I'm a lasagna boy!

In which the neighbourhood has a fence-y plan

I have many fond memories of trips to Paris, all without leaving the neighbourhood. I have little affection for Duboce Park, the junkie- and vagrant-riddled local patch of greenery. The half-block-wide park, valiantly cared-for by the community, is made all the worse by the constant presence of dogs and their ill-mannered walkers. The dogs poop and pee everywhere, intimidate pedestrians and people who might want to play a game or have a picnic (in a park? of all the nerve. Parks in San Francisco are for dogs!): and the people walking them are, as a group, brazen and disrespectful of the notion of shared space. The dogs run everywhere, across paths and along all the pee-stained stretch of grass on the south side of the park, as dogs are wont to do. I cannot stand going to the park, nor even walking past it -- it stinks!
We already have a segregated play area for children, and the notion of cordoning off the already-ragged south-east corner of the park for the exclusive use of four-legged friends has raised some hackles. I say build a damn BART station on the half-block area and give 'em what for. Like taking coals to Newcastle it is, to give the Lower Haight another area for dumping fæces.
The city has not done an admirable job of handling, either through policy or through enforcement, off-leash dog areas (Duboce Park is not an off-leash area). For their part, San Francisco dog owners have a cutesy web site that gives lip service to the idea that you gotta scoop the poop. ... even if everyone's poop were scooped, the dogs still pee on all parts of the park. I do'n't want to pic-nic there, I would'n't want kids playing there (mine or anyone else's; so broad-minded of me), and I sure do'n't want to stroll about a smallish greenspace which reeks. I have Haight Street for that.

Edmund Bacon

Edmund Bacon died:

His 1967 book "Design of Cities" remains one of the key texts for architecture students.
Bacon, born in Philadelphia to a staunchly conservative publishing family, maintained his influence long after his retirement as the city's chief planner in 1970.
At 90, he lashed out at city leaders for banning skateboarders at a park adjacent to City Hall, saying, "Show me a skateboarder who killed a little old lady and I'll reconsider."

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2005/10/14/edmund_n_bacon_city_planner_dies_at_95/

Edmund N. Bacon, city planner, dies at 95
By Joann Loviglio, Associated Press Writer | October 14, 2005

PHILADELPHIA --Edmund N. Bacon, a renowned city planner whose vision transformed postwar Philadelphia and whose influence continued to shape the look and feel of the nation's fifth-largest city, died Friday. He was 95.

Bacon, whose children include actor Kevin Bacon, died of natural causes at his home in Philadelphia, according to a statement from the family.

"He told me when he was a little boy, he went to the top of City Hall and looking out on the city, he understood the plan William Penn laid out," said Alexander Garvin, a Yale University professor and member of New York City's planning board.

"From that point on, his plan was very clear how the city should progress," Garvin said.

Bacon's work landed him the cover of a 1964 issue of Time magazine, which called Philadelphia's redevelopment "the most thoroughly rounded, skillfully coordinated of all big city programs in the U.S." His 1967 book "Design of Cities" remains one of the key texts for architecture students.

Bacon, born in Philadelphia to a staunchly conservative publishing family, maintained his influence long after his retirement as the city's chief planner in 1970.

At 90, he lashed out at city leaders for banning skateboarders at a park adjacent to City Hall, saying, "Show me a skateboarder who killed a little old lady and I'll reconsider."

He also recently railed against a new waterfront hotel, plans to reconfigure the Benjamin Franklin Parkway leading to the city's art museum and the impending redesign of Independence Mall plaza, created in the 1950s with his oversight.

Bacon also vehemently contested the lifting of a "gentlemen's agreement" in 1984 that skyscrapers couldn't be taller than the pedestal of William Penn's statue atop City Hall.

"He's not just significant in Philadelphia; he's significant as a national figure," said Garvin, who interviewed Bacon for a 1996 book on city planning.

In 1933, as a 23-year-old graduate of Cornell University's architecture school, Bacon used a $1,000 inheritance from his grandfather to travel the world. His visit to Beijing influenced his style for the rest of his career.

Beijing's groupings of black- and purple-roofed buildings leading to the red and golden buildings of the emperor's Forbidden City "taught me that city planning is about movement through space, an architectural sequence of sensors and stimuli, up and down, light and dark, color and rhythm," Bacon once said.

After returning from China, he studied city planning at Cranbrook Academy in Michigan. He worked as a city planner in Flint, Mich., but his push for public housing brought criticism, and that led him back to Philadelphia.

