The mournful town of Cairo, Illinois

Nearly two hundred years ago, settlers began trying to construct a town where the mighty Ohio and Mississippi Rivers came together. Intimately tied to the water and the river trade, Cairo, IL rose to great fortunes in its heyday.

But the river trade changed, and the fortunes of economy passed Cairo by. Today the town is a sad shell of its former self, its glory long wilted.



This is Commercial Street, the main shopping street of the town back in the day. I arrived about 4:30pm on January 2nd, a Friday. The street looked like this: empty. Deserted. Not a soul was to be seen. No cars. No lights. No people. Nothing.



Three or four solid blocks of Victorian commercial buildings have been left to rot. Some are literally collapsing onto the sidewalk. Others are gutted, every piece of glass shattered.



Nearby Washington Avenue is doing better, and has most of the city's businesses. It is a more suburban-styled street, but has some architectural gems.

The town's struggles with racism are legendary. In the late 1960s, the city's black community organized a boycott against segregated white-owned businesses. The owners so adamantly refused to give in that one by one they simply went out of business, over the course of a few years.

Those days may be past, but the city's struggles continue. The town's fall probably has as much to do with the overall centralization of river traffic as any problems created by racism. Cairo isn't much of a port anymore. The Interstates have passed it by, and there isn't much room to grow. The Bunge Corporation maintains a soybean processing plant there, and railroads still loop around and through the town, so little Cairo isn't entirely off the economic map. But there is little else.



Cairo's geography is unfathomable. Sited on a narrow wedge of land between the two rivers, it is perpetually in danger of being washed away by the whims of the mighty rivers. Thus a huge levee rings the entire town. To the south, one simply drives over it. But to the north, where land is lower, a gargantuan metal gate descends to close off a tunnel through the railroad embankment when flood waters rise.



At Fort Defiance Park, one can literally stand at the confluence, the exact point where two thousand miles of river join together. The two channels unite to form a river nearly a mile in width. The view is awe-inspiring. The water was nearly level with the park land on the evening of my visit, an obvious warning of the rivers' power.

Two mighty bridges cross the rivers, connecting the city to Kentucky to the east, and Missouri to the west. They carry two-lane roads, long surpassed by I-57 to the west.





Traces of Cairo's glory days remain. Scattered churches, mansions, and public buildings have been restored and maintained.







But they sit in a landscape wrought with the physical signs of abandonment, of despair: empty lots, reclaimed by forest. Wrecked and ruined buildings. Streets leading nowhere.



It's hard to imagine a bright future for long-suffering Cairo, but there remains a peculiar beauty to its ruins, amplified by its precarious place upon the fickle rivers.

Links:
* More photos
* Cairo, IL at Wikipedia
* Mississippi River web site page on Cairo.

New Orleans in links

This is a list I've been accumulating for a while. Eventually it'll end up on my permanent pages, but it's worth sharing in the meantime. There's some incredible information and stories in here, stuff that Americans in general really need to be aware of. It's a lot -- easily an entire day's worth of reading.

http://www.nola.com/katrina/pages/092205/0922PAGEB02.pdf
Flood map of New Orleans. Why didn't I ever find this thing before?

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/21/060821fa_fact2
Lengthy New Yorker article covering the first year post-hurricanes. Starts off with a graphic description of the Lower 9th's destruction.

Squandered Heritage
Astounding blog tracking the demolition of houses, including the steamroller approach the city of New Orleans is taking toward homeowners. Also has ruminations on the nature of poverty.

1603 Katrina
A preservationist working in New Orleans. Reports from the city, ruminations on architecture, urbanism, and preservation. And Memphis. And Philadelphia.

Thomas Neff, Photographer
Web site of Thomas Neff, author of "Holding Out and Hanging On", a chronicle of the people who stayed in the city during Katrina.

Bulldozers at the ready
NYTimes article about the pending demolition of several enormous New Orleans housing projects.

Pioneer
The Old River Control Structure portion of John McPhee's book The Control of Nature, inexplicably reprinted in The New Yorker under the title "Pioneer" and attributed to "William McKibben".

