What is the Identity of Your Community?

Communities, like individuals, have a unique character and identity.  I spent two years in Ft. Worth, Texas, while attending Texas Christian University.  (Go Horned Frogs!)  The area most people refer to as Dallas - Ft. Worth, I refer to as Ft. Worth - Dallas.  Ft. Worth sometimes seemed overshadowed by its larger neighbor.  At the time, gift shops at the international airport, situated strategically between the two cities, offered a vast sampling of Dallas souvenirs and only a few token Ft. Worth items.  Mostly there was just a friendly rivalry between the two cities.  I never felt that Ft. Worth lacked for a unique culture or identity and I enjoyed my time there.

This is how Fodor's describes Ft. Worth:

"The city and its people are more deliberate, mindful of the western legacy forever shaping their identity.  That's not to say this is a town of simple country folk - Fort Worth's Cultural District houses world-class art, showcased in architecturally significant buildings."

That's a little stereotyped but basically reflects my memory of the city.

(Google map of Pinellas County, showing the position of St. Petersburg.  Tampa in Hillsborough County is toward the right.)

Until recently, I lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, often reduced to one-third of Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater.  In fact, it often becomes just Tampa-Clearwater, even though St. Petersburg has about twice the population of Clearwater.  Here's how Fodor's describes St. Petersburg:

"There are two distinct parts of St. Petersburg: the at-times snobbish downtown and cultural area, centered on the bay, and the more laid-back but pricey beach area, a string of barrier islands that faces the gulf and includes St. Pete Beach, Treasure Island, and Madeira Beach.  Causeways link beach communities to the mainland peninsula."

Even Fodor's can't identify St. Petersburg!  The beaches referenced in that paragraph (St. Pete Beach, etc.) are not part of St. Petersburg; they are separate communities with their own local governments.  And downtown is an important but geographically small part of the total city.

Further evidence that St. Petersburg can't commit to an identity:  At first I thought this road sign identifying St. Petersburg as a "Bicycle friendly community" was a joke.  There are bike friendly areas in St. Petersburg, but this street (66th St. North, a heavily traveled commercial thoroughfare with no bike lane) is not one of them.  It's almost as if the city can't make up its mind.

Did you know a Major League baseball team plays in St. Petersburg?  Many don't, because the team won't take on the city's name.  Instead, they're the Tampa Bay Rays.  Talk about an identity complex.

The mayor of St. Petersburg recently hired a city lobbyist; skeptics have wisely pointed out that lobbying for the city should be part of the mayor's job.

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath offer a case study of The Daily Record, the newspaper in Dunn, North Carolina.  Dunn had a population less than 10,000 according to the 2000 census.  Yet the newspaper has a circulation over 8,500, based on the most recent figures I could find.  This is extraordinary at a time when major newspapers are shrinking daily.  The Daily Record has one mission - to be local.  To provide the news that national and regional newspapers or network and cable news channels cannot; to fill The Daily Record with as many local names as possible.

I picked up a copy of the St. Petersburg Times last week.  I confess I seldom purchase the local newspaper because between the internet and television, I get more news than the paper can provide (some of it from the Times' own web site).  More important, however, is the lack of news about the city from which the paper takes its name:

• On this particular weekday, there was not one item on the front page specific to St. Petersburg.  Yes, there were state and regional articles of interest to St. Petersburg, but I bet the Tampa Tribune's front page that day looked very similar.
• The food section contained a review of a restaurant in Clearwater.
• The local/state section included a couple of brief articles about St. Petersburg subjects.  It also had a substantial article about Brooke Shields, who I'm sure is a nice person but seems to have no local connection.
• The business section had a brief article about a survey released by the University of Florida in Gainesville, will over 100 miles from St. Petersburg.  Raymond James, Payless Car Rental, Jabil Circuit, and Home Shopping Network are among the companies located in St. Petersburg - it's hard to figure this out from the local newspaper.
• The St. Petersburg Times has an odd section that combines classifieds with comics and advice columns.  The classifieds are from all over Pinellas County; the rest is primarily national syndicated material.
• A weekly Life Times section contained more nationally syndicated material along with a lengthy article about local residents (some actually from St. Petersburg) competing in a Wii tournament.  This section also includes a tiny paragraph advising us to "shop locally" - despite a glaring lack of information about local businesses.
• The sports section had some local focus, with a few articles about St. Petersburg high school sports and coverage of the above-mentioned Tampa Bay Rays
• Finally, a weekly Neighborhood Times section contained several pieces specific to St. Petersburg.

