Category Archives: Cities

Bob Hicks, Cities, Food, General, Journalism, Theater, Visual Art

Sunday links: Art garden and a wild and crazy quote

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A quick Sunday scatter of good stuff in other places:

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, "Summer," 1573, Louvre/Paris. Wikimedia Commons*************************

FEED THE BODY, FEED THE MIND: Under the headline Philbrook Museum of Art Trades Tulips for Tomatoes, artdaily.org reports that Tulsa’s Philbrook — the museum that Brian Ferriso left to become executive director of the Portland Art Museum — is replacing its 3,600-square-foot south formal garden with a vegetable garden and will give the veggies to the Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma to help Oklahomans get through the economic crisis. Now, there’s a conceptual art project we can get behind. Bravo. Too often when times get tough, culture and shelter (and schools, for that matter) get tossed into an either/or funding game, turning natural allies into competing animals at a shrinking watering hole. As this project reveals, it doesn’t have to be that way.

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STEVE MARTIN UNLEASHED: The Oregonian’s Marty Hughley has a good report in Sunday’s O! section on how things turned out when students from the local high school finally got to put on their production of Steve Martin‘s stage comedy Picasso at the Lapin Agile. They performed it at Eastern Oregon University instead of at the high school because the school board, after receiving parental complaints about the play’s purported immorality, called the thing off.

Martin then stepped in and paid for the production himself, and in a letter to the local paper he came up with this gem, which Hughley quotes:

“I have heard that some in your community have characterized the play as ‘people drinking in bars, and treating women as sex objects.’ With apologies to William Shakespeare, this is like calling Hamlet a play about a castle.”

Yes, Xenophobia, there is an Oregon. But the good news to take from Marty’s story is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

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IN SWITZERLAND, A SWING TO THE RIGHT: A few art insiders complained when Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times’ chief art critic, decamped to Europe for a year instead of paying attention to what was happening on the art scene stateside. Not me. I’ve enjoyed his Abroad reports. They’ve helped an already top-notch critic broaden his knowledge even further, and they’ve given readers a lot of good stories they wouldn’t have had otherwise.

One of the best is last week’s report from Zurich, In Quiet Switzerland, Outspoken Rapper Takes on the Far Right, about an Estonian-born Swiss rapper stage-named Stress who’s stirred up some welcome controversy by tackling directly in his lyrics chemicals tycoon Christoph Blocher, powerful head of the ultranationalist Swiss People’s Party, who is one scary dude. Like Hitler and Stalin before him, Blocher uses his own sanitized vision of cultural purity in the arts to push his ideal of the perfect, and perfectly xenophobic, homeland. Kimmelman writes:

Mr. Blocher used his own collection of works by 19th-century painters like Albert Anker and Ferdinand Hodler in shows he organized to illustrate what he has said represent wholesome Swiss ideals: women in the home, farmers milking cows, a nation historically separated from outsiders by more than just mountains.

Steve Martin, the good people of Switzerland need you. Now.

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A CREATIVE WAKE-UP CALL IN PORTLAND?: Also in Sunday’s O! section of The Oregonian, visual arts critic D.K. Row files this intriguing report on how the flap over City Hall’s recent push to bulldoze Portland’s Memorial Coliseum has lit an activist fire under at least a slice of the city’s creative class. D.K. quotes architect/activist Stuart Emmons:

“We’ve just said, ‘Enough.’ We need to speak out for what we believe in and quit allowing politics to keep us from what’s right. This goes way beyond Memorial Coliseum.”

This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the art of politics.” Stay tuned. Let’s see where this thing heads.

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ON ART AND THE CRITICS: A recent Art Scatter post about Rocco Landesman’s appointment to run the National Endowment for the Arts sparked a heady and rambunctious round of comments that went off in all sorts of directions. I hope to get back to some of those issues, notably the meaning of “local” in the arts and the role of failure in creativity: Is it a necessary element of discovery, or a cult of self-absorption that ignore the needs and rights of the audience? Then there was this note from playwright, filmmaker, novelist and teacher Charles Deemer:

“At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.”

