
But this is merely a red herring. I've spent significant parts of my life in buildings of all styles, and I can't say that there is anything about the exterior facade that greatly affects what goes on inside. It certainly could be this way, but it usually isn't because all buildings are renovated to have the same interiors. For as much energy people spend railing against the bland, corporate architectural aesthetic, they seem quite content to ignore the fact that once inside, they all look like [this] (https://www.cbre.com/properties/properties-for-lease/office/details/US-SMPL-19904/koppers-building-436-seventh-avenue-pittsburgh-pa-15219). These pictures are from the Koppers Building, a 1929 Art Deco structure (technically modern, but prewar, so it apparently doesn't count). Except, once you get out of the lobby, there's nothing Art deco about it at all; the actual office space you're renting isn't going to be that different than what you'd find in a newer building. It would be easy to blame this on property developers and their desires to institute Globohomo, but when you look at people's houses, they do exactly the same thing. In the past ten years, I can't tell you how many people I've know who have bought older homes and told me how great the architecture was. If they mention doing any kind of renovation or redecorating, I usually jokingly ask them if they've looked at wallpaper yet, at which point they make a face like I asked them to ingest cod liver oil. Because, let's face it, no one born after 1980 wants a house with wallpaper, or wall-to-wall carpeting, or metal kitchen cabinets, or floral upholstery, or wingback chairs, or wood paneling, or any of the other design choices that might make a house period correct. They want the interior to conform to the latest design trends, whether that be grey walls, hardwood floors, quartz countertops, stainless steel appliances, or any of the other things that make people say "this is really nice" when they walk into a house.
No one thinks to consider that this could have ever applied to exteriors.
IIIB. The Inevitability
So what will come of any presidential dictat to return to traditional styles? Tradition? Or the facade of tradition? As an argument in favor of the latter, I'd like to point out the rise of what I refer to as "Neoneoclassical Architecture". Neoneoclassical architecture is a good citizen of the neighborhoods it inhabits. It fits well with its neighbors, but is free from the embarrassing ornamentation that is anathema to modern tastes. It's also significantly cheaper as a result. Pittsburgh's Oakland neighborhood has two buildings from the past couple decades that fit this style. One is Nordenberg Hall, a University of Pittsburgh dormitory that was constructed in 2011. The other is the Oaklander Hotel, from 2017. Outside of Pittsburgh, the Ole Miss School of Law fits the style, too, though it is accented by a rather plain collonaded portico. Down the road at Mississippi State, we have the new [Azalea Residence Hall], set to open this fall. I'm not a big fan of neoneoclassical architecture. I don't particularly hate it, either. It does what it needs to do, unobjectionably. It says "Don't look at me, nothing to see here. Look at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association next door. Interestingly enough, the building Nordenberg Hall replaced, the 1924 University Place Office Building, in its sparse detailing almost anticipated the Neoneoclassical style.
The Neoneoclassical style is the polar opposite of what I call the "Fuck You School of Architecture". The canonical exaple of this is when there's a nice, picturesque tourist town on whose edge a developer erected a giant concrete behemoth with "Radisson" written on the top, sticking out like a giant middle finger to the community. Which brings me to what I think is the reason modern architecture has so little purchase with the general public: Poor execution. When working in traditional forms, there's only so much you can do to make a building terrible. Frank Gehry once said that 98% of architecture was shit, and while I may personally believe that most of his own work is included in that 98%, he had a point. 98% of what we see are structures designed to be functional structures, and nothing else. I don't know who designed this building, but I doubt they were trying to make a statement; they were trying to make a building that could house a few businesses. People may bemoan strip malls and urban sprawl in general, but nobody finds the buildings particularly objectionable, because there's nothing to object to. No one pays attention to the architecture of a gas station.
The buildings that people actually do pay attention to are limited to big public projects: Skyscrapers, stadiums, government buildings, airport terminals, schools, museums, large apartment complexes, and the like. Of these, there are two options. The safe option is to pick a designer that designs boring buildings and have them design something so unobjectionable that no one would even think to object to it, build it without incident, and allow it to blend into its surroundings. In 75 years when somebody wants to tear it down, nobody will bat an eye. The other option is to hire a designer who will run wild with a bold design that draws attention to itself. Here you run the risk of designing something hideous that everyone hates, but it's also your only chance of building something that will be beloved and cherished for generations. The problem with modern architecture was that its practitioners combined the desire for bold statements with the Fuck You sensibility, which resulted not only in several bad buildings but several otherwise good buildings forced into places where they didn't belong.
