St. James Avenue, Boston

Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct

Two hours southwest of Hudson, on the New York-Pennsylvania line, lies one of the most remarkable bridges found anywhere. Somehow, I hadn't heard of the Delaware Aqueduct, the oldest wire suspension bridge in the United States, until a couple months ago. It was designed by John Augustus Roebling, the engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. But as remarkable as the Brooklyn Bridge is, the Delaware Aqueduct might be more amazing.



The aqueduct carries vehicular traffic today.

The aqueduct was built in 1849 as an improvement to the earlier, 106-mile long Delaware-Hudson Canal. The privately financed canal had been completed in 1828 to carry coal from northeastern Pennsylvania to the Hudson River at Kingston, New York. Most of the coal apparently continued to New York City via the Hudson River, helping fuel the city's growth. I haven't yet grasped the canal's whole story (... e.g., why such a circuitous route to NYC?!), but apparently boat traffic on the canal originally crossed the Delaware River via the river itself. I'm guessing the canal boats were lowered via locks, floated across the river, and raised again to continue on their way. In any event, the canal traffic had to negotiate commercial timbers being floated down the river, presenting not only an inconvenience but a danger. Hence, the Delaware Aqueduct was built to carry the canal and its boats over the river.

Running an artificial waterway over a river strikes me as a pretty cool thing; doing it with a suspension structure is even cooler. And the suspension system is extraordinary, as the main cables are so low in profile as to be contained almost entirely within the height of the cross trusses. An unobservant passerby might mistake the very complex structural system for something simpler. Here's a cutaway view showing how it works:



The canal as originally designed and constructed in 1849

One of the approximately 80 cross trusses

The canal bed sat on the bottom chords of the cross trusses while the tow path sat on the top. Pictured at right is one of the cross trusses. The metal, inverted U-shaped stirrup near the lower left of the assembly was used to hang the truss from the main cable. Each stirrup was a different length to accommodate the drape of the cable.

Eventually, the commercial viability of the canal was superseded by rail. The canal was abandoned and filled, and the aqueduct was decommissioned in 1898. The aqueduct was then purchased by a local businessman who removed the canal side walls and the upper tow paths (thus exposing the cables) and installed a vehicular roadway.  He used his new bridge to transport timber from his forests in New York to the rail lines in Pennsylvania. He allowed the public to use the bridge for a fee, payable at a new toll house built on the New York side. Several generations of toll keepers lived in the house until the 1970s.


The original road conversion



The current roadway with the canal sides restored

In 1980, the bridge was purchased by the National Park Service. A full restoration was undertaken, including reinforcement of the structural system (structural loads for water are uniform, while loads from moving vehicles are dynamic, something not considered in the earlier conversion). The canal sidewalls and the upper towpaths were rebuilt. The toll house at the New York side of the bridge was made into a modest, informative museum.

The bridge doesn't get a lot of traffic. In the 45 minutes I was there, about six cars crossed. It's probably busier during vacation season. But driving and walking across it are unique experiences. The one lane roadway is tightly framed by the canal sidewalls, creating a tunnel effect for drivers. Crossing on foot, on the old tow paths, gives the pedestrian a bird's eye view of the river as well as the roadway 9 feet below. Here's a video showing what it's like to drive across the bridge.

I'm hoping to visit it again soon... perhaps via a raft ride next time.

Mission accomplished

James Morrett at Fallingwater, 1980

Don’t go to architecture school,” Jim warned. “It will ruin your mind.”

The advice was from James Morrett, my first architecture professor, who had not completed architecture school and maintained a lifelong suspicion of those who had. My memoir-essay about Jim, "The Last Word, Indeed," appears in Architecture Boston magazine's current issue on architectural education.

Roadway, Malden, New York

New York State Capitol, Albany

"To seek 'causes' of poverty... is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes."

—Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

On kitchen renovations, messiness, and economic development

About ten years ago, I received a call from a woman in the midst of a home renovation project. She and her husband were tearing down interior walls in their new house in Boston. "We're not sure how to lay things out or which walls are structural. Can you take a look?"

I knew it would be a mistake to get involved in designing a project already under construction. A successful home renovation typically requires a year of design effort before it is safe for anyone to go near a hammer. A lot of aimless "what if?" explorations have to be engaged without the pressure of making final decisions. There's a lot of practical stuff to figure out, too: budgets and building codes and building permits and which walls are holding up the roof. Homeowners who begin construction without first doing these things are digging a bigger hole than any expert will be able to dig them out of once construction has started. An architect foolish enough to step into this breach is likely making a grave professional error.
 