Can’t argue with that. But if you’d like to, hit that comment button.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Visual Art

Calatrava in Manhattan: It’s a jungle out there

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Conception for World Trade Center transportation hub

Everything old is new again. Or everything new is old again.

Or (and this is much more satisfying to type) DINOSAURS ARE ON THE LOOSE IN NEW YORK CITY!!!

Thanks to Art Knowledge News for this story about architecture superstar Santiago Calatrava‘s design for the new transportation hub at Manhattan’s World Trade Center site. (And when, if ever, will Portland start thinking about this sort of architectural landmark?) An exhibition on this and other Calatrava projects will be at New York’s Queen Sofia Spanish Institute through Aug. 31.

I love the look of this building, which seems, well, Jurassic. You might even say, stegosauran, although Calatrava prefers to think of it as suggesting a bird being released from a child’s hand. Well, we know about birds’ prehistoric line of descent. Which prompted me to poke around Google until I found this image, of a stegosaurus model at the Bartow Jurassic Park in Poland. Maybe this guy’s the Model T to Calatrava’s Ferrari. But the family resemblance is unmistakable:

Stegosaurus, Baltow Jurassic Park, Poland/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General

Rose Quarter/Coliseum: Is K.C. the sunshine gang?

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Broadway & 42nd Street, New York, 1880/Wikimedia CommonsA quick followup on our last post about Memorial Coliseum and how it fits or doesn’t fit into plans for a revamped Rose Quarter. In this morning’s Oregonian, Ted Sickinger files this fascinating report from Kansas City and its  Power & Light District, a glitzy entertainment district developed by the Cordish Co., which also wants to redevelop Portland’s Rose Quarter in partnership with the city and the Trail Blazers. It’s a good, balanced read that talks clearly about money, about the differences between Portland and Kansas City (Kansas City’s downtown was pretty much wiped out and any fix looked good), and about the audience for the new K.C. entertainment zone — pretty much suburbanites and out-of-towners.

Question: Is the city’s goal to set aside a chunk of prime real estate as a lure for out-of-town spenders, like Vancouver, B.C.’s Gastown or New York’s recently sanitized Times Square? Is that good policy? How will it help or harm already existing businesses and nearby neighborhoods in Portland? Will any Portland businesses be part of the deal? Sickinger points out that several of the Kansas City development’s prime tenants are owned by a subsidiary of Cordish — a cozy arrangement that suggests this will be a dropped-from-the-sky project, not an organically grown development.

And over at Culture Shock, Mighty Toy Cannon gives this blistering analysis of the Coliseum situation, connecting a lot of dots that needed to be connected. It’s highly recommended reading.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Journalism

Memorial Coliseum: The empire strikes back

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portlandmemorialcolWell, damn those architects’ pointy little heads. What right do they have to protest the demolition of a historically important building when a billionaire’s profits are on the line?

Astonishingly, that seems to be the subtext of this morning’s banner story in The Oregonian, under the reductionist headline, Save the coliseum, but for what? Unlike the paper’s previous reporting on the issue of razing or saving Memorial Coliseum, which has been solid, this piece feels like it belongs on the op-ed page. Even then, it’s poorly thought out — mainly, in its thrust, a repetition of the Portland Trail Blazer/City of Portland talking points and a flicking-away of the several legitimate counterproposals that have been made for use of the building. Now that Mayor Sam Adams has given the Coliseum at least a temporary reprieve, this morning’s story reads like the first strike in a counter-campaign to get it torn down, after all. That’s a legitimate goal for an opinion-page story, even though I happen to think it’s the wrong choice. But why am I reading it on the front page, in the guise of a news story?

I won’t get into the arguments in favor of preserving the Coliseum, which have been made well and often in several places (among them Portland Arts Watch, Burnside Blog, Portland Architecture and Culture Shock), except to say this: For all of Portland’s vaunted reputation as a well-planned city, it’s hardly overloaded with buildings of real architectural distinction, and that makes the potential loss of any excellent work of architecture a matter for deep public concern. I’m not an architect, and the International Style is hardly my favorite — indeed, I have a lot of issues with it — but you save what you have, and in the case of Memorial Coliseum, what Portland has is an elegant, almost startlingly pure expression of the International ethos. We’re not talking about an abandoned Home Depot here, in spite of City Commissioner Randy Leonard’s unfortunate stab at architecture criticism.

