PhotojogBlog

Getting ready for the race

Tugboats

Near the start. Much of the course is industrial waterfront like this.

At mile 1 in St. George

Staten Island Rail tracks

Heading back, with a view of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge

From staten island

After the finish, rewarded with a great view of the city

The minor league SI Yankees park

Walking back to the ferry, cheering on some tough runners

Ferry terminal

Last look back

From staten island

Sorry, but can't resist this... SI's biggest pop cultural moment?

Woke up, it was an O.C. morning

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:51:00 +0000

A gloomy run from the hotel by the freeway.

Vinegar Hill and DUMBO (Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass)

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 03:13:00 +0000

Shots from a short 3.5-miler to the little remnants of Vinegar Hill by the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

From vinegar hill

Brick road in Brooklyn

From vinegar hill

Prayer flags

From vinegar hill

Married

From vinegar hill

From not-so Italian Carroll Gardens to Brooklyn's 8th Avenue Chinatown

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 02:46:00 +0000

New York City has, by some counts, five different Chinatowns. There's the famous one in Manhattan, Flushing in Queens, and two smaller Chinese neighborhoods in Elmhurst, Queens and along Avenue U in Brooklyn. The main Chinatown in Brooklyn is along more than twenty blocks of 8th Avenue in Sunset Park.

I started my run in Carroll Gardens, an Italian neighborhood along the South Brooklyn waterfront. It wa Italian, anyway, when I lived there in the late 1990s, in my first New York apartment. My wife and I were part of the early wave of "new people"—that's what the neighbors called us. As in, "It's disgusting you'd even sell ravioli with fat-free cheese! That's for all the new people ruining this neighborhood!"* The new people pretty much run the joint now. Even Dennett Place—a narrow block in the shadow of the elevated subway tracks, with squat half-doors leading down to the garden apartments of cramped houses—had a couple of artists' open-studio shows this weekend. Back in 1997, it seemed impregnably old-neighborhood, and I felt mildly nervous and conspicuously non-Italian just walking down that block.

Between Carroll Gardens and Sunset Park is a mostly dreary stretch of 4th Avenue, and the historic Green-Wood Cemetery, of which I could only snap a few glimpses from behind the fence.

This run was just over nine miles.

*Actual rant by the woman in front of me on line at Fratelli's pasta store, 1997. Her son came home with the wrong pasta.

Dennett Place... watch your head.

From Sunset Park

Green-Wood entrance

From Sunset Park

On 8th Ave.: More fun than a basket of putti

From Sunset Park

Name that produce

From Sunset Park

Sidewalk cobbler

From Sunset Park

Service while you wait

From Sunset Park

Picturing the outer boroughs, this time by a real photographer

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 23:14:00 +0000

A good friend of mine—who lives all the way out in Montgomery, Ill.!—sent me a link to the website of a photographer named Nathan Kensinger. He specializes in the industrial edges of New York City. He hits a lot of the same neighborhoods I pass through, but actually climbs over the fences to see what's usually hidden from those of us on the street. And his photos are beautiful.

Check out his essay on the rail tunnels hidden below East New York, and this one on the "desertification" of once-prime Williamsburg land.

His work is showing at the Capture Brooklyn show at the powerHouse Arena in Dumbo until October 15. I'm going to try to go this weekend. Here's a slideshow of images from the exhibition:

Capture Brooklyn - Winning Entries from New York Photo Festival on Vimeo.

Bums, jerks, and surfers, by way of Canarsie

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 13:00:00 +0000

"By way of Canarsie" is supposedly Old New Yorkish for taking the most circuitous route possible. As in: "How'd that cab ride cost you twenty bucks? Jeezus, did the guy take you by way of Canarsie?"

In other words, it's kind of out of the way. Until yesterday, in fact, it was the only major Brooklyn neighborhood I'd never been to. So... that's fixed now.

This run was just a touch over 12 miles. It also went through Crown Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Flatbush and East Flatbush. Basically, the Caribbean heart of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Museum. Those blobs in the foreground are pulses of water
from the choreographed WET Design fountain. View here.

From 2010-09-19

Apartment building at the home of the Dodgers

From 2010-09-19


Townhouses in the Prospect Lefferts Gardens district

From 2010-09-19


Supermarkets here sell barrels for shipping stuff back to family in the islands.

From 2010-09-19


Too many possible captions. I've settled on: "We're gonna need a bigger building..."