The lack of a local focus doesn't seem to be hurting the St. Petersburg Times.  The newspaper has a circulation over 300,000; St. Petersburg's population is about 245,000.  The paper received two Pulitzer Prizes in 2009.

On the other hand, I have to wonder about the impact on the community and St. Petersburg's apparent lack of a coherent identity.  Would St. Petersburg be better served by a newspaper with a true local focus?  Would other news media come forward to provide local news for other Pinellas County communities?  (A local strategy would work with me.  The one day I bought two copies of the St. Petersburg Times was the Sunday that one of my photos was featured in the travel section.)  I also think our definition of "local" is too geographically broad to support strong neighborhoods and communities.

One final item:  A major Bay Area entertainment venue is called the St. Pete Times Forum.  It's in Tampa!

All of this is not to criticize the St. Petersburg Times or the city of St. Petersburg.  I loved living in St. Petersburg.  I do think it's important to consider questions about community and identity.  If we don't work to build and maintain a positive identity for our respective communities, the wrong identity may prevail.  St. Petersburg has at times been identified with a culture of cruelty.  And that's not good for anyone.

The Places We Leave Behind

Sorting through boxes of stuff in preparation for moving, I came across a 1990s newspaper article about the Old Mill Six.  The Old Mill Six was a discount movie theater in Mountain View, California.  If you were willing to wait until just before a film's release on VHS (remember VHS?), you could see a movie at the Old Mill Six for less than $2.  A buddy and I had a somewhat weekly routine of seeing a movie at the Old Mill Six, then searching the jazz room at nearby Tower Records, followed by good conversation at a coffee shop next door to Tower.  The Old Mill Six closed years ago, as did all of Tower Records' U.S. stores.  But when I say I still miss the Old Mill Six, it's not just the place I miss but the camaraderie of a friend I haven't seen since leaving California in 2001.  They are forever linked in my memory.

I've written previously about my grandmother's caution to me about wanderlust in the Bravard family.  I've moved many times and lived in five states.  My launching point for this blog was the plan for another move - Julie and I moving from St. Petersburg to Tampa.  We've rented out our house in St. Petersburg and found a small apartment in Tampa, so this week is moving week.  We're caught up in the rush of packing boxes, changing our utilities and all the many things you have to do when moving.  We're not moving far, only Tampa Bay separates the two cities, but for some reason it feels to me like a vast distance.

I've also written previously about the definition of home; about how wildlife often has an instinctive need to return to its place of birth while people have considerable flexibility to change homes as needed.

Moving is a situation designed for nostalgia.  It's natural to think not only about the logistics of moving and setting up a new home, but about the emotional impact of what we're leaving and what we're about to find.  "Place" isn't just a house or the built environment, it's the people and experiences that fill that environment.  Time and distance don't just take places from us, they take the people who complete those places.  My advice is to enjoy your place as much as you can, because you never know when it might change or circumstances might require you to leave.  I still miss the Old Mill Six.  I still miss my grandparents' farmhouse in central Indiana.  I still miss the wonderful couple who lived across the street from us in North Carolina; they treated us like family and invited us to all of their holiday get-togethers.  And in St. Petersburg, I'll miss the Good Fortune Chinese Buffet; Julie and I are regulars there and it's a great place to have a long conversation over some General Tso's chicken.

There are pros and cons to settling in one place, just as there are pros and cons to my affliction with wanderlust.  I've seen places and met people I would never have seen or met otherwise.  And places change regardless; the Old Mill Six would have closed whether I stayed in California or not.  Still, it's hard not to feel a little sad over the places we leave behind.  Sooner or later, it seems, the time always comes to walk along a new sidewalk.