After establishing the impracticality of the architectural trade in general (why, you’d almost think they were college professors!), The Oregonian’s story gets down to business: The Coliseum is a money-loser. An accompanying bar chart reveals that, yes, for the past three years it’s lost money, mainly because the city’s spent close to $2 million in that time period on needed upkeep (the bill’s been $3.2 million since 2000). And it could cost another $13 million or more to make up for years of neglect and get the place in really good shape again.

Fair enough, although the chart also reveals that in the three immediately preceding years the Coliseum stacked up profits of $243,000, $338,000 and $275,000 — even though the Blazers, who have the sole right to manage and book the building even though it’s city-owned, haven’t had a lot of incentive to push the Coliseum to the detriment of their own Rose Garden a quick jog away.

Continue reading Memorial Coliseum: The empire strikes back →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

Memorial Coliseum saved. Now what?

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Conceptual drawing for Lents baseball stadium, 1760. Wikimedia CommonsThis morning’s Oregonian headlined the news that Mayor Sam Adams and his partners-in-sports have backtracked and won’t take the wrecking ball to Memorial Coliseum, after all.

Hooray for that. But the story’s far from over.

Mark Larabee’s report says that aspiring mogul Merritt Paulson will shift his proposed minor-league baseball stadium back to the Lents neighborhood of Southeast Portland instead of trying to squeeze it into the Rose Quarter site controlled by full-fledged mogul Paul Allen, whose Trail Blazers organization wants to redevelop the whole shooting match for a highly questionable, theme-park-ish entertainment district. Fellow scatterer Barry Johnson, over at his alternate-universe blog on OregonLive.com, raises several pertinent red flags. Read his column — it’s important.

Questions:

1. Why build a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball park at all? Lents might want it, and maybe it’ll be good for a neighborhood that could use a few good things, and certainly it’ll provide some decent (if short-term) construction jobs. But is it necessary? PGE Park, which is now slated to become a soccer-only stadium for Paulson’s new major-league soccer franchise, is still a great place to see a baseball game. We’re told the soccer league insists that member teams provide soccer-only stadiums, but let’s face it: “Major” league or not, we’re not talking baseball or football or the NBA or even big-league hockey here. Why not call the league’s bluff? After all, we’re all paying for this thing. It’s in the public’s best interest to (a) insist on the best deal possible, and (b) decide whether it wants to make a deal at all. Sam doesn’t get to decide that all by himself.

2. Why should the Blazers decide what the best use of Memorial Coliseum will be? Yes, I know the city cut Allen and his companies a sweetheart deal on management of the Coliseum and the rest of the district, which is part of the reason the Coliseum’s become run-down: The Blazers don’t have a lot of incentive to let it compete seriously with their own Rose Garden. Time for the city to rethink this thing and stand up for itself. The Coliseum needs to be reimagined as an attractor for the entire city, not just a money-maker for the Allen organizations. I still very much like the idea of a first-class participatory sports and recreation center. That would draw thousands of people into the Rose Quarter, year-round.

3. Why are Randy Leonard’s heels dug in? The famously assertive city commissioner, who has been Adams’ sidekick through this thing, says that with the Rose Quarter off the table for the baseball stadium, he won’t consider any option other than Lents for the new ballpark. “It’s either Lents or I’m off the deal entirely,” Larabee quotes him. Wait a minute: What about leaving the Triple-A Beavers at PGE Park, where they could easily be scheduled around the new big-league soccer team and would — hello — help keep the stadium from sitting idle most of the year? Our city council isn’t prepared to even consider that? This is the cheapest option. It might also be the best.