IV. McMansions, Thomas Kincade, and Kenny G I first heard the term "McMansion" circa 2005 in a 60 Minutes segment about a phenomenon that was sweeping suburban fringes all across the country. In typical newsmagazine fashion, Morley Safer spent half the segment interviewing the owners of these monstrosities and the other half interviewing architectural critics who talked about how terrible they were. As I recall, the only arguments they gave were that they were too big for the small families that inhabited them, and that they weren't Good Architecture™. My thoughts at the time were those of apathy. "If someone wants a house like that and is willing to pay for it, who cares?" A decade later, Kate Wagner launched McMansion Hell.
The laziest form of criticism is looking at something that's obviously bad and describing why it's obviously bad. The genius of McMansion Hell is that, rather than low effort sneers at rich people, the blog makes wry sneers based on an implied understanding of architectural principles. The idea that someone would dedicate a blog to complaining about McMansions in 2015 was like someone today dedicating a blog to complaining about washed up rock musicians recording albums full of standards, so getting people to care at all was a tough sell. But it works because it takes something that everyone hated for three years and then promptly forgot about and uses it as a springboard for architectural education. I haven't met many people below a certain age who aren't familiar with it.
McMansions create a problem because they don't fit into any coherent narrative about architectural history. On the one hand, they appear to be a naive yearning for the architecture of old, the purest representation of contemporary mass taste. On the other hand, they completely reject all the traditional principles of good architecture. They're intended as ostentatious displays of wealth, but are built as cheaply as possible. One wonders what could have been done, had the same money been spent on a stylistically coherent house following good architectural principles built with high-quality materials. Well, you'd probably get something like this, i.e., a normal suburban house, but bigger. Nothing to give that wow factor.
McMansions appeal to our sense of traditionalism the way a Thomas Kinkade painting appeals to our sense of sentimentalism: We don't so much yearn for the past as we yearn for the idea of the past. Nothing built before 1945 resembled anything close to a McMansion, in the same way that nothing painted before 1900 much resembled a Kinkade painting. But nobody is calling either of them modern. What McMansions and Kinkade both do is incorporate elements of old work in haphazard ways that are intended to make an immediate impact. McMansions have so many masses you can't tell what's supposed to be primary, in much the same way that Kinkade's paintings have so many subjects you're not sure what you're supposed to look at. Neither Kinkade nor the McMansion much care for proportion. They both draw from innumerable influence yet nonetheless manage to look the same. Tom Wolfe criticized modern art and architecture from being too obsessed with theory, but this is what you get without it.
Kenny G represents the opposite problem. As I mentioned earlier, mainstream jazz produced jazz-rock in the early 1970s, which in turn produced fusion in the middle of the decade, which finally led to fuzak in the 1980s. Kenny G started out as a fusion musician in the late 1970s; if you hadn't noticed, the link I included above to a Jeff Lorber recording had him on saxophone. the amazing thing about Kenny G is that he demonstrated that, if jazz could be deconstructed by the avant-garde forces for their own ends, it could also be deconstructed by populist forces for their own ends.
If jazz is the blues at its most sophisticated and cerebral, R&B is the blues at its most populist. Sometimes this means that it's more primal and raw, but it also means that it's more susceptible to influence from mainstream pop. The two began to diverge in the 1940s, and by the 1960s the gap was growing larger and some sought to bridge it. Jimmy Smith pioneered soul jazz, a movement that wasn't critically admired but was able to sell a lot of records. As the 60s became the 70s, this task was taken up by jazz-rock and later fusion. The biggest difference between the two is that fusion strips away most of the rock elements in favor of contemporary R&B elements. And in the late 1970s, R&B was becoming smoother, and in the 1980s it was becoming increasingly indistinguishable from Adult Contemporary.
Like free jazz and the modal jazz that preceded it, Kenny G's music simplified harmony to place a greater emphasis on melody. But rather than develop alternative harmonic structures, or eliminate them entirely, it simply stripped out anything that was harmonically interesting or distinctive. Jazz and all of its tritone substitutions, II-V-Is, chord extensions, suspensions, and secondary dominants were replaced with the simple, diatonic harmonies common in the blandest pop music. He sold 75 million records. Take a song like "Forever in Love", nobody is listening to this because it's harmonically interesting; its appeal lies in the fact that it isn't harmonically interesting.