Bacon became managing director of the Housing Association of the Delaware Valley, a nonprofit group advocating low-income development, and spearheaded efforts to create a commission that would oversee and guide city planning.

He served in the Navy during World War II, then joined the commission's staff in 1946 and became its chairman three years later.

Bacon's renewal ideas gained momentum after reformers took control of City Hall in the early 1950s. His first major plan was Penn Center -- a complex of high-rise office buildings, shops and restaurants to replace a railroad yard.

The idea was considered so radical at the time that when Bacon introduced it to the city Chamber of Commerce, then-Mayor Joseph S. Clark "was so scared he refused to sit at the speaker's table," Bacon once recalled.

The complex was not executed exactly as Bacon and architect Vincent Kling envisioned -- more space was devoted to offices and less to aesthetics -- and it was criticized by some as bland. But it marked the birth of the city's urban renewal.

"The landscape of this city would have been measurably different and decidedly poorer had Ed Bacon not chosen to be a Philadelphian," Gov. Ed Rendell, a former Philadelphia mayor, said Friday.

Bacon and many planners of his day had their critics. Many lambasted urban renewal as being indifferent, even hostile, to the poor.

Bacon oversaw projects including the demolition of the decrepit wholesale fruit-and-vegetable market, which was relocated and replaced by a trio of I.M. Pei-designed high-rise apartment buildings called Society Hill Towers. After the work, people began renovating the run-down 18th-century rowhouses in the area, now one of downtown's wealthiest neighborhoods.

After retiring as Philadelphia's planner in 1970, Bacon did planning work for the cities of Burlington, Vt., and Salem, Mass., and became vice president of a Canadian development firm.

Bacon is survived by sons Kevin and Michael, a musician and composer; and daughters Karin, Elinor and Kira. His wife died of cancer in 1991.

© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

In which he has no-one, no-one but himself to blame

While walking from the Civic Center, mine eyes caught three F-Market trains lined up at Gough and Market. Flashing lights in the distance signalled an accident of some sort, and I walked over to take a look. A single man was being tucked into a paddy waggon, and one of the toothless junkies reeling against the building at the corner told me that the driver had come a cropper eastbound down Market St., hitting the MUNI platform and then careening the remainder of the block until he and the k-car finished up against a tree. Lucky bastard that he was'n't being taken away in an ambulance! I walked up towards Octavia, a woman from the neighbourhood association told me that a few weeks ago, a car speeding off the new Octavia Boulevard exit ramp crashed full-tilt into a F-Market train. When I reached Octavia, one of SFPD's finest asked if I had seen the accident, and I said no; he pointed to the debris scattered across that intersection, and said that the same driver had hit the kerb or centre divider there as well, and continued on his rambunctious path down Market St. The accident did a fair job of snarfling Friday evening rush-hour traffic coming off the freeway, as the police cordoned off the blocks of Market St eastbound between Octavia and Gough.
I proceeded to The Orbit and had a cool glass of gin.

In which I am under the volcano of flowers

This morning I waited, inadvertently, until almost 9.30 to have my cup of coffee -- one per day has been my motto since resuming full-time work (wow, almost three years ago now); every now and again (34 times so far this year, according to my records, I find that I have a cuppa in the morning and then another in the afternoon, but on the whole the extent of the coffee is a double espresso early in the ack emma.
Today's cup was delicious: twenty-two seconds, the legendary time for a double-shot, and with a nice thick crema. (more great coffee photos and articles at Coffee Geek). The Fire Show's riveting and too-smart "Under The Volcano of Flowers" album goes very well with espresso, I find.

In we go faster, and pay people to help us out

Alec posted some exciting photographs of the human-powered vehicles speed trials a few weeks ago. My favourite is the slightly-blurry snap of Sam Whittingham in the Varna Diablo, the current land-speed-record holder.
Aram pointed out that for the slower amongst us, the Better World Club provides roadside assistance, triple-A-stylee, for bicycles (!!).

In which vector graphics appear

Eyebeam research (great name, that!) have added vector-graphics support for Google Maps. Their proof-of-concept application is a New York City Subway map. I like this better than the transit-maps-on-ipod widgets of a few months ago: different medium, yes, but easier to design programmatically, and more functional ( alpha portability, I suppose).

