Using summer as a verb: Photojogblog goes to Friendship, ME

My runs on Bradford (top), Davis
and Martin points

I spent last week in this little lobstering village in Midcoast Maine. Friendship is spread out along four points along the coast: Bradford, Davis, Martin, and Wadsworth. I managed to run the first three of three of them (right) this year. Last summer, when I was in better shape, I did three points in one run. I had vowed to do all four this year, a run of roughly 18 or 19 miles. Nope.

Friendship's main claim to fame is the Friendship sloop, a small sail boat that was favored by New England's commercial fishers. The town has long had a sizable summer community—John Cheever vacationed here—and second homes dominate the coastline, but it still has a busy working waterfront. By all accounts, the lobstermen of Friendship have been having a tough time lately: Notice all the hot new lobster-roll restaurants in New York? They're a pretty much direct result of a crash in Maine lobster prices. 

Lobstering is a territorial business. As Colin Woodard explains in his terrific book The Lobster Coast, local lobster gangs—that's what they're called— have a lot of, shall we say, informal ways of defending their traditional bit of the water. Occasionally this has escalated in to “lobster wars.” In 1995, Friendship tried to push into the waters claimed by Monhegan Island’s lobster fleet. “Traps were cut,” writes Woodard, “and, near the end of the season, vandals sank John Murdock's Sea Hag while she sat at her mooring in Port Clyde, causing $13,000 in damage.” Fishermen were carrying guns. Since then, Maine has allowed lobsterman to participate in the official regulation of the sea bottom. But Woodard argues that the old system of traditional fishing grounds helped to defeat the tragedy of the commons and keep lobstering sustainable, even as the Gulf of Maine cod fishery collapsed. 

I really can't recommend The Lobster Coast strongly enough, especially if you spend any time in coastal Maine—but also if you live in or love any place that's grappled with growth and economic dislocation (Brooklyn... Montana...) It's a popular history written by a journalist, but unlike most books of that type, it's really smart about social history and economics. Woodard shows how Maine's economy has shaped its landscape, and vice-versa. Here he makes the intriguing argument that coastal Maine, which all us folks from "away" love so much because it seems timeless and unspoiled, was really America's first Detroit: 

Maine wasn't preindustrial; it had just been deindustrialized. 

...Maine ice, granite, lumber, salt cod, and foodstuffs filled the docks of the United States' Atlantic ports, themselves clogged with Maine-built sailing ships. But those goods had been displaced by refrigerators and cement, by fresh fish caught by Gloucester steamships and cheap lumber and foodstuffs moved from the Midwest by the nation's railroads. Practically overnight, all of Maine's industries collapsed. As a result, the coast was losing population. The wild meadows and weather-beaten farmhouses the summer people found so picturesque had been abandoned by their owners, thousands of whom had moved to Ohio in hopes of a better life. With the offshore fishing industry in decline, residents of many coastal towns tried to build an industry around the only resource they had left: the summer people themselves.

Woodard spends a lot of time of the delicate relationship between outsiders and locals. The vacationers aren't new interlopers: They've been a big part of the economy in Maine for over a century. But the flood of new development since the 1990s has made it harder to keep the working waterfronts open, and for the people who work on the water to live anywhere near it. The Island Institute does work on these issues, including publishing this excellent newspaper I've subscribed to for the past couple of years. Good local journalism is itself activism.

On to the pictures, most of them after the jump.

Run to Davis Point

From mainephotojog Friendship's famous sign, at the Mason Lodge

"The best public housing project ever built in New York"

That's how the AIA Guide to New York City describes the Williamsburg Houses, which were built in 1937 as a project of the Public Works Administration. The raised stainless-steel street signs on the apartments caught my eye as I passed them on this run; I didn't realize until I got home and did more research that these were the easily the most important buildings, both architecturally and historically, along the route. So I had to come back.