Point A to Point B: The Downtown St. Petersburg Edition

Let me digress for a moment:  I love The Globe Coffee Lounge in downtown St. Petersburg.  It is a funky, friendly café with an eclectic menu and a diverse clientele.  The owner, JoEllen Shilke, is smart and vibrant and a strong supporter of local arts.  I think every community needs more JoEllens and more Globes.

So when Julie and I went to an event at the Globe this week, I decided to make that my next experiment with Tampa Bay Area transit.  I rode PSTA (Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority); one bus, no transfer needed.  Downtown is easily accessible by bus as many of PSTA's routes pass through there.

(Point A to Point B: My route)

The distance from my house to the Globe is 8 miles.  The entire trip, including wait time, took me 58 minutes; compared to Google's estimate of 47 minutes.  (I could have reduced my wait time by 10 minutes but since I'm not familiar with PSTA's on-time record I decided to play it safe and get to the bus stop a little early.)  Exactly 6 minutes of that time was walking from my house to the bus stop; that matches Google's estimate of the walking time.  Driving from Point A to Point B is 20-30 minutes, depending on traffic.

(The view from the bus)

• I wrote previously about my belief that we do not sufficiently fund transit in the Tampa Bay Area.  I think PSTA does very good work with the resources available to them.  On this particular trip the bus was clean, comfortable and on time.

• I'm not wild about PSTA's route maps.  They show a few landmarks but the maps do not show routes in the context of streets, or even with a conventional north-south orientation.  I don't feel these maps are very welcoming to new transit users.

• On the other hand, I do like PSTA's web site.  I find it easy to navigate.  You can purchase tickets online with a $2 handling fee.  Fare and route information are all easy to find.  And Google trip planner is incorporated into the home page.

• A coalition of organizations, including PSTA, operates trolleys that cover downtown St. Petersburg.  The fare is only $0.25.  However, these trolleys only operate until 5PM Sunday through Thursday (later on Friday and Saturday); this is of limited use to people who work a conventional weekday schedule and want to visit downtown in the evening.

• Be careful to look at every suggested route when using Google trip planner.  In my case, Google offered three suggested routes and the third route was the most efficient.

(The Globe)

Simplicity in urban planning

Thanks to the Permission to Suck blog I came across a talk Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda gave at TED on the subject of simplicity.  (Maeda literally wrote the book on simplicity.)



I really started to appreciate simplicity when I was a student in Professor John Sullivan's fluid mechanics course at Purdue University.  Our first exam did not go well; Professor Sullivan said our class achieved one of the lowest test score averages in his career up to that point.  One particular test problem had most of us scribbling furiously for a page or more; when Professor Sullivan demonstrated the solution, it only required a simple, elegant, three lines.  It was a thing of beauty.  I don't always succeed, but the power of simplicity is a lesson I've tried to return to throughout my life.

Simplicity can be a valuable tool in urban design and city planning.  In his excellent book Green Metropolis, David Owen wrote, "Walking in much of Manhattan...is like walking on a map."  The average New Yorker lives nine months longer than the average American; there are several reasons for this, but one reason is the fact that they walk more.  The city is a walker's dream: plenty of landmarks, sprawling sidewalks, and a beautiful grid street layout.  The city is easy to navigate because of the grid.  Even if you get lost on foot, you'll rarely go more than a block out of your way.

I've lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, since 2004.  We do not come close to New York in terms of walkability.  But we have a street grid system that makes St. Petersburg a breeze to navigate.  Sequentially numbered avenues run east-west and sequentially numbered streets run north-south.  So if I'm looking for 5100 3rd Avenue North, I know I need to go to 51st Street and 3rd Avenue North.  If, from there, I need to go to 71st Street and 38th Avenue North, then I need to travel 35 blocks north and 20 blocks west to reach my destination.  This is perfect for the directionally challenged like myself.