The late, great Jane Jacobs, who
understood the good kind of messiness

Naturally, I agreed to take a look. Perhaps I found it hard to decline because I knew the voice on the other end of the line. Elaine cut my hair every month, and I probably didn't know how to say no to someone who regularly stood over me with a sharp pair of scissors. 

I arrived at the house to meet Elaine's dust-covered husband. Except for being a little less rectangular, Tim was indistinguishable from the rest of the dust-covered house interior. He had already removed every wall except those he suspected guilty of holding up the house. They needed to go, too, and the sooner the better.

"No walls, anywhere," Tim said. "We hate clutter. We want a big open interior with lots of light and no junk."

"Where are you going to put things?" I asked. "Where will you put the mail and your coat when you come in the door? Where will your closets be?"

"No closets," he insisted. "No storage. No junk. Just open space."

"I hate junk too," I said. "But even the neatest person has some junk. Everyone needs places to put coats and boots and ski poles and the litter box and the dishes that get used twice a year. You need to figure out where those things are going to go so you can have other spaces that aren't messy. Otherwise, every piece of junk you own will be on constant display. Everywhere you look you will see clutter. That pristine dining room table you're envisioning is going to be covered with magazines and mail. You are on a course to realizing the exact opposite of your goal."

If it's difficult to say no to a woman holding a pair of scissors, it's impossible to reason with a man holding a sledgehammer. Tim would hear none of it, and he was looking ever more longingly at the wall dividing the dining room from the kitchen. I realized that the more emphatically I argued, the less likely I was to convince him of his error, and the greater the chance of having the second floor crash down on my head. I wished Tim well and left, and shortly thereafter began looking for someone else to cut my hair.

I tell this story because of a larger lesson: A viable vision for any physical place, whether a kitchen, home, neighborhood, or city, has to incorporate and even celebrate the reality that life is inherently messy. Not all of life perhaps, but certainly some or even most parts of it. Life is full of change, invention, reinvention, false starts, unrealized what-ifs, dead ends, failures, losses, misunderstandings, and occasional successes, many of which do not last.

Here in Hudson, where so many are engaged in the arts, it is generally understood that creativity requires a willingness to indulge messiness. Even a modest blog post requires a writer to write down, sort through, and rework a lot of random thoughts, go-nowhere sentences, ugly irrelevancies, and rough drafts before there is any chance of a reasonably polished piece emerging. It is a foolish, self-destructive writer or artist who shuns the mess and attempts to deal only with fully formed ideas.

Likewise, the city planning process has to indulge a lot messiness before any clarity starts to emerge. But there is a crucial difference, and this does not seem to be well understood: the process of creating a city, unlike a literary or visual work, is never finished. The messiness of the creative process is always present in the urban realm, because the urban realm is a living artifact of life itself. People grow, change, get married, have kids, invent things, encounter rising and declining fortunes, and die. They move away and others arrive with different ideas. New products and technologies are invented to replace old ones. Government administrators and highway builders and others enact new visions before the old visions can be realized. Meanwhile, weather, fires, accidents, and other forces erode the built environment.

Interesting, truly alive cities and city districts are always messy in at least some regard. Something is always changing. No district is ever physically perfect or wholly restored or orderly twenty-four hours a day. It is a wise urban vision that allows, accommodates, and even celebrates messiness.

This frightens some Hudsonians. Some envision a future Hudson that is very clean and genteel, and they seem unwilling to make room for the messier aspects of a fully alive urban place. I touched on this point in a blog post a month ago, when I addressed what I and some other Hudsonians perceive to be an anti-industry sentiment among some members of our community. One or two commenters said my claim could not possibly be true; certainly all Hudsonians would be pleased to have industrial activity filling our empty industrial buildings. Surely, I was told, the widespread pleasure over the arrival of Etsy to the Cannonball Factory was evidence of this.

This is precisely where the problem lies: in the mistaken notion that a viable economic development model is mess-free, and that an economy can be built upon a clean-hands practice of having businesses that originated elsewhere fill Hudson's empty buildings. According to this model, Hudson does not need to make conceptual or physical space for the ad-hoc, root-level, messy creative processes that bring fledgling enterprises into the world in the first place. We don't have to allow homely little business endeavors to be tried out in the buildings on our back alleys. We don't have to consider a model of zoning that would allow a State Street resident of limited means to sell dresses or pedal calzones or run a repair service out of her house. No indeed, one city alderman recently explained to me. "We can't have that! Someone might complain!"

Hudsonians—even those who disagree about almost everything else—seem to almost universally agree that it would be best for Hudson if the majority of our businesses were created, owned, and run by Hudsonians. So why do we have in place a development model whose essential structure is built upon the attracting of businesses? Why does this model essentially insist that the people who are already already here create little to nothing? Why do we define economic growth as something that arrives from beyond?

