Across the Great Divide

A Bike-partisan Evening.

Instead of engaging this evening in a symbolic show of bipartisanship — which is people who'd like to stab each other in the back pretending they won't — I decided to engage in a nonpartisan documentation of universal symbols: Bikepath markings.

Minneapolis is old school in its iconography on older trails, portraying only the bike and placing one icon  between lanes, rather than twice to indicate direction of the lane. The icon's smaller size, minimal lines and  placement save considerable paint over other designs.

Minneapolis follows the European style, if not the approach to marking lanes. This illustrative mark is not only more elegant than the ones that follow; it is scaled for decoding by a pedestrian or cyclist, not a faster-moving car.

A rider is not not essential to conveying the concept of a bike lane, yet all subsequent icons emphasize the person. This one, along St. Paul's Summit Avenue fills in oval tires. Here, a higher paint-to-pavement ratio is justified because the bike lane is a marked portion of the roadway.

This version, headed the other direction on Summit, shows how variation creeps into what is apparently the same stencil. The figure appears to be leaning forward more here, and the elliptical wheels seem to be going faster.

Now we are on the Midtown Greenway with some of the newest versions of lane iconography. Note the figures head to the left, and their bodies and wheels are bisected to accommodate the stencil.

Is the difference here simply the camera angle or are the rider and wheels separate stencils placed by the painter each time, accounting for slight variations in the geometry? Certainly, the head is less ditto-like.

Heading over the Sabo bridge, the style changes momentarily. Riders suddenly acquire rounded noggins and wear helmets. I have no idea if this has anything to do with federal funding.

The mushroom-headed stencil rider alternates with a recumbent rider laid down with a rubberized, nonskid material. So nice to see safety and differently abled cyclists receive their due, if ever so briefly.

On the west side of the bridge, we return to the ditto- headed rider, who is now facing right and riding a transected wheel that looks like a life ring. This guy accompanies me all the way to Dean Boulevard, where I pull off to the old bike trails and the traditional symbol.

On my way over to St. Paul, I was riding on the West River Road north of the newly connected I-35W bridge. A driver indicated to me that I should be on the bike path, where the speed limit is 10 mph. Already cultivating a non-partisan frame of mind, I resisted indicating to him where I thought he should be, and now I dedicate this  post to all those angry drivers out there. I mean, look at all the confusing signals we have to contend with.

Why So Many Roads Suck.

[Intersection near Mall of America, part of the absolute worst stretch of a four-hour bike ride through the city.]

The Project for Public Spaces (PPS) talks about the qualities of a great street and picks 10 of them in the U.S. to feature each year.

Looking at the list of qualities, it's not hard to see why our freeway-laced cities and suburbs lack greatness. An emphasis on vehicles, carrying capacity and speedy non-distraction creates vast dead zones around our streets and highways. These are not the qualities PPS is celebrating.

Attractions & Destinations. Destinations are off-ramp or set back across acres of pavement. If they're visible from the road, they're represented by over sized signs rendered in corporate-approved, back-lit plastic.

Identity & Image. See one freeway, you've seen 'em all.

Active Edge Uses. This deals with human scale and a safe, inviting transition between indoors and outdoors. The closest thing to an active edge use on a freeway is two people on the shoulder exchanging insurance information.

Amenities. Well, having a place to pee and buy beef jerky every so often is certainly covered.

Management. They don't mean Minnesota Department of Transportation.

Seasonal Strategies. Attracting people year round? I wouldn't say drivers are attracted, exactly, but we certainly do linger more in the winter.

Diverse User Groups. "Mixing people of  different race, gender, age, and income level"? Check, as long as they can go at least 50 miles per hour.

Traffic, Transit & the Pedestrian. This one is about lack of auto dominance and ease of access to places  regardless of mode. Have you looked for a place to walk or bike along a busy street lately?

Blending of Uses and Modes. This relates to blurring the edges of public spaces (like sidewalks), commercial spaces and private spaces (like front yards and apartments in upper stories). Development is slowly heading back in this direction, but the last 50 years of road building was based on a different model.

Protects Neighborhoods. They're talking about design, not sound walls and speed bumps.

Santa Fe's Canyon Road is an example of artists transforming a street and then managing to keep it, unlike the usual free market pattern of artists reclaiming an under-loved place, giving it charm and character, and then being pushed out by developers and the gentry who love it to death.