From 2010-09-19

A shipping center on Utica Ave. These were headed to Trinidad.

From 2010-09-19

The Wyckoff House, parts of which date back to 1652,
making it New York City's oldest building

From 2010-09-19


The last glass-bottle seltzer works in New York. Here's a great new short film about it: Seltzer Works.

From 2010-09-19

A sign for a street that isn't there anymore. Canarsie has
a lot of these. ForgottenNY explains.

From 2010-09-19

Another Ghost Bike. This one for Keith Powell.

From 2010-09-19

Fishing on Canarsie Pier in Jamaica Bay

From 2010-09-19

He says the fish here are porgies.

From 2010-09-19

Canarsie rowhouses.

From 2010-09-19

Google did not reveal any explanation for this intriguing name.

From 2010-09-19

The first/last stop on the L. Transit geek moment: It's unusual for being
at grade, and for having a bus gate for free transfers.

From 2010-09-19

At the top of the awesome three-level Broadway Junction station.

From 2010-09-19

The hipster-heavy L from Williamsburg and L.E.S. meets with
the Rockaway Beach-bound C here. So the station was crawling with surfers.

From 2010-09-19

After the Great Brooklyn Tornado

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 00:30:00 +0000

I went on a short run today in Clinton Hill and Prospect Heights. Here are some shots of the damage Thursday's wild storm did to Lowry Triangle, a vest-pocket park on Washinton Ave.

From Tornado

Meanwhile back at the ranch: Middle-class modern in Aurora, IL

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:46:00 +0000

On my August vacation, I also spent a few days in my home town, a small city about an hour west of Chicago. Driving around the day before this run, I noticed how may interesting ranch-style houses there are in my old neighborhood. These houses didn't register as anything special when I was growing up—they were just what newish Midwestern suburban houses looked like back then. But that was before I moved to the Northeast, where ranches are rare. And it was before the housing boom, which turned builder-designed McMansion tracts into the default for suburban housing. And maybe I'm also under the spell of Mad Men's midcentury swankitude. In any case, these houses suddenly look stylish and sophisticated in a way my 17-year-old self would have considered impossible in a place like Aurora, Illinois.

In addition to the ranches, there's a Frank Lloyd Wright house and an internationally famous house by the architect Bruce Goff, known locally as the Round House. It was photographed by Life magazine in 1951; check out this amazing interior shot. It was built for an artist named Ruth Van Sickle Ford and the neighbors hated it: At one point, according to this bio, she put up a sign on the lawn that said, "We don't like your house, either." My neighborhood also has several examples of something more humble, yet positively Space Age: prefab steel Lustron homes, clad in powder blue enamel tiles.

I don't think I'd like the ranch to make a comeback as a model for new houses. As this article by Witold Rybczynski suggests, the ranch is a creature of automotive sprawl: You needed a lot of land to build a relatively small house. But compared to today's suburbia, the ranches are refreshingly grown-up homes They're built to house a family, not a family plus the maximum amount of stuff one can haul back from Costco. Rybczynski says they "lacked traditional domestic status symbols, such as porticoes and tall gables," signifying an openness to new ideas, and even some social modesty. I'm romanticizing a bit, of course. The main reason houses like this weren't built until the 1980s was that people couldn't afford them yet.

The whole package: Ranch house, Airstream RV,
wood-paneled station wagon, aerial antenna.

From midmodern

I bet there's a big Zenith in the living room.

From midmodern

A Lustron house of steel and enamel

From midmodern

Ruth Van Sickle Ford house by Bruce Goff

From midmodern

a.k.a. the Round House

From midmodern

The hissing of summer lawns

From midmodern

The Lester Kaufman house, one my favorites in the city

From midmodern

Frank Lloyd Wright's William B. Greene house

From midmodern

Chicago International: Running to Mies' Illinois Institute of Technology

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 01:29:00 +0000

Here's a run I did a month ago while on vacation in Chicago, the first big city I ever lived in. There's really too many places to run and too many things to photograph in the city, so I decided to focus on one notable part of the city I don't know very well: the south 30s and the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology.