Let me be clear: I am not saying Etsy shouldn't be here. That is not my point or my belief. What I am saying is that the model that brought Etsy here is not a sustainable one. It is not in any way a creative model, even though some allow the fact that Etsy deals in artistic goods to cloud the underlying fact that the economic development model behind its arrival is non-creative. Frankly, I wonder how it can be considered a development model at all, when it amounts to nothing more than cherrypicking the fruits of a development process that took place somewhere else.

The great, unrecognized poison of American economic development today is the ubiquitous notion that localities need to "attract businesses." At some level, the notion is absurd. As E. F. Schumacher once noted, "We did not start development by obtaining foreign exchange from Mars or from the moon. Mankind is a closed society." [Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered] Yet the belief that economic growth necessarily comes from without drives the mission statement of the nonprofit Hudson Development Corporation: "[We] promote and assist current businesses and provide opportunities and assistance to attract new businesses." Ditto for the Columbia-Hudson Partnership: "We act as a facilitator... for businesses seeking to expand their current operations in the county, or locate new facilities here." Neither mission statement acknowledges the genesis of new businesses; they allow only for the growth and attraction of existing businesses. To wander a bit farther afield for a moment, New York City's Director of Planning, in the first paragraph of her website statement, writes, "I welcome the opportunity to plan and develop places in which people will love to live and work—the vibrant places that will attract and hold creative talent." How poisoned our development well must be when the planner for a city of more than 8 million people thinks it essential to attract anyone at all.

Like every city, Hudson has talents and ideas and manpower within its borders, but we are forbidding them to flourish. "Cities," the late Jane Jacobs wrote in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, "have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." Why are we unwilling to build from within, allowing everybody to create? Why are we not willing to develop our own resources? Why aren't we encouraging the messy stab at new businesses instead of outlawing them? To seek economic development by attracting fully formed businesses is to sell your own people short. It is to tell them—even if you say otherwise—that you don't want them to be productive, involved members of the local culture. It is to tell them you don't want the mess that comes from seeing them live creatively. It is, in essence, to order the twenty-somethings out of your community until their ideas are fully formed. Then, and only then, are they welcome to come back.

To close with a somewhat finer point: not all messiness is of equal value. Not all messiness is constructive. The point is not that messiness is inherently good, but that messiness in life and in cities cannot be escaped. One can choose either the good messiness that is part and parcel to the creative process, or the bad messiness that comes from prohibiting creative endeavor. In other words, we can have either a messy Columbia Street or State Street that results from its residents becoming creative, self-directed entrepreneurs, or we can have the kind of messiness that blights a neighborhood and destroys its buildings when its residents aren't able to generate wealth for themselves. Wouldn't you rather have the good kind of mess than the bad kind we now have?

300 block of Columbia buildout

Keeping the county in the city: a closer look at Site #5

Here's a somewhat closer look at a potential buildout for county offices in the 300 block of Columbia Street (Site #5 on my recent post.). This is a particularly prominent and complex site with significant design challenges. It consists of two parcels bisected by Columbia street. The southern parcel lies adjacent to the PARC Foundation pedestrian way and is quite visible from Warren Street. Any building constructed here would have to bear significant civic weight, as it would lie on axis with City Hall Place and the Opera House.

The northern parcel also abuts the "PARCway," although it appears that the park has not been fully developed at this location. The parcel is somewhat less prominent than its southern companion, but also presents significant design challenges. The grade on the back/alley side is two stories higher than Columbia street, which would make it difficult to get adequate daylight into a building interior. This, combined with the possibility of using the sloping grade to conceal part of the building mass, suggests it might be more suited to a parking garage. However, this would still introduce a scale problem vis-à-vis the handful of wood frame houses nearby.

This exercise, however, is charged with the simpler task of determining if the site offers adequate space for a new Columbia County headquarters. Given that it is located adjacent to an existing 30,000 s.f. county building, it has a bit of a head start on the 100,000 s.f. target. However, with a garage on the northern parcel and a 3-story office building to the south, the scheme falls about 25,000 s.f. short. A 4-story building might produce enough space but almost certainly would be too massive. An alternative would be to build an additional office building on the northern parcel (assuming the daylighting problem could be solved), and to site a garage somewhere nearby.

I wouldn't rule this site out for county offices, but given its complexity, it can be properly analyzed only in context with other nearby sites and other city development needs. Its civic visibility and size might make it more suited to a police station or courthouse than to county administration. Too, there has been talk of creating separate senior housing when the Bliss public housing project is redeveloped. Perhaps one of these parcels would prove suitable.