Some might argue that is Canyon Road today, but as a welcoming and intriguing outdoor public space, it still works for me. However, it was helped along by some interesting extant buildings — most of our suburbs have nothing worth reclaiming — early government protection and probably more than a few artists with trust funds.

Slippery When Built.

Bob Collins is soliciting nominations for the Worst Architecture in the Twin Cities. My nomination:

those anonymous mini-malls that ring the Twin Cities with bricked facades and green-tiled endcap towers. The Home Depot/Wal-Mart big boxes, ugly as they are, at least make no pretense of beauty or accommodation to their surroundings. Somehow, buildings that pretend to do so seem even worse to me.

I didn't have a photo handy to illustrate my nomination, but the shot at right captures the spirit.

I also left a few comments there about already nominated buildings: the former Federal Reserve Building and the Multifoods Tower, which I think both succeeded at what they intended, but failed at what they should have accomplished.

Another commenter nominated the former First Bank Place (225 South Sixth), which will be renamed Capella Tower next year. I do have a photo for that building... and a story.

First Bank Place was supposed to be a prestige address, and the developing partners brought in big names to design a landmark building. For added cachet, they commissioned Vietnam Veteran's Memorial designer Maya Lin to do a "winter garden" for the east lobby.

I wrote the leasing brochure for the project. It was a high-gloss, oversize  hard-bound book that had a spectacular center spread of the new building dominating the skyline. It was even more spectacular, because while we were creating the book, the site was still a hole in the ground. The designers, Larsen, rented a crane so the photographer could shoot from the proper angle and altitude, then they stripped in a model of the building. Not a big deal today, but to make it look realistic in 1992 was an accomplishment.

As happens, the planned building didn't exactly get built that way. The winter garden was still a sketch when we did the brochure and as I recall, it was scaled back. Here's how the architects show it on their site. But a more representative image is the next one. 

I've visited namesake clients in the building since it was built, and for a good part of the winter, these signs are installed all over the winter garden's polished granite.

Ten years later, Lin created another Winter Garden for the three-story, glass-enclosed entry to the rather anonymous American Express Client Service Center at 9th St. and Third Avenue:

Called "the character of a hill, under glass," Lin uses birch trees, granite benches, an uneven wooden floor, a pool of water and wall of water that will freeze in subzero Fahrenheit temperatures to bring the outside environment inside.

Next January, I'll have to go see if she and her architects learned anything about winter and buildings in Minnesota.

Front Outdoor Rooms: A Suburban Microtrend?

This morning, I noticed our neighbors across the street having coffee on their front stoop, blankets in laps. Last weekend, I chatted with Steve and Stan as they ate lunch on the expanded front porch of the house where they've made extensive changes. Here's another house nearby where the front yard has been reclaimed as an outdoor room.

As you can see, these early-60s-vintage ramblers weren't built with classic midwestern front porches originally designed for escaping summer heat. The front steps are often perfunctory slabs that simply make up the difference between the grade and the front door. There's no room for porch swings or receiving neighbors outside.

The main entry in these houses is through the garage. The front door has no processional; visitors are assumed to enter from a car in the driveway, not walking up the street.

The front yard is a buffer or frame for the house, not a gathering place. The back yard is the private sanctum where suburbanites congregate, two-by-two or family-by-family.

Like our neighbors, we've been more focused on the rear of the house, where we have a screened porch projecting into a woodsy lot overlooking Basset Creek. It's a great rural-feeling oasis in the city, but a true oasis is a public space that brings people together, not a retreat from company. 

After finishing some new landscaping, mostly to correct drainage issues,  we moved our pile of firewood from the entry of house — where it was easy to unload and retrieve — to the side of the garage. Other detritus — including a chair that was used for... okay, it wasn't really used — has been removed and generations of sow bugs and grit have been swept away.

Now, we too look upon the quiet street, with two unused chairs brought around front. I predict coffee in the morning. And connection.

They Teach History There, Don't They?