The Williamsburg Houses are NYCHA public housing, but they have a different history than most other city projects. They went up before the Housing Act of 1937, which among other things mandated extremely tight controls on construction costs. So the apartments were built to a higher standard than later megaprojects like Red Hook and Queensbridge. The public housing historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom writes:

Williamsburg's modernist designs offered a machine aesthetic but did not achieve industrial scale economies. The four-story walk-ups.... [were costly] because the low heights did not at that point balance out high land costs. Glazed brick stair hall exteriors, high ceilings in the apartments, wood floors, closet doors, and commodious kitchens raised expenses. Each building also had up to eight stairwells with only two apartment entrances on each landing. Williamsburg... looked cheap but was comparatively expensive.

In 2003, the Williamsburg Houses were designated a landmark, in part out of appreciation for their Modernist design. This represents another turn of the screw in intellectual fashion, I guess. If you took Intro to Architecture in college, you came away with the idea that weird European Modernist ideas about superblocks, breaking up the street grid, and "towers in the park" were almost entirely to blame for the disastrous state of American public housing and the decline of cities in general. Anybody who's ever visited Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan or Sandburg Village in Chicago—upper-middle-class communities that look just like public housing towers—knows that this story was way too simple. Still, if the Modernism works here, it's probably because the PWA avoided towers and maintained a human-friendly scale. Unfortunately, that turned out to cost quite a bit more more than Congress and local political machines were willing to pay to house low-income families.

It would be easy to wax rhapsodic about the New Deal idealism behind such an ambitious low-income housing development. (Below, a picture of one of the tenement apartments it replaced.) But the projects in New York and elsewhere were also segregated at birth: Of the original 1,650 families in Williamsburg, just one was black, writes Wendell E. Pritchett in his biography of the African-American New Dealer Robert Clifton Weaver. Another project built around the same time, in Harlem, was almost entirely black. It was considered a limited victory at the time that the Harlem project was even built, that African-Americans were able to get jobs on housing-project construction sites, and that the projects at least weren't used as an excuse to clear blacks out of neighborhoods to replace them with whites. As Pritchett observes, public housing's entanglement in racial segregation is at least as important to the story of its failure as Le Corbusier's bad ideas about architecture.

The archival pictures here are from The New Deal Network. Below are my own pictures. I'll close with a few more thoughts and links.

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

From Bushwick

I try not to get too heavy in these posts. This is, after all, a blog about the rather eccentric activity of jogging with a camera. And snapping the outsides of buildings while running past them affords only modest insight into the lives lived inside them. But when you explore the outer boroughs on foot, it's hard not to be aware that the vast majority of people in this city get by on extremely tight budgets, and that a lot of them live in public housing. Nationally, the failure of the projects is so well-known that even liberals rarely talk about a right to decent, affordable housing anymore. (And this in a country that massively subsidizes homeownership in the higher tax brackets.) But reading more about the Williamsburg Houses got me thinking about how little I really know about public housing, even though it has shaped both my city and my neighborhood. (I live just a couple of blocks from the Whitman Houses.) How big a failure has it really been in New York? What do we know about how it fails and how it succeeds? Here's an interview with historian Bloom, in which he makes a compelling case that the NYC projects were a relative success in providing affordable housing, and shouldn't be lumped in with what happened in Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, etc. This article from the conservative City Journal paints a grimmer picture... and then sets up the argument for what sounds to me like the mother of all real-estate boondoggles. As for those Chicago projects, this short history of the Robert Taylor Homes (pdf) sheds a lot of light on why big projects so often failed, and is a reminder of a real weakness of post-war urban liberalism: When planners made an inevitable mistake—such as building too many large family apartments, which over-saturated the projects with teenagers—the sheer scale of their designs and the bureaucracy made it difficult to adjust.

There's a fledgling National Public Housing Museum in the works in Chicago, which hopefully will engage with these questions. It's said to be modeled on the excellent Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a place everyone in New York should visit at least once.

The Sixth Borough: Hudson County, NJ

The cities just on the other side of the Hudson—especially Jersey City and Hoboken—are like a mirrored New York. Because Hudson County is surrounded on three sides by water (the Hudson, Kill Van Kull, Newark Bay, and the Hackensack River and Meadowlands marsh), it feels almost as separate from the rest of New Jersey as Manhattan does. It's densely packed, has a skyline that would do a Cleveland or a San Jose proud, and a big-city worthy transit network, with both a new light-rail trolley and a subway (the PATH) connecting to lower Manhattan and the Village. (Click here for the interactive map of my run.) If you can ignore the arbitrary political boundaries, JC and Hoboken are almost as woven into the fabric of the city as Brooklyn and Queens across the opposite river.

