Billboards blowing hot and cold.

After yesterday’s lengthy musings on strip malls, I’m going to spare the readers (and myself) a lengthy polemic on billboard proliferation and ensuing blight. But I had to show this beauty from Atlantic City, NJ, taken on a frigid winter day a few years ago:

But what about this particular slab of rotting particleboard? Such a prominent location, right there on the Boardwalk! The most valuable real estate in Monopoly! The timeless song by the Drifters (referring to Coney Island’s boardwalk, but a boardwalk nonetheless)! The demographics and economics of Atlantic City scarcely resemble those of Plainfield, IN, the boom-burb featured yesterday. But this sad sight may indicate that the proliferation of mounted advertisements is just as problematic as our glut of strip malls: too many spaces, not enough buyers.

Regulation and strict permitting for billboards most likely help to reduce excessive billboarding and blight created from a consequent lack of demand. Some clearly some would argue that any billboard—blank or otherwise—is a blight to the environment. I don’t want to make a value judgment on billboards; I’m no Lady Bird Johnson. I often think billboards can be a prosaic but powerful vessel for folk art expression, though I can also respect those who see them as an egregious blend of commercialism and pollution.

One element that surely influences the success of billboards—and retail—beyond their location, location, location is the temporal factor. Time of year in a seasonal town like Atlantic City could have a huge impact, and it may be hard to convince a vendor to advertise during the slow season; it would be interesting to know how long billboard companies typically lease their space. Then again, Atlantic City is hardly the picturesque seaside resort of the Roaring Twenties. Despite its extensive waterfront (and the oft referenced boardwalk), the casino culture is probably its biggest draw—an industry that knows no seasons, nor do they necessarily have much interest in the neighboring Jersey shore. Atlantic City’s public beaches are undoubtedly more crowded at a warmer time of year, but from what others have told me, the crowd that populates these beaches tends to have low purchasing power, which could deter some companies from advertising. (Low income neighborhoods, incidentally, often endure a surfeit of billboards, so the economics may not sway this very much.)

Perhaps innovation plays an even bigger role here than in strip malls. Is it possible that, with both rotating panel billboards and now animated LED displays, the conventional static image will lose its luster? If high-speed train travel ever became a prominent means of transportation, would we see billboards along the railroad track, or would we be moving too quickly for the images to settle into our minds? The leadership of Atlantic City no doubt considers a single dead billboard as a minor concern, but I think these mounted advertisements are indelibly wedded to the larger palette of visual communications and are just as semantically rich as directional road markers, neon beer ads, barn roof paintings, or those great welcome signs when we cross state boundaries—all minor fixations of mine that hint at upcoming postings.

Why is retail so fickle?

Almost everyone here has seen the telltale strip mall that has seen better days. We usually surmise that one of two factors has impelled the tenants to flee a shopping center or other commercial district: either the demographics in the area have changed (usually becoming lower income), or a newer, shinier shopping center has opened up within close proximity. The photos below are scarcely groundbreaking, because what we have here is a strip mall that has clearly reached the end of its marketable life.

Here’s the most prosperous looking corner, but looks can be deceiving, because its vacancy rate is still 100 percent. And here is a crude panorama of the entire sprawling strip of stores, with its clear anchor on the far right:

Anyone with an eye for logos or big-box architecture can recognize the anchor building as a former WalMart; the company has a vibrant history of abandoning these buildings, only to move to a brand new, bigger structure less than a mile away.

To the far left of this panorama is a smaller strip, built perpendicularly to the aforementioned. It clearly isn’t faring any better.

And in between the older and the newer WalMart? Another struggling strip mall, where the anchor, Value City, still seems to be functioning well, but all the in-line tenants are struggling. Here’s the scene immediately to the west of the previous photos.

The Value City (which I unfortunately failed to photograph) is to the left of this second photo. And, if we venture further to the west, we get a booming new WalMart and generally prosperous retail leading to the old town center (which also could use some help).

Aside from the severity of the blight here, is there anything else that makes these shopping centers distinct? For one thing, it doesn’t take place in an inner-ring suburb; sadly, this is precisely what you might expect to see in parts of Indianapolis. But these pictures come from Plainfield, Indiana, one of Indianapolis’ surging suburbs and part of one of the fastest growing counties in the country. If you look at the distance of this picture, in between the old WalMart and a row of smaller, in-line stores to its left, you can see what most likely drove all the retail out:

Yes, a JC Penney, part of the Metropolis, a new open-air lifestyle center that has become the principal shopping hub for the city’s western suburbs. (The edge of the vacant WalMart is barely visible in the far left of the above photo.) Metropolis is still growing—not just finding more tenants but purchasing adjacent parcels for the intention of expanding its gross leasable area. No doubt most of the tenants formerly housed in this completely vacant strip mall all moved to this new location, or to other, newer, more desirable strip malls in the area.

