The Vigorous North

Intermission Floods

2010-03-09T16:37:00.000-05:00

Early last year I wrote a post about the sudden spikes in demand for electricity that happen nightly in Britain, when millions of Britons put on their teakettles at the conclusion of the soap opera Eastenders. A lone engineer sitting in a high-tech control room watches the program with the rest of the nation, and as soon as the credits roll, he opens the floodgates through dozens of European hydroelectric dams in order to deliver enough electricity.

It's a deluge equivalent to ten Niagara-sized waterfalls set loose for fifteen minutes every evening. On the surface, it's hard to see any connection between a cultural predilection for hot beverages, a television drama, and the ecosystems of European rivers. But it's certainly there - unfortunately, most Brits are too busy making tea to notice the hydrologic spectacle that their utility bills are paying for.

The big gold-medal hockey game between Canada and the United States provided another striking example of how a cultural phenomenon can set loose Biblical floods through the pipes of our modern infrastructure. EPCOR, the water utility in Edmonton, Alberta, recently published this chart of water consumption during the big game, which two-thirds of Canadians were watching (graph courtesy of Pat's Papers):

The scale of the y-axis is in megaliters, which means that between the final seconds of the third period and the pre-overtime intermission, water consumption spiked by 140 million liters, or 37 million US gallons - roughly the amount of water that flows over Niagara Falls in a two-minute interval. During the span of one commercial break, this water flowed from huge city reservoirs, through arteries of water mains and millions of bathroom pipe capillaries, then out through another mesh of pipes, into Edmonton's sewer system.

How's that for a natural wonder? Unfortunately, most Canadians missed the opportunity to witness it in person - they were locked in their bathrooms instead.

The working parking waterfront

2010-03-05T08:48:00.003-05:00

Kudos to reporter Tom Bell for bringing attention to the over-supply of cheap parking - on waterfront property, no less, in today's Portland Press Herald. Bell notes that "Until the middle of the last century, when Portland's waterfront was a hub of transportation and fishing activity, the piers were covered with buildings, including warehouses for grain, molasses, coal and wood."

This was the city's working waterfront heritage, which everyone wants to preserve and protect.

However, Bell goes on to observe that "Most of those buildings have been demolished over the years, and today more than three-fourths of the area that could be developed in the central waterfront zone has no buildings. Instead, there is plenty of parking."

It's got some choice quotes, including:

“We don’t have a working waterfront. We have a parking waterfront,” said Don Perkins of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute.

This is kind of a dangerous idea. Portland prides itself so much on its working waterfront - the handful of bait shacks, trawler berths, and chandleries that still remain on the city's piers. Speaking the truth - that 3/4 of the "working" waterfront is really just a big parking lot - really deflates this big source of the city's pride.

Even the hotel and convention business, which is traditionally been seen as a prime economic adversary of marine industrial uses on the city's piers, agree that the acres of empty lots are a blight on the waterfront:

More public transit is the key to eliminating parking lots on the waterfront, said Barbara Whitten, executive director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Portland. "A sea of cars," she said, "is not an attractive way to market the waterfront."

Read the full article here.

The Texting-While-Driving Solution: Park the Car, Take the Bus

2010-03-03T11:44:00.001-05:00

Clive Thompson to Texters: Park the Car, Take the Bus

Excerpt:

"Texting while driving is, in essence, a wake-up call to America. It illustrates our real, and bigger, predicament: The country is currently better suited to cars than to communication. This is completely bonkers."

Portland's Unemployed Waterfront

2010-03-01T07:03:00.003-05:00

My home city, Portland, Maine, takes great pride in its "working waterfront," and so do I. While most other cities have given over their central waterfront districts to luxury condos, hotels, and outdoor malls, Portland still reserves most of its downtown waterfront for lobster pounds, marine chandleries, and fish wholesalers.

The city has managed this by brute-force zoning laws: when the first tacky condos went up on Chandlers Wharf (pictured) in the 1980s, the city reacted quickly and viscerally to outlaw any non-marine activities on Portland's wharves. This kept rents low for the city's remaining marine businesses and let them continue doing business without fear of offending new neighbors.

But the 1980s, when kitsch like these condos and the "Dimillos Floating Restaurant" were introduced, was also the last time that the waterfront's creaking wharves attracted any real investment. Rental income from fishermen and other marine businesses alone isn't enough to maintain the docks and pilings, and after over two decades of the working waterfront protections, many piers are in dire need of repair and serious investment. Besides that, most of Maine's fisheries have collapsed, and there just aren't enough marine businesses operating anymore to fill up Portland's three-mile harborfront coastline. As a result, one gorgeous 19th-century brick warehouse has had its windows plugged with cinderblocks to be used for storage.

And on the western end of the waterfront, beyond the Casco Bay Bridge, is a mile-long stretch of waterfront that's been abandoned entirely for decades now:

A wrecked wharf and early-successional birch forest on the former Maine Central railroad yards of West Commercial Street, Portland.

This month, pier owners are lobbying the city to loosen its restrictive zoning, to make the business of operating a working waterfront a bit more feasible. Some of their suggested changes are productive: doing away with the requirement to set aside valuable waterfront real estate for parking, for instance. But others seem to be aimed at allowing hotels and other tourist catnip to replace the bait shacks and warehouses.

As many people have noted, though, the fishing piers and marine warehouses on the waterfront are a big part of what define's Portland's sense of itself - even if it isn't a huge part of the economy anymore. If those places get replaced with Hard Rock Cafe franchises and hotels, what's to distinguish our city from Baltimore or Boston or San Francisco or any other of the numerous cities that have auctioned off their historic waterfront districts to transform them into cheesy shopping malls?