But those boundaries are hard to ignore. To the average NYC snob—and I'm afraid I'm one of those—the first stop on the PATH over the river might as well be the Moon or Montclair. It's still, you know, New Jersey. Historically, there's evidence that even people who've live in Jersey City haven't had a strong sense of their hometown as a distinctive, interesting place on the map. In her memoir The Place You Love Is Gone, former Hoboken resident Melissa Holbrook Pierson writes:

In the late fifties some researchers finally went around and asked people the most important thing of all: what the places they lived in felt like. Of the three cities studied, Boston, Los Angeles, and Hoboken's twin, Jersey City, the latter was found to be peculiarly poorly differentiated or "imageable," as the study has it. Its denizens' recall of its layout was far worse than those in the other two cities: "Many descriptions of the scene by established residents, young or old, were accompanied by the ghosts of what used to be there. Changes, such as those wrought by the freeway system, have left scars on the mental image."

Much more change was to come. They knocked down the minor-league stadium where Jackie Robinson played the first integrated pro baseball game. A gated condo development stands in its place. Later, JC sprouted a slick new waterfront business district of glassy office towers and "luxury" apartments for the junior financial analysts and computer programmers who toil there. If you've been to Arlington's Pentagon City, the London Docklands, or Cambridge's Kendall Square, you've been to the JC waterfront. That's where my run started. After that, things quickly get more interesting—the city really won me over. There are blocks and blocks of Brooklynesque brownstones. The way you know you aren't in Cobble Hill is that the power and telephone lines are all overhead, and the neighborhoods are arranged around gorgeous Victorian square parks. Some buildings on the corner lots have street markers on their walls, like you see in Europe.

Then there's the former Jersey City Medical Center, a huge mass of Art Deco skyscrapers built with money from the Works Progress Administration. It was the special project of Mayor Frank Hague, a classic Democratic machine boss. According to this New Jersey City U. site, the

Medical Center provided free care to residents who couldn't pay, which must have been most of them—the hospital cost $3 million a year to run, but supposedly billed patients just $15,000 in 1929. It went bankrupt in 1988. The buildings have since been converted into loft-style condos. I think you have the whole social history of the U.S. over the last 50 years right there...

My run also took me through Journal Square, JC's real commercial hub and the heart of its large Filipino and South Asian communities. On the other side of the Holland Tunnel entrance from Jersey City is Hoboken, the funny-sounding mile-square city of Frank Sinatra, On the Waterfront, Yo La Tengo, and my favorite book when I was ten. (It occurs to me now that jogging with a camera is a very Pinkwater kind of hobby.) Since the 1980s, Hoboken has gone from working-class 'burg of cold-water tenements ("The place they forgot to clean, forgot to love, forgot," writes Pierson) to affluent urban playground. A rash of deadly arsons preceded a boom in development; it seems like it was an easy way to clear out low-rent tenants. Today, Hoboken is certainly beautiful—compact, walkable from end to end, packed with old brick townhouses—but it also makes Park Slope seem diverse and edgy. The city has a W hotel now. And a Five Guys. All it needs now is an NYU dorm. As Pierson writes about Hoboken's '80s transformation: "Hoboken was not changing so much as being eradicated. They kept only the name the same."

Like I said, it's really just another part of New York.

Now on to the pictures, most of them after the jump:

From jersey

Starting at the waterfront

Industrial Brooklyn: The Eastern District and English Kills

In 1854, the City of Brooklyn annexed the City of Williamsburgh (still with the mysteriously lost "h" then) and the Town of Bushwick. These areas became Brooklyn's Eastern District.