It was really a great speech on public life and public space, and hizzoner threw the note-laden pages into the air after he read each one, clearly in his element and relishing the moment. And he ended with a defense of planning, saying that people often asked him why he spent so much time thinking about little details like sidewalks and parks when there were so many larger, more pressing problems at hand ... things like the war in Iraq, climate change, or deepening economic inequalities. He said that he tells those people to "connect the dots", that we're fighting a war for oil for our cars, that climate change is going to demand walkable streets and less intensive lifestyles, and that economic growth starts with strong neighborhoods. You could tell he really meant it when he said, "together, we're going to rebuild the American city."

Last week, Bill Lindeke recapped Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak's speech to the American Institute of Architects  Reweaving the Urban Fabric: Minneapolis Great City Design Teams gala April 10th. And today he decodes the University of Minnesota's position on Central Corridor light rail.

The University argument against running the line down Washington Avenue seems to consist of "it will have serious adverse consequences," primarily by cutting down Washington Avenue's usefulness as a car-choked thoroughfare that divides the campus.

One particularly amusing rationale trotted out is how a light rail line and its overhead wires would destroy the integrity of the Northrop Mall Historic District, a culturally significant area "possessing integrity of location, design, setting, materials, spirit and association" that just happens to be passed by a concrete-wall-divided, four-lane,  bus- and car-filled trench.

The original design for the mall, part of a campus master plan that was never fully executed, was begun informally in 1907 by architect Cass Gilbert, commissioned a year later and built in a reduced form some 20 years after that.

In 1890, the Washington Avenue Bridge was reinforced to accommodate streetcars, and the Twin City Rapid Transit Company soon connected Minneapolis and St. Paul over the bridge with the area's first inter-urban line. The company issued a painting of the streetcar system in 1904 and updated it in 1916 [here in section] showing the Washington route through the campus connecting with University Avenue. The "historic" overhead-wire-free vista down the mall came only after 1954, when the streetcar line was dismantled.

Does Walkability Equal Livability?

One index of a livable community is its "walkability," how easily residents can reach on foot the amenities of daily living — schools, libraries, grocers, entertainment, coffee shops and cafes, shopping and parks. The creators of walkscore.com have developed a Google Maps-based tool that allows you to enter an address to find its relative friendliness to walkers. Locations are ranked on 0-100 scale.

Walkable but hardly lovable. Closed retailer in a Brooklyn Center neighborhood that scores the same as Vancouver's West End.

As with any such application, it's only as good as its database and algorithms that rank the various features of the neighborhood. It's more designed for real estate agents and people looking for a nice neighborhood than for promoting a healthy, low-energy-footprint lifestyle. Biking doesn't count here, and neither do sidewalks or access to transit.

The site assigns no value to street scape beauty and safety or quality of the establishments in the area, either. Also, it's hard to tell if proximity to a cooking school scores the same as being near a university campus. Is a serene park with a lakeshore walking path equal to an inner city block populated by vagrants? Or is it worth less because the water takes up space that could be occupied by businesses?

I plugged in a few familiar addresses and got quite a range of scores.

The hiking right out my semi-rural Colorado back door is spectacular, but the walkability only rates a 6.  My lightly driven suburban Minnesota street, within close range of a Byerly's, express bus service, Basset Creek, parks, drug store and a middle school, only scored a 40. Maybe that's because the nearest bar is more than mile away and the closest clothing store is a thrift shop. And since you don't go to a dentist or veterinarian every week, there are no points for being able to walk there.

Hikable but not walkable.

Most denizens of  50th & France in Edina would be terrified to walk the Northside neighborhood of Broadway and Emerson, but it scores nearly as well (65 vs. 69). Higher-scoring neighborhoods included urban Vancouver just off a wonderful avenue near the harbor and Stanley Park (75), a Washington Avenue address at the edge of new condos and the far less genteel near north side (72) and a block just off Selby & Western in Garrison Keillorville (71).

The best score by far I found was at a downtown condo on Main Street in Grand Junction, Colorado (97). I would throw in extra points for weather, art on the street, a weekly farmer's market, low population density and proximity to bike shops (three within two blocks).

We all get to decide for ourselves what best makes a place livable, but the walkable factor certainly offers a good place to start looking.

The World According to Data.

The tagline for Worldmapper is "The world as you've never seen it before." Actually, if you're into information design, you probably have.

Michael Kidron married global perspective, political analysis, graphic design and data from the CIA in the State of the World Atlas (first published in 1981 and heading into its 8th edition) and The War Atlas (1983). Worldmapper may be more up-to-date and accessible, but its more fluid reworking of maps to portray relative differences among nations actually conveys less information — especially if you're looking for specific countries.

