DUST: Pedology 101, Part II – Just add water.

In the first half of this post, I explored my limited familiarity of Afghanistan’s pedology—the physical characteristics of the soil that allow scientists to place regions into different taxonomies, governed at least in part by a variety of temperature and moisture regimes. Without using any more terms that strain my word processor’s spell check feature, I’ll focus this time on those physical properties from a more empirical angle. I have scores of pictures to show the vast array of characteristics that force us—at least here in Afghanistan—to be conscious always of the conditions of the ground we walk on. The analogies for Afghan soil are limitless: the oft-cited moon dust, talcum powder, Pixie Stix, cosmetics, beige cocaine, cement mix. Aside from the generally agreed-upon observation that the ground is quite soft to the touch whenever it’s dry, none of the descriptions are flattering. The mere tire tracks from a vehicle manifest the torripsamments with dunes condition; the treads of a tire don’t imprint themselves into Afghan soil; they just displace the powder together into little rounded piles. If people were to get their faces close to the ground and exhale heavily, those “dunes” would disperse.

As annoying as it may be to fend against the steady accumulation of dust/dirt particles indoors, at least it is generally harmless to wooden or plastic furniture. It poses a much more serious problem to the electronics needed for basic operations here.

I’ll admit that I’ve been remiss in cleaning my computer top, partly to make a point, so the environment in that photo above is a bit contrived. But imagine how long it would take to achieve this level of dust accumulation in most environments in the US. Here’s a co-worker’s desk:

And here is a more authentic depiction of dust patterns on a laptop that I use—one that I have cleaned with pressurized air about two weeks ago.

Compare the keys that are commonly used (most letters) with those that generally remain untouched (the function keys at the top row, or the letter Z) to see what even a couple days of accumulation can achieve. It has undeniably caused the demise of some expensive machinery, and I have no doubt that particles of soil effectively killed the camera I referenced in a recent post.

And yet these wearying images and descriptions are only indicative of the soil conditions in Afghanistan during the dry climate. When the soil is wet, which is often the case during the rainy season (running from late January to mid April), it offers an entirely different array of unpleasant burdens.

In early April, we received an early morning sprinkle over the course of maybe two or three hours, though never enough to justify an umbrella by most people’s standards. The photo above and several below demonstrate the aftermath. Sure, they're just puddles, but puddles wouldn’t typically form after a sprinkle, even accounting for the relative imperviousness of the gravel base. The conditions are far worse in other locations.

For the most part, the soil here does not support anything more than scrappy, intermittent herbs and grasses, which is the yin to this abiotic yang. If the earth grew more plants, their root systems would facilitate drainage, but since the soil’s percolation ability is poor—characteristic, no doubt, of the Psamment suborder mentioned earlier—most plants simply can’t grow. These helicopter views are poor quality, for which I apologize, but it still manifests the conditions in Afghanistan after a minor shower, which is generally all we get here:

It looks like a mud slide engulfed the city of Mazar-e-Sharif, but this just shows the typical conditions after rain—an endless sheet of beige slime, punctuated by occasional grasses (but only during the spring growing season). Viewed from the ground, the ponding is much worse in one of the lower points of Bear Village, the American Army compound at Camp Marmal:

The poor folks who live in these tents have to deal with days of standing water; it only diminishes through evaporation, and in the peak of the rainy season (which this year was February) minor sprinkles occur every few days. Although the rocks would seem to impede drainage, the gravel bed is the only preventative measure to keep pedestrians from slurping through ankle-deep mud. Witness these slippery stairs nearby:

And the conditions on the less heavily graveled side of that wall:

Puddles emerge after even the mildest of rains—and virtually all rains in Afghanistan are insignificant, yet they are hardly ever inconsequential: the mildest ones still take at least a full day to evaporate, remarkable given the arid nature of the climate through much of the year. Drainage simply does not occur to any measurable degree. Thus, the German engineers who first broke ground at Camp Marmal several years ago decided to build a full array of drainage ditches, partially visible in this earlier blog post, to prepare for no more than a half-dozen modest drizzles over a four-month rainy season in the late winter and early spring. The rest of the time, those ditches will sit idle.

Thus, the engineers and planners for this base had to invest in a drainage system to prepare for a situation that usually occurs no more than a half dozen times each year. And many years the rainy season passes by without a real thunderstorm. It seemed like 2011 was going to be one of those years, but around the 10^th of April, just days before the anticipated end of all measurable rain, Balkh province in Afghanistan got pummeled. Well, not really: the storm was no more than a half hour of moderate rain; not enough to make people in Louisiana open their umbrellas. But it was significant enough for this arid country. The immediate aftermath of a shower at this scale is predictable, given the conditions of the soil:

Ponding is especially problematic in the back of these tents, where the HVAC systems and circuit breakers rest. Fortunately it didn’t appear too bad this time:

But it was more than enough to fill those roadside drainage ditches:

And elsewhere, the water just sat in pools atop the nearly impermeable mud.

It turned out this was just the prelude to our apocalypse. About an hour later, as the sky was fully brightening, we encountered this unpleasantness:

Water had come surging down the mountainside, accumulating velocity and volume as gravity took its course, so that the landlocked tsunami forced its way through the opening formed by the base’s Commercial Entry Control Point (ECP), continuing on down what used to be a road—a paved one, mind you:

At the next major intersection, the low point formed by two streets allowed the water to disperse…

…right into our compound.

Sandbags worked as valiantly as possible, but they were no match for these water levels, some of which easily topped a foot in height. The sandbags on the closest side of this tent were completely submerged.

Here is the front of our row of tents, after the flood had peaked and begun to recede:

And the back, where it mercifully appears that the Environmental Control Units (ECUs) weren’t badly affected:

While our one-acre compound bore the brunt of the flooding because of our proximity to the Commercial ECP, other parts of the base felt the impact as well. The large drainage swale, empty 96% of the year, came close to topping over.

Fortunately the engineering for this swale is superior to that of these smaller channels, which exceeded their capacity, resulting in some minor water intrusion in the back portion of the American gym:

Though the channel below looks unremarkable as a static image, the water had crested above its banks just 30 minutes earlier, and the flow speed at the time of this photo was still so fast that a person falling in would likely result in a drowning.

