Although the day, month, and season Brian Eno met Laraaji Nadabrahmananda in Philadelphia’s New York’s Washington Square Park in 1979 is unknown, their meeting led directly to an important album, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance (1980). In commemoration of this creative encounter, the Philadelphia Ambient Consortium is at the beginning stages of organizing an outdoor music festival, tentatively titled Day of Radiance, to take place in Philly’s own Washington Square Park on the day Laraaji and Eno met. Over the coming months, Philadelphia ambienteers and space music enthusiasts will be working to realize this event which we hope will become an annual celebration of Philadelphia’s long thriving experimental music scene.

Washington Square Park is perhaps Philadelphia’s loneliest park, so any celebration there is bound to cheer the space up. And in return, the space will bring us cheer and inspiration for further creative encounters. Please contact me if you would like to help plan and participate in this project.

(Image of Washington Square Park, Philadelphia, modified from Flickr user chingers7’s original image. Used with permission via creative commons share-attribution non-commercial license.)

Tags: Ears,parks,Philadelphia
Categories: Ambient Music, Art History and Urban Planning
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I’ve taken more notes than I’ve been able to blog just yet, and the conference is already over. I came to the conference to see what opportunities there might be for a former researcher for a major park advocacy group to stroll back into the world of park professionals after cutting his teeth working on everything but parks for the past two and a half years. I left with a stack of business cards I need to follow up on and a list of topics I need to research more about. That’s pretty standard for a good conference. There’s a fleeting moment for riding the crest of post-conference momentum. I’m feeling more resolved and recommitted to the intention and decision that motivated me to become a planner in the first place back in 2002, and I have some specific avenues I want to develop in order to become a more capable advocate for parks and sustainable, healthy cities. In all, I’m re-oriented in my career and this is a good thing.

I want to thank Linda Everhart and Helen Goodman for helping me to volunteer work and attend the conference. Linda’s son Ian, recently returned to the States from Honduras, had pretty much everything under control from the technical side, so besides session monitoring, my job was pretty easy. I mostly backed him up at critical moments. (Looking forward to seeing Ian at work registering Ohio voters in the next couple of weeks.)

Back in Cincinnati, electricity is restored but the cable feeding our house Internet access is still down. So I’m writing this from Sitwells, my favorite coffeehouse in Clifton near the University of Cincinnati, rather than from my usual hermitage in the wilds of North Avondale. This will put a cramp in my blogging up my notes from the rest of the conference but I hope to complete this by the end of the week. Here’s just a brief rundown of what I’ll be writing about:

The No Child Left Inside Act, and the movement that links childhood recreation, nature education, parks, and open space conservation. One of the exciting themes I found at this conference was the search for a driving issue that promotes better park funding and resonates across a broad and bipartisan constituency of voters, interest groups, and politicians. That issue seems to have been discovered by linking parks with the desire to give children the freedom to explore their childhood outside, and a genuine fear rooted in nostalgia, that too many kids are absolutely disconnected from nature. (Unfortunately I didn’t hear enough talk linking this issue with Smart Growth and land use, since the pervasive sprawl of low-density housing subdivisions has forced children to constantly rely on their parent’s cars, and thus their parents, to meet friends and visit places.) Have you read Rosa Park’s article at the LA Times on “the erosion of free, unstructured outdoor play”? This issue connects with the parenting movement to nurture more independent minded children unshackled from media conditioned fear of their absuction by strangers. Back in April of this year Mark Frauenfelder and Cory Doctorow began posting about this parents movement. See Mark’s post on Lenore Skenazy’s article on her letting her 9 year old ride the subway alone here and Cory’s post on Free Range Kids here. Luis Acosta, Richard Dolesh, and Richard Louv all remarked on this topic. I’m excited to be seeing the dots connected.