4. What about big-league baseball? We’re talking $55 million for a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball park when (a) most Portlanders simply don’t care about minor-league baseball, and (b) there’s an even chance that in the next five to ten years the city could lure an actual big-league franchise? Then what? How much more will the city pay for a big-league stadium? Where will the stadium be? And what will happen with the little Lents park? Maybe we should just sit out this whole Triple-A deal and work on the real thing.

5. Can someone please explain how the Hooters at the city’s northern gateway is an improvement on the old Waddle’s restaurant it replaced? At least Waddle’s had a decent corned-beef hash. This may seem like a digression, but it’s not, really, because it echoes the main trouble with the Blazers’ proposed entertainment district: It substitutes tired, watered-down (if also pumped-up) cookie-cutter ideas about culture for the local, truly individual, real deal. To borrow a line from Nancy Reagan, maybe it’s time to Just Say No.

Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Theater, Visual Art

Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink

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thomas_paineOur partner-in-Scattering Barry Johnson (who does not look like the portrait here of Tom Paine, rabble-rousing author of the political tract Common Sense) advocates a little citywide common sense in the continuing flap over Portland’s Rose Quarter and Mayor Sam Adams’ push to tear down Memorial Coliseum to make room for a minor-league baseball park and a suburban-style “entertainment district” of aggressively anonymous chain outfits on the order of a Hard Rock Cafe.

Barry writes in his alternate-universe column in this morning’s Oregonian that we all need to think more clearly about common sense the way the thinkers of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment thought of it, as “an idea based on the best available evidence and therefore potentially persuasive to anyone.”

Barry’s pretty clear about the slapdash quality of the thinking on this rush-rush move. His summation of how we got into this municipal pickle has the blunt ring of truth:

The initial push to demolish Memorial Coliseum came from Mayor Sam Adams, who wanted 1) to make sure Portland got its Major League Soccer team, 2) which he could only do by building a new baseball stadium, 3) which would help him and the Blazers build their entertainment district if it landed in the Rose Quarter, 4) which, in turn, would serve his new convention hotel. Oh, and 5) he’d have to knock down Memorial Coliseum to do it.

Brian Libby, on his site Portland Architecture, also continues to hit hard and tellingly on why Adams’ plan is a bad idea (I’d argue that after Point 1 above none of it makes sense), and Libby’s helped rally the city’s architectural community to the cause. Keep checking him out, because he keeps adding new twists to the story.

I can only add, picking up on Barry’s theme of “common sense,” that we also think of the meaning of the commons — those areas that we hold in public trust, for the greater good of all of us. The division between what’s public and what’s private has long since been blurred: These days, big  projects increasingly come in the form of what’s called “public/private partnerships.” That’s why city and state governments pay hundreds of millions of dollars for big-league baseball and football stadiums, and it’s why, in Portland, the rehab of the old armory building into a home for Portland Center Stage came from a complex quiltwork of various governmental dollars. It’s not a bad thing: It gets things done. But it does muddy the sense of what’s public and what’s private and who benefits most. And it makes it that much more crucial for our political leaders to remember which side of the fence they’re on.

Continue reading Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink →

Cities, General, Vernon Peterson

Bad Day at Black Rock: The far post

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200px-bad_day_at_black_rockStop me if you’ve heard this one before. There are two plots, it is said: Someone Goes On A Trip and Stranger Comes To Town. That’s one plot, actually, with two points of view. Stranger must go on trip from some other town in order to come to ours.

Why then so many stories? Subplot and denouement.

For example, Kid comes to town and wants to play ball. Say Kid is poor and lives on the flats (the poor kid is always from the flats). When Kid shows up on the field, he’s picked on and stuffed in the trash can. Or, Kid shows up on the field with immense talent, becomes a hero, and gets a scholarship to State.

Or, say, Kid is rich, and when he comes down off the hill (the rich kid always lives on the hill), he brings a shiny new ball and a couple extra pairs of shin guards, to share. Many options here. Say Kid’s dad builds town a Carnegie library and moves on to next town (Kid leaves ball with team).

Or, Kid says, “We play by my rules or I take my ball and go home.”