And, of course, combining all that water with the infuriating Afghan soil results in one ubiquitous condition: ankle-deep mud. The photos below show the conditions the next day, approximately twenty-four hours after the rainshower:

And inside the tents, which, at the time of this photo, were in the process of being dismantled:

It’s hard to capture depth or thickness of such a large planar surface with a camera, but let it be known that if one’s boots were not tied tightly enough, the suction of that thick stew would easily pull them off. After wading through it for just a few minutes, a person would come out two inches taller, with newly formed platform shoes.

It took three twelve-hour days to restore most of our compound, which truthfully was probably not a long time considering the vast amount of work to be done. It could have been much worse: no tent received more than 16 inches of water and, most importantly, no one was hurt. But it remains a curiosity to most Americans that it happened at all. The rain volume, even for a largely arid environment, were not particularly severe, and yet it elicited flash flood conditions at the base. My suspicion is that the intensity of the rain was much greater in the nearby Hindu Kush mountains, which would help to explain the deceptively large surge that came barreling down the slope and hour later. The change in grade also undoubtedly intensified the velocity at which the water tumbled down. But the soil remains the key player; its imperviousness contributed to both the volume and the speed of the run-off. By no means does Camp Marmal have the greatest drainage infrastructure: as mentioned in a previous blog on cost-cutting measures at military outposts, it's hard to justify the steep expenditures for a top-of-the-line flood prevention system at a base which its creators never intended to be permanent. Nonetheless, one can only imagine what the permanent Afghan population has to contend with during the rainy season: according to a report on the province of Balkh released by the Afghanistan Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development, only 49% of the province's households have electricity, 31% have access to safe drinking water, and only 12% can access safe toilet facilities. Incidentally, Balkh's standard of living ranks much higher than most other provinces in the country, thanks to the presence of a large city such as Mazar-e-Sharif. Within the urbanized areas in and around this nation's fourth-largest city, the above statistics are superior: 95% of households have electricity, 67% have safe drinking water, and 15% have safe toilets. However, like most of Afghanistan, Balkh is significantly rural, and remote settlements lacking good infrastructure are abundant. If systems for providing water are scarce or poor quality, it is reasonable to suspect that water removal and drainage are also less than advanced. We've experienced what happens on base during a minor rainstorm. How do the Afghans manage?

The soil in Afghanistan is a palpable impediment to the nation's citizens' ability to attain a higher standard of living. Those who live in cities like Mazar-e-Sharif still sometimes maintain garden plots outside the urbanized areas; the aforementioned report reveals that 40% of households in Balkh province depend on agriculture as the primary source of income, either through direct cultivation or trade. The parched climate and friable soil results in a remarkably short growing season for most grasses, suitable for the nomadic ethnic Pashtuns known has Kuchis, but undeniably a challenge for more permanently settled populations. Though the cultivation and consolidation of food no longer precludes urbanization in most developed nations, it most likely plays a role in Afghanistan's ranking as one of the world's most rural countries, with only 23% of the population living in urbanized areas. The dust impedes operationality of electronics, making it an unlikely place to attract foreign technological investment, a barrier further exacerbated by the incredibly low literacy rate (less than 30%, and barely 10% for women). The filmy layer of soil makes routine living for outsiders unacquainted with these levels of dust—which includes practically everyone—a constant frustration. It's miserable in the dry season and impedes visibility enough to pose potential problems for air travel, while eclipsing those mountain views much of the time. A person is never far from a spectacular mountain range, but he or she can often only see it half the year, as indicated by the visibility rates in the chart below:

My experience of southern Afghanistan around Kandahar was that it was even worse than Mazar-e-Sharif. Down there, everyone I spoke to felt as though the hands need washing every five minutes. And, of course, the rains, as rare as they are, not only elicit pools of muddy water in the best of times and catastrophic flooding at the worst, they render many of the roadways impassable—a tremendous problem in a region where only 38% of the roads can handle car traffic in all seasons. A mud-filled unpaved road is unusable.

Is there a region in North America at all comparable to Afghanistan? A superficial research of climatological patterns—an admitted problem when I understand northern Afghanistan's climate far better than my native country—suggests to me some parts of the US might share at least remotely similar pedological characterstics. The temperature and rainfall data for Mazar-e-Sharif in the charts below, as well as the previous visibility chart, comes from the Joint Meteorological and Oceanographic Climatology Segment from the Department of Defense. (I wish I had included this material in Part I of this essay, when I referenced temperature and moisture regimes, but at least I've managed to integrate it to Part II before it goes to post.)

In the US, from the information I could determine, the region that most closely mimics Afghanistan's alternating mountain/desert plateau topography falls, not surprisingly, in the West. But much of the Rockies receive far more precipitation, or the temperatures are far more consistently warm or cool than the extremes that Afghanistan experiences. The best that I could determine is that northern and central Nevada—a virtually waterless region that includes only a half-dozen counties (Humboldt, Churchill, Pershing, Lander, Elko, Eureka, White Pine) but covers a significant land mass (about half of the state)—may have soil that most closely resembles that of Afghanistan, in terms of the moisture and temperature regimes. However, north-central Nevada does not exactly meet the war-torn southwest Asian country's demographics.

While Afghanistan has a land area comparable to and a population somewhat larger than the state of Texas, northern Nevada (approximately 55,000) is virtually uninhabited. The largest communities in this region, are Elko, Fallon, and Winnemucca, which only total approximately 30,000 people. The famed U.S. Route 50-- “the Loneliest Road in America”--bisects the region. If it were to quintuple in size, which is about what it would take to be comparable to Afghanistan, it would still have fewer than a half million people. Afghanistan, by contrast, has a landscape more austere and certainly just as rural, but it claims a population of nearly 30 million. Obviously the distinguishing factors between northern Nevada and Afghanistan—which include birth rates, colonization histories, stability of governments, sovereignty and enforceable boundaries, among other things—are complicated enough to generate an entirely different article. Suffice it to say, though, that population distribution in the US has proven that, given the choice, a significant portion of America has not found northern Nevada suitable or desirable for settlement, where as Afghanistan's similarly unforgiving landscape hosts more people than any US state but California.