(St. Petersburg, Florida)

I'll be moving to nearby Tampa soon enough.  Not quite as easy to navigate.  Yes, most streets are laid out according to an approximate grid.  But Tampa covers a much wider area than St. Petersburg (more on that in future posts) and, except for a few areas, the convenient numbering system is gone.  I don't know Dale Mabry Road from Hillsborough Avenue from Columbus Drive.  I'm looking forward to being in a new city and learning my way around.  It will just take longer than in St. Petersburg.  I'm also wondering if this has an impact on emergency services.  The street numbering system in St. Petersburg doesn't require much thought (or GPS help) once you're used to it.  It seems finding an address in Tampa, and most cities for that matter, will take precious extra time, even if only a few moments.

(Tampa, Florida)

Point A to Point B on the Tampa Express

How we get from Point A to Point B in our daily lives consumes massive time and energy.  My current home in Pinellas County, Florida, and my (hopefully) future home in Hillsborough County, Florida, are not hotbeds of public transit progressivism.  With a few exceptions, local civic leaders embrace the inefficiency of roads and highways and exclude other transit modes.  Thankfully, there is serious talk these days about light rail (often led by Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio), but that is far off in the future.  For now, bus travel is our only public transit option.

So from time to time I'll select a Point A and Point B, geographically, and use public transit to make the trip.  This week I went from my home to a Borders in Tampa via an express bus that crosses Tampa Bay, connecting St. Petersburg and Tampa.  Julie works near this Borders, so I had a reference point for driving (and a ride home, something most transit riders don't have).

Bay Area residents have some idea of how difficult this trip is.  I traveled through two counties via two different transit agencies: PSTA (Pinellas Suncoast Transit Authority) and HART (Hillsborough Area Regional Transit Authority).  My trip involved walking, riding a local St. Petersburg bus (PSTA), riding the express bus across Tampa Bay, and riding a local Tampa bus (HART).

According to Google, this is a distance of 21 miles.  My actual travel time was 1 hour, 23 minutes; Google Trip Planner estimates 1 hour, 48 minutes; Julie normally makes the drive in about 50 minutes.  Fifteen minutes of my travel time was walking from my house to the bus stop.

However, my total travel time, including waiting, was 3 hours.  I could have shortened this by taking a later local bus in St. Petersburg, but if that particular bus had been only 5 minutes late, I would have missed the express bus, leading to an additional 2 hour wait.  Wait time, of course, is crucial for transit users.

Here are a few take-aways from my bus experience:

• I haven't studied many of HART's routes, but many PSTA routes only run every half hour, some only once per hour.  This is not frequent enough to be practical for many people.  I don't blame PSTA for this; the real problem is that we have not sufficiently funded transit.

• Buses were clean and comfortable.  All the drivers were professional and courteous.  (This is more important than it sounds because I think driving a bus seems like a very stressful job.)  Buses ran on schedule; one even reached its destination a few minutes ahead of schedule.

• Counting student and senior discounts, PSTA offers 14 different fare options.  I appreciate the attempt to offer options, but this might be a little too much.  I would also like to see more area-wide fare options that integrate both PSTA and HART.

• The total fare was $6.50.  This is a little steep, but there are discounted multi-fare options for regular bus travelers.

• The individual fare for both HART and PSTA local buses is $1.75.  Exact change only.  For all those times when you have a dollar bill and three quarters handy.  This (not to mention potentially long wait times) can be a problem for the impulse traveler who just wants to go to a movie or shopping.  Until debit card readers are installed, the fares should be even dollar amounts.

• The day I took the bus was a beautiful spring day in Florida with high temperatures in the mid-70s.  Imagine waiting half an hour or longer at a bus stop during the Florida summer, with a heat index well over 100 degrees.  Now imagine that wait carrying groceries or with a child.  This is another argument for more frequent service.

• This was my first experience using Google's trip planner with public transit.  It was reliable and told me specifically which buses to take.  It did not, however, tell me the bus fare, so I still had to look at the individual transit agencies' web sites for this.

• The buses were not heavily used; there were only 5 passengers on the local PSTA bus and never more than 12 passengers on any of the three buses.  Many use this to support the abandonment of transit.  I feel the exact opposite is true - for all the reasons I've listed above (and more I'll surely think of later), this is evidence that we need to improve Bay Area transit and increase service frequency.  The more convenient it is, the more people will use it.

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.