The campus was master-planned by the great modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who also led IIT's architecture department. I've been down there before, but this run was my first chance to spend a lot of time there on foot. I moved away from Chicago in 1997, and IIT wasn't loved (or visited) by many Chicagoans back then. The adjacent neighborhood was dominated by some of the country's worst, most dangerous housing projects, which stood as examples of just how horribly modernism could fail. And with the conspicuous exception of Mies' masterwork, Crown Hall, the campus buildings didn't look, at first glance, all that different from Stateway Gardens or the Robert Taylor Homes. (I wrote earlier about modernism and public housing here.) Modernism in general was out of style: For most people, it evoked, at best, windblown office parks and cheap government buildings; among the architecture-and-design smart set, it was often mocked. I remember reading around that time Charles Jencks' postmodernist takedown of the IIT campus, it which he pointed out that the heating plant is shaped like a church, while the church looked like a heating plant. (I thought that was pretty funny.) In the mid-1990s, IIT seriously considered packing up and moving to the suburbs. In his essay Miestakes, architect Rem Koolhaas writes:

According to statistics, a student and his or her parents decide, within five seconds of arrival, whether to apply to a given university or not.
With that test, Mies van der Rohe’s IIT Campus is in trouble.
The IIT campus is a masterpiece invisible to the contemporary eye. Mies’ work has become unnoticeable without explanation.

A lot has changed since 1997. Stateway and Robert Taylor have been demolished, and IIT decided to stay and pour money into its campus. Koolhaas designed a new campus center—controversially, because it connects to and obscures Mies' Commons Building. The new building incorporates the overhead El tracks, turning them into an architectural cloister-like feature of the campus rather than a divider. It actually looks like a bow tying the two sides of campus together. It's a loud, intentionally comic, glamor-mongering thing, but it works well with the Mies buildings. The contrast helps you see that the older classrooms and labs aren't bland and blank, but clean, uncluttered and sharp. That chapel doesn't look like a heating plant. It looks like a place perfectly suited to its purpose: getting you to sit up straight and think.

Modernism seems to me to be aging well—especially now that we know that it's just one historical style, not the only thing we're going to get from now on. I wasn't the only person roaming the campus with a camera. Which makes me wonder: Are we ever going to regret they way they ripped the guts out of Walter Netsch's UIC?

This run was just over 11 miles. It started on the lakefront, and also passed by Mies' two Lake Shore Drive apartment complexes. A shout-out is due to the excellent Galinsky.com, an online guide to modern and post-modern landmarks. I've linked to some of its pages in the captions below.

Mies' 900-910 N. Lake Shore Drive

From Chicago run

And his earlier 860-880 N. Lake Shore Drive apartments

From Chicago run

Chicago's new southern skyline

From Chicago run

Entering IIT: the Rem Koolhaas McCormick Tribune Campus Center

From Chicago run

Mies' giant face

From Chicago run

Helmut Jahn's dorm building

From Chicago run

First view of S.R. Crown Hall

From Chicago run

I was surprised to find the door unlocked...

From Chicago run

The only dorm Mies designed

His only church: St. Savior

a.k.a. the God Box

Peeking inside

Sunday morning, downtown

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:23:00 +0000

Little Italy, Soho, the Village, Chelsea, even the new High Line Park... all impossible places to run. Unless you get out by 7 a.m. on a Sunday and beat the milling sidewalk crowds.

My GPS didn't work, so you'll have to take my word for it that it was 12.25 miles.

Door to the churchyard at Old St. Patrick's

From iphone

Cooper Union, where Lincoln addressed New York

From iphone

Grace Church and School

From iphone

On the High Line, the park on the old elevated rail

From iphone

To the naked eye, this window looks green. My iPhone sees purple. Odd.

From iphone

Chaise on rails

From iphone

The end of the Line

From iphone

Soho... this early, you can almost imagine 1979

From iphone

Hipstamatic in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 01:48:00 +0000

I took the photos from this 7.5-mile run with my iPhone using the Hipstamatic app. The idea of the Hipstamatic is to recreate the effects of those cheap plastic film cameras—Holgas, Dianas, etc.—they sell for too much money at Urban Outfitters and museum gift shops. I used the "film" settings from the "Williamsburg Pack" add-on, so it was a good excuse to run in Williamsburg and over the bridge. The app was fun to play with. Apparently by design, it's impossible to a frame a shot accurately with it, which means the images you get are a bit of a surprise. Even just playing with Hipstamatic for a couple of hours, I can see that images like this can get old quickly. But a few cool shots came out. (I really like the one at the produce market near the end.)

The Brooklyn salt pile

From Hipstamatic

Hip gallery? Or secret Williamsburg KKK lodge?