The pier owners say that non-marine land uses are necessary to preserve what's left of the working waterfront. But five-star hotels and office buildings for lawyers are almost certain to drive up rents and displace what's left of the city's waterfront marine industries. The pier owners are telling us that in order to save the working waterfront, they need to kick out the working waterfront.

I'm not sure that the choice has to be such a stark distinction, between dilapidated piers and strict, industry-only zoning on the one hand, and Disneyfication on the other. On the one hand, I agree with the premise that the pier owners need their businesses to be more profitable than it is now so that they can repair their wharves and keep them from falling into the ocean. But I also agree that zoning can have a productive role in maintaining a place for struggling marine industries in the midst of development pressure from high-rent offices and hotels.

I've written here before about what I believe the solution would be: allow any kind of development on the city's waterfront wharves and piers, as long as a substantial portion of the ground level of those developments are constructed to be useful and adaptable for marine industrial tenants. Go ahead and build that hotel, on the condition that 3/4 of the ground level will be fitted out for lobster pounds and marine repair shops. The city could also dedicate a portion of new tax revenue from new developments to economic development programs for marine industries, in order to keep that ground-level space occupied.

Sure, we can make room for new development on the waterfront. But that doesn't mean we can't also preserve space for the marine industries that are already there.

This week, March 2nd and 3rd, the City will host (yet another) pair of public discussions about the working waterfront, in advance of a discussion about zoning changes. Details here.

The Curse of the Albatross

2010-02-18T18:06:00.012-05:00

Photographer Chris Jordan's images of albatross carcasses, bloated with the plastic bits that starved them to death, are easily the most disturbing testimonials of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch I have seen so far.

Images from Midway: Message from the Gyre, by Chris Jordan, via www.chrisjordan.com

These photographs remind me of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In that classic of romantic poetry, the bird first appears as a good omen for a ship bound in ice:

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came ;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit ;
The helmsman steered us through !

Images from Midway: Message from the Gyre, by Chris Jordan, via www.chrisjordan.com

But the Ancient Mariner of the title senselessly slays the bird, which brings a curse on the ship and its crew. They are tortured with thirst before a visit from a death-ship, yet the Mariner survives to suffer:

I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away ;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

The Mariner eventually makes penance. "He beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm" and "blessed them unaware." Then, "by grace of the holy Mother," he survives to tell the tale.

The parallels between Coleridge's Albatross, slain by a careless Mariner, and these modern-day Albatrosses, murdered by our plastic, are eerie. Today's Albatrosses confuse bits of plastic for nourishment and feed it to their nesting young; Coleridge's Albatross, before it died, "ate the food it ne'er had eat." Coleridge's dead Albatross curses the Mariner with "a rotting sea;" today a similar trail of death swirls throughout the Pacific Gyre.

In a new profile in SEED Magazine, Jordan identifies our culture of consumption with the appetites of the Albatrosses:

"To me, the birds look like us: filling themselves with something that is not nourishing, thinking that it is, and killing themselves in the process. Isn’t that what we’re all doing as a culture? Our spirits are dying from our overconsumption of toxic plastic crap."

So: will the same death-ship that condemned the Mariner's crew visit us as well?

Or will we find the grace to save the oceans from a trillion plastic lighters and bottle caps?

Related: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, May 2008.

Postcard from Antarctica

2010-02-15T14:40:00.004-05:00

Our friends Geoff and Cricket (a.k.a. 13 Falls) sent us a postcard a couple weeks ago... from ANTARCTICA. Here's a picture of the postmark from McMurdo Station, the American base on the continent's coast due south of New Zealand. Amazingly, it only costs 28 cents to send a piece of paper from Antarctica to my apartment - nice work, postal service.

They ought to be home by now, but it sounds like they had an amazing austral summer. They shared some great stories and photos on two blogs they started writing for the job - Geoff's Hoary Frost of Heaven and Cricket's At Least It's A Dry Cold. It's pretty easy to read both straight through in one sitting - there's so much that's incredible about their life and work on the ice, and the pictures they took. They also spent a few weeks at Byrd Station, near the middle of the continent, which Cricket describes this way: "It feels like you’re in an infinitely large white room. On sunny days, the whole ground sparkles. And I swear that the first night I slept in a tent there, I could feel the depth of the 7,000 feet of ice between me and solid ground."

Here's a photo Geoff took of their tent neighborhood at Byrd.

My other favorite highlight from their blog chronicles are the photos Cricket took of a glacial fjord, which she and some co-workers climbed after disassembling the storage floor for a giant robot (a lot of what they write about sounds like it could be the first-person domestic account of the civilian extras who keep the ice base on Hoth running before the big attack in The Empire Strikes Back). Anyway, here's one of her pictures:

Those aren't clouds among the mountaintops, they're glaciers. And what really boggles my mind is to think that New England's mountains once looked like this, as recently as 13,000 years ago.

Welcome back to North America, Geoff and Cricket. Enjoy photosynthesis.

Double Aurorae on Saturn

2010-02-12T17:08:00.005-05:00

The planet Saturn takes thirty Earth-years to orbit the sun, which means that its equinoxes happen only once every fifteen years. One of those equinoxes happened last September, and astronomers took the opportunity to focus the Hubble telescope on the planet to photograph it with both poles visible at once, and equally illuminated by the sun. The result is this image, which shows two simultaneous aurorae (!) on the poles of the distant gas giant:

Hubble captured a series of images like this one to assemble a short film of the aurorae, which are helping scientists to better understand Saturn's magnetic fields. "Given the rarity of such an event," comments ScienceDaily, "this new footage will likely be the last and best equinox movie that Hubble captures of our planetary neighbour."

The Wasted Spaces of Bureaucratic Amnesia

2010-02-05T15:09:00.008-05:00

Since writing my last post about the opportunities of empty lots in our city, I've come across a couple of other articles on the subject. Funny how this idea is cropping up different places simultaneously.