Beyond music, the Kenny G phenomenon is difficult to get a handle on. If a teenager were to ask me who Kenny G was, the obvious answer would be that he was a saxophone player who was popular during the 80s and 90s. But that doesn't begin to tell the story, nor does inserting lazy adjectives like "hugely" or "massively" in front of "popular". It's not so much that Kenny G was big as it was the way in which he was big, which is something that I doubt will happen again in American history. His music was everywhere; you couldn't enter a mall without hearing it. Any function that required dinner music played it. The entire "smooth jazz" radio format revolved around his music, which radio format led several markets because it was played in offices where you were forced to listed whether you liked it or not. And it's not like he was an anonymous studio musician who accidentally became ubiquitous (like the guy who wrote all the free YouTube library music); people knew who he was. He was a household name, and everyone could identify anything he did based on a few notes, even if they hadn't heard it before. His claimed sales of 75 million units put him in the same league as Nirvana and Tupac, but he doesn't have the same level of continued relevance as either of those. Hell, he doesn't have the same level of cultural relevance as one-hit wonders like Snow (1.9 million) and Right Said Fred (1.5 million). Despite having a career that is extraordinarily successful by any conventional metric, and a decade of unprecedented ubiquity, he's mostly forgotten. Not forgotten in the sense that no one remembers him, but forgotten in the sense that no one thinks of him. If you were to ask people to name popular musicians of the '80s and '90s, his name would not be among the first mentioned, if it is even mentioned at all. Radio stations dedicated to hits of the era don't play him, and he's not going to appear in any listicle involving 90s nostalgia.
IVA. Trouble in Paradise
In their heydays, Thomas Kinkade and Kenny G were massively popular, and while McMansions were beyond the budget of most Americans, they were at least aspirational. All three were also among the most hated cultural products of their times. McMansions were ugly, Kenny G was insipid, and Thomas Kinkade was both. If Americans could criticize the cultural elites for being too critical, they could criticize others for not being critical enough. Thomas Kinkade was art for the person who was so unadventurous he didn't even want to attempt to challenge himself. Kenny G was music for the kind of person who viewed his stereo as an appliance and what it produced as wallpaper. McMansions were housing for the nouveau riche asshole who got what he wanted, when he wanted it, and didn't need anyone's advice.
The interesting thing isn't merely that these hugely popular things were criticized, it was the nature of the criticism. The New Kids on the Block were peaked around the same time as Kenny G and weren't exactly critical darlings, yet they don't receive nearly the same amount of derision, even if no one is trying to justify them as artistically underrated. NKOB's music was marketed to teenage girls, who aren't expected to be arbiters of taste. But Kenny G was popular among adults, and adults are supposed to know better. A few years before the McMansion piece, 60 Minutes ran a piece on Kinkade, and I remember him telling Morley Safer that people found art galleries intimidating. That his stores were so popular because people didn't want to go into echoey galleries with white walls where some overeducated snob would describe the work to you in terms of people you'd never heard of and expect that to mean something to you. The embarrassment of it all! His stores, though, were warm and inviting, where there was a big fire and a salesman who liked art but doggone it if he knew anything about it. Saying you liked Kenny G or Thomas Kinkade or McMansions was like saying that you had no aspiration toward cultural literacy and you didn't care. The general public may not be the most sophisticated consumers of art, but they at least pretend to care.
V. The End of the Road
Art exists on a continuum. At one extreme there is the stuff that smart people say you're supposed to like, but that few people actually like. This is mostly artifacts of the 20th century avant-garde: Free jazz, modern architecture, abstract expressionism. On the other end you have the crass popular stuff that doesn't even try to be artistic: Kenny G, McMansions, Thomas Kinkade. But there's a middle ground here, and it's the obvious target for anyone who is too practical to be seduced by the avant-garde and too proud to stoop to populism. This is the world of Wynton Marsalis, and this is the world of Donald Trump.