From Hipstamatic

Broadway in Brooklyn

From Hipstamatic


Williamsburg Bridge

From Hipstamatic

Brooklyn skyline

From Hipstamatic

"Avenue of the Immigrants"

From Hipstamatic

The world's creepiest ice cream shop

From Hipstamatic

Produce market, Manhattan Bridge anchorage

From Hipstamatic

Chinatown

From Hipstamatic

Manhattan Bridge

From Hipstamatic

To Blackwell's Welfare Roosevelt Island

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 18:19:00 +0000

Here's slightly old run I've been late in posting: A Memorial Day weekend 9-miler from Brooklyn to Roosevelt Island.

Roosevelt Island is... strange. It looks less like part of New York City than a worker's housing district in one of the richer European social democracies. Which considering the community's birth during the Lindsay administration was probably not far from the desired effect. The first apartments on the island opened up in 1975; many of the units were part of the Mitchell-Lama affordable housing scheme. Roosevelt Island is part of Manhattan, but you can only get to the rest of the borough via the subway or an aerial tram suspended over the East River. To cross to the island on foot, you have to come in through Queens, via the parking garage.

R.I. has just one street—Main Street, natch—laid out according to a master plan by John Burgee and Philip Johnson. The street is closed to most traffic other than buses.

Before it became one of the last strongholds of the middle class in Manhattan, Roosevelt as known as Welfare Island and Blackwell's Island. It was home to "The Alcatraz of New York", a work house, hospitals—including a smallpox quarantine—and the octagonal Lunatic Asylum, now part of a luxury rental complex that went up at the tail-end of the bubble. The current website of The Octagon sells the historic character of the place with sweet euphemism, saying it opened in 1841 as an "island retreat," which was visited by Charles Dickens, who remarked on its lovely staircase. They skip this part of Dickens' American Notes: "The moping idiot, cowering down with long dishevelled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror." 1 & 2 Bedroom Rentals Available Now! As low as $2200/Month!

From roosevelt

South Williamsburg

From roosevelt

Art-to-go on Bedford Ave.

From roosevelt

Automotive High School, for manly men

From roosevelt

Greenpoint Rococo

From roosevelt

Another sad ghost bike, this one for Liz Byrne, 44

From roosevelt

Crossing Pulaski Bridge to Long Island City, Queens

From roosevelt

Not an especially interesting building, except that I got
married in it.

From roosevelt

An allée of London planes alongside the Queensbridge projects

From roosevelt

The Queensboro, a.k.a. 59th Street, Bridge.

From roosevelt

The giant "Big Allis" power plant

From roosevelt

Roosevelt Island Bridge

From roosevelt

The door to the Island

From roosevelt

Descending

From roosevelt

Exit on Main Street

From roosevelt

The old asylum—I mean, island retreat

From roosevelt

The lighthouse

From roosevelt

Lazy fishermen

From roosevelt

The campus of The Rockefeller University looms over the FDR—
nearby, yet hidden, Hogwarts-like, from the view of most New
Yorkers. But you can see it from here.

From roosevelt

Good Shepard is Espiscopal, but the island's Catholic parish uses
it for masses, too.

From roosevelt

Some new boom-era buildings

From roosevelt

Blackwell House, one of the island's first buildings

From roosevelt

An old trolley kiosk that used to be on the 59th Street Bridge
above

From roosevelt

The tram is down for renovation

From roosevelt

Coler Hospital, one of two long-term care hospitals on the island,
a reminder of its institutional legacy.

Using summer as a verb: Photojogblog goes to Friendship, ME

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:40:00 +0000

My runs on Bradford (top), Davis
and Martin points

I spent last week in this little lobstering village in Midcoast Maine. Friendship is spread out along four points along the coast: Bradford, Davis, Martin, and Wadsworth. I managed to run the first three of three of them (right) this year. Last summer, when I was in better shape, I did three points in one run. I had vowed to do all four this year, a run of roughly 18 or 19 miles. Nope.

Friendship's main claim to fame is the Friendship sloop, a small sail boat that was favored by New England's commercial fishers. The town has long had a sizable summer community—John Cheever vacationed here—and second homes dominate the coastline, but it still has a busy working waterfront. By all accounts, the lobstermen of Friendship have been having a tough time lately: Notice all the hot new lobster-roll restaurants in New York? They're a pretty much direct result of a crash in Maine lobster prices.