The soil conditions in this war-torn, remote—yet hardly unpopulated—country are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of impediments to long-term prosperity. By many metrics, Afghanistan enjoyed a higher standard of living under monarchy in the 1960s and 1970s than it does today. The Soviet occupation throughout the 1980s fostered an additional soil condition that prove a bigger onus to Afghan quality of life than any dust piles or flash floods: the land mines buried within. The statistics for the country are grim. According to the 2010 Landmine Monitor, Afghanistan had the highest number of casualties in the world, at 859—over 20% of the world's total. It is one of the five most mine-enriched countries, with an estimated 10 million total, so that every square mile of the country averages 40. The popular site Listverse estimates that mines kill or maim an estimated 10 to 12 people every day in Afghanistan. Fortunately, the country also benefits from some of the most intensive mine clearance initiatives in the world: Landmine Monitor reports that it ranked top globally in 2009 and the square kilometers of mine area cleared there comprise nearly 30% of the global total. Nonetheless, land mines will inevitably impede any other form of investment, until they are eradicated, which could easily take decades—while assuming that no other events will throw the demining process off course, or, inshallah, foster a new reason for planting land mines. This article may depict the living conditions in Afghanistan as bleak, thanks to its infuriating soil. However, the relics of war—and land mines are hardly a relic since they perpetuate a culture of conflict-related casualties long after a treaty has been signed—transcend most if not all of the intrinsic pedalogic features. Who knows—after the nation is liberated from its broadly scattered landmine catastrophe, maybe that moon dust will seem like small potatoes.

DUST: Pedology 101, Part I - Worth a name change to http://dustafghanistana.blogspot.com?

While topography can pose a variety of impediments to human settlements, we have attempted to overcome or at least tame most of them over the years. Whether it is overcoming the propensity for flooding in a mountain valley, dredging a swamp to capitalize upon a critical river arterial, or precariously perching a structure atop a precipice with high tendency for mudslides, architects and engineers (among others) have transcended the perceived limitations of this malleable earth to satisfy what often prove to be ephemeral demands for civilization, and what constitutes “ephemera” and “civilization” are so subjective that I withhold judgment as to whether we have domesticated our craggy wilderness. But we're strivers. And as a result, Homo sapiens are more broadly dispersed across various climates, ecosystems, and altitudes than just about any other member of the animal kingdom. Not all environments are equally suitable for habitation, though, as is inevitably proven by certain critical global nodes: the Yellow or Ganges River Valley, the Niger Delta, the broad coastal plain of Benelux and northern France, the northeastern Megalopolis sandwiched between the Atlantic coast and the most rugged of the Appalachians—all of these regions harbor far more condensed settlements than Siberia, central Asia, the Sahara Desert, Antarctica. And then, of course, vast stretches of land fall between these two density extremes, including my current home in northern Afghanistan. This landlocked nation in southwest Asia is neither small nor sparsely populated; though still incredibly rural, both the population and land area are comparable to that of the US state of Texas. (Texas is a bit larger and has about 10% fewer people; thus, Afghanistan is more densely populated.) But few people would manage to describe the prevailing environment in Afghanistan without using the word “harsh” before too long. The country juxtaposes some of the globe’s most rugged mountain ranges alongside arid plains that qualify as desert, even if the appearance isn't conventionally desertlike.

But little of it fits the most stereotypical depictions of deserts, particularly visible in the broadly Arab belt that stretches thousands of miles to the west of Afghanistan. It isn’t a desert, exactly—at least not one that I have seen, and the biggest distinguishing factor is the baffling, often infuriating soil conditions in the country. In the almost half of a year that I’ve lived here, I’ve visited bases in the south, the east, and—for the most part—the northern edge, and the soil all falls under a characteristic that people here routinely call “moon dust”.

With some geospatial data from the US Department of Agriculture, I was able to re-create a map of all the various soil regions of Afghanistan, with an inset traced in bright blue on the central portion of the Province of Balkh where I’m currently living:

The original USDA map upon which mine is based can be found here. It may be less accessible to begin this lengthy blog entry with the clinical description of the implications of Afghanistan's bizarre soil, but it helps to get the quantitative stuff and the hard science—or at least what little I know of it—out of the way so that I can back up the quantitative with far more expressive photos. Essentially, the Mazar-e-Sharif area falls under three fundamental soil regions:

• torripsamments with dunes;

• torriorthents with torrifluvents;

• rocky land with torriorthents.

All three of these classifications fall under the mesic soil temperature regime, which implies a moderate mean temperature, though “moderate” is particularly misleading in a desert environment like Afghanistan. The soil earns this mesic quality primarily through the mutual nullification of relatively cold and extremely hot conditions, sometimes achieving both in a 24-hour-period as is reflected in the considerable differences in air temperature between day and night throughout the year. Thus, moderation in Afghanistan hardly suggests an arched or peaked bell curve when depicting temperatures; this isn't a Brazilian rainforest. The kurtosis on an annual probability distribution of temperatures in Afghanistan would be high, so the soil is exposed to scorching heat of 110°F (43.3°C) almost daily during the summer months, sometimes exceeding 120°F (49°C), while routinely dipping below freezing at night in the winter, while occasionally falling as low as 15°F (-9.4°C). Throughout the year the temperature fluctuates across more than forty degrees Fahrenheit over the course of a typical day—not exactly a suitable, lengthy growing season for too many plants.

So what happens to a soil in which climate extremes are the norm? The flora of Afghanistan doesn't just seem to lack diversity; it often seems to be missing altogether. The soil is devoid of visible life for much of the year, as this photo from just outside the wire can attest.

An etymology of those tongue-twisters used to describe the soil regions above can help shed some light on why the landscape is so austere. I’m no pedologist, so I have to work primarily by delving into the terminology through the resources I have at my disposal (such as pedosphere.com ), which are often only slightly less meager than my pre-existing knowledge. However, research allowed me to decipher the component parts of these cumbersome words, as well as how they relate precisely to the prevailing soil moisture and temperature regimes. Most of the aforementioned classifications fall into the most precise classification within the taxonomy: the great group, nestled within the suborder, which in turn is nestled within the order. Thus, it’s to easiest start the analysis with the least precise category and build from there.

Most great group classifications consist of compound words in which the second half is the suborder. Therefore, torripsamments with dunes (beige and white hatching on the map) belongs to the Psamments suborder, which in turn is one of five classifications in the Entisols order. According to the Cooperative Soil Survey, Entisols are relatively recently developed soils frequently found where alluvium is deposited after any major flood event in a floodplain, or areas where bedrock recently was exposed. Any of the soil suborders and great groups falling under Entisols should share a common characteristic of comparatively recent inception. The suborder of Psamments describes any Entisol with less than 35% rock fragments, characterized by loamy fine sand known for its friability. The torri­- prefix featured in the suborder indicates that the moisture regime is aridic (torric), and the reference to dunes naturally implies that these powdery characteristics facilitate the formation of sand ridges, no doubt caused by the often powerful westerly winds.