Still, the maps do succeed as a way of provoking global thoughts in the short-attention-span crowd.

Here's a picture of the countries of destination for both refugees and internally displaced persons. Unfortunately, there's no way on the map to distinguish internally uprooted people (in Iraq or the Sudan) with refugees entering another country (say, France or the U.S.). A poster version does list top 20 countries and shows the breakout by region, however.

Here's a map showing where the world's rabies cases occur — most are in India.

And here's the distribution of the Sunni Muslim population.

I Feel I Should Show Up.

The boys are at it again, and I promised not to miss the next one, but I'm a bit out of range to make it to Intermedia Arts on April 1st.

Instead of repeating themselves with another speed lecture series, Troy Gallas and Colin Kloecker, young designers who brought us Solutions Twin Cities, are curating an exhibit and other events that merge "data visualization, artistic expression, and interactive installations."

It's called W(e are)here: Mapping the Human Experience, and the gallery speak may not get you too excited, but there's a beer prelude at Herkimer Pub & Brewery at 5 pm Tuesday and a mapping mashup /meetup and...

The promo site will give you a better idea of what to expect on Tuesday as well as the rest of the exhibition run.

While there, I ran across We Feel Fine, which I gather is part of the exhibition, but you can also explore it online. It searches blogs for versions of the phrase "I feel" and then incorporates the statement in an interactive "exploration of emotion on a global scale."

I feel certain I'll be showing up there soon.

My Parade of Homes.

Sick of political nonsense? Me, too. I took a ride around my hometown and put together a personal Parade of Homes. I didn't cover everything, but a Parade is all about exclusion.

I this case, I exclude granite counter tops, great rooms and a bunch of other stuff you can find anywhere.

Remember, this'll autoplay unless you seize the controls and use the arrows.

Signs of Emotion.

I've had bullets on the brain, so the other day, we took a long hike to get away from the news, the blogs and discussions of the Second Amendment. Heading up Coal Canyon, we thought we might get to see some of the wild mustangs living there, but mostly we saw where horses had been.

You could walk for hundreds of yards, and then there would be a pile of horse flop. Often, it represented the work of several horses over a period of time. On previous trips, we'd seen the mustangs let loose on an existing deposit, like a dog marking a tree, but without the sniffing.

The only horses we saw was a pair far down valley, spotted near the end of our hike.

Of course, this being rural America, I couldn't totally escape bullet thoughts. Even the trail head sign that mapped the area's many trails was scarred with high caliber bullet holes.

Since I've been working on how to get past gun-owner and gun-restricter stereotypes, the blasted signs naturally brought me to this thought: What are the archetypal images — both positive and negative — that reinforce attitudes about guns?

My riddled signs can evoke one view, that boys with guns are reckless and irresponsible, with no respect for others and a strong dislike for anything that might restrain their personal enjoyment.

Here's a pair of posters from Oleg Volk who has an extensive gallery of gun photography and propaganda images putting forward the idea we've been discussing here — that guns are tools of empowerment and responsibility.

On the left is the face meant to reassure the rest of the world "we're just normal Americans looking out for ourselves." On the right is a typical appeal to logic (predators exist and the shepherd can't be everywhere) and emotion (you don't want to be a defenseless sheep like those anti-gun nuts).

 

There's a whole other category of propaganda aimed at reinforcing beliefs of the gun faithful that it's stupid to be a voluntary victim, while to a non-gun owner, these images might seem over-wrought and even paranoid. The image on the right bridges from personal safety to personal freedom, an important theme, since the feared armed intruders are not just criminals, they are a powerful and coercive government.

Volk is careful to avoid racial stereotyping when representing intruders, and most focus on the defender, allowing to viewer to conjure up their own threat. Other images reach out specifically to minorities who are disproportionately victims of violent crime. Images of family and cultural traditions, especially hunting, are other common themes.

Viewing these and the many more in Volk's gallery, I think to when I steered my conversation with Joel Rosenberg toward the emotional aspects of the gun control debate and met with impatience over talking about "feelings." It's impossible to look at the images employed to support the gun rights side and believe emotion has nothing to do with it. And while the visual propaganda may not be as prolific on the other side, it's there, too.