Lobstering is a territorial business. As Colin Woodard explains in his terrific book The Lobster Coast, local lobster gangs—that's what they're called— have a lot of, shall we say, informal ways of defending their traditional bit of the water. Occasionally this has escalated in to “lobster wars.” In 1995, Friendship tried to push into the waters claimed by Monhegan Island’s lobster fleet. “Traps were cut,” writes Woodard, “and, near the end of the season, vandals sank John Murdock's Sea Hag while she sat at her mooring in Port Clyde, causing $13,000 in damage.” Fishermen were carrying guns. Since then, Maine has allowed lobsterman to participate in the official regulation of the sea bottom. But Woodard argues that the old system of traditional fishing grounds helped to defeat the tragedy of the commons and keep lobstering sustainable, even as the Gulf of Maine cod fishery collapsed.

I really can't recommend The Lobster Coast strongly enough, especially if you spend any time in coastal Maine—but also if you live in or love any place that's grappled with growth and economic dislocation (Brooklyn... Montana...) It's a popular history written by a journalist, but unlike most books of that type, it's really smart about social history and economics. Woodard shows how Maine's economy has shaped its landscape, and vice-versa. Here he makes the intriguing argument that coastal Maine, which all us folks from "away" love so much because it seems timeless and unspoiled, was really America's first Detroit:

Maine wasn't preindustrial; it had just been deindustrialized.

...Maine ice, granite, lumber, salt cod, and foodstuffs filled the docks of the United States' Atlantic ports, themselves clogged with Maine-built sailing ships. But those goods had been displaced by refrigerators and cement, by fresh fish caught by Gloucester steamships and cheap lumber and foodstuffs moved from the Midwest by the nation's railroads. Practically overnight, all of Maine's industries collapsed. As a result, the coast was losing population. The wild meadows and weather-beaten farmhouses the summer people found so picturesque had been abandoned by their owners, thousands of whom had moved to Ohio in hopes of a better life. With the offshore fishing industry in decline, residents of many coastal towns tried to build an industry around the only resource they had left: the summer people themselves.

Woodard spends a lot of time of the delicate relationship between outsiders and locals. The vacationers aren't new interlopers: They've been a big part of the economy in Maine for over a century. But the flood of new development since the 1990s has made it harder to keep the working waterfronts open, and for the people who work on the water to live anywhere near it. The Island Institute does work on these issues, including publishing this excellent newspaper I've subscribed to for the past couple of years. Good local journalism is itself activism.

On to the pictures, most of them after the jump.

Run to Davis Point

From mainephotojog

Friendship's famous sign, at the Mason Lodge

From mainephotojog

Every little town in Maine seems to have a Mason or Grange hall.

From mainephotojog

Pulled over much?

From mainephotojog

Friendship's war memorial. The names
on the benches show that this little town
has seen a lot of its young people go to war.

From mainephotojog

Archie Wallace's. The only store in town.

First view of the Friendship Harbor

From mainephotojog

Wallace's lobster wharf

The Sloop society

Boats at the town landing

Run to Martin Point

The Lobster Conservancy

From mainephotojog

Friendship Museum, a former one-room school house

From mainephotojog

Hatchet Cove

Crystal Pond

From mainephotojog

Martin Point has a bit of of a summer-camp feel

The end of Martin Point Road

Back in "downtown" Friendship

Run to Bradford Point

The road ends in the water...

From mainephotojog

...except at low tide. On the GPS map

above, it looks like I ran into the harbor.

The submerged road becomes the Carlsons' driveway.

From mainephotojog

The Carlsons' dog chased me off his island and back to

the mainland. He's no Cujo.

Lash Brothers Boatyard

A Run Through the Backwoods

From moremaine

On the big rock in the woods

From moremaine

So let him out! (At Archie Wallace's store.)

"The best public housing project ever built in New York"

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 15:25:00 +0000

That's how the AIA Guide to New York City describes the Williamsburg Houses, which were built in 1937 as a project of the Public Works Administration. The raised stainless-steel street signs on the apartments caught my eye as I passed them on this run; I didn't realize until I got home and did more research that these were the easily the most important buildings, both architecturally and historically, along the route. So I had to come back.

The Williamsburg Houses are NYCHA public housing, but they have a different history than most other city projects. They went up before the Housing Act of 1937, which among other things mandated extremely tight controls on construction costs. So the apartments were built to a higher standard than later megaprojects like Red Hook and Queensbridge. The public housing historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom writes:

Williamsburg's modernist designs offered a machine aesthetic but did not achieve industrial scale economies. The four-story walk-ups.... [were costly] because the low heights did not at that point balance out high land costs. Glazed brick stair hall exteriors, high ceilings in the apartments, wood floors, closet doors, and commodious kitchens raised expenses. Each building also had up to eight stairwells with only two apartment entrances on each landing. Williamsburg... looked cheap but was comparatively expensive.