On the Economic Value of Parks. The search for better ways to communicate both the tangible and intangible values of urban parks continues. Besides the critical importance of nature awareness in benefiting the process of childhood maturation, park professionals and advocates are still struggling to realize a common set of instructions for calculating the economic benefits of parks. We need absolutely need a more academically oriented conference that brings together consultants and academic park researchers to begin nailing down some industry standards and doing some peer review on this topic. In general I want to see more rigour attached to this question since park departments are already looking for someone to provide this analysis. Luis Acosta proposed the idea of a “Green Line” akin to the Poverty Line, to determine the minimal amount of greenspace needed to live healthfully. How can this be studied by psychologists? It seems more practical to first nail down the Green Line in terms of the seven economic benefits already proposed by Peter Harnik in his work at the Trust for Public Land’s Center for City Park Excellence. The issue of economic values for parks is regularly published on in academic journals. Since academic journals are not easily accessible (or their indexes easily searchable) by non-academic professionals, I believe there is a dire need to bridge the practitioner-academic divide here.

On the trailblazing park work being done in NYC. I had the fortune of monitoring the session moderated by Peter Harnik entitle “When the Rubber Meets the Green: Cars in Parks.” Harnik gave an overview of worst and best practices across the country, shining a light on his exceptional and broad grasp of the diverse solutions park architects and transportation planners have wrestled with when visioning the best use of available open space. Barry Bessler of Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park Commission provided the specific example of the road closures along the Schuylkill River Park greenway. Lastly, Andy Wiley-Schwartz, fomerly of Project for Public Spaces, gave an amazing presentation on the new work initiated by NYC’s Department of Transportation in reclaiming the open commons and asphalt of city streets into plazas and parks. Wiley-Schwartz’s work frankly blew my mind. Looking forward to researching and writing more on this. He’s only been there a little over a year and so many good things to show for it.

Besides these topics I also want to write about my experience in Pittsburgh, on my bicycle adventure along the Ohio River last Sunday. I also enjoyed a dérive of downtown Pittsburgh Monday night with Bernard Luyiga, a city councilman from Kampala, Uganda. He was at the conference in order to learn more about parks and preserving public space. With Google Earth, Luyiga showed me acres of public park land in Kampala that had been appropriated for private development by government officials in league with developers.

I’ve taken bunches of pics so I have to upload them first now available here.

Tags: freedom,kids,parks
Categories: Urban Planning
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I’ll be blogging the Urban Parks conference session as I attend them. The opening session occurred yesterday evening.

Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente, a community based human rights and environmental organization in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, and recipient of the Heinz Award for the Human Condition, provided a rousing keynote address, “Parks: The Common Ground for Democracy and All Human Rights.” The speech was notable for spurring the largely non-Latino audience of park advocates and professionals to stand up and chant “el pueblo unido jamás será vencido.” Acosta stressed the importance of creating broad alliances between diverse community and ethnic groups in order to effectively advocate for community health issues. He honestly described the challenges of reaching out to Chasidic community leaders in Williamsburg and was surprisingly blunt in describing the tensions between the Latino and Chasidic communities there. More detailed notes of his speech are below.

Tupper Thomas, administrator for Prospect Park, president of the Prospect Park Alliance, and board chair of the City Parks Alliance introduced the speakers. Thomas credited Meg Cheever, founder and president of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, for the genesis and vision behind the conference five years ago. She then introduced Gary Saulson, Director of Corporate Realty Services for PNC Financial Services Group, noting approvingly Saulson’s disapproval of using pesticides in his home lawn care. PNC is a major philanthopist for city park facilities in Pittsburgh and internationally touts the most LEED certified buildings of any megacorp. It’s nice to see a corporation that sports its plumage by way of showing off its LEED certifications and aesthetic sensibilities in landscape architecture. Saulson was particularly proud to show off two downtown “gateway” parks in Pittsburgh that it has designed, PNC Firstside Park (completed) and PNC Triangle Park (still in its design phase).

PNC Firstside Park (image below) was developed on the site of the former Pittsburgh Public Safety Building, an “insignificant building of no historical importance” according to Saulson. PNC purchased the site from the city for an undisclosed but admittedly exorbitant amount after negotiations. Saulson was pleased to describe the deconstruction of the building, where rather than conventional demolition, the building was taken apart and its constituent building materials (steel, cement, etc.) recycled or repurposed. I had only previously heard of this sort of process occuring in Japan so it was wonderful to know that PNC was promoting this best practice as well.

PNC Firstside Park, Pittsburgh, PA

The 1.5 acre, PNC Firstside Park looks amazing, but I also think that the desire to have a corporate park, albeit public park, in front of their downtown building speaks to me as a way of incorporating a bit of an suburban office park image within the city. But hey, they can afford it, and so long as it is a truly public park, freely accessible as a public commons, why should anyone complain. On the contrary, this sort of expensive park planning by a private entity is extremely laudable.

