The blogger Atrios likes to highlight articles about the incongruities between urban life (with its walkability and density) and automobile culture (which demands curb cuts, parking spaces, fast-moving highways, and suburban developments). He’s especially giddy when drivers are driven mad by cities–because suburbanites perceive them to be unsuitable as places to live, yet they still want to visit urban attractions (or work their urban jobs).  So when they can’t find a place to park, their frustration is palpable (particularly on internet comment boards).  For an urban planner, the only solutions seem to be: a) destroy your city, or b) resist the suburbanites’ car-centric frustration, possibly by coming up with transportation alternatives.

Atrios highlighted an article on the parking shortage in Newport, RI, particularly this quote:

Though a modern streetcar system may seem out-of-place with the city’s colonial appeal, officials say it could actually be a throwback to the early 20th century, when trolleys operated in the city. Plus, Bronk said, there’s nothing quaint about the city’s traffic.

“Does four lanes of automobile congestion, is that in keeping with the colonial period? It’s not,” he said. “Is a highway downtown in keeping with the colonial era? It’s not.”

Of all the cities I discussed in Rebels Rising, Newport is the best place to discern a surviving colonial landscape and surviving colonial buildings.  After that, I’d rank them as follows, from best to worst: Charleston (SC), Philadelphia (where Atrios lives), Boston, and New York City.  (Obviously there were other cities at the time, but those are the five that got the most attention in my book.)  Of those five, Newport has grown the least, economically and demographically, over the years, so it’s not so surprising that more of its colonial landscape survives.  The other cities have also struggled with transportation access in a lot of ways, and I’m sure visitors to all these cities (and to all cities, really) can call to mind the highways that lead into these cities, the neighborhoods that have been blighted by modern highway construction, and the public transportation alternatives that exist (or don’t exist) in these places.

All this is making me very grateful that my fellow fellow at the John Carter Brown Library used to offer me a parking space at his father’s office whenever I was driving down to Newport for dissertation research.

UPDATE: Why preserve historic buildings?  Because sometimes the findings are really cool.

Two articles in the NYT are worthy of attention as the impact of the economic crisis spreads.

First, Michael Powell and Janet Roberts, in “Minorities Hit Hardest by Foreclosures in New York,” do a great job describing the foreclosure crisis in the NYC metropolitan area.  They also nicely situate their story in the social and economic developments of the last 30-60 years or so.

If all this economic pain still seems rather abstract to you, then turn to the first-person account by Edmund L. Andrews, “My Personal Credit Crisis,” in this weekend’s magazine section.  Sure, it’s an in-house book promotion, but it also nicely captures the psychological effects of this kind of financial pain.  Take the emotions from Andrews and map them onto the larger-scale developments in the Powell/Roberts article, and it really brings home the power and viciousness of the recession.

In honor of Oxford University Press publishing the paperback edition of Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution, I thought we might strike up a playlist.  The annotations make it a long entry, so if you’re in the mood for some Friday fun, please follow me below the fold.  In the meantime, pick up a copy and add it to your syllabus today.

I should start by saying that there isn’t much musical, historical, or thematic rhyme or reason to this list (which I first created in 2007 when the hardcover edition was published): I just wanted a CD-length playlist inspired by the book, drawn from songs I already owned (although I did hunt down a couple more).  Under my self-imposed rule, the songs had to have “rebels,” “rising”, “city,” “cities,” or the name of one of the book’s five cities (Boston, New York City, Newport, Charleston, and Philadelphia) in the title.  I also included songs that corresponded with the introduction and epilogue.  Where songs are named for a specific city, they are in chapter order; the three “rebels” songs precede the three “rising” songs.  Here’s the book’s table of contents if you’d like to follow along.

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Finals week here, and many holiday duties as well, so I will have to content myself with limited posting for a bit. Today we have a follow-up to a post from two weeks ago on an unlikely link that was made between Thomas Jefferson and the anti-scientific Creation Museum outside Cincinnati.