Although I've been thinking about this for a while, this article by the editor of Governing magazine is what motivated me to finally write about it. The article suggests trying lots of different, temporary uses for the nation's proliferating empty and abandoned lots, in a sort of urban laboratory. But the most striking part of the piece was this sentence: "The typical large city has 15 percent of its land sitting vacant or abandoned, according to the National Vacant Properties Campaign."

This is nuts - especially when we consider that most large cities also have real estate that sells for millions of dollars an acre. This is a clear indication that we have some serious market failures interfering with things. All this land could be used for jobs, or housing, or parks. But as long as they lie fallow, our cities are going to suffer from more income disparity, crime, homelessness, budget cuts, unemployment, and environmental problems than necessary.

I found the Governing article via a Twitter post from thisbigcity.net, a newish urban-issues blog from London that looks very promising. If you enjoy The Vigorous North, you should check it out.

Finally, the same day I published my post, the excellent Opinionator blog on NYTimes.com ran a similar post from architectural critic Alison Arieff. Her piece, "Space: It's Still A Frontier," talks about how Geographic Information Systems are giving cities new tools for identifying and inventorying the empty lots and in-between spaces that have been filed away and forgotten in the bureaucratic purgatory of City Halls. She writes:

"Neglected at the local level because they neither provide nor generate revenue, these sites are markers of larger patterns of neglect (much as we’re seeing with homes abandoned to foreclosure). In San Francisco, they often outline the shape of entire, mostly lower income neighborhoods like Hunter’s Point, Bayview and the Outer Mission. Abandoned by traditional development, such areas are precisely those in need of ecological and social attention."

Arieff also profiles an architecture school project in Berkeley called "Local Code," which has culled forgotten places from a San Francisco city database and proposes "a systemic re-greening of leftover pavement space on a large scale."

Empty lots in San Francisco, courtesy of Nicholas de Monchaux. Via the New York Times Opinionator blog.

The professor leading this project, Nicholas de Monchaux, and his students found 1,625 distinct sites throughout San Francisco - various overgrown lots and informal parking lots with "a combined surface area of more than half of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park."

This in a city that might have the nation's most acute need for affordable and middle-class housing - unbelievable.

De Monchaux repeated the exercise in other big cities:

“When we examined all the leftover spaces in San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Minneapolis — we found the same thing to be true in every city,” de Monchaux says. “You had a whole archipelago of city-owned lots lying fallow. In New York they add up to the size of Central Park and Prospect Park together. It’s a massive untapped resource that’s impossible to visualize without these contemporary tools.”

Granted, these empty and forgotten spaces can be really interesting as they are, as tiny refuges for urban wildlife and inner-city forest succession. That doesn't mean they couldn't be improved, though, and put to a better use while also enhancing their value as inner-city habitat - even if we redevelop some of them for new housing or space for businesses, which are critical components of urban habitat in their own right. De Monchaux's project actually calls for transforming San Francisco's forgotten lots into neighborhood-scale environmental infrastructure: small greenspaces designed to capture stormwater, clean the air, and reduce the heat-island effect.

As much as I love visiting abandoned places like these, I'm discouraged at the staggering scale of their proliferation. The fact that we've forgotten 15% of the landscapes in which billions of us live and work every day testifies to a general attitude of environmental neglect in our cities. Environmentalism calls for us to embrace a sense of stewardship and responsibility for our landscapes; these places owe their existence to a complete absence of stewardship or responsibility. It's the polar opposite of Aldo Leopold's land ethic.

We need to do better.

Cities aren't wasting money, they're wasting space.

2010-02-03T21:44:00.005-05:00

Portland, like most governments in America these days, is in the middle of a big budget shortfall. They're cutting school programs, raising bus fares, and laying off social workers. The city's main source of revenue is a 1.8% property tax, which is already high by Maine standards - the city can't raise it much further without sending more development and investment into the suburbs, and sending more homeowners into foreclosure.

On the face of it, it looks pretty hopeless. But in fact, City Hall has millions of dollars in costs that, out of pure neglect, it's been hiding off of its balance sheets. They're not in the schools, or in homeless shelters.

They're the opportunity costs of the city's acres of parking lots.

Here's an example - the East End School has a half-acre off-street lot on North Street. It's got gorgeous views of Back Cove and Casco Bay, it's across the street from the community gardens, it's a desirable neighborhood - and we're using this space only 15% of the time, for private vehicle storage during school days. This is self-evidently stupid, isn't it? And yet, there it is.

What if, instead, we made those few drivers park in the abundant on-street spaces on North Street and the Eastern Promenade (or walk, or take the bus), then sold this half-acre on the open market, no strings attached? Even in this economy, such a desirable location would fetch a lot of money - probably at least $400,000, which happens to be roughly 5% of the school system's budget shortfall this year.

And that's not all. If this half-acre of hilltop land goes to the private sector, it's all but certain that some developer will want to build something there. Most likely it would be homes, which is something our city needs more of. Let's assume they build 8 townhomes for $210,000 each. Then the city will collect 1.8% every year in property taxes - or about $30,000 in new revenue total. That's enough to cover the entire East End School's annual supplies budget.

And another thing: if we sell a pointless parking lot on the open market, the East End School will save a few thousand dollars every year in avoided pavement maintenance and plowing costs. It would become somebody else's problem, instead of the taxpayers'.

What do you think would make the teachers at the East End School happier? Having very convenient off-street parking, or having their jobs and a reasonable number of kids in their classes?

This is just one single parking lot. There's also Reiche School's 1/4 acre parking lot on Brackett Street in the West End, the 1/2 acre of parking at the corner of Stevens and Pleasant Ave (the very center of Deering Center), and the huge 6 acre front lawn of the PACTS school on Allen Avenue. Selling all this land could recoup 1/3rd of the school budget cuts this year, and start generating new property taxes immediately for future years, and trim the school system's property maintenance costs.