PNC Triangle Park (rendering below) was also billed by Saulson as a “gateway” park. I’m never really impressed by the use of these buzzwords, but again, no one can really argue wth the public asset that PNC will be providing. Kudos to them.

PNC Triangle Park (rendering)

After Saulson, Thomas introduced Richard Dolesh, Director of Policy, National Recreation and Park Association. Dolesh provided a brief historical summary of the organization, and in particular I noted that the NRPA is just the latest incarnation of an org with roots in the late 19th century. The current NRPA was created in the 1960s and I’m interested to note how the focus of the org has changed over the last century from urban to suburban. Dolesh pleaded with the conference attendees to recognize the dire need for more park advocacy and lobbying noting that the federal Urban Parks Recreation and Recovery Act (1978) that provided matching funds for urban park maintenance has been dead for the past seven years. He did note one recent success, the No Child Left Inside Act, passed by the House of Representatives last week. This call for urgent advocacy from the leading umbrella org for park professionals and friend-of-park advocates, provided a good segue to Acosta’s keynote address.

Below are my casual notes from his speech. Personal commentary is in brackets. More substantial criticisms follow.

***

Acosta brings greetings from “the People’s Republic of Brooklyn and the ‘hipster capitol’ of Williamsburg.” While recently in Beijing, Acosta is surprised to find a Chinese news report about Williamsburg. The news report does not mention how the neighborhood’s diverse population also includes a substantial number of Chasidim and Latinos. [Acosta is a community activist who has been active in the neighborhood since the late 70s, way before the influx of hipsters in the 90s.]

Acosta talks about the late 70s when south Williamsburg was an extremely dangerous and largely Latino neighborhood. A teenage gang capitol. A crack capitol. [Crack in the late 70s?]. The organization Acosta created, El Puente (The Bridge) initiated a program to bring gang members on weekend retreats boating down whitewater rapids. After experiences like this, gang leaders wanted to do more with their life than market drugs. [Acosta's work in El Puente during this period is what brought him recognition though the Heinz Award in 1984.]

Acosta brings three examples of neighborhood coalitions that have made an important difference in health, youth and family service and crime.

1) Outward Bound. Simple objective: playing touch football in George Washington Plaza park. Major problem was that the park was a major venue for drug dealing and thus dangerous for recreation, [least of all because of all the scattered glass vials littering the park]. Question was how to confront the problem but avoid violence with the drug dealers. Outward Bound organized protest days for three straight years that combined community shame with having this drug park with a call to city action to clean up the park. They used the symbolism of the statue of George Washington’s horse, the ass half of which faced the park center, to make the case that the city’s attitude towards the park was disrespectful and the park needed redesign. Newspaper photos of the ass also showed the graffiti and crack vials on and below the statue. After the thrid year, the park commissioner consented and the park was redesigned. [Significantly, the most important design change was not the reorientation of Washinton's horse's ass but the removal of the high walls surrounding the park that made the park feel unsafe. Clear sight lines remain an important design component for both the psychological perception of safety and functional application of surveillance and law enforcement in a public commons.]

2) Apologies for not capturing enough detail on Acosta’s second example, the clearance of a vacant lot (I think ) piled with two stories of garbage. Not clear on the name of the coalition or group responsible. The site is now a public park and community garden, but first the garbage had to be cleared by community volunteers and the toxic topsoil completely removed and replaced. Veggies grown in the garden are now sold at local corner groceries and bodegas.

3) [Acosta's third example was by far the most sensational as well as the most recent.] A group called the Toxic Avengers fights NYC and the state for the removal of a neighborhood storage facility for chemical and nuclear toxic waste owned by Radiac Research Corpoaration. Since the 1960s, Radiac had housed the waste onsite in barrel storage. The design of the facility was not up to code — jst one example of many, the only door out of building in case of a fire was through nuclear side of storage buidling. Folks living on block didn’t know this facility even existed and to what degree they were at risk in case of an accidental fire and explosion. There was no bureaucratic lever to close it down and the facility seemed grandfathered into its current location. According to officials the facility could never have been licensed today. The Toxic Avengers mobilized much of the community and especially its church leadership. They made note on the sidewalk and roadways in a growing radius around the facility how many seconds they had to live before being engulfed in a toxic cloud if an explosion were to occur. The Toxic Avengers achieved success in getting Radiac to give up license. They successfully lobbied the state legislature to sponsor legislation to disallow toxic storage in the manner that had been permitted.