In 2003, the Williamsburg Houses were designated a landmark, in part out of appreciation for their Modernist design. This represents another turn of the screw in intellectual fashion, I guess. If you took Intro to Architecture in college, you came away with the idea that weird European Modernist ideas about superblocks, breaking up the street grid, and "towers in the park" were almost entirely to blame for the disastrous state of American public housing and the decline of cities in general. Anybody who's ever visited Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan or Sandburg Village in Chicago—upper-middle-class communities that look just like public housing towers—knows that this story was way too simple. Still, if the Modernism works here, it's probably because the PWA avoided towers and maintained a human-friendly scale. Unfortunately, that turned out to cost quite a bit more more than Congress and local political machines were willing to pay to house low-income families.

It would be easy to wax rhapsodic about the New Deal idealism behind such an ambitious low-income housing development. (Below, a picture of one of the tenement apartments it replaced.) But the projects in New York and elsewhere were also segregated at birth: Of the original 1,650 families in Williamsburg, just one was black, writes Wendell E. Pritchett in his biography of the African-American New Dealer Robert Clifton Weaver. Another project built around the same time, in Harlem, was almost entirely black. It was considered a limited victory at the time that the Harlem project was even built, that African-Americans were able to get jobs on housing-project construction sites, and that the projects at least weren't used as an excuse to clear blacks out of neighborhoods to replace them with whites. As Pritchett observes, public housing's entanglement in racial segregation is at least as important to the story of its failure as Le Corbusier's bad ideas about architecture.

The archival pictures here are from The New Deal Network. Below are my own pictures. I'll close with a few more thoughts and links.

From Bushwick

I try not to get too heavy in these posts. This is, after all, a blog about the rather eccentric activity of jogging with a camera. And snapping the outsides of buildings while running past them affords only modest insight into the lives lived inside them. But when you explore the outer boroughs on foot, it's hard not to be aware that the vast majority of people in this city get by on extremely tight budgets, and that a lot of them live in public housing. Nationally, the failure of the projects is so well-known that even liberals rarely talk about a right to decent, affordable housing anymore. (And this in a country that massively subsidizes homeownership in the higher tax brackets.) But reading more about the Williamsburg Houses got me thinking about how little I really know about public housing, even though it has shaped both my city and my neighborhood. (I live just a couple of blocks from the Whitman Houses.) How big a failure has it really been in New York? What do we know about how it fails and how it succeeds? Here's an interview with historian Bloom, in which he makes a compelling case that the NYC projects were a relative success in providing affordable housing, and shouldn't be lumped in with what happened in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, etc. This article from the conservative City Journal paints a grimmer picture... and then sets up the argument for what sounds to me like the mother of all real-estate boondoggles. As for those Chicago projects, this short history of the Robert Taylor Homes (pdf) sheds a lot of light on why big projects so often failed, and is a reminder of a real weakness of post-war urban liberalism: When planners made an inevitable mistake—such as building too many large family apartments, which over-saturated the projects with teenagers—the sheer scale of their designs and the bureaucracy made it difficult to adjust.

There's a fledgling National Public Housing Museum in the works in Chicago, which hopefully will engage with these questions. It's said to be modeled on the excellent Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a place everyone in New York should visit at least once.

The Sixth Borough: Hudson County, NJ

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Wed, 19 May 2010 05:02:00 +0000

The cities just on the other side of the Hudson—especially Jersey City and Hoboken—are like a mirrored New York. Because Hudson County is surrounded on three sides by water (the Hudson, Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, and the Hackensack River and Meadowlands marsh), it feels almost as separate from the rest of New Jersey as Manhattan does. It's densely packed, has a skyline that would do a Cleveland or a San Jose proud, and a big-city worthy transit network, with both a new light-rail trolley and a subway (the PATH) connecting to lower Manhattan and the Village. (Click here for the interactive map of my run.) If you can ignore the arbitrary political boundaries, JC and Hoboken are almost as woven into the fabric of the city as Brooklyn and Queens across the opposite river.