Old River is the monumental yet precarious structure that keeps the Mississippi from diverting into the Atchafalaya River. I read this book over a decade ago, while living in New Jersey, but having focused so much attention on New Orleans in the last two years, it was a much more intimate and intense read this time around. It also helped that I could have maps.live.com open in another browser tab and scroll around over the geographic features being described in text.

Making It Expensive in the Lower 9th

In an amazing convergence of fame, money and humanitarianism, Brad Pitt is sponsoring a rebuilding project in New Orleans' devastated Lower 9th Ward. The northern half of the Lower 9th was directly in the path of a break in the Industrial Canal, with many houses being crushed by an errant barge that drifted through the breach. 2 years after the hurricanes, most of the house remains have been removed, but there's virtually no rebuilding going on.



Pitt's project is named Make It Right 9, and there's a good writeup about it at the Poverty News Blog. As part of the project, a range of architecture firms were invited in to create prototype house designs for the neighborhood.

I had the chance to view the house designs this week. I applaud the intent behind the undertaking, but some of the designs really made me wonder what the architects were thinking.



Many of the houses feature crazily angled walls and roofs, bizarrely bent forms that would require a master carpenter to build (or a computerized factory.) One looks like it was picked up by a flood and smashed in the middle, its back broken as though a bus (or a barge) had landed on it -- ho ho, oh, ironic commentary! What wit! If I were a survivor of the post-Katrina catastrophe, I think I'd feel insulted.



Several of the designs, however, seemed to show true interest in economy (ie, ease and speed of construction, the use of common and widely available methods and materials, not to mention use of common design elements that have made New Orleans buildings survivable for a century or more), which is what's truly needed to bring back an entire neighborhood. I particularly liked the one that featured a house whose walls are largely made of premanufactured modular storage cabinets, with a straightforward roof dropped on top. Simple to design, easy to erect in the field.

The green features are also of interest, though I wonder what the startup costs vs. long term savings are.



Ultimately, the problem is not a lack of design concepts. You can wander New Orleans and find a dozen or so tried and true house designs that have weathered a hundred years of the city's notorious heat and humidity and torrential rains. The problem is that hundreds or thousands of new houses are needed, right now. This means they have to be done quickly and affordably.

So again, I wonder -- what were some of the architects thinking? Was their intent to construct houses on a tight budget as a reproducible precedent, or merely to show off their bleeding-edge designs capabilities? Is theirs a humanitarian effort, or just jumping on a chance to jerk off, to experiment at the possible expense of the poor?

The full roster of designs can be seen here. Most of the projects featured descriptive text on their display boards, but sadly that text is not reproduced on the web site.

Notes from New Orleans

So all that snow that fell Friday and Saturday? Sorry, sorry, that was me. I came through town with my bicycle in tow, thinking I might get out and do a little bit of riding. Ha! I still had a pretty great weekend in St. Louis, though. Photos to come in January!

The weather in New Orleans has been much kinder, fortunately, and I just finished the first of several days riding around town. A few thoughts:

New Orleans' flat topography and warm climate may make for easy bike travel, but otherwise the city is one of the least bike-friendly places I've been. There are no bike lanes to be found in the Garden District, French Quarter, or downtown. The streets are narrow, pinching bikers between racing traffic and parked cars. Despite it being a pleasant 65 degrees or so, I saw almost nobody biking today. It's a bit inexplicable considering how accommodating parts of the city are for the pedestrian.

Even disregarding the memory of what happened there in September 2005, the Superbowl and its environs are a horrible and inhuman place. The building itself is a mammoth superblock, with low-rise wings and parking garages taking up a vast area of downtown. Surrounding half of it are Interstate overpasses, cutting off roads and funnelling westbound traffic from downtown onto a limited number of routes. It's a classic example of the awful "urban" planning of the 1960s, all plopped down on the edge of what is otherwise a delightful downtown. The building itself, seen from ground level, looks like an arena of doom. I can't imagine how it must have looked to the poor souls who dragged themselves there on foot across a flooded city, with no idea what they might find within.

The Garden District and the surrounding neighborhoods are astonishing in their endless delight and vast architectural variety. And the neighborhoods just to the north are abuzz with construction and rebuilding activity.

Tomorrow's travels: Charity Hospital, Canal Street north of downtown, Marigny, Bywater, and more!

"We'll never be like Chicago!"