And that's just the school system. The public Housing Authority is hoarding acres of parking lots in the West End and East Bayside. Redeveloping those lots wouldn't just mend the budget, it would also start to mend those neighborhoods' ugly scars of urban renewal, by providing new homeownership opportunities and a measure of economic diversity.

But the biggest opportunity is the city's parking management itself. By charging below-market rates for parking on the city's streets and in its garages, the tiny little Parking office might rank as one of the most expensive in City Hall: it's hiding tens of millions of dollars from the city's balance sheets, from unaccounted parking subsidies to lost tax revenues. Our city's parking manager could have worked for Bernie Madoff.

So, I ask you again: what's more important? Solvent schools, a social safety net, and decent public services, funded by the development of new housing opportunities?

Or free parking?

After-Work Safari: The Presumpscot River

2010-02-02T14:07:00.005-05:00

For the last few weeks, a bald eagle has been hanging around the Presumpscot River estuary, on the border between Falmouth and Portland. The other evening, on my way home from work, I managed to take a couple of lousy photos of it as it flew upriver:

I swear it's an actual eagle, and not an eagle-shaped smudge on my point-and-shoot camera lens. It was more impressive in person, maybe you had to be there. Hopefully this picture can at least convey that bald eagles are very large birds.

In spite of its surroundings (a freeway on one shore, and Falmouth's sprawl of over-fertilized trophy lawns on the other), this tidal basin attracts a lot of wildlife. The Route One bridge from which I snapped this photo is an excellent spot to see critters, fish for stripers in the summertime, or watch the shipping traffic in the harbor. And it's only fifteen minutes by bike from downtown Portland, which makes it an excellent after-work safari destination.

Ski Your City!

2010-01-29T14:08:00.008-05:00

Last week, most of Maine got a soaking 3 inches of rain, which washed away most of the season's snow. It was a sad day.

But as I write this, an unlikely alliance of scaffolders, public works employees, and snowmaking crews from the Sunday River ski resort in western Maine are converging in Monument Square, the center of downtown Portland, to put together an artificial ski hill and cover it in snow. Tonight, hotshot skiers and snowboarders will spend the evening running dozens of loops up the scaffold's stairs, down the short hill and its stunt-rails, and up the stairs again. Here's a video of last year's event:

Admittedly, the main intention of this is to get the kids to drink more Red Bull and surrender $60 for a day's lift ticket at the big ski resorts that are sponsoring this. Still: a temporary ski-slope installation in the central public space of your city's downtown is pretty cool. They've brought the mountains to the people.

It also reminds me of a proposal to redevelop Berlin's Templehof airfield as a giant mountain, girdled at its base by the Nazi-era terminal building. It wasn't a serious proposal, but it was meant to inspire more creative and interesting ideas for redevelopment beyond the typical mix of apartments, parks, and office buildings:

Templehof Mountain, by Jakob Tigges and Malte Kloes, via Der Spiegel

And it also reminds me of the mid-century craze for winter carnivals, with the massive ski-jump constructions they brought to the nation's big stadia. Pruned posted a good compendium of those historic photos last year - my favorite might be this one from Dodger Stadium:

Ski jump in Dodger Stadium, 1963. Photo by Tom Courtney, via Pruned.

Note the palm trees in the photo. Skiing in Los Angeles required both architectural and meteorological interventions.

Historically, skiing has always served to open up new ways of crossing the landscape in the winter. Before it became a "sport," it was a mode of transportation for Swedish postal carriers, soldiers in Italy, and Ernest Hemingway. It wasn't until the sport was commercialized and commodified after World War Two that skiing became limited to something that you primarily did downhill, on mountains with elaborate and expensive cable lifts.

Why should it be that way, though? The ski slope in Monument Square doesn't particularly make me want to drive 2 hours to the ski resorts. Instead, I look up at the even taller buildings that surround the Square and think about what it would take to ski down the four-story terraces on the office building at One City Center.

Two or three times a year, there are snowstorms big enough to overwhelm plowing crews downtown, and it actually is possible to ski through the streets. And in back alleys, snowdrifts pile up and open up new, otherwise inaccessible shortcuts between buildings.

Skiing in the city can be, like skateboading or parkour, a radical act to rearrange our understanding of and relationships with the urban environment. As such, we should probably expect these attempts to commercialize and control it, but that doesn't mean we have to buy it. Skiing in the city is free - and fun.

A Walk to Wachusett

2010-01-27T19:40:00.004-05:00

In 1842, a 25-year-old Henry David Thoreau walked from his home in the town of Concord, Massachusetts to the summit of Wachusett Mountain, 34 miles away. It's a small mountain, barely cracking 2,000 feet in height, and today it's best known for hosting a ski area where one can take a few runs on winter evenings after getting off of work in Boston.

When he got back to Concord, he wrote this:

"And now that we have returned to the desultory life of the plain, let us endeavor to import a little of that mountain grandeur into it. We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from it, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon."

I can't claim that I've read a lot of Thoreau's writing, but this little passage might be my favorite of what I've come across.

Wachusett isn't much of a mountain, even by New England standards - it's eroded over long eons into a round-shouldered, leafy hill. Still, what humble "mountain grandeur" this hill has clearly made an impression on Thoreau.

He's telling us two things in this passage: first, that we don't need to fly to the Himalayas to awe ourselves with big mountains - we can experience the same feelings in our own backyards, if we care to look for them.

Mount Wachusett. Photo by flickr user ornoth / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Second, he's also telling us that we can carry that inspiration with us "in every hour" - that is to say, through the humdrum routines of everyday life. If only we raised our heads to look up, we can command the "uninterrupted horizon" of a summit view.

