Category: Uncategorized

Sorry I’ve been absent these recent weeks. Took a week of vacation, earlier, and a day last week, and the rest of the time I’ve been bailing like crazy to keep the boat afloat. Here’s the situation: Too many candidates, too little time! We on the editorial board try to offer endorsements, and that involves researching the people running and trying to interview as many as we can.

This year, what with Tea Party candidates and anti-health care reform candidates and Democrats running against other Democrats, including some pro-health care reform candidates, we’ve got something like 68 candidates to deal with. Democracy is a grand thing, but you can have too much of a good thing.

So while I’ve been squirreling away interesting blog items I haven’t had the time to post them. Next week should be better, and I might even have time to dish a little about candidates. So don’t give up on The Naked City.

Friday and Saturday of this week I’ll be at a conference on “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. My plan is to blog from there, although last year my Mac seized up with something called a kernel panic (don’t ask) and I was thwarted. Let us hope for better computer vibes this time.

To all the folks bent out of shape because I suggested that NC DOT might have fared better if it had pushed for stimulus money for the commuter rail line in Mecklenburg instead of to repair the Yadkin River bridge, please read what I wrote, both Thursday and Wednesday.

I never said the Yadkin bridge shouldn’t be fixed. Indeed, I called it “sorely needed.” I never said commuter rail was more important. I wrote that it might be possible the state would have gotten money for commuter rail had they pushed it instead of the bridge project – a strategic decision in the realm of competing for stimulus money.

In yesterday’s piece I called the bridge project “sorely needed” and also said: “In any case, now that the state has learned the bridge repair project gets only $10 million in stimulus money, it’s moving to start the repairs in a few months.”

That means, as I wrote, THE BRIDGE WORK IS STARTING. THE STATE HAS MONEY. Indeed, stimulus money is supposed to go to projects that won’t get done otherwise. Is it possible that was another strike against the Yadkin bridge project?

It’s one thing to be mad about a rickety bridge. I completely agree. But how about reading the facts BEFORE you start with the insults?

I’ve been contemplating shutting down comments completely, because so many people are such jerks that it seems to just bring out the hostility all around. Thoughts?

Heading out to Tryon, N.C., to attend the Charlotte City Council’s annual retreat. Will be blogging and Tweeting (@marynewsom and, sometimes @nakedcityblog) if wireless connections are good. Stay tuned, starting Thursday ayem.

OK, folks, here’s your big chance. The Observer’s e-mail system is down for a second day. We’re told that whenever it comes back, there’s a chance we’ll lose anything sent since Friday.

To you, that means: OPPORTUNITY! That’s because our stash of letters to the editor and Buzz items for the editorial pages is empty. The competition for getting your letters and Buzz items published will be much, much easier. In other words, the lottery odds got better.

Feel free to tell any and all friends, neighbors, family, co-workers and the folks you meet in the grocery store checkout line.

Remember, letters to the editor should be 150 words or less and include your name, address and daytime phone number – we don’t publish them but we use them for verification. Getting your facts straight is a big plus. So is avoiding libel. We reserve the right to edit for brevity, accuracy and correct English. We put a thumb on the scale for letters that are different from our editorial opinions.

Send them to thecharlotteobserver@yahoo.com. Our trusty Forum editors are standing by.

That glass that fell and broke on the sidewalk yesterday? Les Epperson with the City of Charlotte’s solid waste services saw the blogpost and called late yesterday to say he’d send a crew to clean it up and look into what happened. We had a small chat about the famous building in Boston whose glass windows showered passersby – the John Hancock Tower, designed by I.M. Pei and Henry Cobb. Eventually all its window panes had to be replaced, costing $5 million to $7 million.

Epperson called back today. “The glass had the consistency of automobile glass,” he said. It didn’t have a lot of sharp shards, as a glass window from a building would. He thinks it came from a vehicle. Whew!

And to whoever commented that it was not the brightest thing for me to go stand where the glass fell and look up, I must confide that as I was doing so, I thought, “This is not the brightest thing I could be doing …” But journalists are like cats – we can’t switch off the curiosity.

Did the Obama administration and the Congress favor states over cities in the stimulus package? This article in the Atlantic magazine finds evidence that happened. It notes that Veep Joe Biden, in a In a September speech on the stimulus, lamented that “Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the governors should have a bigger input.”

Wi-Fi on city buses?

Keith Parker, late of CATS and now leading the transit system in San Antonio, talks in this Houston Chronicle story about the experiment offering free Wi-Fi in city buses. It’s a pilot project, to see if the service gets used by enough riders to make it worth installing permanently.

We’re calling out goods/bads about the South as a region:

Positives:
Southerners are storytellers
Humor and style
Agrarian connection to land
Rich connection to history
Strong public college system
Natural resources, mountains-beach, etc.
Weather
Strong family connections
Personal relationships
Patriotism

Negatives
Reseparation in schools
Lack of progressive infrastructure
Deeply ingrained acceptance of violence in all forms
Awareness of history begins in 1860, ends in 1865
Lack of technological infrastructure in rural areas
Low tax base
We’re not embarrassed enough about poverty
Lack of commitment to K-12 education
Historical avoidance of talking about “the bad stuff”
General acceptance of low expectations – “Well, we’re a poor state.”
Lack of regional planning

For those who don’t always see the Saturday Charlotte Observer, here’s a link to my regular weekly op-ed column. Today’s topic: what really doomed the Coffee Cup restaurant, the building demolished on Thursday. “It was pricey dirt that killed the Cup.”

The Planetizen.com votes are in and – no surprise – Jane Jacobs has topped the voting of the 100 Top Urban Thinkers. If you don’t want to take the time to follow the link to all 100, here are the Top 10:
1. Jane Jacobs
2. Andres Duany
3. Christopher Alexander
4. Frederick Law Olmsted
5. Kevin A. Lynch
6. Daniel Burnham
7. Lewis Mumford
8. Leon Krier
9. William H. Whyte
10. Jan Gehl

Sad to say, Charlotte’s Terry Shook dropped off the list during the voting. And am I being persnickety in wondering if there’s a whiff of sexism in the No. 2 position for Andres Duany and his partner (and wife, and dean of the U. of Miami School of Architecture) Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk is way down at No. 24? Yes, Andres is the showman of the pair, no doubt. But still …

Jane Jacobs’ topping the list provides me with a chance to tout a new book about the Manhattan activist’s battles with Robert Moses (who also made the list, but at No. 23, just below Baron Haussmann, who remade Paris in the 1800s). It’s “Wrestling With Moses,” by Anthony Flint. It’s an excellent and readable account, and since biographies of Jacobs aren’t plentiful it helps to fill some blanks in our understanding of her life and work. Here’s a link to a long and excellent article about the book in The New Republic from Harvard’s Ed Glaeser (who made Planetizen’s list at No. 51).

Back to Jacobs being No. 1 – Here’s one intriguing thought from Rick Cole, city manager of Ventura, Calif.:

“We’re all better off for more attention being drawn to the work of Jane Jacobs — not just ‘Death and Life [of Great American Cities]’ but her later work on economics and cities. While I thoroughly enjoyed reading Tony’s book, I don’t share his view that Jane Jacobs has won the legacy battle. The widespread embrace of her work is often shallow, and developers continue to push megadevelopments that look cute, but are barren monocultures that cannot replicate the ‘complexity’ she celebrated.”