The second classification, torriorthents with torrifluvents (orange on the map) straddles two suborders. The Fluvents suborder falls under the Entisols order as well, but unlike Psamments, Fluvents have no real lithic, densic (high enough density to inhibit plant roots except in cracks), or paralithic (rocky but with breaks and fissures) contact within 25 cm of the mineral soil surface. Thus, Fluvents are comparatively free of qualities that would inhibit plant growth and can be comparatively fertile if flood cycles do not coincide with cropping periods. They also must have a slope of less than 25 percent and a temperature regime that is either cryic (mean temperature lower than 8°C but no permafrost) or warmer. According to the Encyclopedia of Soil Science (Ed. Rattan Lal, 2006), Orthents are the most extensively occurring suborder among the Entisols. They defy attempts at scientific horizon development, due to their steep slopes, permanently situated non-weatherable materials, and high erosion rates, thus explaining their commonality in desert and mountainous environments. Since both Orthents and Fluvents both fall under the Entisol order, this classification would suggest an alternation of fertile and highly unstable soil in alternating patterns, both of which are young in their development.

The final classification, rocky land with torriorthents (brown on the map), again involves the Orthents suborder, which, in turn, falls within the Endisol order. The juxtaposition of rocky land with the Orthents indicates soil that engages with superficially exposed rocks at steep angles, suggesting both instability (propensity for erosion) and a low capacity to support plant life, both of which undoubtedly go hand-in-hand.

Sifting through the words that recur amongst these definitions, one can better assess the prevailing conditions around Afghanistan’s fourth largest city: arid, loamy, powdery, rocky, unstable. With the exception of the Fluvents suborder, very little of the soil characteristics would seem to support life, an assertion which boldly ventures into the other branch of soil science—that of edaphology, the direct relation between soils and the corresponding flora and fauna.

But rather than expound upon taxonomies of which I have only a passing familiarity, this essay will benefit far more through some real, empirical meat and potatoes: active descriptions and demonstrations of how Afghan soil operates among human systems, complete with vivid photographs. I commend those of you patient enough to wade through the science, as interesting as it may be to some, because the bulk of this analysis has far more to do with how we—Americans, Afghans, coalition forces—engage with the soil here.

Dry and easily airborne—such is the nature of Afghan soil. But those analogies scarcely account for the tremendous repercussions of building a temporary settlement such as a military base in an area where the soil is often loamy and friable. The dust is relentless, as demonstrated by the trees in the photo below from Bagram Air Field, one of the lushest parts of the country that I have seen:

I have no reason to believe these trees are anything but healthy, and yet, like all flora in this region, a sepia membrane dulls the green, making them appear sickly. And it doesn't take a great deal of imagination to speculate how easily the soil-powder makes its way indoors; the accumulation under this desk provides more than enough evidence:

If I were to demonstrate accumulation through a day by day progression, I'm sure it would render the conditions here even more vivid. But let it be known that what would pass for six months of undisturbed dust particles in temperate North American environments would only take about two weeks around Mazar-e-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan. In Kandahar and southern Afghanistan; it's even worse: less than a week to achieve the thick powder on all interior flat surfaces. Down there, the gritty feeling on the skin resumes just minutes after one washes his or her hands.

The second half of this lengthy essay will explore in much greater detail and with far better photographs the repercussions of life in a place where the soil makes things virtually unlivable. I don't intend to complain or turn it into a tirade; obviously we and almost 30 million Afghans have to make do with what we get. But as humans almost instinctively subjugate the lands around them, some settings clearly pose greater challenges, which certainly help to explain widely variable regional differences in economic development. With a series of images so closely chronologically tied as to almost serve as a flip-book, I hope to offer a taste of life amidst some of the globe's greatest hinterlands.

Tripping hazards.

My apologies on having gone this long into the month of April without a single blog post. Make no mistake that I am working on one, though it demands a bit more research into soil science than I was initially expecting, and it will take some time. The fact that I have been recruited by the Germans to play organ for the Holy Week services also cuts significantly into my available evening free time. I am working on a post and will have it displayed as soon as possible.

On top of this, I have more lousy news: my trusty 4-megapixel camera seems to have bit the dust (literally). I am trying home remedies, but this little machine that has served me so well throughout most of the life of this blog is probably at its final days. If anyone has any recommendations for a moderately priced camera where the emphasis is less on quality of imagery and more on the machine's ability to withstand lots of abuse and a harsh climate, I'm all ears (and eyes). Thanks as always for reading.

The greasy spoon straddles the Pacific.

As much as I’d like to commend the efforts of Lady Bird Johnson, I have to confess: I love billboards. Maybe I’ve spent too much time living in parts of the country where the landscapes offer relatively little variety, and the billboards help compensate for monotony. But I also love the flattest, most treeless stretches of the Midwest as much as New Hampshire’s White Mountains or Utah’s moonscape. When the topography is rugged, I like seeing where the billboard companies have coyly planted their signage on hillsides, in order to maximize visibility. Yes, I know, those tacky signs often mar the purity and majesty of their surroundings, but billboards routinely come and go, and the scar of chopped foliage needs continual maintenance to remain that way; trees will inevitably grow back when a billboard retires. Places that outlaw billboards—the entire state of Vermont comes to mind—often seem to be missing something, even for those who cherish what the state lacks. The absence of billboards is a low murmuring voice across the landscape forced permanently into mute, and perhaps that’s why I defend them: the connoted message of an unadorned environment where nature speaks differently to everyone combines with the (usually) unambiguous denotations of giant words on a sign. This dichotomy between the inferred (nature) and the declared (advertising/commerce) generates a skittish rhythm when traveling, a tense semantic energy that helps keep the drive from getting boring. Having no billboards sometimes seems as sterile as the scene from the movie Brazil where the landscape only consists of billboards. Vermont might be happy to squelch the homogenizing ambitions of Clear Channel and other corporations, but it also stifles a sort of folk culture generated by the advertisements for attractions and enterprises unique to an area. Federally funded highway signs can’t replace that vernacular. Ms. Lady Bird Johnson has plenty of successors, and I hope the battle against billboard blight continues, just as I wish for the companies to fight back. The push-and-pull between the two should help keep them both in check, while individual states can continue to let their constituents use their individual laboratories of democracy to decide what billboard quotient is right for them.

