The Jersey Citoyen

Tris McCall has begun what promises to be a multi-stage rant against the new condos being built in JC. Good shit-- I suggest you read it.

I've pondered, however, how one can actually develop community-based scructures, as he prescribes. Anyone this stooped in development politics has surely read the Death and Life, wherein Jacobs provides what I see as an explanation to our plight.

She says there needs to be varying ages to the buildings. But in Jersey City, as in the rest of the country, all post-war construction basically amounted to shit. If a building was shit when you first built it, it'll never be anything more than shit. Jersey City is stuck with deteriorating radiant towers, brownstones which are beautiful but in many ways too old, and brand new, inward-facing condos.

These three do not mix. To argue for "low-income" building stock is flawed, since it will once again get demolished the next go-round. Outward-oriented mixed-use condos would certainly be an improvement over what's currently being built, but won't achieve true city nature because only one income level could ever inhabit the stores and condos above. And since these projects are over vast swaths of land, they basically create dead zones.

I'm having a hard time discovering how houses were built 100 years ago. I imagine that plots were sold and houses built individually, varying the age, style and use accordingly. What we see today is a very expensive Metro New York, in which any developer with any land will automatically maximize height, privacy, and luxury at the expense of the surrounding neighborhood.

I've been asking myself if deep down I just want to recreate montreal in jersey city. Or, have jersey city recreate montreal for me. This is an internal, existential debate, surely, so let me not deal with it here. But there are a few features of the cities which line up well.

For one thing, as one gets closer to the waterfront in Jersey City the building size increases just as in Montreal. Nestled within these tall buildings is the mall, built-in, half-underground, where you need to be. Personally I'd pass through the Eaton Centre almost every day in one direction or another on my way from one transit to another. Similarly the walk from the Hamilton Park region to the P-N Path will have to pass through the mall.

This is no trivial feature: to me, the worst part of suburbia is the inconvenience of shopping. One has to *go out* to do it (props to Tris McCall on that style). This is already a huge pain for things like groceries, drugs, and alcohol, but for clothes, it's a whole nother matter. Here the shopping must be completely natural, completely involuntary, completely subconscious. Otherwise it turns into a therapy session at best or a nervous breakdown in some cases. (Cf. "That's not my style, but what is my style? Must everything match? Must they not match so I'm truly postmodern? But the non-matching shit doesn't look good because I have no aesthetic sense, so I should formalize the wear and thus abandon my philosophy...") Yeah, we don't want that.

One more subtle similarity is the topography of the two cities. One literally descends from the heights to the water in Jersey City. Beautifully, this walk points directly towards lower Manhattan, which will one day include a gigantic needle reenforcing the orientation. In Montreal there was always a gradient to my travels: downward to start the day and back up at the end. The opposite of Sisyphus. While it may be subtle, it's this kind of orientation that will build the city's character within me.

I haven't spent enough time in Jersey City to know the situation for bikes down there. I've seen a few people here and there, not unlike anywhere, but certainly nothing like a community. So, in the words of Pink Floyd:

Is there anybody out there?

This is a genuine question, not a plea. Now that there are at least two people out there reading this damn blog I figure I might get a response. Respond away! Or don't, but know that bikes are going to figure in in this space sooner or later.

Not too recently I decided to show a friend all the construction taking place in Liberty Harbor. Only thing was I took us on the wrong course, actually heading toward the water from Jersey Ave instead of Grove St. I thought that surely we'd be able to connect down there, but turns out the two light rail stations were separated by a few acres of mud piles and a fenced-in brownfield.

Now, my buddy has a fear of climbing fences so getting stuck in this field was serious. We'd only made it in in the first place because a downed tree took out part of the fence. After about a half an hour of searching in the dark for another exit we left the way we came, back through the hills of mud and debris, and wound up walking down the light rail tracks after all.

In a way, however, I was happy to see the deserted land because I knew someday soon it would have lots of development on it. Of course, I wish we had had a twelve of PBR for the walk.

After this diversion we landed safely in the brand new, barely open "townhouses" of liberty harbor. They were six stories, mostly, but without very much ornamentation. (It's been my conviction lately that now that modernism is dead we don't have to avoid ornaments, especially since they're rarely symbolic anyway, but alas.) But the aesthetics of the buildings aren't what concerned me, rather their orientation.

Some of the buildings face Grand St., which my friend pointed out is a suburban road. Certainly to regain the city atmosphere down in Liberty Harbor they're going to have to add street parking there. But the side facade of these townhouses was wall, brick, fence, garage, and small windows-- dead all the way to the water. Behind the townhouses were parking garage doors, not a traditional alley (generally absent from metro NY, but here's our chance). Finally at the water itself there was not a single front door.

It appears that our developer friends failed to read the Charter for the New Urbanism. But that's why we blog, hoping someday to get the message through.