Movies and Place

A few location-specific movies I've watched (or re-watched) lately:

The Model Shop (1969):  Watch Gary Lockwood drive around late-1960s Los Angeles in an MG convertible.  The buildings are packed tightly together but seldom reach above two stories.  Yet it seems very neighborly.  Sprawl seldom looked so good.

Rocky (1976):  Philadelphia in the late 1970s was showing her years.  The buildings are crumbling but the mood of the city, like Rocky Balboa, is restless, a city paying dues for an uncertain future.  Watch for the great shot of City Hall.

Annie Hall (1977):  New York City vs. Los Angeles.  Woody Allen always prefers NYC, and it shows in the loving shots of the city that show up in many of his films.  Received the Academy Award for Best Picture.

King of California (2007):  Michael Douglas plays a character in denial of how suburban sprawl and big box retailers dominate the landscape.  Watch for all the corporate retail logos that represent the gentrification of an entire country (and someday the world?).  Turns out the real bargain is underneath CostCo.

A River Runs Through It (1992):  Rural Montana in the post-World War I years.  I've never been fly-fishing but director Robert Redford proves it's an art form.  The movie justifiably won the Academy Award for cinematography.

Home

Nature, it speaks true.  Why not man?

The Tempest (1982)

One morning Julie and I found a turtle in our back yard.  Being tree-huggers of sorts, we were at a loss.  Although for me, the love of animals has more to do with their helplessness than any sense of conservational responsibility.  We couldn't leave the turtle in the back yard because the dogs might hurt it.  Our house sits close to the street, so the front yard wasn't an option.  We called an area nature center and were advised that a turtle will do just about anything to return to its place of birth.  This gave me some relief that turtles lack firearms and opposable thumbs.

The guy at the nature center told us the turtle was probably headed for the nearest body of water.  The only thing we could think of was the drainage ditch that runs across the street.  So we left the turtle out there and hoped for the best.

Every year a pair of doves nests in an orange tree in our back yard.  Not only the same tree, but the same branch of the tree.  I've read that the average life span of mourning doves is 1.5 years, so maybe these are descendants of the original doves.  Either way, I appreciate their consistency.

This theme of returning to the place of origin seems common in nature.  I've met people who never left the county in which they were born.  I've met others who spend their lives wandering and have no wish to settle in a specific location.  I left my home state of Indiana in 1989 to go to school in Texas.  Since then I've returned to my hometown exactly three times; two of those trips were for funerals.  It's not that I don't like the place; funds and time are always limited.  In 2001 Julie and I sold our house in California, moved to North Carolina, and bought a new house there - all in one month.  This adaptability, the ability to position ourselves in more viable locations relatively quickly, has clearly been critical to our survival as a species.

Only economics and politics - national borders - complicates this social and biological freedom to move from place to place.  And technology has gradually chipped away at economic factors, making it easier for more and more people to live and work in completely separate locations.  What is home, then?  A physical space?  A state of mind?  A collection of emotional or social bonds?

We affect our location and our location affects us.  Where to live is not a trivial decision.  In the United States, Sperling's BestPlaces helps you figure out the city or town best suited to your likes and dislikes.  (San Francisco came out at the top of my list, which makes me think their algorithm isn't giving enough weight to my desire for affordable housing.)  Either way, living a thoughtful, deliberate life involves giving serious thought to our location.

I admit, some days I still wonder how things worked out for that turtle.  But the baby doves left the nest recently and it was a real treat to watch.

Traffic Circles

Traffic management is a vital aspect of community.  In his book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What It Says About Us, Tom Vanderbilt cites research showing that traffic roundabouts can reduce traffic delays as much as 65% compared to intersections with conventional traffic signals.  That's because at roundabouts all drivers have to slow down, but they rarely have to stop.

(Traffic circles and roundabouts are technically different.  In traffic circles, priority is often given to drivers entering the circle.  In roundabouts, drivers entering the circle generally have to yield to drivers already in the circle.  I often use the terms interchangeably but the efficiency increased mentioned in Traffic applies to roundabouts.)

