New York City – Page 4 – artdiamondblog.com

Great-Grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt Privately Built First Highway Dedicated to Cars

Source of book image: https://lihj.cc.stonybrook.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Motor-Parkway_review.jpg

(p. 13) It survives only as segments of other highways, as a right of way for power lines and as a bike trail, but the Long Island Motor Parkway still holds a sense of magic as what some historians say is the country’s first road built specifically for the automobile. It opened 100 years ago last Friday as a rich man’s dream.

As detailed in a new book, “The Long Island Motor Parkway” by Howard Kroplick and Al Velocci (Arcadia Publishing), the parkway ran about 45 miles across Long Island, from Queens to Ronkonkoma, and was created by William Kissam Vanderbilt II, the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

. . .

The younger Vanderbilt was a car enthusiast who loved to race. He had set a speed record of 92 miles an hour in 1904, the same year he created his own race, the Vanderbilt Cup.
But his race came under fire after a spectator was killed in 1906, and Vanderbilt wanted a safe road on which to hold the race and on which other car lovers could hurl their new machines free of the dust common on roads made for horses. The parkway would also be free of “interference from the authorities,” he said in a speech.
So he created a toll road for high-speed automobile travel. It was built of reinforced concrete, had banked turns, guard rails and, by building bridges, he eliminated intersections that would slow a driver down. The Long Island Motor Parkway officially opened on Oct. 10, 1908, and closed in 1938.
. . .
But by the end of Vanderbilt’s life (he died in 1944), the public had come to feel entitled to car ownership. And there was growing pressure for public highways, like the parkways that the urban planner Robert Moses was building.

. . .

In 1938, Moses refused Vanderbilt’s appeal to incorporate the motor parkway into his new parkway system. The motor parkway just could not compete with the public roads, even after the toll was reduced to 40 cents, and Moses eventually gained control of Vanderbilt’s pioneering road for back taxes of about $80,000. The day of public roads had come, supplanting private highways.
. . .
The parkway marked the beginning of a process: the road was designed for the car. But in offering higher speeds, the parkway and other modern roads would push cars to their technical limits and beyond, inspiring innovation. In that sense, the first modern automobile highway helped to create the modern automobile.

For the full story, see:
PHIL PATTON. “A 100-Year-Old Dream: A Road Just for Cars.” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., October 12, 2008): 13.
(Note: the centered bold ellipses were in the original; the other ellipses were added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 9, 2008.)

The book mentioned in the article, is:
Kroplick, Howard, and Al Velocci. The Long Island Motor Parkway. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

“Approximate Route of Long Island Motor Parkway.” Source of caption and map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

Modern Cities Are “Successful Former Slums” that Allowed “Vibrant Economic Activity”

(p. 82) Babylon, London, and New York all had teeming ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at its peak, nearly 20 percent of its residents did not have a “fixed abode”–that is, they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A (p. 83) weaver’s family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. A century ago Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak in the 1880s. In the New York slums, reported the New York Times in 1858, “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”
San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his eye-opening book Shadow Cities, one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.” As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first twenty-first-century cities.
That’s how it works. This is how all technology works. A gadget begins as a junky prototype and then progresses to something that barely works. The ad hoc shelters in slums are upgraded over time, infrastructure is extended, and eventually makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow. This is already happening in Rio and Mumbai today.
Slums of the past and slums of today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells are overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: italics, and bracketed “San Francisco” in original.)

Global Warming Causes Trees to Grow Faster and Absorb More CO2

“CITY TREE, COUNTRY TREE; Scientists have been looking more closely at urban plant growth in places like Central Park.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D3) . . . , some . . . scientists have moved beyond political questions to explore how rising levels of heat and emissions might provide at least some benefits for the planet.
. . .
Lewis H. Ziska, a plant physiologist for the Department of Agriculture, . . . [said] . . . , “we need to think about the tools we have at hand, and how we can use them to make climate change work for us.”
Among the tools are cities, which have conditions that can mimic what life may be like in the temperate zone of a heated planet.
“The city is our baseline for what might happen in future decades, and with all the negative effects global warming may have, there may be a bit of a silver lining,” said Stephanie Searle, a plant physiologist who led a Columbia University research project on tree growth, and now works as a biofuels researcher at the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation. “Higher nighttime temperatures, at least, may boost plant growth.” Robust growth takes more carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
. . .
The effects of higher, mostly urban emissions are what prompted Dr. Ziska to reappraise global warming as a potential benefit to humanity. In an essay last summer in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dr. Ziska and a group of colleagues from across the world argued that an expected increase in world population to 9 billion people from 7 billion by 2050 necessitated a “green revolution” to enhance yields of basic grains. Carbon dioxide, the group suggested, could be the answer.
Since 1960, world atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have risen by 24 percent to 392 parts per million and could reach 1,000 parts per million by the end of this century.
. . .
In New York, the Columbia researchers studied for eight years the growth of red oak seedlings at four locations, including an “urban” site near the northeastern edge of Central Park at 105th Street and a “remote” site in the Catskills 100 miles north of Manhattan near the Ashokan Reservoir.
. . .
The Columbia team’s first red oak experiments ended in 2006, and average minimum temperatures in August were 71.6 degrees at the city site, but 63.5 degrees in the Catskills. Researchers also noticed that the city oaks had elevated levels of leaf nitrogen, a plant nutrient.
The team did two more rounds of experiments, then in 2008 made a final outdoor test using fertilized rural soil everywhere so all the seedlings got plenty of nitrogen. The urban oaks, harvested in August 2008, weighed eight times as much as their rural cousins, mostly because of increased foliage.
“On warm nights, the tree respires more,” Dr. Griffin said. “It invests its carbon sugars to build tissue.” By morning, the tree’s sugars are depleted, and it has to photosynthesize more during the day, he continued. The tree grows more leaves and gets bigger.