Joseph Clarke, the author of the article that made the link, wrote me soon after the post went up and we had what I think was an interesting little exchange on the subject. With Clarke’s permission, I am going to share it here.

Clarke wrote:

Dear Dr Pasley:

I’ve just discovered your December 5 post about my article “Specters of a Young Earth” on northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum.

You object to “innocent Founders being dragged in to get blamed or credited for everything that a given writer likes or dislikes about American culture.” I’m not sure Jefferson would appreciate the implication that his efforts to shape American culture met with so little lasting success. The notion of Jefferson as one of the Creation Museum’s “intellectual progenitors” in a doctrinal sense is absurd, and I make no such claim. But surely mainstream America’s views on urbanism do owe a great deal to Jefferson, who, as an amateur architect, had particularly strong views on the question of what form settlement should take on the continent.

According to the great Italian architectural scholar Manfredo Tafuri–and I’d be interested to know whether you agree–Jefferson’s efforts to restrain industrial development in order to create an agrarian utopia is a persistent drive in the national psyche. Tafuri writes, in his book Architecture and Utopia:

“Hamilton interpreted the aims of the political situation–that had begun with the American Revolution–to be economic, and coldly and lucidly pursued an accelerated development of American financial and industrial capital. Jefferson, on the contrary, remained faithful to a democracy arrested at the level of a utopia. Agricultural economy, local and regional autonomy as pivots of the democratic system, and the restraining of industrial development all had an explicit significance for Jefferson. They were symbols of his fear in face of the processes set in motion by the Revolution. Essentially this was fear of the dangers of involution, of the transformation of democracy into a new authoritarianism, brought into being by capitalist competition, urban development, and the birth and growth of an urban proletariat. In this sense Jefferson was against the city and against the development of industrial economy. This is why he tried to impede the logical economic consequences of democracy. With him came into being ‘radical America,’ or rather the ambiguous conscience of American intellectuals, who acknowledge the foundations of the democratic system while opposing its concrete manifestations.”

I hope it’s apparent that I regard the Creation Museum as a benighted pastiche of many such aspects of American culture, and its invocation of the “Jeffersonian” agrarian impulse as entirely unwitting.

Joseph Clarke

I replied:

Mr. Clarke:

Thanks for writing. It took me a few minutes to connect the name! I actually liked your article quite a lot and possibly my  “intellectual progenitor” line was a little unfair. The passage on Jefferson just seemed to fall under one of the categories I try to police on the blog, deployments of the Founders (especially Jefferson) into arguments where they do not seem to fit very well. You may not have been quite clear enough if you meant to distinguish the Creation Museum’s “benighted pastiche” from Jefferson and Bryan’s celebrations of rural life. It came off as, “Here are the CM’s deep roots in American culture.” Jefferson gets used as a rough stand-in for “American Culture” so often — these days usually in a critical context where he stands in for American racism or expansionism or ruralism — that I usually feel compelled to remind people how Jefferson was seen and what he stood for as a public figure in own time: as man of the left (a Jacobin to his critics), dedicated to the progress of Enlightenment and democracy, within some of the limits of his time, but quite beyond others. Obviously in the longer run, and in terms of many of his specific writings and actions, a very different portrait of Jefferson can be painted, but to me they miss his essential significance for his period.

Part of the problem, though it is not much of a problem, is the fact that you are writing as much about the architecture and siting of the Creation Museum building as its “scientific” content. Jefferson may be more relevant to the former than to the latter, though I wonder about that too. Certainly Jefferson’s own orderly Palladian style, with its domed centers and wings, seems more traditional museum than the anti-monumental office park style you talk about quite insightfully in the article. My own guess would be that the origins of the Creation Museum’s worldview should be located much more recently. I tend to see W.J. Bryan’s synthesis of Jeffersonianism with religious fundamentalism as a failure that portended the decisive rightward shift of American evangelical Christianity and “agrarianism”/ruralism as they confronted the mass society of the 20th century.

We really should have this discussion publicly. I would be happy to post your comment on my blog, or a fuller response that I could promote to a guest post, if you are interested.

Yours,
Jeff Pasley

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