(Satellite view courtesy of Google Maps)
Above is a roundabout in a residential area of St. Petersburg, Florida.  I'm not wild about this one; based on observation it's not effective at slowing traffic.  Traffic from two directions does not have to reduce speed until it's well into the circle, so drivers from these directions often force the right-of-way, increasing the possibility of a crash.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure of an effective solution because of the divided road on the east side of the circle.  Expanding the width of the roundabout might work, but this would require acquisition of substantial amounts of the surrounding private properties.

(Satellite view courtesy of Google Maps)
The above roundabout is also in St. Petersburg.  It seems effective at slowing traffic.  It's smaller than the earlier roundabout and it's located in a commercial district.

Above is a photo I took of Columbus Circle in Manhattan in 2005.  This is a traffic circle; entry is controlled by stop lights.  Traffic circles and roundabouts can do more than calm traffic.  They offer a public space - note the benches around the interior of the circle - and they offer a forum for public art, in this case a statue of Christopher Columbus.

(Satellite view courtesy of Google Maps)
One of the highlights of a recent trip to Washington, DC, was an evening hanging out in DuPont Circle.  It not only manages the intersection of four streets but provides a public greenspace.  Benches line the circle.  Julie and I sat with cold beverages while enjoying the diversity of ethnicities, ages, income levels, and activities around us.  Dog walkers, athletes and families passed by, along with people who appeared to be homeless and others dressed in a formal business attire.  On nearby streets we found a range of shops and restaurants, as well as a DC Metro station, giving us easy access to the entire DC area.  It's the kind of public space all communities could use more of.

Where to see a movie in a small town

Well Saturday night about eight o'clock

I know what I'm gonna do

I'm gonna pick my baby up

And take her to the picture show

The Drifters

When I was a child, I didn't realize the Castle Theater was such a unique place.  The Castle is a real movie theater, at the time the only theater in my hometown of New Castle, Indiana (there is a drive-in just outside of town).  It opened in 1935, before the days of metroplex shoeboxes where the sound from one microtheater leaks into the next.  I saw some of my favorite movies there, including the original Star Wars in 1977.  As I've written before, I've only returned to New Castle three times in the last twenty-one years.  On the last visit Julie and I saw American Wedding at the Castle.  The movie was forgettable, but Julie was impressed by the Castle and I couldn't help feeling proud that my hometown could sustain such a nice theater.

Except, it almost couldn't.  The Castle closed in January.  It was a real shock to many of us who grew up there.  The good news is the Castle is scheduled to open in March under new ownership.  I admire the new owners but I don't envy them; operating the only movie screen in a small city can't be easy.

I lived one terrible year in Stockton, in the Central Valley of California.  One of the few things I liked about Stockton was the Empire Theater, another historic movie theater.  They often showed classic films and I saw The Godfather there.  Some folks suggested the classic film route for the Castle.  I like the idea, but I don't know if New Castle has the population (18,339 in 2008) to sustain such a niche business.

Part of what defines a place is the kind of businesses it attracts and retains.  Cheap consumer electronics and a global trend toward urbanization haven't been kind to small towns and their movie theaters.  Movies are one of the things America has always done well and many of our fondest memories are what movies we saw, the theaters we saw them in, and who we saw them with.  A night at the movies is local entertainment that is culturally unifying whether we're in a theater in Newton, Iowa, or Middletown, Connecticut, or New Castle, Indiana.  Every small town theater that closes causes a disconnect bigger than the business itself.

The good news is that the Castle Theater will open again.  Maybe this is not a great thing in the grand scheme of economics.  But I'm relieved because in a world that changes more rapidly all the time, the theater's presence is a constant that links several generations.  And I hope for the best when the Castle reopens, because while the movies are still good, the movie theaters have really gone downhill.  And the Castle is a great theater.