Having lived and debated both north and south of the Windy City, I have heard Chicago brought up many times as an example of how to carry out some particular aspect of urban design and planning. And without fail, somebody will pop up with the stock local pride response: "St. Louis/Milwaukee isn't Chicago! And we shouldn't try to be!"

It drives me crazy, because it completely misses the point.

Chicago, while plagued with the same problems that most Rust Belt cities must deal with, is a highly successful urban environment when compared to most American cities. It packs considerable population density across a large area, enough to support a busy and thriving mass transit system. The rail portion of that system succeeds because it runs so frequently that it's a viable alternative to driving. It's desirable not to drive because things are so dense, parking so scarce. Things are dense because a large volume of historic buildings have been preserved, and where they have been destroyed they've been replaced by buildings of greater density. It has both major chains and small local stores. It has a diversified economy, fueled by this variety of scales. It has busy street life. It has, in short, all the hallmarks of a true urban environment.

But those are not the trappings of some kind of mythical aura of Chicagoness that if emulated will turn all your citizens into zombie Bears fans. They are the basic requirements of any successful urban environment, regardless of its size. They apply across the board -- in Chicago, in New York, in San Francisco, and yes, in St. Louis and Milwaukee.

Build upon those things, and your city succeeds. Diminish them, work against them, allow developers to build sprawl instead of density, and your city fails.

It is not about becoming Chicago; it is about becoming an urban environment, and Chicago is the closest example one that works. Your city may never "be like Chicago" in whatever other ways you're thinking of (certainly it's unlikely to match Chicago's population), but it would do well to learn some of Chicago's lessons. They transcend any one location.

Thoughts on the Philadelphia Skyline

I was in Philadelphia a couple of weeks ago, a wonderful, amazing city where I spent three very happy years living and working. It's a second or third home for me, and I very likely will end up back there some day.

So, after getting back home, I'm browing PhillySkyline.com, and I see that the city's getting a new tallest building: the Comcast Center.

Alright, now, people, help me out here. Is this thing not the ugliest thing to go up since the Mellon Bank Center?

I mean, okay, some background here for our non-Philly readers. See, way back when, City Hall went up, and it was the tallest thing around. And a "gentleman's agreement" kept every building thereafter lower than the top of William Penn's hat. To this day, people harp on and on about what a wonderful arrangement that was. But, dear reader, I challenge you: go rent the first Rocky movie. Pay attention when he's on the Art Museum steps. The camera pans around, and you get a great view of the Philadelphia skyline, circa 1975. One thing is immediately obvious: it's dull. It's flat-topped, dominated by uninspired, monotonous, ugly boxes, all of which are chopped off flat just below the top of that hat. And the statue atop City Hall, not to mention City Hall itself, is buried under all of it. The "gentleman's agreement" -- kind of stupid to begin with -- was a mockery by that point, a mere technicality. Billy Penn was already lost in the forest of deathly dull skyscrapers.

Enter Liberty Place. In 1987, developers finally threw tradition to the wind, and put up this magnificent glass high rise, designed by Helmut Jahn. It's a masterpiece, a symphony of multi-shaded blue glass climbing fervently to the sky, one setback emerging after the next, reaching its peak in a soaring pinnacle. I love it; it's undeniable proof that a modern glass building doesn't have to be horrible or anti-human. It can be beautiful; it can be inspiring. With the limit thus broken, half a dozen more tall towers followed in as many years. And while I don't approve of all of them, the fact remains: Philadelphia's skyline was remade, carried out of the 1950s at last and given the scale a city of its size deserves.

Now, Philly's getting this awful thing. It's the World F***ing Trade Center (which, I'm unashamed to say, were really ugly, awful buildings), with a couple of minor notches cut out, rendered in endless sheets of glass. With its massive flat roof, it meets the sky with all the grace of a sledgehammer meeting a wine glass. The renderings show nothing to give it any sense of scale; it appears to have been blow up directly from a 1/100th scale model.

I have no problem with a building surpassing Liberty Place, but can't it be done with the slightest bit of grace?

Also, I don't think much of the Circa Center, either. Monolithic, abstract forms belong in a sculpture garden, not a skyline.



(Also, man, this site is distracting. Look!! That was where I lived in Philly! Our front porch is on the very left edge of the photo.)