So, nothing profound here. But this is a particular black eye to a boom-burb like Plainfield, whose civic leaders would no doubt love to see this blight removed from the principal east-west artery in the city, which also happens to be US Highway 40, the historic National Road. Plainfield shows no evidence of being a suburb in decline; in fact, if anything, it has ascended to become one of the most prominent suburbs in recent years, competing with the more established northern suburbs at luring new arrivals to the Indianapolis area. Yet the city still struggles with this broad swath of depressed, vacant real estate. What does this say about retail in general, and what can be done in scenarios like this, which are taking place all over the country? Here are my thoughts on why retail tenants in particular have to make the shift so often:

1) Location. By most regards, this is so obvious that it doesn’t merit consideration. We’ve all heard the maxim. But delving into the ramifications of retailers’ decisions to locate can reveal much more about loyalty to a specific shopping center or the lack thereof. The demographics in Plainfield favor this area; nearly every other shopping center along the Main Street here is thriving or at least has an occupancy rate of 75% or more. I could speculate the lifecycle of this strip mall has transpired as follows: a) WalMart leadership recognized that the trade area for their store at the original blue-and-gray structure is growing rapidly since Plainfield matured from a humble little satellite of Indianapolis to a prominent suburb of over 25,000 people; b) the regional leadership at WalMart hurriedly bought a spot along the principal artery 1,000 feet away from the new store and built a supercenter nearly twice the size of the original; c) the other tenants at the old WalMart strip mall see customer traffic counts plummet with the departure of the anchor tenant; d) the burgeoning City of Plainfield entices a major new lifestyle mall development called Metropolis (creating a Planned Unit Development, or PUD, in their zoning ordinance facilitate it), just 1,000 feet in the opposite direction from the new WalMart; e) smaller in-line tenants depart the strip mall for newer, more attractive retail plazas in the city, including (but not limited to) the Metropolis lifestyle center when it opens in 2006. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this out, but the design of this shopping sarcophagus bears all the marks of long-faded glory: the vinyl awning crowning a fake stucco façade was a popular motif from about 1990, and the complete absence of landscaping in the parking lot generates the uncomfortable heat island effect in the summer while rendering the overall design stale and uninviting. (Compare most new strip malls with elaborate landscaped islands, even when city ordinances don’t require them.) The decline of this strip mall happened so quickly the property managers probably had little time to react, which provides an excellent transition to the next point.

2) Leasing agreements. The managers of these shopping centers are often required to devote most of their energies to securing an anchor tenant: because these tenants absorb a preponderance of leasable space and generate both high sales volumes and customer traffic, owners and managers generally entice them with incredibly generous rents, sometimes offering a lease with no rent at all. Sometimes they even sell the property to the anchor tenant. Thus, the manager’s revenue depends on leases from the other in-line tenants, who may settle for a flat rent rate for a set number of years (typically less than five) but more often then not will negotiate a rent based on existing market conditions, where it will “step up” over time or correlated to the consumer price index. In-line tenants may often pay the preponderance of common area maintenance. These onuses suffered by the smaller retailers (and the dependence owners have on them for the revenue) means these agreements can be highly competitive. And since owner typically focus on finding stable anchors, the small in-line tenants enjoy freedom to shop for the best deal, which usually factors in rents, Common Area Maintenance (CAM) costs, and the desirability of an anchor tenant, among other things. Fidelity to a certain shopping center will scarcely last beyond the terms of a lease, and both anchors and in-line tenants are always seeking better deals.

3) Easy finance. So if the market is so competitive, why build so many new shopping centers in the first place? This is where my own knowledge gets foggy, and I can only hope to quote others more informed than I am. The sour economy has precipitated a steep rise in shopping center vacancies; as an article by Stacy Mitchell from the New Rules Project puts it, “the forces driving retail expansion have become untethered from actual consumer demand.” But how are developers able to access financing so easily when the battered retail landscape sits in plain view to even the most untrained eyes? According to White and Gray (1996) in their book Shopping Centers and Other Retail Properties, the emergence of the Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) in the early 1990s transformed the landscape of shopping centers that were often family-run and guarded their financial data carefully, to public ownership of real estate in which the data became widely available. The reliance of public markets as a source of capital also opened the floodgates to a variety of participants in shopping center finance, allowing developers to find the exact type of security that meets the their desired return on investment and risk tolerance at that point in a market cycle (pp. 77-78). The continued proliferation of powerful REITs has most likely influenced the development of new large-scale shopping malls—thus explaining why in the late 1990s and early 2000s new mega-malls were constructed concurrent with others malls dying just a few miles away. This phenomenon embodies that culture that allows the creation of Plainfield’s Metropolis Mall, but what about the smaller retail casualties featured in this picture?