And, thankfully, most of the rest of this post’s analysis won’t be as academic as that first paragraph, because that opener is almost a non-sequitur. Perhaps it’s a good thing I come from a state that seems to like billboards as much as I do. As anyone knows who has driven through Indiana (which seems be just about everybody), it’s filled with them. The Crossroads of America—no wonder. In a given day, hundreds of thousands of eyes will glance at these massive roadside advertisements. So there’s no reason that the billboard below, from the stretch of I-65 between Indianapolis and Louisville, should stand out to its hundreds of thousands of viewers each day:

And, sure enough, it’s just an advertisement for a Motel 6, looking like any other. Except for that part about the Indian restaurant.

It doesn’t take a good pair of eyes to notice that, although the US has a sizable population that claims India as its country of origin, restaurants serving Indian food aren’t quite as commonplace as, say, Mexican or Chinese. You can expect to see Indian restaurants in affluent urban and suburban areas, downtowns of major cities, college towns, or neighborhoods with large concentrations of Indian immigrants—not off the side of a highway in rural Indiana. And not attached to a budget motel. It just hasn’t yet reached mainstream palates.

But that may only be indicative of a dormant trend. I investigated this particular motel/restaurant outside of the micropolitan area of Seymour, and I didn’t see any evidence of an Indian eatery from the outside appearance. I inquired with the manager on duty, and he said that the Indian restaurant had closed; in its place was a Mexican restaurant. So clearly this experiment in eclectic roadside cuisine failed. But I’m not convinced it was trying to appeal to the sort of traveler who typically patronizes Indian restaurants in fashionable areas of large cities or hip college towns. I think it was primarily attracting people who had grown up on the food—namely, Indian Americans and recent Indian immigrants.

I think two socioethnic phenomena are at play here in Seymour. No, this small southern Indiana city (pop. 18,000), though generally prosperous, is not suddenly attracting a large Indian immigrant community. I'd be surprised if there are more than two dozen persons of Indian descent in a thirty mile radius. But Seymour is a major pit stop for travelers, with an abundance of hotels, chain restaurants, and even an outlet mall (albeit not a very successful one). The concentration of hotels off the interstate should offer one clue: as I have noted in the past, the hotel industry has increasingly become dominated by Indian Americans, with nearly half of all hotels owned by persons of Indian descent, according to the Asian American Hotel Owners Association. While Indian ownership may still be uncommon among rural highway motels or downtown luxury suites, the budget franchise hotel—Sleep Inn, Days Inn, Super Eight, Motel 6—is dominated by Indian families, many of whom live on the premises. No doubt this Motel 6 in Seymour is within a stone's throw of another Indian-owned hotel, or two, or three. The entirety of the Indian population of Seymour may be tied to the hospitality industry.

But that doesn't explain the presence of an Indian restaurant, even if it's now defunct. The statistical odds that a traveler seeking lodgings in Seymour is an Indian American is still reasonably small, and you'd think that real estate around an interstate exit ramp would attract cuisine of a more common denominator. After all, most of the other restaurants you see around Seymour are the same ones you might find at any rural interstate exit in America: McDonald's, Arby's, Subway, Burger King. Even a Chipotle (Mexican) or Panda Express (Chinese) might be too eclectic. But the owner of this Indian restaurant/hotel clearly thought he or she had a large enough demographic from which to draw, perhaps through curiosity seekers that appreciate ethnic cuisine, or Indian American motorists.

As farfetched as it may seem, the Motel 6's proprietor took a reasonable gamble: not so far away, another roadside Indian restaurant is managing quite well. On the stretch of Interstate 70 in eastern Indiana, near the small town of Spiceland (about halfway between Indianapolis and Columbus OH), an Indian restaurant was fully operative when I visited in January of 2009. Apparently Taste of India/India Curry seems to have changed its name recently, but it was still in business as of last summer. It had the familiar smell of curry and various meats from the tandoor, but it didn't look like a plush Indian restaurant you might see in downtown Chicago, or the more middlebrow Indian offerings along Devon Avenue north of the city center. It didn't look like the sparsely decorated Indian restaurant you might see in a strip mall in the outskirts of Indianapolis, either. This Indian restaurant looked like a truck stop.

The above photo from the website Yelp makes it clearer: Taste of India really is a truck stop. And its principal clientele is truckers: Punjabi truckers. As referenced in the aforementioned blog post, a number of different immigrant groups have carved a niche within a certain profession. I have no doubt it started organically and grew from the first few successful entrepreneurs, but while many Indians from throughout this enormous polyglot eastern nation have cut their teeth in the hotel industry, Punjabi Indians—and Sikhs in particular—have made significant headway in trucking. The result, not so surprisingly, is a roadside economy that caters to a demographic that is only likely to grow in upcoming years—much the same way Indian-owned hotels have proliferated.

But this ethnic industry has left a visible fingerprint on the Midwest in more ways than just billboards. As itinerant as truckers may often be, they have to live somewhere, and it naturally follows that they would settle in cities with a robust logistics industry—more available jobs. Indianapolis in particular has asserted itself as a vast logistical hub, widely promoting its convergence of four interstate highways within the city limits. And, within the past decade, the very Middle American suburb of Greenwood, just south of Indianapolis, has become a bit of an enclave for Sikhs.

Two miles east of Greenwood’s main street, the suburbanization quickly reverts to cornfields, with newly emergent subdivisions interspersed between family farms. Although they are scattered across a number of new subdivisions in Greenwood, the Homecoming at University Park has attracted the highest concentration of Sikh families, outlined in purple on the map below:

Recent reports estimate that as many as 2500 Sikhs have moved to the southern suburbs of Indianapolis within the past five to seven years, often coming from California and attracted to Indiana by the low cost of housing and excellent school systems, among other things. It is possible that a particularly talented realtor who shares their cultural heritage has been instrumental in getting so many Sikh families to relocate; Ms. Siskand has retained on her website the Indianapolis Star article that first recognized the migration trends.

The attraction of Greenwood to Sikh families extends well beyond just the schools and housing, though. Notice that the Homecoming at University Park subdivision sits about a half mile east of Interstate 65. Immediately adjacent to the interstate—outlined in blue—the following businesses sprawl across former farmland.