Or, Kid says, “Give me your lunch money and I’ll let you clean up and mow Mr. Wilson’s vacant lot for a new pitch, and I’ll let you paint the fence. And, if you promise me your kid’s lunch money 20 years from now, I’ll give you free tickets on promo night.”

Moral of story: Some kids teach their parents about Stranger Danger. Some don’t.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General

The city and the Rose Quarter: First, do no harm

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Le Malade Imaginaire, Honore Daumier

“Government should practice the same principle as doctors,” President Obama said the other day. “First, do no harm.”

He was responding to critics who say he’s been too timid on the banks, shying away from the get-tough part of the takeover business. Going too far, Obama argued, could make things worse instead of better.

Whatever you think of Obama’s tactics in this particular case, “First, do no harm” isn’t a bad principle for government, even — and maybe especially — when government decides it’s time to be bold. Be bold, yes. But also be sure. Before you do something radical, make sure it’s actually going to make things better rather than worse. That isn’t a conservative or a liberal stance. It’s just a sensible one.

It’s a principle that Portland Mayor Sam Adams seems to be ignoring in his rush to tear down Memorial Coliseum — one of the city’s best-designed buildings — and replace it with a $55 million minor-league baseball park as part of a complicated package to free PGE Park for exclusive use by a new major-league soccer team, push through a government-funded $200 million convention center hotel, and synergize with a Portland Trail Blazers plan to transform the Rose Quarter into an entertainment district that would seem to be more at home along a suburban shopping thoroughfare than in a vital corner of the central city.

Whoa, Nellie. What’s that choking sound? It’s the gurglings of architects, preservationists, planners, veterans groups, North/Northeast Portland residents and economic analysts reacting to having something shoved down their throats. In a word, ouch.

Fellow Scatterer Barry Johnson, in a post headed Demolishing Memorial Coliseum — a bad idea inside a bad plan, has an excellent analysis on his Oregonian/Oregon Live blog, Portland Arts Watch; read it here. Oregonian reporter Mark Larabee filed a good report on gathering opposition to the Rose Quarter steamroller here; and The Oregonian’s Ryan Frank reports here on Adams’ effort to push for the 600-room convention center hotel, a plan that so far is opposed by Multnomah County exec Ted Wheeler, whose support is necessary if the thing is going to get built. In addition, architecture and design writer Brian Libby has been weighing in frequently (and critically) at his Web site Portland Architecture, and Tim DuRoche has this sharply worded argument on his blog for Portland Spaces magazine.

I don’t want to turn this into a diatribe about public spending on sports. I happen to be a lifelong baseball nut, and although soccer isn’t my game, I know it has a big following here. A couple of points: Despite the argument that PGE Park is a bad space for Triple-A baseball, in fact it’s a terrific place to watch a ballgame, a little gem along the lines of Seattle’s old Sicks Stadium or even Boston’s Fenway Park. Sure, it usually has far more empty seats than filled ones — but that’s because baseball destroyed its minor-league system decades ago in terms of audience allegiance (how do you follow a team when the players shift week to week?). And this: Fifty-five million dollars for a 9,000-seat minor-league park? Does it get torn down in turn if and when the city lands a major-league franchise?

As for Memorial Coliseum, yes, it’s been allowed to get shabby. But that’s fixable. And a little imagination could turn it into a genuine attractor (and economic kick-starter) for the area. A few years ago, when he was The Oregonian’s architecture and planning writer, Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg championed a plan that would turn the Coliseum into a first-rate community athletic center, with Olympic pool, indoor track facilities and other active-participant draws. I thought it was a great idea then, and I still do — something to attract people to the area all year long. I’m sure there are other good ideas much better than tearing the old girl down. Can we seriously consider them, please?

Most of us laugh wryly now and again at Portland’s penchant to talk anything and everything to death before taking action. But while it may have cost us here and there, that earnest inclusionary tendency is also an essential part of what makes the city work. We don’t mind haste when haste is necessary, but we want deliberate haste — haste that pauses long enough to make sure that the issues are clear and the stakeholders have been heard. Around here, rushing things unduly is a hell of a way to run a railroad — and right now, what’s going on at city hall feels exacly like a railroad job. Is there a doctor in the caboose?