In my personal reading of this, Thoreau is asking us to continue thinking about our connections to the natural world even in the level life of the city, and in our daily work. If we can manage that, he tells us, we'll be rewarded with a sense of perspective and humility not unlike the sense we get from a clear mountaintop view.

It's common for people and our popular culture to misinterpret Thoreau's later experiment at Walden Pond as a rebellion against civilization. Indeed, this confused reading may be responsible for - and is certainly associated with - the destructive old orthodoxy that environmentalists' activities should be focused on places where there aren't (or don't seem to be) any people - whether the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the northern Maine woods. The participants of anti-urban, white-flight environmentalism in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s tried to realize this false conception of Thoreau's experiment in back to the land movements, and the result was widespread urban sprawl along with brutal economic and racial segregation in American inner cities.

The real Thoreau wasn't at all interested in turning his back on the problems of civilization. Unlike the back-to-the-land hippies, Thoreau's time at Walden was intentionally temporary, and mixed with frequent trips back to (and engagement with) society in the busy town of Concord. Being an active, engaged member of society - whether by protesting the institution of slavery, or publishing his writings, or selling the pencils he manufactured in his family's Concord factory - was extremely important to Thoreau.

He loved mountains - even humble ones. But he didn't climb them for bragging rights, or exercise, or to fool himself that the problems of the world didn't exist. He climbed them to bring a sense of clarity and perspective into his everyday life in the valley.

And that's a perspective that I wish more mountain-climbers would embrace.

The Cosmopolitan Winters of Corvus brachyrhynchos

2010-01-20T15:13:00.007-05:00

Here in Maine, we get thousands of migrants who arrive here every summer and stake out their own tiny territories in seaside cabins or camps in the woods, turning Maine's quaint villages into far-flung suburbs of New York and Boston. And every fall, as the days get darker, they flock back south to console themselves against the cold and the dark with the social opportunities of cities.

As it happens, the common American crow does the same thing.

Around this time of year, all over the country, huge swarms of crows flock across the skies and mob the trees at city parks every afternoon and evening. Here in Portland, they seem to start around the northern end of the Eastern Promenade, then they flock over to Lincoln and Deering Oaks Parks before settling in for the night near the new Mercy Hospital buildings near the Fore River.

A few months ago I started working at Maine Audubon, and I asked the staff naturalist, Eric Hynes, what these crows were doing. He told me that, essentially, they're just socializing. While crows are fairly territorial in the summer, in the winter, when food is scarce and predators are more of a threat, they prefer the company of other crows. Thousands of other crows.

It's not all for fun: "They get together every afternoon and check each other out," said Eric. "They might say, 'hey, that guy looks fat and happy today, we'd better follow him and find out where he's getting his food.' Or, 'that one looks sick and scraggly, stay away from him.'" When it gets dark, they bed down together by the thousands to provide safety in numbers against predators.

Crows have also figured out that they're safer in cities, where their biggest nemesis, the Great Horned Owl, is less likely to venture. As a result, these wintertime social flocks tend to gravitate towards urban areas.

To see them for yourself, head out to your local city park this afternoon around 4 pm and walk towards the noise of a thousand crows cawing.

Fort Gorges, Portland, Maine

2010-01-17T09:17:00.003-05:00

Here's a post to remind us of the halcyon days of summer.

Fort Gorges (pronounced "gorgeous") is a military installation that dates to the Civil War era, when Portland's harbor was still a strategic military target. It was built more or less in the ocean on top of Hog Island Ledge. Its thick granite walls were built to withstand cannon blasts, which means that they're still in good condition to withstand the constant waves of Casco Bay.

Its construction continued during wartime, but by the time of its completion in 1865, wartime advances in artillery had already made its walls obsolete against the largest cannons. According to this history, "a modernization plan was begun in 1869, but funding was cut off in 1876, with the third level of the fort still unfinished." That third level was instead covered over in a mound of sand, to insulate the interior of the fort and its stores of gunpowder against attack. Today, that mound of sod grows wild with small trees and shrubs.

Inside the fort's walls is a large open parade ground, which is remarkably calm and quiet:

Granite staircases are still in good condition and lead up to the second and third levels, where there are dark tunnels that lead into the pitch-black powder magazines. The northern side of the fort, facing the city, houses the remnant woodwork of the officers' quarters. Walk on the rotted-out floors at your own risk.

During World War Two, the Fort was basically used as a military storage unit, and there's a concrete pad in the central field where sea-mines were allegedly stored. In 1960, the military finally decided that it had no further use for it, and they donated it to the City of Portland, which has maintained it as a public park ever since. The military cleaned out everything that wasn't nailed down or made of granite, with one exception: a large, Civil War cannon on the eastern side of the third level, which was apparently too large to move out and melt for scrap. It's still there, pointing towards the harbor, half-overgrown in grass and daisies:

The Fort is wide open to the public, but you need a boat to get there - some water taxis will take you there at high tide, or you can rent a kayak (as we did) and paddle there from the East End boat launch. It is a pretty excellent adventure.

Haliaeetus leucocephalus in the Heights

2010-01-11T22:17:00.001-05:00

Image from www.trinitywallstreet.org.

The people at the Trinity Church Cemetery and Mausoleum in Manhattan's Washington Heights snapped these photos of an American Bald Eagle, enjoying a lunch plucked from the Hudson in a tree near the cemetery offices. It's a big fish - maybe a striped bass?

This just happens to be the same cemetery where the famed naturalist John James Audubon has been buried since 1851. During most of Audubon's lifetime, bald eagles were a common sight in the ecologically-rich Hudson River estuary, which had been a teeming mixing-basin of saltwater and freshwater habitats. But by the mid-nineteenth century, sewage and industrial waste from the booming city (in an era without pollution controls) laid waste to the estuary's food chain -from the oysters near the bottom to the bald eagles at the top.