For the full story, see:
GUY GUGLIOTTA. “Looking to Cities, in Search of Global Warming’s Silver Lining.” The New York Times (Tues., November 27, 2012): D3.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed “said” added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 26, 2012.)

The Ziska article mentioned above, is:
Ziska, Lewis H., James A. Bunce, Hiroyuki Shimono, David R. Gealy, Jeffrey T. Baker, Paul C. D. Newton, Matthew P. Reynolds, Krishna S. V. Jagadish, Chunwu Zhu, Mark Howden, and Lloyd T. Wilson. “Food Security and Climate Change: On the Potential to Adapt Global Crop Production by Active Selection to Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 279, no. 1745 (Oct. 22, 2012): 4097-105.

The article co-authored by Searle and Griffin, and mentioned above, is:
Searle, Stephanie Y., Danielle S. Bitterman, Samuel Thomas, Kevin L. Griffin, Owen K. Atkin, and Matthew H. Turnbull. “Respiratory Alternative Oxidase Responds to Both Low- and High-Temperature Stress in Quercus Rubra Leaves Along an Urban-Rural Gradient in New York.” Functional Ecology 25, no. 5 (Oct. 2011): 1007-17.

New York Resisted Roosevelt’s Enforcing “Stupid” Vice Laws

Source of book image: http://media.npr.org/assets/bakertaylor/covers/i/island-of-vice/9780385519724_custom-e38a25fc66f104a049d4d24aa39dbe92d42fbd57-s6-c10.jpg

(p. C9) . . . as Richard Zacks’s excellent “Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York” ably shows, while we might like to believe that the stretch from 1970 to 1995 represents the city’s nadir, it was just about business as usual in New York over the centuries.

From its time as a Dutch colonial outpost, the city has always been pretty bad. You’d almost think New Yorkers prefer it that way. Of course, we don’t like fraud, robbery, assault, arson, rape or murder any more than anyone else does. But the deliberate injury of one’s fellow citizen isn’t the only way to break the law. There are also those crimes that fall under the broad category of “vice”: things such as gambling, prostitution, indecent exposure and selling alcohol at a convenient time. Historically, the average New Yorker has not greeted these acts with the same immediate urge to suppress that many of his or her fellow Americans have had. You don’t get a nickname like “The City That Never Sleeps” without having a certain amount of things worth staying up for.
. . .
In the end, Mr. Zacks’s exhaustively researched yet lively story is a classic battle between an irresistible force, Roosevelt’s ego, and an immovable object, the people of New York’s unwillingness to follow laws they thought were stupid. In this case, the object won, and handily. Mr. Zacks’s account of the way the city’s saloonkeepers instantly turned their establishments into hotels to take advantage of a loophole in the law is particularly amusing. Eventually, the police department, not unsympathetic to the Sunday tippler, began finding ways to wriggle out from under the commissioner’s thumb, and beer-friendly Tammany Hall, with the people solidly behind it, began peeling away his allies.

For the full review, see:
DAVID WONDRICH. “BOOKSHELF; Teddy’s Rough Ride.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., March 17, 2012): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date November 30, 2012.)

Book under review:
Zacks, Richard. Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean up Sin-Loving New York. New York: Doubleday, 2012.

Most in NYC Oppose Bloomberg’s Nanny State Soda Ban

“Theodore Ogunbiyi-Roche, 10, who is visiting from London, drank a large soda in Times Square . . . ” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) . . . , New Yorkers are cool to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to prohibit sales of large sugary drinks in city restaurants, stadiums and movie theaters, according to a . . . poll by The New York Times.