The success of this action led to an important grassroots effort to oppose a large garbage transfer station envisioned by former mayor (Guiliani?) along their waterfront. The community wanted a viable park there instead, and the community got this park approved. Acosta  was especially proud to note that even the Chasidim love to use this park. [This seemed to relate to tensions later described between the Chasidim and community activist groups in Williamsburg that Acosta goes int o detail a short time later.]

Acosta returns to the general theme of his speech. [When community activists make a case before city and state government they need to pose the issue as representing a holistic response to numerous problems, rather than as a "parks issue" because doing so will translate very quickly into a parks budget versus health services budgetary question by bureaucrats. Community activists must dodge this sort of categorization.] The issues is not parks vs. health or parks vs. education funding. Acosta says “green and open spaces is the fundamental connection. It is what makes us human.”

Acosta calls “a fundamental human rights issue: to be one with nature.” Acosta’s mother was “ripped” out of rural, idyllic Puerto Rico in the 1930s and dropped into concrete Fort Green the most concentrated and dense housing project in the world. Having been one with nature in Puerto Rico, she managed to remain one with nature in her housing project despite her poverty. Filled her apartment with plants. Acosta says “the earth is within us, we have to connect all the time.” We must oppose “the insatiable force for brick and mortar development.”

“We are living in a crisis but not of financial systems: it is a crisis of our humanity.” Acosta asks, “what kind of a human being are we becoming? Come to NYC and see what the future of the country is today!” [This remark perplexes me. The country is in more peril from unrestricted urban sprawl, not the exceptional population densities of megacities like New York. The transformation of rural countryside into privatised lawn space of low density disconnected automobile-oriented housing subdivisions is the most present danger to an accessible open public commons. This is not to say that residents in concentrated urban neighborhoods do not need more greenspace. They need more absolutely, and they need their existing parks to be well maintained to preserve them as facilities from the stress of their overuse. They also need many many more greenroofs!]

Those of us who work to reclaim brownfields are part of a “green resistance, championing connecting to the earth.” Acosta proclaims, “we are radicals. we need to become revolutionaries!” [This is a call to arms. I am surprised by the tone of this language and wondering how it will go over with my colleagues.] Acosta continues, “(parks) are essential to our humanity. We need to reinvigorate our movement.” Acosta calls for standards for how much greenspace a human needs to live healthfully. He compares this with the issue of poverty. “From Presidents JFK and Johnson we learned that we are as strong as our weakest link.” After researching the issue of poverty, policy makers introduced the idea of a poverty threshold. If you don’t obtain a certain amount of money you cannot sustain your life in this society, and this became known as the poverty line. Louise suggests a “green line” or minimal daily requirement for open space. “Demand it!” he exclaims to applause.

[Acosta returns to the coalition to remove the Radiac facility from Williamsburg and how it led to a a coalition to oppose a toxic waste incinerator in the neighborhood.] Explains Acosta, there was a “No talk protocol between Chasidic leadership and Hispanic leaders.” The chasidim in the neighborhood controlled key community assets from housing to public schools. Acosta brings up corruption among Chassidim. 6 million dollars stolen and documented. Vigilante Chasidim beating up Blacks in the neighborhood, even Black cops. [Could Acosta be referencing the recent shameful beating of a Black policemen by Chasidic vigilante thugs in Crown Heights??? Crown Heights is not Williamsburg! Also the Chasidim of Williamsburg are Satmar and in Crown Heights they are Lubavitch. But whatever. For Acosta, this nuance may be irrelevant for this speech. Acosta later explained to me that the Satmar vigilantes had beaten up a Black policemen in the early 90s and that he wasn't referring to the recent assault on a black patrolman in Crown Heights by Lubavitch vigilantes.] Acosta continues, “They (the Chasidim) controlled the housing, controlled the schools regardless of there being no Chasidic kids in the schools.” Really dangerous tensions existed  between the communities. And no communication on any level. But for this issue with Radiac there was a dire need for a broad representative coalition that included the Chasidim. What to do?