This is one of many distribution centers in the Indianapolis metro, and one of the biggest in Greenwood. And there’s plenty of room for more:

Thus, the situation in Greenwood efficiently depicts a modern variant of the old work-home dichotomy, reconfigured at a lower density for the automobile age. As the pictures reveal, this layout isn’t really designed for walking to work, though there are quite a few sidewalks and the short distances would still make it feasible. And on the more urbanized western side of I-65, within the more established part of Greenwood city limits, tenants at the strip malls support this burgeoning demographic.

A mile north of these storefronts, just within the Indianapolis city limits, is a popular Indian restaurant, India Diner. And, since this is an ethnic group that largely defines itself by its shared religious background, it only follows that a house of worship would enter into the landscape. At the intersection of Graham Road and Allen Road (the red circle in the map) the local community has bought conventional private residence built in the 1980s and converted it into a gurdwara, the third Sikh house of worship in metro Indianapolis. The process of getting it approved by Greenwood Board of Zoning Appeals elicited a minor ripple a couple years ago, mostly because of fears of traffic along Graham, which at this point remains essentially a country road on the south side of its intersection with Allen Road. The BZA approved the request unanimously, no doubt taking into consideration the continued plans for the area to grow and urbanize, eventually necessitating an upgrade to Graham Road that will make the occasional traffic elicited by the gurdwara less of a problem.

While the Indian restaurant referenced in the Motel 6 billboard in Seymour is a thing of the past, I have no doubt that over time it will seem like less of a fluke, less a failed entrepreneurial endeavor, a one-shot deal. The successful Indian truck stop restaurant in Spiceland proves that such a seemingly unlikely venture can find a large enough clientele to succeed, even though the Indian population in rural Indiana will probably remain rarefied—isolated primarily to those economy hotels at the interstate exit ramp. Then again, like so many Indiana communities, Seymour, too, is home to a sizable logistical hub: a Wal-Mart distribution center stretches for what seems like miles on the other side of the interstate highway from the Motel 6. While it lacks the economic agglomeration power of a much larger city such as Indianapolis, Seymour does boast above-average representation in these two Indian dominated industries: trucking and hospitality. It may only be a matter of time before billboards advertising Indian truck stops are commonplace in Indiana (or elsewhere in the US), and it only foreshadows the steadily growing heterogeneity of the country that Indian cuisine may become as mainstream as it is in the UK—or as Chinese and Mexican already are. It would have been unthinkable to find these latter two cuisines fifty years anywhere outside of the largest American cities, and yet today a town can be a tenth the size of Seymour and still expect to have at least one of the two, if not both. Tandoori chicken may vie with country fried steak for trucker fare; they might even be served under the same roof.

When Disney's main street is the last man standing (without support).

I was hoping at this point to begin a new article on the effect the climate has on the soil here in Afghanistan. Mid-March being the peak of the rainy season here, I figured I’d come up with some demonstrative photos and explore the ramifications that rain has on human habitations here. But so far, Mother Nature has thwarted my efforts: we’ve had nothing but unexpectedly warm, sunny, and dry weather this entire March so far, so I have no photos to offer as proof. I’m not yet concerned. We’re bound to encounter a thunderstorm eventually, here at the northern edge of the Hindu Kush mountain range. The rainy season doesn’t usually end until mid-April. And when we do get that rain, I promise I’ll deliver an article analyzing impacts of precipitation on Afghan soil. Try to contain your excitement.



In the meantime, I return to the States to visit a familiar topic: the “artificial” removal of the vast majority of a structure while preserving the façade. I use the word “artificial” with some hesitation—thus the quotes—because this act, usually (clumsily) called façadectomy, has become so commonplace that it’s almost a natural part of many re-emerging historic urban environments. In most instances, the façade is propped up while the developer builds something else behind it—usually an entirely different building with a floor plan that meets modern demands. Thus, the process is predicated upon the notion that everything about the structure is obsolete except the way the front of it engaged with its surroundings (i.e., the street and adjacent buildings). And in many cases, it is. The entire building would have met the wrecking ball otherwise; keeping the façade allows building and its immediate surroundings to retain a simulacrum of salvaged history. Preservationists usually frown at the façadectomy practice, no doubt because it taints the integrity of this discipline by implying that the veneer is what really matters. A façadectomy implies that the essence of the building—its ability to enclose specific human activities—is expendable, tossing most of the refinement of true preservation out the window and reducing it to a cosmetic exercise. Conversely, anyone preparing a rebuttal to a criticism of façadectomies would argue that the façade really is the most important aspect, while building interiors often undergo far more frequent surgeries over the life cycle of a building. Rare is the National Historic Landmark that enjoys preservation inside and out, so salvaging the just the façade—the one part that the vast majority of people will actually see—frequently succeeds as a cause célèbre in populist preservation. Thus, the “ectomies” continue.

But what happens when the developers salvage the façade, only to replace it with nothing? I first noted this occurrence early on in the life of this blog, when it took me by surprise on Memphis’ Beale Street. For several of the structures along this popular, touristy entertainment hub, the façades are all that survive. If a visitor passes through what used to be an entrance, he or she encounters a courtyard featuring a restaurant and bar.

But from the outside, it doesn't look remotely like a building: the girders supporting the structure make no attempt at subtlety; the masonry where the rest of the building was demolished is still jagged and irregular; the windows are just gaping apertures without glass. It looks like exactly what it is: a brick sheath suspended in an upright position. From a greater distance it's a bit more convincing, and it retains the essence of a contiguous street wall—the classic old-fashioned main street with a storefront at the ground level and apartments or offices on the floors above. As much as I hate sneering Disney analogies, the illusion Beale Street hopes to create is not unlike Disneyland's Main Street, which in itself is a specious paradigm since Disney's corridor owes its vibrancy to a captive audience and its imperviousness to conventional urban blight. Beale Street is vibrant too, no doubt due more to its loose alcohol than because it still harbors a genuine blues community, or many of the Street's actual buildings for that matter. From a distance, Beale Street looks like the real deal. But up close, it's like Pinocchio hoping to become a real boy (alas, another Disney analogy)—the semblance of a building that depends on a human presence to animate and legitimize it.

Keeping this in mind, I was less surprised when I encountered a similar practice in Mobile. Alabama’s southernmost big city, and probably the one with the most distinctive vernacular architecture, has an emergent entertainment corridor in the form of Dauphin Street, a remarkably long main street (over ten blocks) for a not-so-large city.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine whether the corridor is enjoying a rebirth or a decline. Vacancy was pretty high on a summer 2010 visit, with some surprising shuttered storefronts:

I know we’re long past the microbrew craze, but at least one should survive on the primary entertainment spine of a metro of over one quarter million. Mobile didn’t appear to have one in business. And the surest sign that Dauphin Street isn’t hot property is the presence of a storefront church:

I've blogged about this a ton in the past. If you see one of these, you can rest assured that the landlord is hard-up for any tenant and rents are low—especially in an area that most likely is trying to attract high-energy, revenue generating debauchery more than piety.