Six in 10 residents said the mayor’s soda plan was a bad idea, compared with 36 percent who called it a good idea. A majority in every borough was opposed; Bronx and Queens residents were more likely than Manhattanites to say the plan was a bad idea.
. . .
. . . those opposed overwhelmingly cited a sense that Mr. Bloomberg was overreaching with the plan and that consumers should have the freedom to make a personal choice . . .
“The ban is at the point where it is an infringement of civil liberties,” Liz Hare, 43, a scientific researcher in Queens, said in a follow-up interview. “There are many other things that people do that aren’t healthy, so I think it’s a big overreach.”
Bob Barocas, 64, of Queens, put it more bluntly: “This is like the nanny state going off the wall.”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM and MARJORIE CONNELLY. “60% in City Oppose Soda Ban, Calling It an Overreach by Bloomberg, Poll Finds.” The New York Times (Thurs., August 23, 2012): A18.
(Note: ellipses in caption and article added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 22, 2012, and the title “60% in City Oppose Bloomberg’s Soda Ban, Poll Finds.”)

Descartes Saw that a Great City Is “an Inventory of the Possible”

(p. 226) Joel Kotkin writes about “The Broken Ladder: The Threat to Upward Mobility in the Global City.” “A great city, wrote Rene Descartes in the 17th Century, represented ‘an inventory of the possible,’ a place where people could create their own futures and lift up their families. In the 21st Century–the first in which the majority of people will live in cities–this unique link between urbanism and upward mobility will become ever more critical.”

Source:
Taylor, Timothy. “Recommendations for Further Reading.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 219-26.

“The Bulk of New Yorkers Do Not Have an Unlimited Appetite for Growing Their Own Kale”

“. . . , Ena K. McPherson holds the key to three different community gardens.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D1) There is some evidence, . . . , that the bulk of New Yorkers do not have an unlimited appetite for growing their own kale. Official counts of New York gardens are fragmentary. But John Ameroso, the Johnny Appleseed of the New York community garden movement, suspects that the number of present-day gardens — around 800 — may be half what it was in the mid-1980s.

In his long career as an urban extension agent for Cornell University, Mr. Ameroso, 67, kept a log with ratings of all the plots he visited. “I remember that there were a lot of gardens that were not in use or minimally used,” he said. “Into the later ’80s, a lot of these disappeared or were abandoned. Or maybe there was one person working them. If nothing was developed on them, they just got overgrown.”
The truth, Ms. Stone said, is that at any giv-(p. D6)en time, perhaps 10 percent of the city’s current stock of almost 600 registered GreenThumb gardens is growing mostly weeds. “In East New York, I can tell you that there are basically many gardens that are barely functioning now.”
. . .
An honest census would reveal that many gardens (perhaps most) depend on just one or two tireless souls, said Ena K. McPherson, a Brooklyn garden organizer. She would know because she’s one of them.
Ms. McPherson holds the keys to three community gardens in Bedford-Stuyvesant. (Ms. Stone appreciatively refers to these blocks as “the Greater Ena McPherson Zone.”) And she serves on the operations committee for the nonprofit Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, which holds the deeds to 32 garden plots.
“In an ideal situation, we would have gardens with everyone in the community participating,” Ms. McPherson said. “But in fact, a few die-hard people end up carrying the flag.”
. . .
The original gardens followed the city’s vacant lots, which by 1978 numbered 32,000. Mr. Ameroso, though trained in agronomy, pitched them as an instrument for community renewal. “How did you take back your block?” he said. “Put in a community garden and stop that dumping.”
Ms. Stone, who laughingly (and earnestly) describes herself as a socialist, continues to embrace something of this mission. “All the people who are marginal in society — and I’m not using that as a judgmental term, it’s children, senior citizens, people on disability, the 47 percent — these people are the main power people in the garden,” she said.
These days, Mr. Ameroso espouses more of what he calls an “urban agriculture” model: a food garden with a dedicated farmers’ market or a C.S.A. These amenities make stakeholders out of neighbors who may not like dirt under their nails and rural farmers who drive in every weekend.
“The urban-agriculture ones are flourishing,” he said. “There’s a lot of excitement. They’re active eight days a week.” But “community gardens, as such, where people come in to take care of their own boxes — those are not flourishing.”
It’s almost a cliché to point out that this new green model seems to have attracted tillers with a different skin tone. “Back then,” Mr. Ameroso said of his earlier career, “when we worked in Bronx or Bed-Stuy, it was mostly communities of color. Now when we talk about the urban agriculture stuff, it’s white people in their 30s.”
What explains this demographic shift?
“I have no idea,” he said. “I’m still baffled by it, and I’m involved in it!”

For the full story, see:
MICHAEL TORTORELLO. “IN THE GARDEN; Growing Everything but Gardeners.” The New York Times (Sat., November 1, 2012): D1 & D6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated October 31, 2012.)