The Clean Water Act and other environmental laws of the 1960s and 1970s gave the Hudson River a chance to recover, though. Fish came back, but state and federal wildlife programs had to resort to importing eagles from Canada in order to lure the big birds of prey back to the city.

In the summer of 2006, when this blog was just getting started, I was part of the Urban Park Rangers team that maintained a bald-eagle hack site in Inwood Hill Park on the final year of a five-year program (here are some of my photos). Eagles typically wander around for a five-year adolescence before returning to nest near the place where they were raised, so it tickles me to think that this bird in the Trinity cemetery might be one that was raised in Inwood Hill Park.

Birdwatchers in New York City can look for this eagle themselves at 770 Riverside Drive, between 153rd and 155th streets.

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Portlandhenge: Winter Street

2009-12-26T19:32:00.007-05:00

These photos were taken the morning after the winter solstice - December 22nd at about 7:30 am - on Winter Street in Portland, Maine.

As you can see, the length of Portland's "Winter Street" is almost perfectly aligned with the rising sun on the winter solstice (as well as on the days immediately preceding and following).

Coincidence?

More on Portlandhenge, Manhattanhenge, and other city-henges here.

Using Bikes, and the Social Web, for Environmental Monitoring

2009-12-18T15:59:00.005-05:00

MIT's Senseable City Lab has a lot of great projects loosely organized around the idea that a proliferation of cheap sensors, hand-held electronics, and mobile networks offers people more ways to collect and interpret data about their city.

So, for instance, you can embed a cheap radio beacon into a piece of garbage and learn about your city's waste-handling practices (something that city governments rarely like to talk about publicly). The Senseable City Lab did it.

The Lab has a new project they're launching in Copenhagen now, in conjunction with the global climate ~~suicide pact~~ treaty negotiations.

Copenhageners love riding their bikes: it's the dominant mode of transportation in the city, and how 57 percent of workers and students commute. The Senseable City Lab designed a new bicycle wheel (pictured at right) that includes a small electric motor and a 3-speed internal hub, which can transform any bike into a hybrid human-powered/electric bike.

But the hub also includes a GPS unit and an array of environmental sensors that measure levels of pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides, plus temperature and weather conditions. As users ride through the city, they can share their data online with others, and offer real-time environmental transects on a daily basis.

As more users use the wheel and share their data, the city can get a bigger, more complete sense of environmental hotspots, how pollutant levels change over the course of a day, and how to better-manage pollution sources.

I want one. Imagine being able to do your environmental ground-truthing on a leisurely bike ride, or a crowd-sourced revelation of the embarrassing hotspot of volatile organic compounds (from the basement laundry) next to the luxury hotel downtown. I'm hoping these come to the mass market soon.

The Boom: Portland's Spoils of the Naughts

2009-12-16T07:48:00.003-05:00

The naughts are almost over. This was the decade of the real estate bubble, but it would be easy to assume that the bubble passed by Portland, Maine. After all, the city's skyline, as viewed from Falmouth or across the harbor in South Portland, hasn't changed much in the past 10 years.

But take a closer look, by walking along the city's main streets and through its neighborhoods, and it's clear that Portland is substantially newer and more vibrant than it was in 1999, when I graduated from Bonny Eagle High School and left for college in that other Portland. Many of the buildings are the same, but they've been refurbished and re-inhabited with households and businesses that care more about them. And elsewhere, abandoned lots and under-utilized parking spaces have given way to new housing and businesses.

The Portland peninsula has sprouted dozens of new buildings in the past decade. Here are five of my picks for the best, in no particular order (I'll post five more in a follow-up post next week):

Bayside East. Corner of Smith and Oxford Streets, East Bayside. Designed by Scott Teas, TFH Architects. Completed 2008.

While prosperity arrived in most of Portland's neighborhoods during the 2000s, East Bayside was largely left out. The neighborhood is centrally-located geographically, but it remains isolated thanks to the lousy ideas of 1960s urban renewal: a monopoly of government-owned housing and dead-end streets cut off by the wretched Franklin Arterial. It's Portland's most Detroit-like neighborhood.

Bayside East is a another affordable housing project, but unlike its older neighbors, it doesn't look like one. The south-facing patio works well as a pleasant public space for the building's residents, and the solar hot water heaters take a prominent place as a sort of awning on the top floor.

It's not at all flashy, but of all of Portland's new buildings, this one might be the most successful at integrating itself into the scale and context of Portland's central-city neighborhoods. It goes a long way towards healing East Bayside's tattered urban fabric.
280 Fore Street, by SMRT Architects. Completed 2004.

There was a time when banks invested in good, quality buildings to establish a public trust in the solidity of their institutions.

During the 2000s, though, most banks were content to put up cheap offices ringed with drive-thrus. Banks literally sought to emulate fast-food joints, both in the facile idiocy of their products and in the shittiness of their architecture. And then they collapsed.

Bangor Savings Bank wasn't immune from this impulse - they built Burger Bank franchises out on Brighton Ave. and over the bridge in South Portland's Mill Creek Strip Mall - but at least they put some effort into their downtown Portland branch and corporate offices. It's a quality building, and the curved acute angle of its northern corner adds a dynamic presence to the corner of Franklin and Fore Streets. I don't mind admitting that my admiration for the building led me to choose this bank over its competition.
490 Congress St., by Jim Sterling. Completed 2007.

Like the W.L. Blake Building addition below, this is an attractive modernist structure that fits in well with its historic surroundings on Congress Street. It's even more striking in the context of what it replaced, a pair of half-abandoned 2-story hovels that stuck out like a missing incisor in Congress Street's smile.

The wide glass windows and striking metal siding probably make this building the city's most stereotypical example of naughts architecture. It's clearly making a hard sales pitch for "loft living" - you can even buy Eames chairs and contemporary art from the ground-floor retail tenants. Still, it's a damned attractive sales pitch, and even if it's a bit cliched I much prefer this to the urban abandonment that prevailed in the latter half of the last century.
W.L. Blake Building Addition, 79 Commercial St. By David Lloyd of Archetype Architects. Completed 2001.