But those boundaries are hard to ignore. To the average NYC snob—and I'm afraid I'm one of those—the first stop on the PATH over the river might as well be the Moon or Montclair. It's still, you know, New Jersey. Historically, there's evidence that even people who've live in Jersey City haven't had a strong sense of their hometown as a distinctive, interesting place on the map. In her memoir The Place You Love Is Gone, former Hoboken resident Melissa Holbrook Pierson writes:

In the late fifties some researchers finally went around and asked people the most important thing of all: what the places they lived in felt like. Of the three cities studied, Boston, Los Angeles, and Hoboken's twin, Jersey City, the latter was found to be peculiarly poorly differentiated or "imageable," as the study has it. Its denizens' recall of its layout was far worse than those in the other two cities: "Many descriptions of the scene by established residents, young or old, were accompanied by the ghosts of what used to be there. Changes, such as those wrought by the freeway system, have left scars on the mental image."

Much more change was to come. They knocked down the minor-league stadium where Jackie Robinson played the first integrated pro baseball game. A gated condo development stands in its place. Later, JC sprouted a slick new waterfront business district of glassy office towers and "luxury" apartments for the junior financial analysts and computer programmers who toil there. If you've been to Arlington's Pentagon City, the London Docklands, or Cambridge's Kendall Square, you've been to the JC waterfront. That's where my run started. After that, things quickly get more interesting—the city really won me over. There are blocks and blocks of Brooklynesque brownstones. The way you know you aren't in Cobble Hill is that the power and telephone lines are all overhead, and the neighborhoods are arranged around gorgeous Victorian square parks. Some buildings on the corner lots have street markers on their walls, like you see in Europe.

Then there's the former Jersey City Medical Center, a huge mass of Art Deco skyscrapers built with money from the Works Progress Administration. It was the special project of Mayor Frank Hague, a classic Democratic machine boss. According to this New Jersey City U. site, the

Medical Center provided free care to residents who couldn't pay, which must have been most of them—the hospital cost $3 million a year to run, but supposedly billed patients just $15,000 in 1929. It went bankrupt in 1988. The buildings have since been converted into loft-style condos. I think you have the whole social history of the U.S. over the last 50 years right there...

My run also took me through Journal Square, JC's real commercial hub and the heart of its large Filipino and South Asian communities. On the other side of the Holland Tunnel entrance from Jersey City is Hoboken, the funny-sounding mile-square city of Frank Sinatra, On the Waterfront, Yo La Tengo, and my favorite book when I was ten. (It occurs to me now that jogging with a camera is a very Pinkwater kind of hobby.) Since the 1980s, Hoboken has gone from working-class 'burg of cold-water tenements ("The place they forgot to clean, forgot to love, forgot," writes Pierson) to affluent urban playground. A rash of deadly arsons preceded a boom in development; it seems like it was an easy way to clear out low-rent tenants. Today, Hoboken is certainly beautiful—compact, walkable from end to end, packed with old brick townhouses—but it also makes Park Slope seem diverse and edgy. The city has a W hotel now. And a Five Guys. All it needs now is an NYU dorm. As Pierson writes about Hoboken's '80s transformation: "Hoboken was not changing so much as being eradicated. They kept only the name the same."

Like I said, it's really just another part of New York.

Now on to the pictures, most of them after the jump:

From jersey

Starting at the waterfront

From jersey

The Hudson Bergen Light Rail

From jersey

This powerhouse once ran railroads

From jersey

Parking lot cricket

From jersey

An old fire house

From jersey

Entering the Van Vorst Park neighborhood

From jersey

Van Vorst Park

From jersey

Jersey City Medical Center

From jersey

Saint Peter's College

From jersey

A bell tower...

From jersey

...on a movie palace.

From jersey

Journal Square

From jersey

JC skyline and a PATH train

From jersey

Newkirk House: The marker says this was built in 1690.

I'm guessing the stucco came later.

From jersey

Where to buy a tombstone

From jersey

Jersey City & Harismus Cemetery

From jersey

A railroad trestle's remains

From jersey

On the way into Harismus Cove

From jersey

Check out the classic street markers

From jersey

The empty trestle divides Harsmus Cove from

Hamilton Park

From jersey

In Hamilton Park

From jersey

JC's French Quarter?

From jersey

The first hotel outside of New York

From jersey

NYC's golden door. Admission: $8

From jersey

In Hoboken: Hudson County Homing Pigeon Club

From jersey

Hoboken horah

From jersey

A new playground on its own island

From jersey

WWII Memorial

From jersey

View from the Hoboken

From jersey

I don't think Frank played soccer.

