Man Made Lake

Doors of New York

South Williamsburg, Brooklyn | Hamilton Heights, Manhattan
Prospect Heights, Brooklyn | India Square, Jersey City

San Ysidro

      Imagine a large metropolitan area, say five million people, physically split in two by a river or a mountain or any other physical barrier, the two sides connected by a single crossing.  Now take into account that this crossing doesn't just link the two sides of the metropolitan area but is also a critical segment of a vast transportation network that links people and places far beyond the limits of the local region. 

      Finally, consider that this physical barrier separates not just two sides of a region but two nations, one vastly wealthy and one tremendously poor, and you have the perfect recipe for a memorably chaotic bottleneck.

      While large flows stream into Tijuana unfettered, an endless queue of cars and pedestrians await their turn to convince American border patrolmen to let them in.  Some are San Diegans and other American tourists who made a day trip to TJ to buy cheap drugs and get drunk.  Some have traveled all the way from Chiapas and points south to risk their lives jumping the fence.  But many, if not most, are Tijuanitos who commute through the border madness everyday to jobs in San Diego.  For them it's about as exotic as a Starbucks drive-thru.

Greetings from Philadelphia

    Philadelphia is the quintessential American city.  Forget New York.  It's too educated, too rich, too diverse, too pompous.  In New York, people of all colors and tax brackets take public transit into a vastly wealthy inner city.  There's nothing American about that.

    In Philly, the city is poor and black and the outskirts and suburbs are white and rich.  SEPTA, the city's transit agency, is constantly fighting bankruptcy.  Junk food dominates the local cuisine, city government is notoriously corrupt and shiftless, and, occasionally, people actually look you in the eye and smile.

Street Art in TJ

At the entrance to a pedestrian overpass for the Tijuana River Canal.

San Francisco's Market Street Tunnel

    As I've become increasingly acclimated to the New York City Subway's abandoned factory aesthetic of bare I-beams and rotting tilework I've almost forgotten how a rapid transit agency can actually invest in their appearance.

    Imagine my surprise when I boarded a Bay Area Rapid Transit train at sparkling SFO. I used the BART system extensively in my youth but, like everybody else in the Bay Area, I never had anything to offer but [mostly unwarranted] complaints. While the suburban stations are generally nothing more than long slabs of concrete, the urban stations, particularly under Market Street in San Francisco and Broadway in Oakland, have a distinctly space age feel to them, so much so that a few scenes from THX 1138 were filmed in them while still under construction.

Cast-Iron SoHo

    Prior to setting the standard for gentrifying warehouse districts and achieving unmatched name recognition, SoHo was known as the Cast Iron District.

From Wikipedia:
    "SoHo boasts the greatest collection of cast iron structures in the world. Approximately 250 cast iron buildings stand in New York City and the majority of them are in SoHo. Cast iron was initially used as a decorative front over a pre-existing building. With the addition of modern, decorative facades, older industrial buildings were able to attract new commercial clients. Most of these facades were constructed during the period from 1840 to 1880. In addition to revitalizing older structures, buildings in SoHo were later designed to feature the cast iron.

    "An American architectural innovation, cast iron was cheaper to use for facades than materials such as stone or brick. Molds of ornamentation, prefabricated in foundries, were used interchangeably for many buildings, and a broken piece could be easily recast. The buildings could be erected quickly, some were built in only four months' time. Despite the brief construction period, the quality of the cast iron designs was not sacrificed. Previously, bronze had been the metal most frequently used for architectural detail. Architects now found that the relatively inexpensive cast iron could form the most intricately designed patterns. Classical French and Italian architectural designs were often used as models for these facades. And because stone was the material associated with architectural masterpieces, cast iron, painted in neutral tints such as beige, was used to simulate stone."

    In the late 1960's the powers that were wanted to ram the Lower Manhattan Expressway ("LoMEX") through the neighborhood, among others, and bulldoze the majority of the building stock.  A now infamous opposition movement stopped the expressway from being built, in part because preservationists argued that the areas cast-iron buildings held architectural significance.

    I find a certain irony in the preservation of SoHo's cast-iron architecture.  The original appeal was the ability to cheaply imitate older styles.  The facades were made of metal, but painted to look like stone.  Now these "fake-old" structures are themselves deemed historic.  How long do I have to wait before the vinyl siding and aluminum awnings in my neighborhood become bohemian?

    Regardless, the throngs of locals and tourists alike who flock to SoHo's flagship stores and overpriced restaurants don't even realize that they are surrounded by anything but pretty buildings.

Tijuana Streetscapes

    King of the border towns, TJ constitutes 2 of the 5 million bodies in the greater San Diego-Tijuana area.  Tijuanitos go to San Diego for service jobs and shopping malls.  San Diegans go to Tijuana for underage drinking, discount surgery, and wholesale pharmaceuticals.

bear with me...

Posting is slow since I'm in California on vacation for a week.  Bear with me.

SFO

Adams Point, Oakland

Stockton Street Tunnel, San Francisco

Tremont, the Bronx

    I've noticed a consistent hierarchy of the boroughs, both in conversation and in writing.  Manhattan is, of course, Manhattan.  Brooklyn is typically associated with brownstones and pre-WWII ethnic enclaves, however false they may be, not to mention recent gentrification across a rash of neighborhoods.  It was also a functioning independent city for a time, earning it a distinct downtown, intense pride, and the rank of borough #2. 

    Queens is by and large considered a significant drop from Brooklyn.  A smattering of townships and unincorporated neighborhoods upon being annexed into the city, Queens is essentially a postwar-borough, largely an early, ugly attempt at suburbia.  A handful of attractive gentrifying neighborhoods, easy subway access to midtown and the heart of New York's "melting pot" keep it a step above the remaining boroughs.

    Staten Island and the Bronx, for their own reasons, tie for last. 

    Staten Island was mostly rural before the Federal Highway Act.  Aside from a handful of Victorian homes and some farm houses, it's suburban.  It's so disconnected from the rest of the city, both mentally and physically, that the "forgotten borough" is typically not included on maps. 

    The Bronx, to it's credit, has great subway access.  Home to a massive art deco building stock and some of the city's only hills, the Bronx isn't physically lacking.  But it can't shake it's rough history, and the young gentrifiers have generally steered clear.  Everybody I talk to always suggests the same two or three destinations (including the zoo).  I'm skeptical that a borough of New York City that has so much history and is home to over a million people can have so little to offer.

    And yet, thus far that's been my experience.

Flushing at Night

   Of all the disorienting ethnic neighborhoods in New York, Flushing gives me the best twilight-zone-foreign-country experience.

   Perhaps it's the way every inch of space is used for retail.  Or maybe it's the weird themed architecture of tall neon signs and unfashionable typefaces.  Unlike Manhattan's Chinatown, which physically resembles the typical building stock downtown, in Flushing the facades are often tiled metal or concrete, terribly weathered, that brings to mind the vast high-rise slums the British built in Kowloon. 

   

    Originally settled in 1645 by the Dutch West India Company, Flushing was, at one time, a Quaker haven.  Fast forward 350 years to 1990, when an old Irish neighborhood was giving way to a growing Asian community, then 36% of the population.  Today it's estimated to be 55% Asian, and, depending on your source, either the biggest or second biggest Chinatown in New York (and thus North America).  Flushing's Chinese population is primarily Taiwanese in contrast to Manhattan's mostly Cantonese and Fujianese Chinatown.  The terminus of the 7-train, a stop on the Long Island Rail Road, and a Queens bus hub, downtown Flushing is exploding with stinky fish markets, tricked out Civics, and pirated DVDs.  Worth a look.