This was one of the first new buildings of the naughts, and it set a good precedent. The new building respects its historic neighbors on either side by adopting the same scale and massing. But it stops short of imitating their brick cladding and granite sills and lintels (unlike most other new buildings in the city, regrettably) with fine-looking building materials of our own era.

The view from inside the offices must be incredible. But the view from the street ain't bad, either.
Unity Village, Stone, Oxford, and Cumberland Streets. By Winton Scott Architects. Completed 2001.

At the beginning of this decade, the city was in the midst of a severe housing shortage, thanks to decades of pointlessly-restrictive zoning and a resulting lack of investment.

Unity Village was one of the city's first proactive efforts to turn things around. City Hall offered up three city-owned parking lots behind city hall to developer Richard Berman (disclosure: I helped build his company's website) for a new, mixed-income housing complex. Today, it's a place where the newly-homeless can live comfortably and unassumingly next to white-collar downtown office workers and immigrant families. The homes have abundant porches that mesh the private life of the households with the vibrant public life of the narrow street and a nearby playground.

If Unity Village hadn't been as successful as it is, the City could easily have slid back into the old habit of Not-In-My-Backyard zoning, which would have effectively stymied most of the other projects listed here. Instead, it helped spark the broader revitalization of Bayside. Unity Village demonstrated to Portlanders that new development - even if it brought poor people into the neighborhood - could be an improving asset for the community.

Condemned to Repeat It

2009-12-02T06:49:00.007-05:00

Jess and I spent some time in Odesa, Ukraine last month. There are a few posts I'd like to write about the visit, but for today, I'd just like to share this photo of the city's memorial to its casualties of the Afghan War.

Out of sight to the left is a black marble monument (similar to our Vietnam War memorial) engraved with hundreds of names of the dead:

The figure depicted in the statue isn't merely a Soviet soldier. It's an allegory of a weary, disillusioned superpower facing its own mortality.

So, my fellow Americans - how does it feel?

Five Minutes on the Bosphorus

2009-12-01T07:01:00.001-05:00

The Bosphorus, the narrow strait that connects the Black and Mediterranean Seas through the city of Istanbul, have been a critical shipping channel for millennia: a connection point between the historical empires of Europe and the Middle East, which in turn made Istanbul a capital of several of those empires.

Today, the strait is no longer the exclusive crossroads of global trade. But the Bosphorus is still busy, especially with container ships carrying goods to and from the busy ports of Odesa and Sevastapol in Ukraine, Novorossiysk in Russia, and Poti in Georgia. The chief exports of the latter two ports are petroleum products from the gas and oil fields of central Asia, bound for the West.

These Black Sea ports send huge tankers freighted with highly explosive compressed natural gas and oil to mingle with hundreds of fishing boats and passenger ferries carrying passengers between Istanbul's intercontinental neighborhoods. So far, somehow, there have been no major accidents.

Here's a five-minute time-lapse of the Bosphorus's shipping traffic from the middle of a weekday morning in October:

Archaeology of the Space Age

2009-11-24T17:58:00.014-05:00

In the previous century, our ancestors went to the moon.

They left Earth in antique capsules perched on top of a million pounds of explosives - the largest rockets ever built.

They navigated with wristwatches, slide-rules, and primitive computers with less processing power than a basic cellphone.

And they took pictures. America's first unmanned satellites carried chemical darkrooms on board, where film was developed, translated into radio waves, and beamed back to Earth. On the ground, the satellites' analog photographic data was stored on magnetic tapes.

And then we forgot about them.

The original data for our earliest pictures of the moon, like the one at left, were very nearly lost - the tapes were filed away, and the machines necessary to translate them into images again were discarded as government surplus.

But a few years ago, a team of technological archaeologists, working in an abandoned McDonald's restaurant, recovered the tapes and painstakingly re-constructed the antique equipment required to translate their data into images.

The Apollo-era tape-readers themselves had been saved by a former NASA planetary phtographer, Nancy Evans, who stored several of the wardrobe-sized machines in her garage for decades in the hope that someone, someday, would want to recover the photos.

It's a pretty remarkable project - as though the complete journals of Sir Walter Raleigh had been found written in an obscure Elizabethan code, and the only way to translate the treasure were by refurbishing a heavy cabinet full of derelict gears and pulleys that someone had found in a cobwebbed dungeon of the Tower of London.

Photo by jurvetson on Flickr.

The archivists are working not in a museum, but in a defunct burger joint, with the tapes piled on the floor next to the grills, and a pirate flag hanging from the window. In this headquarters of the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP), workers are rehabbing the old machinery with the goal of recovering and digitizing the old images in their original level of detail.

It's a digital archaeological expedition: recovering precious artifacts of the space age, using machines whose operations have been forgotten, in a fast-food ruin.

The Lunar Orbiter missions produced images of extremely fine detail in order to scout landing and exploration sites for the manned missions. In fact, one reason behind the restoration project is because they're still some of the most detailed images we have of the moon's surface, and NASA is interested in going back.

At the time, due to security concerns about revealing the capabilities of American satellites, the public only ever saw second-hand images - photographs of the original photographs. The LOIRP project will not only digitize these landmark images; they'll also make them available to the public for the first time in all their glory.

Above: crew sleeping quarters and tapes in the McDonald's kitchen. Each canister contains one photograph's worth of data. Photo by jurvetson on flickr.

SF Gate: Old NASA Moon Photos Released

NASA: LOIRP images

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The Skies of L.A.

2009-11-22T10:00:00.007-05:00

Last month in Houston I met the author of L.A. Places, a blog about the city's most interesting buildings, public art, hikes, and parks. It makes me want to visit southern California again.