Acosta went to the Jewish Community Relations Council and its associate executive director and director of government relations, David M. Pollack. [UPDATE: According to The Activist's Handbook: A Primer (p. 86), El Puente contacted Rabbi David Neiderman and the Jewish org was United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg. David Pollack emailed me to clarify the story today: Pollack was the one who introduced Neiderman to Acosta. Pollack writes, "I brought Garden Acosta and Niederman together using the argument that Hispanic and Hasidic children would glow in the dark equally if  there should be a mishap at Radiac. I also managed to bring Rabbi Niederman and David Pagan of Los Sures together in a joint development project."] In Acosta’s telling, when the Rabbi arrived at El Puente’s headquarters after asking “will I be safe?” from violence visiting a largely Hispanic community forum, Acosta ensured his safety and the rabbi was welcomed by the Latinos with overwhelming love. (The work of Pollack and the arrival of Neiderman signaled a sea change in relations between the Chasidim and Latino groups in Williamsburg. [More on this in a 1994 article in the New York Times.]

The outcome of this coming together was a Community Alliance for the Environment. The coalition to stop 55 story incinerator (that was already legislated, designed, and planned) included Chasidim and Latinos and Italians and Poles. Then Governor Pataki was lobbied to overturn the law to build the incinerator. The coalition succeeded. Acosta is effuesive in describing his joy in watching a 15 years old Chasidic youth chanting in broken Spanish El pueblo unido jamás será vencido alongside a 15 year old Latino youth who was very patiently teaching him how to pronounce the words.

Acosta concludes, “This (Park advocacy) is a struggle and not a delicate matter. We must be militant! We must be radical.” We all stand up and say El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.

***

Thus ends the first evening of the conference. Just a few notes on Acosta’s address. First of all, I believe that Acosta’s important community work needs to be celebrated and extolled as a banner for bridge building between disconnected communities. I also wish he prefaced his examples with the year that these coalitions took place. It was only the occasional detail, like the fact that they were lobbying former Governor Pataki, that clued me in that the example he had mentioned took place over a decade ago.

Besides Acosta’s concern that the future of the U.S. will look like Lewis Mumford’s 1950s dystopic vision of a concretized necropolis, I was taken by surprise by Acosta’s call for park supporters to think of themselves as “Green Militants.” I just don’t understand how appropriating the term militant to describe even an idealized passion for our advocacy can help the parks movement. I understand that in the context of his speech he was trying to rev up the audience in how they perceive themselves. I just don’t think that sort of language even helps park advocates and professionals identify their own work as environmentalists in a useful way. Yes we are environmental professionals and some of us even share his particularly romantic environmental perspective. I think I understand where he’s coming from but I don’t share in his call for identifying as radical or militant. I want environmentalism to be completely and totally mainstream, and the perception of environmentalism as a fringe philosophy plays into the politics of the enemies of environmentalism. And in any case, I believe the idea of environmental work as radical is at odds with current public perception — especially after Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq raised awareness of the related issues of overreliance on fossil fuels and global climate change.

Tags: Advocacy,parks
Categories: Urban Planning
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Over the next few days I’ll be in Pittsburgh for the Body & Soul: International Urban Parks Conference. Besides attending sessions and workshops, I’ll also be monitoring certain sessions to handle audio-visual and other computer issues that often arise. I promise to blog, or at least twitter, interesting ideas gleaned from the conference here at the Omphalos.

I’m excited to be going and especially to see some of my old colleagues from the Trust for Public Land that will be attending. But in a deeper sense, working at this conference and networking with other folk passionate about parks will be a return for me to an intention that motivated me to change my career six years ago.

Rewind the cosmic clock and half a decade ago you’ll find me riding a bicycle along the Schuylkill River Park greenway in Philadelphia and wondering how I could possibly reciprocate for the wonderful space that anonymous civic philanthopists, city planners, and landscape architects had provided for me to re-create myself on that beautiful day. The answer I came up with was studying to become a city planner myself, and two years later after writing a thesis and finishing a ton of work, I was awarded a degree in city planning. Still focused on parks I found a job with Peter Harnik at the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, a research internship that last a year.

