May 31
Not a banner weekend for the Richmond police, if the following accounts are credible. A questionable shooting, and now this, from a now–teary eyed reader:
My name is Jeff Grant, I'm a 23 year-old Richmond resident. I'm writing because last night I attended a party on 2nd and Main St. on a second-floor apartment. There was a band playing, and without any warning police entered the apartment and released mace/pepper spray into the room of roughly 100 unsuspecting people. The apartment has one exit which was instantly clogged with people trying to escape, and others were hanging out of the windows trying to get air--some even smashed windows that they couldn't get open. Outside, cops continued to mace people, pushed defenseless people to the ground, and generally used excessive force (at least 30 Richmond squad cars, a few state police, a few plain-clothes officers). There were obviously a lot of witnesses to this, and I'm hoping that the TD can pick up the story. Last night at the police station they told a number of people that their complaints could be directed to the Internal Services number, but not until Tuesday morning due to weekend and the holiday. A number of people feel we are being given the runaround (especially since when you call any other number at the Police Station and try to complain, they give you the number that won't be answered until Tuesday (646-6816).
We sure we want to give these guys Tasers?

May 24
A slithery slope
Andrew writing: Perhaps Media General is comfortable with employing a cartoonist who says that gay marriage is a plot by the devil. We can't answer that (but you can, by canceling your T-D subscription and having a real newspaper delivered to your door). But there is something kind of amusing here: Roanoke, here in the Garden of Eden, has a divorce rate of 17.8 percent. Massachusetts has a divorce rate of 2.4 percent.

Will somebody PLEASE fire this man?

May 21
Tell us something good
Big, big ups to the people—including Jack Berry from Richmond Renaissance and Joel Katz from the Carpenter Center—who've been working on bringing the National Folk Festival to Richmond. They got it. For the next three years this festival is going to bring all manner of folk and world music to our town. Good work, y'all.

May 20
Scratch that
The eagle-eyed Scott Nystrom just wrote to point out that we shouldn't feel too superior to Hartford: Apparently it's using the same architects as we are to design the performing arts center it thinks will save its downtown.

The Richmond plan
The Hartford plan

Good thing we're not taking a cookie-cutter approach! Hey, maybe the VAPAF can still find the Sixth Street Marketplace clock to maintain some continuity! (P.S.: We especially like the way the redesigned Carpenter Center shoots laser beams into space.)

May 20
Just surfin'
Hey, you think we got it bad here? At least we haven't hired the dream team Hartford's using to revamp its image (really annoying registration required; believe me it's worth it). That said, there are some real Richmond-worthy ideas in there, such as paying people staying in a hotel $5 apiece to hang a banner from their windows.

This article is kind of interesting, even if the sourcing is a bit fuzzy. Apparently a few localities are experimenting with doing away with traffic signals altogether at some intersections, with the surprising result that accidents have vanished. It's probably wishful thinking that this success could be extrapolated to urban design in general, but maybe it's a notion worth considering.

Finally, a roundup of the usual embarrassments: City officials who don't pay their taxes, Chief Parker goes after weapons that stand around, a bunch of old men in a darkened chamber that stinks of gin are pretty sure the Iraq war is going well, and an especially rich argument from the jeenyuses at the Times-Dispatch.

May 19
More of this, please
Bring it, Ralph!

May 14
Teeth will be provided for you
Richmond will probably never be viewed as a "great American city" by anyone other than a few delusional boosters, but there's something it can learn from Jane Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities we recommend highly to anyone interested in the same issues as we are (to that we'd also add William H. Whyte's City and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class). As this week's New Yorker puts it:
[Jacobs'] views, which [forty years ago, when the book was published] seemed wildly erratic—basically, that New York's future depended less on tall buildings and big projects than on the preservation of small, old blocks and catch-as-catch-can retailing—have been vindicated so many times, and in so many ways, that by now one can hardly think about this city without thinking about her, and like her.
It's odd to think of New York as a city that faced problems like Richmond's, but there was a time that much of Manhattan was crumbling and crime-ridden, that the city's government was ineffectual at best and corrupt at worst, and that the island seemed in great danger of being passed by as a financial and retail sector.