I really liked her photos of these murals inside the public transit agency's headquarters building. They are titled "Los Angeles Circa 1879, 1910, 1950, and after 2000," respectively, by James Doolin.

"Los Angeles, Circa 1879":

"Los Angeles, Circa 1910":

Los Angeles, Circa 1950:

"Los Angeles, Circa After 2000":

What I really like about these murals is how LA's atmosphere is as much of a character as the city itself. As the city grows from a landscape of farms to a landscape of freeways, the sky above it transforms from a pristine blue to a smoggy, orange blanket of haze. The last mural - depicting the city as it is today - looks like something out of Blade Runner.

You can see more murals from LA's transit stations, and lots of other awesome things in Los Angeles, at Vanessa's blog.

Foreshadowing from 1962

2009-11-19T10:20:00.005-05:00

Grist uncovered this ironic ad for Humble Oil (motto: "Happy motoring!") in a 1962 back-issue of Life Magazine on Google Books. Incidentally, Humble was one of several companies that would merge to become ExxonMobil.

Canada's Skateways

2009-11-11T14:00:00.002-05:00

Photo by flickr user vincealongi/ / CC BY 2.0

I love winter - it's a big reason I left Houston and moved home to Maine.

But the Canadians really know how to enjoy the season. In Ottawa, for instance, the frozen Rideau Canal becomes a 5-mile long skating rink every winter. The "Rideau Canal Skateway," pictured above, extends from the campus of Carleton University south of the city center to downtown's Confederation Park, just three blocks away from Canada's Parliament Hill.

This means that Ottawans who live in the city's inner neighborhoods and work downtown are actually able to commute by ice-skates in the winter. And many of them do.

I was going to make this post exclusively about the Rideau Canal, until I found that the city of Winnipeg has copied the idea and gone one better, by opening "the world's longest skating rink" (1 mile longer than Ottawa's) on that city's frozen Assiniboine River. The Assiniboine River Trail, mapped below, is more of a skating path than a skating rink, but the idea of skating to cover long distances is the same.

Winnipeg's skating path extends from Assiniboine Park, not far from the airport in the city's western suburbs, to The Forks, where the Assiniboine meets the Red River. Along the way it passes through several city neighborhoods, and skirts past the southern boundaries of the Manitoban capitol grounds and the downtown business district.

Here's a time-lapse trip down the Assiniboine skate path from YouTube:

Writing this post makes me look forward to winter even more. So when is this good idea from the Canadians going to catch on south of the border?

Baggers

2009-11-05T06:23:00.006-05:00

PBS has recently been broadcasting a long documentary series called National Parks: America's Best Idea. I haven't seen it, but apparently one of the co-producers, a fellow named Dayton Duncan, took it upon himself to visit every one of the nation's 58 national parks as a lifelong project. This effort was chronicled in an article headlined Collect 'Em All, published in the July-August edition of the Sierra Club's magazine.

"Collect 'Em All"?

In response, Utne Reader published a good critique by its senior environmental editor, Keith Goetzman. "Park bagging," the act of collecting visits to every park, requires a lot of gasoline and a lot of vacation time, he points out, which makes it an elite and environmentally-unfriendly pursuit.

But his last point is his best one: "The “collect ’em all” mentality goes against a better, nobler impulse, which is to get to know the land intimately," he writes.

When Jess and I worked in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, we encountered hundreds of "peak baggers" trying to collect all 46 of the state's 4000-foot mountains. Most of them were total douchebags, although, for the sake of full disclosure, I have to admit that I myself climbed the 46 peaks through the course of high school. But back then, I also thought that Ayn Rand was a good writer, so there you go.

Grand Canyon National Park, from Wikimedia Commons.

Anyhow, I have lots of stories about New Hampshire peak baggers. Like the crowd of 20 people that showed up at Zealand Falls Hut one bitterly cold and windy Saturday in January, dead-set on finishing a 20-mile loop to "bag" Guyot and Bondcliff mountains with their huge newfoundland dog, Brutus.

Brutus, they told me, was going to be the first dog to "bag" the 46 peaks in the winter season. This was very important to them. I responded that there were 60 mile an hour winds above treeline, which meant that their planned itinerary would leave them exposed to negative-50 degree windchills for several miles on the ridge. "Don't be stupid," to paraphrase.

They opted to be stupid, of course. They were too late coming back to stop by the hut again, but I heard later through the grapevine that they'd had a miserable trip, and they'd come quite close to leaving a big dog's frozen corpse on the ridge.

Safety and common sense aside, what's really problematic about the baggers' attitude is how it reduces these places - mountain peaks or national parks - to petty consumption items, things to be ticked off on a list, like beanie babies.

This is entirely antithetical to environmentalism, which requires a nuanced and thoughtful understanding of the natural resources and landscapes that surround us.

The National Parks themselves are fetish objects for most environmentalists. Sure, I like them too. Their spectacular landscapes really do inspire a lot of people, including a lot of legendary environmental thinkers like John Muir.

But the National Parks are a lousy place to understand our modern society's real relationship with nature. They don't really offer any lessons about where we get our electricity, or our drinking water, or the raw materials that the Chinese use to forge our consumer goods. Instead, the National Parks offer us an unrealistic vision of the way environmentalists wish things were - a pretty backdrop without any people in it. At their worst (as when the federal army forcefully exiled native tribes like the Blackfoot from parks like Yellowstone and Glacier), the parks themselves could be thought of as costly consumption items tailor-made for "environmentalists."

Organizations like the Nature Conservancy are focused on acquiring land for the cause of environmentalism; hikers acquire mountain climbs; RVers acquire National Park passport stamps. But an environmentalist ethic that's focused on acquisition is an ethic that can not and will not address the fundamental environmental crises of our times.