But I don’t want to knock the town when it’s down. Like much of the Gulf Coast, the Mobile area suffered significant losses from Hurricane Katrina, and some of the vacancies might be residual consequences. The fact remains that Dauphin Street almost exclusively features locally owned businesses, and the eyesores alternate in equal measure with streetscapes like this:

Or this:

Or this one:

The establishment in that last photo (probably a restaurant) may be out of business, but the building itself appears well-maintained. None of the grillwork on the balconies is rusted, so it probably hasn’t been shuttered for long. But a trick camera angle is the only thing retaining the duplicity here.
The surgery is much more obvious.

Like the building in Memphis’ Beale Street, it’s an old façade with girders holding it up. But it does show some critical differences. On Beale Street, the girders stood front and center, occupying part of the sidewalk. Here in Mobile, the supports are a bit more subtle because they sit in the back. But this façade also has something else supporting it; unlike Memphis, it’s more than a partition between the street and an open-air courtyard.
The lower level hosts genuine retail space. Whatever the tenant used to be, it was protected from the elements. The alleyway opening to the left of the facade shows how far back the structure extends, seen in the photo angling to the right of the alley:


The scarring of the masonry in both photos suggests that this alleyway underwent some heavy surgery as well in order to achieve its current condition. No doubt at some point in the distant past, this area had a roof. Another significant alteration is right there at the entrance.


Most likely the first floor hosted some large storefront windows flush with the façade, but now they are gated, and the physical entrance to the shelter is offset, allowing a sort of loggia for potential open-air seating—one more reason I think it was intended as a restaurant.

But the most invasive aspect of this façadectomy manifests itself when you crane your neck.

If it weren't for the installation of a new first floor, this building would look just as goofy as the one in Memphis: a decorative brick wall suspended high into the air. But thanks to the restaurant installation at the ground level and the concealment of the girders, it genuinely takes a keen eye to notice the illusion—quite a contrast from the far more obvious, contrived effort in Memphis. Preservationists may groan at the shallowness of either of these initiatives, but they still demonstrate a conscious attempt to retain at least part of the historic commercial character of their respective streets. In both cases, the owner of the property may be waiting until the market is right for a higher and better use. At that point, he or she could fill in the remaining void with a structure that matches the façade.

Filling in the void and completing the façadectomy would be much easier with Memphis. The Mobile example hints at something a bit more problematic and pervasive: many once-struggling commercial corridors are enjoying a revival through renewed populist appreciation in older architecture. But does this revival penetrate the entirety of the building? All to often, the first floor is the only thing capable of landing a tenant: the upper levels remain empty and sometimes quite decrepit. New Orleans' Royal Street in the French Quarter offers a great example, where the first floor is replete with active storefronts hosting often high-end art, antiques, and collectables. Yet even there, where retail space rents at high prices (for New Orleans' standards), the upper levels are frequently shuttered—a problem throughout much of the Quarter. The quaint ideal of retail on bottom and housing above is a concept we idealize but rarely embrace in actuality. Mixed-use seems great when someone else is creating the mixture. But the market demand for it—the best way to find an occupant for those other levels—is often miniscule.

This storefront on Mobile's Dauphin Street looked good enough for a restaurant, and in a better economic climate, it will probably find a new tenant. But the likelihood of demand escalating enough to justify building a structure for those other two floors is slim. In fact, a restaurant on the first floor may actually be a deterrent to transforming those upper levels into residential or office. Food handling is an extremely tough use to mix. Not too many people want the same smells wafting into their home or workspace every day from the restaurant below, no matter how good it may be. And even the best maintained of restaurants have a greater propensity for attracting vermin such as mice or roaches. Ask anyone who's lived next to a grocery store. Ask me.

In light of these undertakings in Memphis and now Mobile, it's hard to take a firm stand on façadectomies. Like it or not, they're part of a sub-practice within historic preservation, and they speak volumes about when the effort to salvage a structure aligns with demand—and when they clearly only generate dischord. We've already lost hundreds of buildings that intended to mix retail and residential throughout this country, and we'll lose many more in the future. Even if Dauphine and Beale Street become trendy entertainment destinations (the latter one already is), nothing suggests that main street architecture has more than a niche appeal—a antique collector's nostalgia. If anything else were the case, the majority of intact American main streets would be flourishing by now, but clearly they aren't. I still hold hope that we will witness the restoration of numerous other aging, pedestrian-scaled buildings in the decades to come, but not all will enjoy preservation from top to bottom, back to front. A flimsy brick wall surviving by braces may look ridiculous, but the care involved in trying to save it earns a distinctiveness all its own. And maybe these shells will find a new hermit crab to re-inhabit them, filling out the remaining three walls, then finding a tenant on those upper-level apartments who never grows tired of the southern barbecue smells simmering below.

DUST: Romancing the (war)zone.

In search for an innovative blog topic, I’ve been sifting through my photo albums, new and old, in order to put my growing understanding of life in a conflict region's military base within the context of other atypical American settlements. It’s going to take some time to ponder over all this—not something I have much of these days. Until then, I have to offer a footnote blog entry as I work out something a bit more extensive.

Obviously these bases are, with occasional exceptions, austere, serious locations without a great deal of time or attention devoted to whimsy. So when one comes across something lighthearted, it offers a welcomed contrast, no matter how slight. I was waiting in line at for lunch at the DFAC (Dining Facility) at a place named after the Afghan “Deh Dadi”, pronounced exactly how it looks.


The lowest form of humor manages to transcend its origins, when the café itself consists of a series of windowless, conjoined tempera tents. The Merriam Webster's online definition for the original word is “affectedly refined in manners or tastes”, with an unknown origin—perhaps the archaic term lardy-dardy used to describe fops, but those terse, successive, mellifluous vowel-consonant combinations also suggest a Romance language origin. Regardless, the creators of this otherwise drab sign betrayed their own la-de-da intentions.