But for the past two and a half years I haven’t been focused on parks. Following the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, I moved down to Louisiana to cut my teeth as a planning practitioner, first for a FEMA contractor in rural southwestern Louisiana, and afterwords for an engineering firm in Baton Rouge. During that time I gained enough experience to apply to take the AICP exam and passed. And now that I’ve returned from Louisiana, I’m once again looking to get back into working for city parks, as a city planner in a parks department, or in some other capacity as an open space or trails planner.

I’ve also been looking into programs that focus on green building and construction. What I discovered in Louisiana is that experience matters. However exciting green technology or environmental best practices sounds to a young planner, the tried and conventional modes ossified in regional expectations are a nearly impossible barrier if you can’t speak with firsthand experience to how practical a different approach might be.

A moment of transition and opportunity. This next year should be interesting. I’ll keep you informed.

Tags: parks,recreation
Categories: Aharonium and Urban Planning
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“Downtown Baton Rouge needs an independent cinematheque!” I exclaimed desperately to Emma Chammah. The architect is familiar with these bursts of urban sentiment from her city planning apartment mate. But she agrees, as do most folk who live and work in the city. Sure downtown now has a selection of bars and restaurants, as well as a nascent arts district, planetarium, (small) library, and (scattered) park space. But what we need (in addition to a pharmacy and fresh grocery) is a film theater. And this is why: while Baton Rouge days are gloriously spent outdoors, nighttimes are best spent walking — not driving — between a plethora of options not limited to bars and restaurants. A cinema is key – especially one that is showing great films every night. I grew up with one of these theaters in my hometown of Cincinnati and they are great – and not only for providing a temple to such adolescent initiations as midnight screenings of Rocky Horror.

Despite what cable television, Blockbuster and now Netflix would have us believe, films are social events. It is good to know you’ve just enjoyed an awakened experience watching Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with other sentient, feeling human beings. Cinemas are like imaginary public commons, mental parks and open spaces where we direct our minds to share in empathy a vision that is wholly other to our own and thus — mind expanding! No wonder that for a hundred years films have been married to dinner dates, giving them some center of gravity about which conversations and memories will orbit. For a downtown to live again, it needs a multitude of places for people to enjoy life together. This is the vision of a downtown that is not a tourist destination, but rather a home to people, humans with needs for art, love, food, nighttime breezes, poetry, street music, and serendipitous discovery.

The argument for this sort of revitalization was articulated recently by Fred Kent of the Project for Public Spaces (PPS) in his 2004 article “The Power of Ten.” Imagine a new art museum building with fascinating things inside, but a dearth of energy about its exterior. Sound familiar? Such was the case the Seattle Art Museum sought to avoid when Kent was asked to look at the plans for their museum’s new downtown building and advise them on how to best generate “public activity” around it. As they brainstormed, Kent was inspired by the concept of scale illustrated so powerfully in the short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. Instead of one or two attractions meant to draw activity to the space, Kent envisioned an arbitrary ten “focal points” — a bike path, a street vendor, a museum, a restaurant, a bookstore, a cafe, a park and water fountain, a busker, the spectacle of other people enjoying themselves, and public art and architecture (just for example).  You can find this sort of environment if you’ve ever enjoyed a stroll through parts of New Orleans or Brooklyn, or even a carnival. The challenge for city planners is often not in finding the attractions but stitching together this fabric among a multitude of public and private interests in a way that doesn’t seem contrived and controlled. Rich urban spaces inevitably develop organically as entrepreneurs use available resources and work around the limitations of the public commons. Sometimes all successful spaces need is interest, attention, and a small push.

In Baton Rouge, the downtown has needed a larger push, greater attention from citizens, entrepreneurs and developers, and top-down interest from the mayor’s office and state government. Ask most Baton Rouge residents about urban planning in their city and they are liable to say, “What planning?” But the truth is that this city has a planning commission, a comprehensive plan (the Horizon Plan), zoning, building, and subdivision ordinances, as well as a rather exciting vision for the revitalization of a downtown grown moribund after a half century of neglect and automobile oriented excess. The plan, succinctly called “Plan Baton Rouge,” was submitted to the city ten years ago by famed architect and town planners, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., the firm of star urban designer Andres Duany. Among other improvements, Duany’s plan called for the creation of a cinema at the corner of Third and Main to act as a commercial anchor for 3rd Street. So what happened?