In which there's someone who knows and trips you when you fall

The San Francisco Museum of History screened Trina Lopez's short documentary, A Second Final Rest: The History of San Francisco's Cemeteries. The film garnered awards at the Womens Film Festival and at the Documentary Film Fest. Afterwards the film-maker answered questions -- she has great poise, and the Q&A session was as informative as the film itself.
Beginning in '01 with a Health Ordinance, San Francisco city fathers began pushing the various burial grounds: first westwards, and then south'ards. The public rejected the first official edict, in '14, to clear out completely, but by the mid-century all the interred had been moved to Colma ("City of the Dead"), a necropolis with its own BART stop.
Several years ago, I began writing a story in which the citizen of Colma, some 2 million strong, rose up and persecuted the grey-bearded city fathers, and especially "Sunny Jim" Rolph, who worked the hardest to shoo all them bones.
San Francisco still has bodies in The Presidio, a military graveyard; in the church-yard at Mission Dolores; in the Columbarium; and a one-off, Thomas Starr King, interred at the church on Franklin and Geary.

Jim Blackett's San Francisco Cemeteries is a handy reference site; Ms Lopez drew her inspiration from Dr Weirde's Weirde Guide to San Francisco, now online at sfgate.com.

In which the infrastructure is built anew

A new Edward Burtynsky exhibition arrived at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco. Edward Burtynsky's photography continues to amaze me with its powerful details of the man-made landscape in industry and urban renewal. The Chinese series has some breath-taking portraits of cities teeming with factory workers, seemingly stripped of their individuality, just as his earlier landscapes of mining areas showed a denuded earth without its once-proud trees, hills, and rocks. Burtynsky's first solo retrospective, Manufactured Landscapes, runs at the Brooklyn Museum through January; it showed at Stanford University earlier this year, and had a marvelous exhibit catalog, Yale University Press.

Galahad at Blandings

After the delightful experience of re-reading Psmith in the City, I picked up a copy of Galahad at Blandings from a going-out-of-business second-hand bookstore (why are the works of Wodehouse available only erratically in the States? I should have bought the lush stack I espied at Dutton's tidy new location in Beverly Hills). The going is a bit slower than the other Blandings books, which I recall with great fondness as being especially light. Wodehouse famously said of his novels: "I believe there are two ways of writing novels. One is mine, making a sort of musical comedy without music and ignoring real life altogether; the other is going deep down into life and not caring a damn". I have a faint memory of our sixth-grade English teacher reading Psmith and Mike aloud to us, emphasizing that the initial "P" was silent, and spurious (our hero Rupert could not abide having such a common name on his uncommon character), but I cannot imagine how such a book, filled not only with anachronistic English school-boy humour but also with many mentions of typical British institutions, came across to eleven-year-old Americans. No wonder Anar says that I have more affectations in my language than she does after three-odd years of living in London.
Galahad is the epitome of a type in Wodehouse: dashing and socially clairvoyant, he is uniquely able to negotiate the social strata "without a bean to his name". He brings sundered hearts together through the most outlandish schemes, and always emerges himself unscathed.

In which we age, and the country with us

Nicolai Ourousoff had a great piece in today's New York Times about American's failing infrastructure, as shown by the failures of recent technology in New Orleans. The last paragraph was especially moving:

Already, some have voiced a fear that this is the city that we will be left with - a Creole Disneyland, reduced to its traditional boundaries, surrounded by a sea of decay and poverty. Sitting in the dark outside his restaurant one recent evening, an entrepreneur suggested that this might be ideal. He joked that the flooded neighborhoods should be transformed into golf courses.

Such cynicism has been reinforced by the government's disastrous response to the storm, when the Superdome was famously transformed into a teeming refugee camp. Clearly, the pump operator's America - the America built by people like Wood and Mulholland - is an anachronism.

Today, the true descendants of these visionaries are more likely to be working in the Netherlands or Spain than in a major American city. Bilbao, for example, may have gained cultural cachet from the success of its Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. Yet the strongest evidence of the city's enlightened planning is the enormous investment it made in a new high-tech subway system designed by the British architect Norman Foster. It's hard to imagine a similar undertaking in an American city today, especially when the federal government seems more concerned about doling out private contracts than reversing decades of neglect. The challenge we face is not just about infrastructure. It's about reknitting the connective tissue that binds us into a functioning society. This cannot be accomplished by retreating into a haze of denial; what's needed is an honest acknowledgment of what's brought us here. New Orleans was a warning.

A similar viewpoint comes from the Ball State Daily News, which notes that not only has the United States failed to make advances in maglev train technology, but also in spreading the gospel of Wi-Fi. Both problems devolve to policy issues: imagine spending five years plodding through the government bureaucracy which constrains the $1bln allocated to a magnetic-levitation project, only to have one's proposal reach "draft" status. Wikipedia has an illustrated entry on Magnetic Levitation trains which details the underlying technology and current implementations.