I miss the bookstores, and so will you

I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for nine years.  It was where I came to love bookstores.  It was where I developed an understanding of what Ray Oldenburg called the "third place," those places away from home and work that give character to communities.  Howard Schultz also developed an understanding of the third place; he put the insight to much better use than I have.

Anyway, there were great bookstores in the Bay Area.  Independents and used bookstores.  And when a Borders opened on University Avenue in Palo Alto, I enthusiastically accepted it as part of the local culture without understanding the impact Borders and Barnes & Noble would have on independent stores.  Amazon.com had not yet conquered the world.  The bookstores I loved were not only places to browse books, but because many of them had attached cafés, they were ideal places to meet with a friend for a hot beverage and good conversation.  (Printers, Inc., was one of the best; their space in downtown Mountain View is still a bookstore/café operated by Books, Inc.)  Used bookstores, like BookBuyers in Mountain View and Know Knew Books in Palo Alto, were treasure hunts where I found the likes of The Last Convertible by Anton Myrer and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; books I would probably never have stumbled onto in a chain retailer.  Those bookstores helped define the community and so they helped define that stage of my life.  I'm thrilled that a few of the bookstores I frequented are still around.

Culture shock hit when we moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, and found that independent and used bookstores were much less common.  Third places were more likely to be chains like Starbucks.  Borders became a guilty pleasure.  We moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2004.  More culture shock.  Our local Borders is usually filled with people shouting at each other (or into their cell phones).  Much of this is more about changing times than changing geography.  We do have a large and popular used bookstore downtown, but they have a shrine to extremist idealogues that I find too distracting.  A few other used bookstores in St. Petersburg, but the selection is limited.  It's not their fault; there's not enough business to support the kind of stores I fell in love with.

Borders recently closed its B. Dalton bookstore in Laredo, Texas.  That makes Laredo one of the largest cities in the United States without a bookstore.  There are suggestions that Barnes & Noble will open a store there in the future.  Should we worry that a city of 250,000 people can't support a bookstore?  Or should we accept that online booksellers and Kindle-like e-book readers are good enough?  I don't have the answer.

I don't know what the future of literacy in our country is.  Or the future of third places.  I don't know if it's a bad thing that the internet (and bloggers like me) seem to be shortening our collective attention span.  I can't prove that it's a bad thing that we spend more time in third places text messaging people remotely than we spend talking with the people in the room with us.  I feel that our society has been unraveling somewhat in recent years and that this trend is continuing, but I don't have data to back that up.  I just know I miss the bookstores, and I think we'll all miss them someday.  I miss them like I miss my wasted youth.  I miss them like a lost love.  And I don't think they're coming back.

Why is it called A New Sidewalk?

I didn't even notice the lack of sidewalks.  When I bought our house in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2004, I didn't notice that the nearest sidewalk was four blocks away.  If you've ever bought a home, maybe you'll sympathize with me; we often overlook something that becomes important later.

In my defense, I was distracted by history.  I grew up in a quiet suburban neighborhood in a smallish Indiana town.  No sidewalks in that neighborhood, either.  There was so little traffic we never seemed to miss them.  (That's the house in the photograph.  Nice neighborhood, except for the occasional ice storm.)

Growing up, my family vacationed on Florida's Gulf coast almost every year.  It was, and still is, common among Midwesterners.  I could walk for hours on the beach and be perfectly happy.  Isn't the beach just a sidewalk for the ocean?  So I grew up with a nostalgic affection for coastal Florida.  Even when I lived in California, I imagined that one day I would live near the Gulf of Mexico.

Julie and I lived in North Carolina from 2001 to 2004.  Of course, we lived in a neighborhood without sidewalks.  Those were boom years for Florida real estate.  We decided to buy into the St. Petersburg housing market even before moving here.  (Don't laugh - you probably didn't see the housing market collapse coming, either.  That's a topic for another day.)  I came to St. Petersburg for a weekend in early 2004, spent a day on a whirlwind tour of houses, and took a bunch of photos to show Julie when I returned.  It was snowing heavily in North Carolina the day we looked at photos of houses in sunny Florida.