Barry Johnson, Cities

Walk the park, talk to yourself

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Tom McCall Waterfront Park, Portland, OregonOn Sunday, the first truly fine day of Spring, Art Scatter found itself scurrying along Tom McCall Waterfront Park. We were in transit, not lollygagging or basking in the sun but not running or biking, either. The latter would have been difficult because so many promenaders were out, choking the walkway with clots of slow-moving homo sapiens.

None of this is remarkable: If you were out at all yesterday, you had company. (Later, we chatted with one woman who’d spent the morning hiking deep in the Gorge, and even SHE found fellow travelers.) But as we walked from the Hawthorne Bridge to the Steel Bridge, we had a couple of, ahem, thoughts.

1. Passing by the remains of the demonstration against the 12-lane, I-5 Bridge proposal was a reminder of what I like about Portland — citizens still think they can affect policy in the city. And sometimes they are right. The 12-lane proposal — and that’s not counting several lanes of ramps on either end of the bridge — has a lot of momentum right now, but there are enough natural hurdles, from the gigantic cost to Oregon at a time when there’s little money to spare to environmental appeals, that opponents are going to get some time to re-sell some of the alternatives, especially to the City of Portland and to Metro. I recently talked to someone connected to transportation planning at one of the riverside industrial areas in the city, and asked him if freight problems were driving the expansion. He replied in the negative, and has become an opponent of the bridge. So, ultimately the question becomes, why does Portland metro need a bridge on this side. And that one is going to be hard for proponents to answer.
Continue reading Walk the park, talk to yourself →

Barry Johnson, Cities, General, Music, Theater

A light Scatter of arts+newspapers+urban matters

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Rough Rider WeeklySo, lots of things bubbling about with Scatter implications, of a Monday evening.

First, a tip from regular TdR, who posts at Portland Spaces’ Burnside Blog — and got to the whole gag reflex to the idea of a Rose Quarter “entertainment district” (mentioned below) WAY before Scatter did. I confess, all I can imagine is the most sanitized experience possible, which is the very antithesis of a good “entertainment district.” Thanks to MTC, we’ve also corrected our link to the Burnside Blog.

We’ve threatened to talk about media, and given the origin myth of Art Scatter, that frequently means “newspaper,” which back in the day transmitted “news” to a populace eager to be told what “news” was. Clearly those days are not these days. The financial pins of the whole newspaper business have been knocked hither and yon by various nefarious forces (as you’ve no doubt heard), and the most recent example of this in action was reported today at The Oregonian, where significant pay cuts and layoffs of part-time staff were announced, among other cost-cutting measures. My rules of engagement forbid me to talk about this in a substantive way, and even if I could, I don’t know exactly what it means except the obvious. The chatter about how to put Humpty Dumpty together again is ongoing on various journalism blogs, and soon we’ll do a little summary for our interested Scatter community.

Over at Portland Arts Watch, we’ve been posting furiously on events we’ve been hitting. Like Imago’s “APIS,” Jerry Mouawad’s fusion of bees and prison. OK, you kinda had to be there, though the “wordless opera,” as Mouawad calls it, reminded me of the connection between Imago’s kid shows (such as “Frogz”) and its adult shows. It also exposed the “tragic” nature of the Imago approach, even its comedies. At least, that’s what I thought I saw.

I also caught the end game of “24/7,” which organizers Bill Crane and Thomas Lauderdale created to mark “7 years of war” with “24 hours of music.” Actually, it’s less than seven years of war in Iraq, but more if you count Afghanistan, which may be the war that never ends. Don’t you hate when Orwell is right? Anyway, the mostly classical program was inspiring, by all accounts, and by the time I got there for Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” Wieden+Kennedy’s atrium was jammed and the musicians were playing free and easy and beautifully.

And my obsession with the PNCA-Museum of Contemporary Craft merger continued in a column in The Oregonian today. Bauhaus came up. Honestly.

Portland has a Major League Soccer team. We just had to type that one more time.