Now, obviously, New York has a lot of advantages we'll never have, but it's instructive to look at the neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach the city took toward its revitalization. This isn't really the place to get into Rudy Giuliani's complicated legacy, but it is a good place to talk about philosophical differences. From the same article, Jacobs tells a favorite story:
"There's a joke that the father of an old friend used to tell, about a preacher who warns children, 'In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.' 'What if you don't have teeth?' one of the children asks. 'Then teeth will be provided,' he says sternly. That's it—that's the spirit of the designed city: Teeth Will Be Provided For You."
The "designed city," as Jacobs so eloquently puts it, is one that tries to bring the spirit of the suburbs downtown. Now, we are not bashing suburbs. One of us grew up in the suburbs, and none of us have a problem with them. We like the convenience and the stores (though we're not so crazy about the food, except Don, who loves him some Cracker Barrel). But it's important to note that suburbs and city centers develop differently. The former comprise a group of planned communities and designated shopping areas; the latter develop organically. Of course, it could be said that Richmond has developed organically, and that the city's just following the trends that have laid waste to so many small cities in the U.S. (more suggested reading: Edge City by Joel Garreau). But we're optimistic and with Whyte on this one: The trick with centers is to manage them aggressively without directing them.

Whyte has a series of questions he asks when he tries to figure out whether a city is "tightening up" its downtown—"reinforcing the role of the street, and in general reasserting the domination of the center"—or "loosening up the structure; gearing it more to the car; taking the pedestrian off the street, and retailing too." The questions are:
1. Was much of downtown successfully razed after urban renewal?
2. Is at least half of downtown devoted to parking?
3. Have municipal and county offices been relocated to a campus?
4. Have streets been de-mapped for superblock development?
5. Have the developments included an enclosed shopping mall?
6. Have they been linked together with skyways?
7. Have they been linked together with underground concourses?
8. Is an automated people-mover system being planned?
Richmond doesn't do horribly on this test. We still have a good share of our pre-'60s building stock, the city government is downtown, and there are no underground concourses or "people-movers" planned. Whyte would probably give us a "C plus." The recent demolition of buildings on Broad and Grace to make even more parking available downtown (and if you think there's a problem parking down there, ask yourself when the last time was that you walked more than three blocks from your car to your destination) does not bode well, nor does the replacement of the Sixth Street Marketplace superblock with the Performing Arts Center superblock.

We've asked this question so many times, maybe we need to rephrase it: "What if they gave a downtown and nobody came?" Grand schemes here have such a bad track record we're frankly amazed the "monorail" model isn't being met by slammed doors at City Hall. For whatever reason, the belief persists that if we somehow build the right thing downtown, suburbanites will descend like manna, forever forsaking Short Pump for the joys of center city. Look at where that's worked: Shockoe Slip, with no big projects, and strong management from very few landlords; and Carytown, which is more of a self-reinforcing area. No stadium. No mall. No arts center.

We like stadiums. We like malls. We like arts. We're just not convinced that any of them are gonna do squat for the center city, no matter what's provided for us. What we want a city that has, as Jacobs puts it, "pizzazz, because people make it new every day." We want something we can bite into, not something that's been chewed up for us. And if we've ever gotten our message mixed-up because we're frustrated about the specific problems of the various plans for downtown, this is what we're all about. We want a city that's new every day. Or as Arthur Lee most eloquently put it: "We're all normal, and we want our freedom."

But after nearly a year of trying to get people interested in "saving Richmond," we're growing ever-more pessimistic that we'll see anything that doesn't, well, bite.

May 13
Wouldn't you like to live here? They have shuffleboard! And lots of other activities!
Let time do its work, old man.

May 12
The curse
We're back! Sorry for the absence. So much to catch up on! First off, we gotta comment on Scott Bass' article in Style Weekly last week, which casts a skeptical eye on the effects of Richmond's efforts to market itself as a "creative class" destination. We don't disagree with Bass' basic thesis—Richmond ignores the non-"creative class" at its own peril—but we have to take issue with his presumption that the city's been so busy trying to attract hipsters and rock musicians it's given short shrift to traditional economic models.

Let's look at those "creative class" initiatives in full: That's it, man! Unless you count the laudable Richmond Regional Bicycle and Pedestrian Plan (Florida cites bike paths as a sure indicator of cities that "get it"; don't know about that, but one of us is an ardent hack of a cyclist and wishes dearly that there were contiguous paths through the city because he is sick and tired of getting honked at as he labors up 21st Street).

Anyway, there may be marketing initiatives trying to draw young, hip, talented people to Richmond, and perhaps that's a bit misguided, because as we've been pointing out since we started this advocacy project, young, talented people are already here—they're just bored senseless. The city does its level best to shut down nightclubs for the thinnest of reasons and clobbers nascent businesses with unreasonable and arbitrary regulations—and in case anyone hasn't noticed, homosexuality is still illegal in Virginia.

If that's fostering the creative class, we'd hate to see how the city discouraged it.

Bass is right: not enough is being done to keep young people here, especially as they graduate from Alley Katz to Babies "R" Us. But we don't think the city's done enough for either group. Going forward we see no signs that Richmond's future holds anything other than paternalism, kooky schemes, and incompetent (albeit entertaining) public servants.

But doing too much? Please. From where we sit, Richmond hasn't even started.