Episode 70: Down By The River

Jane Jacobs Be Damned

Urban planning can work, contrary to Jacobs' screeds, and Battery Park City, on the far south Hudson River edge of lowest Manhattan, is a heartening example. Since the heart of the development is just four lanes across West Street from Ground Zero, it would surely enrage bin Laden to know that the 14,000-plus residents continue to expand in both number and satisfaction. Unlike the controversial "urban renewal" projects of the Fifties and Sixties, Battery Park City didn't require the razing of established (if depressed) neighborhoods to build complexes of apartment blocks that often resembled the Stalinist bleakness of East Berlin and the former Iron Curtain satellite nations. Instead, B.P.C. was built upon new land - the rocks and dirt provided by the excavation for the World Trade Center and from dredgings from New York harbor.

To provide what amounts to a community gathering place, the handsome World Financial Center was erected across the street from the Twin Towers and filled not only with companies engaged in financial dealings, including American Express and Dow Jones, but with shops, restaurants, a ferry terminal, and a marina for private yachts known as North Cove. In the soaring atrium known as the Winter Garden are live palm trees.

The first neighborhood encountered at the north end of the development contains a new building for the elite public Stuyvesant high school, a hotel, theater, and shopping mall to serve the residents of the sever

al mid- to high-rise apartment buildings. South of the Financial Center are the primary residential districts, deploying low- to high-rise structures that are both remarkably harmonious in appearance and yet varying substantially in design.

Separating the subdivisions are east-west pocket parks permitting quiet activities beneath flowering trees. At their waterside ends are symbolic gateways of discretely different design, lending each district a touch of individuality. Dog runs, community gardens, and tennis and basketball courts are spotted along the West Street edge.

On the ground floors facing inland are installed delis, drycleaners, compact supermarkets, pizza parlors, bank branches, daycare centers - most of the services required by the young families that increasingly make B.P.C. their home.

An esplanade runs along the Hudson from the top end of the development well over two miles to where it merges into the park for which it is named. They are lined with bushes, flower beds, and groves of trees, and provide unobstructed vistas of the surprisingly attractive Jersey skyline and down to the south, Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. At the southern end, the gardens widen and the paths intentionally begin to meander. Cyclists, runners, skateboarders, and pedestrians take full advantage; amorous couples occupy benches, devotees work through their yoga routines. 

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"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. "

- Groucho Marx, as recalled by William Safire.

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Video Alerts

You might well think that there is no connection between Julie Andrews and a Belgian train station, but then you probably haven't seen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkBepgH00GM

The now-famous "Gathering Storm" anti-gay marriage commercial is almost its own parody. See both it and Stephen Colbert's take at http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/224789/april-16-2009/the-colbert-coalition-s-anti-gay-marriage-ad

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We Hold These Truths

Apart from those who hang crucifixes over their beds and walk the streets with Lugers shoved in their pants, it grows ever more difficult to find thinking Americans who disagree with these conclusions:

* George W. Bush is a pinhead.

* Dick Cheney is evil incarnate.

* Donald Rumsfeld was wrong. About everything.
* Republicans have a death wish.

* Torture is morally wrong and counterproductive.

* "Just following orders" stopped being a good excuse sixty years ago.

* Every soldier, marine, F.B.I. agent, C.I.A. operative, physician, private contractor, psychiatrist, general officer, and lawyer who conducted, approved, justified, or ordered that "harsh interrogation techniques" be employed against suspected terrorists should be indicted and tried.

But not now.

Raging lions of the Left - this means you, Keith Olbermann and Nicholas Kristof - are demanding that the tumbrels and the guillotine be wheeled out to punish the malfactors this minute!

Forget the collapsed economy, millions of people thrown out of their homes, unemployment at rates not seen in forty years, a health care system in collapse, our nation in disgrace. My fellows on the Left want to deal with the past, not the future. They are the first to condemn capital punishment as revenge, not justice, but what they want here is swift, bloody, vengeance!

They want to fix the blame, not the problem.

Our new president has ordered Guantanamo closed within a year. He has declared an end to torture. He wants to restore habeas corpus to the accused. Don't bog him down. Let him move on.

There's time to deal with the officially sanctioned atrocities of the past administration. Diane Feinstein is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She says it can conduct a thorough investigation and produce a report in eight or nine months. Let her. Let the outrage cool so the committee can proceed in calm deliberation in concert with the Justice Department. Resist the temptation to form Truth Squads, independent commissions, and multiple Congressional inquiries. Make every effort to tamp down the inflammatory partisan rancor which is sure to roil the country and halt progress on every initiative meant to get Americans back to work, into shelter, and secure in their health care.

There's time. Unclench your fists.

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