But the unintentional laughs are the ones that linger. And this other image definitely ranks among my favorite here on the base for its novelty. I was the first American that I know of to discover some of these curiosities, no doubt while trolling around for blog photos. According to some of the troops who have gone on more than one tour, this is the first time they’ve seen such a thing as well. Camp Nidaros, a Norwegian-run compound within the larger Camp Marmal, billets the Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Latvian contingents. And next to the residential tents—the bedrooms—sits the inevitable counterpart, the bathroom.


It’s a latrine, and latrines by definition host sinks, toilets, showers, or a combination of the three, all fit snugly within an 8' by 20' modular metal container. But never before have I seen one specifically devoted to diarrhea, as the red and white lettering warns in its British English spelling: "DIARRHOEA ONLY". I've always thought “latrine” to be a deceptive word, with a far prettier, lilting sound (French of course) that contrasts sharply with anything that goes on inside it. And how telling: already my second thumbnail blog entry focusing on gastrointestinal—how would you say?--irregularities. For the record, here’s the first.

It puts a whole new angle on the idea of latrine duty as a punishment.

MONTAGE: Fanning the flames of long-term neglect.

It's been quite some time since I've featured a photo montage—a blog entry in which the presence of photos essentially dominates instead of text. But a recent occurrence in my home city of Indianapolis prompted me to recall some pictures I took well over a year ago that have suddenly become relevant again. Back then, I had hoped to create a montage of vacant, often blighted structures across the central part of the city that most likely would have undergone renovation by an ambitious developer riding the urban residential wave...except for the fact that both the zoning stipulations and the prevailing culture in the city overwhelmingly demand far more space for parking than these older urban structures are able to provide. And thus, buildings sit and rot.

Maybe someday I will still be able to create that photo montage, but it will have one less structure in my palette, due to a recent fire at the Chadwick building, just north of downtown on Pennsylvania and 10th Street. This structure, built during a pre-Depression rental boom in 1926, gradually devolved into budget studios as downtown Indianapolis began to decline in the 1950s. The Chadwick entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, and it sits in the historic St. Joseph neighborhood, just north of the official limits of the downtown Mile Square. Despite a downtown renewal that began in the mid-1990s, the Chadwick remained a housing choice of last resort, thanks in part to a negligent landlord who allowed the place to fall further into disrepair. It closed completely around the turn of this century and quickly became an eyesore in an otherwise steadily revitalizing area.

Most of my personal pictures of the Chadwick are fairly close-in, and are relatively few in number, so this will be a montage-lite. The best photo to demonstrate the massing of the Chadwick again comes directly from the Indianapolis Business Journal site, and is seen below, where the building to the left is a fully operational engineering firm.



As this picture demonstrates, the Chadwick sat tightly in its portion of the block, with no real setbacks or room for off-street parking. By today's standards, this might seems a bit like architectural irony, since the structure was meeting housing demand for the city's steadily growing automobile industry, but apparently automotive workers were not guaranteed to be car owners in 1926. (Or, at any rate, car owners were not plentiful enough to warrant dedicated off-street parking.) After all, at that point in time, they could have used the city's excellent transportation system to get to automotive jobs that most likely hugged the west side of the city—Indianapolis of the 1920s was “the Interurban Capital of the World”.

Those conditions don't prevail in today's environment, and this city, with one of the lowest funded public transportation systems in the country, depends overwhelmingly on the automobile. The results? Buildings like the Chadwick cannot find a buyer to redevelop them due to the unavailability of parking, and they quickly decay. Here before you are the pics I snapped back in the fall of 2009:



The façade wasn’t particularly distinctive by most measurements, but it reminds me of hundreds of similarly scaled buildings in Detroit, no doubt built in response to that city’s significantly larger 1920s automotive boom.

The building stretched all the way to its back alley, with a visibly contemporary structure immediately behind it.



In the back there was really no room for parking, which no doubt further deterred developers from having a go at it in what otherwise is an economically healthy area.



Buildings left vacant for a decade will inevitably host squatters and graffiti artists. Clearly some vandals left their mark on the adjacent Jarrett Engineering building as well—one of many reasons the latter building apparently posted a sign thanking the Indianapolis Fire Department for containing a blaze which could have spread far more unpredictably than the calculated wielding of a spray paint can.

One feature that has puzzled me has been why the north side of the building (away from the street and adjacent to the engineering firm’s building) used a different material for the third floor than the conventional brick seen everywhere else.



Could the Chadwick have been altered later in life in relation to some other, taller structure that used to abut it but has since been demolished?


Also notable is how much higher the basement of the structure was over the street level.

Most likely the building hosted garden apartments, but this elevation might have facilitated a slightly lower-cost introduction of enclosed basement parking in a potential redevelopment.

However, the structure would have required significant restorative work. Notice the visible cracks in the masonry at the southeast and southwest corners.



Maybe an architect could have assessed whether those cracks were the product of the missing supportive window frames (if they genuinely are missing due to the conflagrations of previous years), or whether more serious subsidence and foundational problems were the culprit.

But it doesn’t matter because the Chadwick Apartment building does not exist anymore. The urbanist blog Skyscraper City offers a heated discussion about the origins of the fire that felled the Chadwick. (Start with comment 3949 and scroll downward then read the next page; it gets feisty and fun.) The structure’s National Register status prevented the City from demolishing it, and despite the pesky issue of parking, hopes remained high that an enterprising developer would eventually see the potential for condos or yuppie apartments. But then the housing markets fizzled. A representative from the Indianapolis Department of Metropolitan Development assured me in a brief phone conversation that it wouldn’t be that hard for a developer to seek a variance. So how did the Chadwick meet its end—an out-of-control interior fire from homeless squatters, or an absentee property owner seeking a quick demolition?

The property will host a new development, most likely sooner rather than later. Many people on the aforementioned blogs prematurely bemoan the fact that it will lack the great urban massing that the Chadwick claimed, since virtually every multifamily unit in downtown Indianapolis needs off-street parking. I reserve judgment. The structure could just as easily have remained vacant for another decade, and it obviously would get only increasingly unattractive—and more costly to renovate. Despite its relative absence of a cited architectural heritage, Indianapolis—even just the St. Joseph Neighborhood alone—has other treasures far more worthy of a preservationist crusade. A hundred structures like the Chadwick have already faced the wrecking ball in Detroit; a structure like this coming down there might not even make news. A new montage awaits this parcel’s eventual redevelopment, and I will eventually complete the montage of salvageable Indianapolis urban beauties when I return the States.