In Health Care, He Who Pays the Piper, Calls the Tune

(p. A15) Under the Bloomberg plan, any cup or bottle of sugary drink larger than 16 ounces at a public venue would be verboten, beginning early next year.
. . .
Here is the ultimate justification for the Bloomberg soft-drink ban, not to mention his smoking ban, his transfat ban, and his unsuccessful efforts to enact a soda tax and prohibit buying high-calorie drinks with food stamps: The taxpayer is picking up the bill.
Call it the growing chattelization of the beneficiary class under government health-care programs. Bloombergism is a secular trend. Los Angeles has sought to ban new fast-food shops in neighborhoods disproportionately populated by Medicaid recipients, Utah to increase Medicaid copays for smokers, Arizona to impose a special tax on Medicaid recipients who smoke or are overweight.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; The 5th Avenue to Serfdom; Nobody thought about taking away your Big Gulp until the government began to pay for everyone’s health care.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 2, 2012): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 1, 2012.)

“There Was Never a Plan . . . Just a Series of Mistakes”

“Robert Caro in his Manhattan office. The later volumes of his L.B.J. biography have taken more years to write than it took the former president to live them.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 37) “There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.”
. . .
(p. 38) Caro had a[n] . . . epiphany about power in the early ’60s. He had moved on to Newsday by then, where he discovered that he had a knack for investigative reporting, and was assigned to look into a plan by Robert Moses to build a bridge from Rye, N.Y., across Long Island Sound to Oyster Bay. “This was the world’s worst idea,” he told me. “The piers would have had to be so big that they’d disrupt the tides.” Caro wrote a series exposing the folly of this scheme, and it seemed to have persuaded just about everyone, including the governor, Nelson Rockefeller. But then, he recalled, he got a call from a friend in Albany saying, “Bob, I think you need to come up here.” Caro said: “I got there in time for a vote in the Assembly authorizing some preliminary step toward the bridge, and it passed by something like 138-4. That was one of the transformational moments of my life. I got in the car and drove home to Long Island, and I kept thinking to myself: ‘Everything you’ve been doing is baloney. You’ve been writing under the belief that power in a democracy comes from the ballot box. But here’s a guy who has never been elected to anything, who has enough power to turn the entire state around, and you don’t have the slightest idea how he got it.’ ”
The lesson was repeated in 1965, when Caro had a Nieman fellowship at Harvard and took a class in land use and urban planning. “They were talking one day about highways and where they got built,” he recalled, “and here were these mathematical formulas about traffic density and population density and so on, and all of a sudden I said to myself: ‘This is completely wrong. This isn’t why highways get built. Highways get built because Robert Moses wants them built there. If you don’t find out and explain to people where Robert Moses gets his power, then everything else you do is going to be dishonest.’ “

For the full story, see:
CHARLES McGRATH. “Robert Caro’s Big Dig.” The New York Times Magazine (Sun., April 15, 2012): 34-39 & 52.
(Note: ellipses and bracketed letter added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated April 12, 2012.)

Caro’s book on Robert Moses is:
Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1974.

Bricks-and-Mortar Restaurants Use Police (Instead of Better Food) to Beat Food Trucks

“Kim Ima and Kenny Lao parked their food trucks on Front Street in Dumbo.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. D4) FOOD trucks, those rolling symbols of New York City’s infatuation with haute casual food, are suddenly being chased from Midtown Manhattan. In the last 10 days, the Treats Truck, which has sold cookies and brownies for four years during lunchtime at West 45th Street near Avenue of the Americas, has been told by police officers that it is no longer welcome there, nor at its late-afternoon 38th Street and Fifth Avenue location. The Rickshaw Dumpling truck, a presence for three years at West 45th Street near the Treats Truck, has been shooed away as well.

The police “have told us they no longer want food trucks in Midtown,” said Kim Ima, the owner of the Treats Truck, a pioneer of the city’s new-wave food-truck movement, who began cultivating customers on West 45th Street in 2007.
. . .
Mr. Lao and other food-truck operators said they suspect that the police are responding to complaints by brick-and-mortar businesses that resent competition. Such was the case last year, when store merchants on the Upper East Side complained about Patty’s Taco Truck, which sold tortas, tacos de lengua and cemitas on Lexington Avenue. The truck was towed several times and the operator arrested, prompting the Street Vendor Project, an advocate for vendors based at the Urban Justice Center, to file the lawsuit that resulted in Judge Wright’s ruling, which said food is merchandise that can be regulated.

For the full story, see:
GLENN COLLINS. “Food Trucks Shooed From Midtown.” The New York Times (Weds., June 29, 2011): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story is dated June 28, 2011.)