Which is confusing. The old Eastern District is the far northern tip of the modern borough, and is now generally referred to as North Brooklyn. I usually think I'm headed straight north when I go from my home in Fort Greene up to Williamsburg, but as you can see from the map, that isn't quite accurate--it's the same kind of schematization of a mental map that, as Tom Vanderbilt explained recently in Slate, causes people to think San Diego is west of Reno. Most Brooklynites are hopeless about cardinal directions. Unlike, say, Manhattan or Chicago, the street grid doesn't help--because so many neighborhoods were once their own city or village, Brooklyn has multiple grids that crash together at weird angles. People also tend to orient themselves to Manhattan, and the Williamsburg Bridge is "uptown" of the Brooklyn Bridge, even though it's at least as geographically accurate to say that it's to the east. If you can wrap your head around that fact, you've gone a long way toward your black belt in Not Getting Lost In Brooklyn.

This run was a couple of months ago, during the lashing rain storm that brought down so many old trees in the New York area. (You can see my interactive MapMyRun map here.) Fortunately, there weren't many trees on my route, because this run took me through the industrial heart of the Eastern District. I had wanted to check out two things. First, I had been vaguely aware that Bogart Street was turning into New York's latest artist/hipster quarter. (As a much cooler co-worker said to me later, "Were you the only guy there without a beard?" Yes.) And I wanted to see a couple of the more obscure bridges in the city, which cross the Newtown Creek and its tributary, English Kills.

As you'll guess looking at the blurred photos, I came pretty close to wrecking my camera in the rain. And I didn't notice probably the most interesting buildings on my route: the Williamsburg Houses. But I'll have more on those in my next post.

From brooklyn industry

The Navy Yard waterfront

From brooklyn industry

Working man's kosher

From brooklyn industry

The pformer Pfizer pfacility

From brooklyn industry

All Saints

From brooklyn industry

From brooklyn industry

From brooklyn industry

Apparitions of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the miracle of the roses

From brooklyn industry

Just off Bogart Street

From brooklyn industry

Cafe Orwell

From brooklyn industry

Bogart Street

From brooklyn industry

From brooklyn industry

I should have bought one of those slickers.

From brooklyn industry

For the subtle and discriminating gentleman

From brooklyn industry

English Kills

From brooklyn industry

Metropolitan Ave. Bridge over English Kills

From brooklyn industry

Grand St. Bridge over Newtown Creek, Brooklyn side

From brooklyn industry

From brooklyn industry

Queens side

From brooklyn industry

Bridge operators shack. (The bridge can swing open.)

From brooklyn industry

From brooklyn industry

Back near the Navy Yard

From brooklyn industry

Washington Avenue

Things One Carries While Running

Your blogger sometimes finds running with a camera a bit awkward.

And then there a people who run with laser-sighted pistols loaded with hollow-point bullets.

From the AP:

AUSTIN -- Pistol-packing Texas Gov. Rick Perry has a message for wily coyotes out there: Don't mess with my dog.

Perry (R) told the Associated Press on Tuesday that he needed just one shot from the laser-sighted pistol he sometimes carries while jogging to take down a coyote that menaced his puppy during a February run near Austin.

Perry said he carries his .380 Ruger -- loaded with hollow-point bullets -- when jogging on trails because he is afraid of snakes. But when a coyote came out of the brush toward his daughter's Labrador retriever, Perry charged.

I visited Austin a couple of years ago, and had a great run there along the river. It hadn't occurred to me that some of my fellow joggers might have been packing heat. I think I'm glad I didn't know.

A short run in Clinton Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant

This blog's been quiet lately because I haven't been running much. I needed some time to recover from the marathon, and I had a big story to write for my magazine. More to come soon, but here are some shots from my first run after the big race. It was just a couple of miles near my house, and went past what's left of Broken Angel.

From recovery run

Ghost bike on Greene

From recovery run

Jaz Tattoo came to a party at my house once. A name you don't forget...

From recovery run

The Broken Angel

From recovery run

From recovery run

Bed-Stuy greystones; unusual for this area

From recovery run

Evening Star Baptist

From recovery run

An interesting new brownstone infill

From recovery run

A former "Sonntag's schule"—Sunday school

From recovery run

Almost none of my neighborhood—or Brooklyn—looks like
this anymore. Which is why I took this picture...

.