Given this history, I think I deserve some slack for not thinking about sidewalks.  Another factor in my favor, there is a county-wide recreational trail across the street.  Plenty of walking/running/cycling to be done there.

In his book The City Assembled, architectural historian Spiro Kostof speculates that the first sidewalks may have been built around 2000-1900 BC in the merchant colony of Kültepe, in what is now Turkey.  They didn't become widely used until the late 1800s.  In modern-day suburbs, like my current neighborhood, zoning and low density work against sidewalks.  Zoning keeps out retail that might benefit from sidewalk traffic.  Housing spread out in single-family homes with yards results in fewer people per block in need of a pedestrian-friendly area (and greater distances usually make walking anywhere impractical).  It's no surprise that sidewalks can dramatically improve safety for pedestrians.  And they can serve multiple purposes beyond the obvious pedestrian transit route.

Like the neighborhood where I grew up, our current neighborhood has little motor vehicle traffic.  But the streets are narrower; the drivers here are faster and less civil.  Certainly faster than traffic in ancient Kültepe.  Julie and I both enjoy walking and we miss having sidewalks.  We like living in St. Petersburg, it's just, well, we should have been looking for a neighborhood with sidewalks.  Lesson learned.

What's missing from this street?

The Bravards I think was known of their wanderlust.

That's from a letter my paternal grandmother wrote to me in 2001.  Grandma wrote a series of letters that described her life in Indiana in the 1930s.  They are fascinating and my only regret is that she didn't write more.

By that time, I had changed addresses eight times since graduating from business school in 1991 (nine times if you count the short-term apartment rental while house-shopping in North Carolina).  Grandma couldn't have told me sooner about the wanderlust?

In the excellent 1991 suspense film Dead Again, Robin Williams' character says something to the effect of:

People are either smokers or non-smokers.  The best thing you can do is figure out which you are and be true to it.

Kids: I'm not condoning smoking.  It destroys your lungs and makes you smell bad.  Still, I'm drawn to the idea that a major source of contentment in life is figuring out one's true nature.  Thinking beyond short-term self-appeasement and looking toward long-term fulfillment.  Shakespeare was unusually efficient on the subject: To thine own self be true.  I wonder if most of us, myself included, have spent enough time thinking about who we really are and what our true potential is.

Despite Grandma's insightful note, I changed addresses three more times before landing at my current address in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 2005 (that's my street in the photo above).  In that time I've learned a few things about myself and the world; I hope those lessons, and lessons in progress, will guide me in writing this blog.  One of the things that fascinates me is how place affects us.  How regional cultures, technology, transportation, and urban design issues influence our lives.  The Florida version of me is not the same as the Indiana, Texas, California, or North Carolina versions.

The time has come for a variation on the Florida version.  I'll elaborate in future posts, but here is the short version: My partner, Julie, works in Tampa, across Tampa Bay from St. Petersburg.  My current plan is to go to school in Tampa beginning January, 2011.  Rather than make the 90-minute-plus round-trip commute every day, we're trying to rent our house so we can move to Tampa.  I'm using this transition as a launching point for this blog.

I'll be writing about the importance of location, the changing nature of the urban (or suburban or rural) environment and how this affects our personal and professional lives.  Also how online communities have come to enhance, and sometimes replace, physical communities.  I'll often turn to people much smarter than me for inspiration, and I'll rely on my passions of photography, music, movies and literature to help tell the story.  My goal is not to point anyone in a particular direction, but to find my own direction and maybe help others in the process.  To find a new sidewalk, so to speak.

Currently, I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter and have my own web site that features some of my photography.  Those are good places to find out about my background and qualifications.  I hope that you'll comment here or drop me a line; suggestions and constructive feedback are welcome and appreciated.

In the meantime, think about always being in a mode of self-assessment.  Every day is a transition; what we can influence are the direction and velocity.  And if you're fortunate enough to be in touch with any of your grandparents, listen to them.  They won't always be right, but they offer a unique historical perspective.