Let's Get Busy

Welp, it's only been about a year since the last post here on Salt City Critique. It feels much longer. Not much has changed on my end, but I did move from Downtown into the lovely residential neighborhood of Tipperary Hill recently. My seven years spent Downtown were fantastic and that neighborhood made it very easy to fall in love with (specifically the close proximity to awesome food). Perhaps a post on what I learned and how the neighborhood changed from 2007-2014 is on deck soon.

For now, I've decided to reboot the blog due to the I-81 discussion heating up as of late. Check out ReThink81's boulevard renderings (which look fantastic!) and see what Centro's Executive Director had to say on how his company will handle any possible solution. Those are some big points for the boulevard. Meanwhile, all is quiet from Save81.

In the meantime, let's kick things back into gear with a presentation by James Howard Kunstler from the TED: Ideas Worth Spreading conference in 2004 in Monterey, CA. (Video contains harsh language)

The Post Standard Building & The Public Realm

"The public realm in America has two roles: it is the dwelling place of our civilization and our civic life and it is the physical manifestation of the the common good. And when you degrade the public realm, you will automatically degrade the quality of your civic life and character of all the enactments of your public life and communal life that take place there."

"The public realm comes mostly in the form of the street in America because we don't have the thousand year-old cathedral plazas and market squares of older cultures. And your ability to define space and create spaces that are worth caring about all comes from a body of culture that we call the culture of civic design. This is body of knowledge, method, skill, and principle that we threw in the garbage after World War II and decided "We don't need that anymore. We're not gonna use it.". And consequently, we can see the result all around us.

"The public realm has to inform us not only where we are geographically, but it has to inform us where we are in our culture: where we've come from, what kind of people we are, and by doing that it needs to afford us a glimpse to where we're going in order to allow us to dwell in a hopeful present. And if there is one great catastrophe about the places that we've built, the human environments that we've made for ourselves in the last 50 years, is that it's deprived us of the ability of live in a hopeful present."

- James Howard Kunstler
From the TED: Ideas Worth Spreading conference in 2004 in Monterey, CA

Loosely paraphrased, what this means is each place should have a proper function, design, and conscience in order to fully engage the public space and the people who interact with it.

I feel like Syracuse's Clinton Square works fairly well in defining public space - despite it having been remodeled a number of times throughout history. It's organized, it defines the area very well, and easily says what it is: a central public gathering place that emphasizes the city's culture and history while showcasing a taste of its beautiful architecture.

There is, however, one building in this civic arena that stands out and fails to encompass the public realm very little, in some cases poorly, and that's the Post Standard building; a low-standing, massive, and concrete structure just directly north of the city's epicentre. The building's designations (both the building itself and its private parking lot) are between north of Genesee St, east of Clinton St, south of Herald Pl, and west of N Salina St.

Two downtown city blocks are designated to this one commercial business and its private parking lot (two distinctions that make it a bit more obtrusive and maybe even a bit more arrogant than the Atrium, a hotel and office convention center built in 1972, that stands at the opposite side of the square). It would be one thing if the Post Standard building took up this amount of space and played into the public realm correctly, but it fails to do so in many regards.

First, here's some bits of history...

Recommended Reading

The above video is of the late activist and writer Jane Jacobs speaking about urban life and planning. You can find any number of videos about Jacobs on YouTube, but this one stuck out for me as I think a lot of it can be applied to Syracuse fairly accurately.

Rest assured that on this blog I'll be quoting Jacobs from her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, as well as excerpts from James Howard Kunstler's, Home From Nowhere and his other related work. Jacobs' book is a heavy read, but full of a seemingly endless amount of poignantly worded statements about urban renewal in the mid-20th century and its negative effects on a neighborhood's quality of life. Kunstler's book on the other hand, written in 1996, deals with suburban sprawl, urban design and charm, America's car-centric outlook, and proper land use. His elegant sarcasm cannot be understated and makes for a very entertaining read with hilariously worded observations at times.

The two books may be out-dated in certain areas, but are timeless in most other parts and very oriented on the human-scale of things as oppose to the automobiles. Both books I highly recommend reading if you're at all interested in urban life and design.