According to Davis Rhorer, director of the Downtown Development District (DDD), “the Shaw Center happened,” describing it as a development that has been “wildly successful.” After the Shaw Center’s construction and with the mayor’s attention shifted to the much needed improvement of the Baton Rouge riverfront, the idea for a downtown cinema was mostly forgotten — but not entirely so. The Shaw Center has been hosting annual film festivals for the past two years: Red Stick Animation, the Jewish and French Film Fests, and is a regular stop on the Southern Circuit Independent Film Series. Rhorer also points out that the Louisiana Art and Science Museum’s planetarium features a “Space Theater” for showing extra large format motion pictures. New construction on the Shaw Center also includes plans for an outdoor film screening area.

Despite these efforts, Plan BR’s vision for a downtown cinema remains obscure and woefully unrealized. Paige Heurtin, financial director of Manship Theatre who helps to manage the film series, knew of Andres Duany but was unaware of Duany’s call for a cinema on 3rd Street. Nor was John Schneider, developer of the Cyntreniks Group that with Chenevert Architects is restoring the Kress-Levy Building at 3rd and Main.  Keen on meeting the needs of the booming film industry, Schneider was pleased to describe plans for a 75 seat theater discussed with the Baton Rouge Film Commission and his realtors, Latter & Blum. Schneider envisions the theater’s primary use as a facility for industry production screenings, corporate training, and for documentaries showing the restoration of the Kress-Levy building and the history of the civil rights era in Baton Rouge. He also contemplates its use for showing second run Hollywood films.

The two facade statues of the Columbia (later Paramount) Theater downtown that grace Rhorer’s office are a constant reminder of the demolition madness that once gripped city developers in the name of progress and surface parking. Rhorer agrees that downtown needs a cinema. Rhorer agrees that downtown needs a cinema. “The suburbs are no place for a theater like Siegen,” Rhorer points out referencing the demise of the closest thing Baton Rouge had to an art theater. Tinseltown Theater, beyond the city’s outskirts, lived just long enough to drive Siegen out of business. Meanwhile, requests to Rave Motion Pictures last fall to show Michael Moore’s Sicko documentary went unfulfilled. Schneider’s plans are unfortunately both tantalizingly vague and too small scale to put much faith in, yet if he can be convinced to engage an independent film distributor such as Landmark Theaters to manage his space, there is hope. Landmark runs the River Oaks Theater in Houston, and cinemas in 24 other cities including Austin, Atlanta, Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, DC. These theaters are integral to the health of their cities’ art districts — and they are profitable and successful theaters as well. They’ve proven the business model for the revival of independent film cinemas in the US. So why not here?

Significantly, most of these cinemas have greater capacity than what Schneider is envisioning, with three or four separate screening rooms for daytime and evening film showings. Could a 75 seat limited single screen cinema survive in today’s market? Many of Landmark Theaters also have the support of a grassroots city politic that adores film, as well as a neighborhood arts district that provides incentives for art businesses. To the advantage of Baton Rouge, the city council passed in March 2008, the creation of its first ever Arts and Entertainment District downtown, an area bound by North Blvd, 4th Street, River Road and Main Street. — a Disneyland main street occupied by chain stores — but Rhorer is optimistic. He argues that 75% of downtown restaurants are locally owned, not chains, and that the DDD is actively working with local entrepreneurs with an overall interest in Downtown’s improvement.

If as Duany envisioned, a theater at 3rd and Main would be the commercial anchor for downtown, it follows that the failure of a poorly conceived second run movie theater would be a serious blight on neighboring businesses. With the Rave theaters and Citiplace already capturing popular audiences, what chance would a downtown theater have? The answer is that once the film is over would one rather submit to the haunted expanse of the suburban parking lot followed by traffic, or rather enjoy the art district’s Power of Ten. Ultimately, the success of an independent cinema, and of downtown’s arts district, will be due to the passionate clamor of the public-at-large. Realtors like Latter & Blum and developers like Schneider need to hear from the people that the most sustainable and beloved use of the spaces they’re constructing and restoring is a well managed independent repertoire cinema.

—

Note: An earlier version with name misspellings was posted to Sweet Tooth at culturecandy.org

Categories: Urban Planning
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