From jersey

Stairs up the cliff to Stevens Tech

From jersey

Stevens Institute of Technology

From jersey

View from the campus

From jersey

Does this frat house really have its own

obeservatory?

From jersey

Columbus Park

From jersey

New Hoboken

From jersey

The light rail station--where I stopped running

From jersey

Elevator to Jersey City Heights

From jersey

On board

From jersey

Looking toward lower Manhattan

From jersey

Walking back toward JC

From jersey

The corporate city

From jersey

I parked around here somewhere...

Industrial Brooklyn: The Eastern District and English Kills

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 03:31:00 +0000

In 1854, the City of Brooklyn annexed the City of Williamsburgh (still with the mysteriously lost "h" then) and the Town of Bushwick. These areas became Brooklyn's Eastern District.

Which is confusing. The old Eastern District is the far northern tip of the modern borough, and is now generally referred to as North Brooklyn. I usually think I'm headed straight north when I go from my home in Fort Greene up to Williamsburg, but as you can see from the map, that isn't quite accurate--it's the same kind of schematization of a mental map that, as Tom Vanderbilt explained recently in Slate, causes people to think San Diego is west of Reno. Most Brooklynites are hopeless about cardinal directions. Unlike, say, Manhattan or Chicago, the street grid doesn't help--because so many neighborhoods were once their own city or village, Brooklyn has multiple grids that crash together at weird angles. People also tend to orient themselves to Manhattan, and the Williamsburg Bridge is "uptown" of the Brooklyn Bridge, even though it's at least as geographically accurate to say that it's to the east. If you can wrap your head around that fact, you've gone a long way toward your black belt in Not Getting Lost In Brooklyn.

This run was a couple of months ago, during the lashing rain storm that brought down so many old trees in the New York area. (You can see my interactive MapMyRun map here.) Fortunately, there weren't many trees on my route, because this run took me through the industrial heart of the Eastern District. I had wanted to check out two things. First, I had been vaguely aware that Bogart Street was turning into New York's latest artist/hipster quarter. (As a much cooler co-worker said to me later, "Were you the only guy there without a beard?" Yes.) And I wanted to see a couple of the more obscure bridges in the city, which cross the Newtown Creek and its tributary, English Kills.

As you'll guess looking at the blurred photos, I came pretty close to wrecking my camera in the rain. And I didn't notice probably the most interesting buildings on my route: the Williamsburg Houses. But I'll have more on those in my next post.

The Navy Yard waterfront

Working man's kosher

The pformer Pfizer pfacility

All Saints

Apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the miracle of the roses

Just off Bogart Street

Cafe Orwell

Bogart Street

I should have bought one of those slickers.

For the subtle and discriminating gentleman

English Kills

Metropolitan Ave. Bridge over English Kills

Grand St. Bridge over Newtown Creek, Brooklyn side

Queens side

Bridge operators shack. (The bridge can swing open.)

Back near the Navy Yard

Washington Avenue

Things One Carries While Running

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:04:00 +0000

Your blogger sometimes finds running with a camera a bit awkward.

And then there a people who run with laser-sighted pistols loaded with hollow-point bullets.

From the AP:

AUSTIN -- Pistol-packing Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a message for wily coyotes out there: Don't mess with my dog.
Perry (R) told the Associated Press on Tuesday that he needed just one shot from the laser-sighted pistol he sometimes carries while jogging to take down a coyote that menaced his puppy during a February run near Austin.
Perry said he carries his .380 Ruger -- loaded with hollow-point bullets -- when jogging on trails because he is afraid of snakes. But when a coyote came out of the brush toward his daughter's Labrador retriever, Perry charged.

I visited Austin a couple of years ago, and had a great run there along the river. It hadn't occurred to me that some of my fellow joggers might have been packing heat. I think I'm glad I didn't know.

A short run in Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant

noreply@blogger.com (Pat Regnier) — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 20:22:00 +0000

This blog's been quiet lately because I haven't been running much. I needed some time to recover from the marathon, and I had a big story to write for my magazine. More to come soon, but here are some shots from my first run after the big race. It was just a couple of miles near my house, and went past what's left of Broken Angel.

Ghost bike on Greene

Jaz Tattoo came to a party at my house once. A name you don't forget...

The Broken Angel

Bed-Stuy greystones; unusual for this area

Evening Star Baptist

An interesting new brownstone infill

A former "Sonntag's schule"—Sunday school