As much as Donald Trump's own architectural tastes might tend toward the garish populism of McMansions, even he knows that they are no template for an acceptable public architecture. To my knowledge there have been no public buildings built using such a template, so I don't know what they would look like, but one can assume they would become immediate objects of ridicule. A poorly-proportioned Federal courthouse that combined the Federal Style with Tudor half-timbering and and a separate Gothic wing would not go over well in my estimation. The solution is to go back in time to when art was free of corruption from either force, proclaim its purity, and set the appropriate boundaries. This is exactly what Wynton Marsalis has done with jazz, and exactly what Donald Trump intends to to with architecture.
I fear that such a move would be disastrous. When Jazz came out in 2001, the music was not popular. There was no cultural cachet to be had from liking jazz; rock and roll had effectively made the complex harmonic structures that give jazz its shape the music of an older generation.Big band was music for elderly people Kenny G was elevator music, and everything else was a combination of the two. Decades of neglect from the press didn't help, a hostile fanbase in the early 70s that wasn't willing to accept change didn't help, boomer associations of anything made before 1964 with squareness and conservatism didn't help, and America's Classical Music was a niche product that was only appreciated by people whose relationship with music went beyond mere listening. Marsalis had the opportunity to at least partly undo that perception. He had the biggest megaphone that any jazz proponent could hope to have. He could have presented jazz as a vibrant force that was still relevant in the new millennium. But instead he merely confirmed what everyone had already suspected: That jazz died 50 years ago, and all we were doing was preserving its memory.
It's tempting to think that such a thing couldn't possibly happen to architecture, as we can do without jazz but we can't do without buildings. That may be true, but remember: 98% of buildings aren't architecture. When we stop caring what buildings look like provided they hold up the ceiling, architecture will be dead. Jazz will have morphed into Kenny G. But insisting on traditional styles because we don't always like the modern ones only hastens that process. If 98% of what is built has no thought put into it, then that gives a special importance to the remaining 2%, and that 2% includes civic architecture. If we limit civic architecture to a set limit of prewar styles, we send the same message to young architects as Marsalis did to young jazz musicians: This discipline has ended as an active art form, and it was over well before you were born. The best you can do is imitate the styles of the past; there is no room for your own artistic vision. Banning modernism might prevent some ugliness. But it might also prevent the kind of bold work that propels the art forward. We'll be condemned to a world of neoneoclassical sludge. Having beautiful buildings is pointless if no one cares that they're beautiful.
Like I said, this case was significantly more complicated than I made it out to be in the post. What the case actually turned on was a provision in the Uniform Commercial Code meant to address situations such as this. A complicating factor was that Warren wasn't even technically in arrears. The terms IIRC called for something like payment within 30 days plus escalating late fees after that, with breach not occurring until the bill was 6 months overdue. Warren had never once paid "on time" but had waited until the last minute and withheld the late fee. There was some argument about whether the coal company had waived that contract provision by accepting payment without protest, and the coal company was arguing that this was evidence that they were juggling their payments to see what they could get away with, and there were rumors of an impending bankruptcy, and that yes, an order requiring them to comply with the contract terms would essentially mean giving away something like $400,000 worth of coal for free.
The case boiled down to the UCC provision allowing the request for reasonable assurances of performance. The judge was sympathetic to the coal company, but he said that if they had concerns they could have requested reasonable assurances at any time, and that anticipatory repudiation of the contract wasn't proper. Then the argument became how long Warren had to provide the assurances and whether the coal company could suspend performance until it received assurances. This is where the whole irreparable harm thing came in, with Warren saying that if they didn't get the Friday shipment that over a thousand employees would be laid off by the end of the weekend and the mill would be idled indefinitely. The final ruling was that the coal company had to make the shipment but that Warren had to make reasonable assurance before the next shipment, and he would dismiss the breach of contract suit as soon as the shipment had been received.
In a general sense, no, it isn't fair, which is why the UCC has provisions for dealing with that kind of situation. If the coal company had concerns it could have asked for assurances a week prior. In any business transaction, there's always some chance that the other party isn't going to hold up his end of the bargain, and that's the risk you take doing any business. The coal company could have protected itself with a condition requiring prepayment back at the formation stage, but they didn't, even though Warren was only a few years removed from coming out of a previous bankruptcy. Up to this point, Warren had held up their end of the deal, just not in a way that inspired much confidence, and there were rumors that they were insolvent. Furthermore, if Warren had already filed for bankruptcy this question wouldn't have even come up, because suppliers have to keep honoring contracts during a bankruptcy.
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