4) Easy credit and standardization. Retail is an exhaustively bifurcated discipline; dare I anger the intelligentsia by calling it a “science” or “art form”? That said, in the United States, for the most part it is quite easy to build a shopping center; site clearance in many exurban or suburban areas such as Plainfield is relatively free of barriers. In places where permitting for retail is easy to obtain (which is most of the country), the costs stay low and the risk of delays pushing it outside a favorable market cycle are minimal. Thus, many amateur developers will cut their teeth with a simple strip mall at an intersection where a subdivision is going up in one of the other four corners. Strip malls are cheap if they lack any of the frou-frou, and often they don’t need frills to lure tenants if the demographics there favor growth. Thus, a site can attract tenants without a great promotional budget, and because they were cheap, even a mediocre occupancy rate should generate enough NOI to allow the developer/owner to amortize quickly. In fact, spending money for a shopping center with high design standards might seem unwise, because the aesthetic will seem dated within a few years, demoting it from prime retail status once the neighborhoods around it are fully built out with residential and the new exurban frontier is just a few miles further away. By this time, it doesn’t matter—it appears better to stick to a mass market design with the loans the developer received, reflecting undemanding consumer tastes in the same way that the abundance of available credit for consumers has diluted demand for quality or durability. After all, why be choosy with the products one buys, whether they’re refrigerators, clothes, or real estate, when there’s plenty more money available to upgrade or replace?

Thus, we get strip malls like this one in Plainfield. Clearly the owner is making no money on it now, but it may have been fully profitable and amortized during its 10 to 15 year lifespan. And today, a strip mall from (as my estimates put it) between 1985 and 1989 is a full 3 or 4 acres of abandoned property. It is obsolete, like many of the homes in Midwestern inner-cities. Straight-line depreciation rules typically place a non-residential building at 39 years, though this accounts for office space far more effectively than retail, which most documentation would suggest has a much shorter life. Recent bills have favored reducing retail straight-line depreciation to fifteen years. Conversely, some strip malls enjoy a second life through extensive renovations and upgrades, often adding features such as landscaped grid in the parking lots or wooden signage that endow them with upmarket features the Plainfield strip mall clearly avoided at its inception. As mentioned before, elaborate landscaping was a luxury until about a decade ago; now it has become standardized as a means of attracting customers. The Cincinnati developer Phillips Edison has integrated the purchase of underperforming shopping centers into its mission statement, and it usually works to instill new life through upgrades that make the shopping centers more fashionable and aesthetic. Thus, through the obsolescence of 15-year-old strip mall designs, a new caliber of standardization emerges, higher than the one from a decade prior but equally mass produced. No doubt in another decade or two, an additional design element will enter the strip mall design standard, making it increasingly easy to estimate the age of a retail center simply by its appearance.

Where does this leave the blighted strip malls of Plainfield? A firm like Phillips Edison would no doubt have a field day with them: the town itself is fiscally healthy and poised to grow further. However, the city is saturated with retail. Our current recession’s most enduring incarnation maybe the miles of vacant retail without a developer willing to shell out the money to refurbish it, proving that the consumerist infrastructure responded to a demand that was artificially inflated by our previously limitless access to credit. The consumer body is too big for its retail clothes, and, with far greater limitations to credit now in place, it may take time for us to grow back into all the empty storefronts built at a time when Americans had plugged themselves into a relentless buy-buy-buy ethos. In due time, this eyesore along Highway 40, Plainfield’s Main Street, will find a redeveloper, though its second life might not be strictly commercial.

Retail may be fickle, but it is only as fickle as the perpetually picky buyer. The lack of loyalty that a retailer has to a certain spot only reflect the customers’ own lack of loyalty to a particular shopping center, mall, or retail typology altogether. If the current recession really does impel the American populace toward a newfound parsimony and reluctance to buy everything in sight, perhaps the average shopping center’s depreciation time will slow. Otherwise, we are only witnessing a pause button on the perpetual flurry of consumers to buy the newest and shiniest (if not necessary the highest quality), and shopping centers will continue to find their butterfly nets are out of reach of the choicest retailers in only a dozen years or less.

These trends are obviously not new: they precipitated the decline of Main Street retail well over a generation ago. And shopping centers were rising and falling during the 1990s boom as well. I’ll conclude with the fitting opening of a favorite, obscure movie of mine, Michael Tolkin’s 1994 opus The New Age, which begins with Katherine Witmer, a successful Los Angeles graphic designer (played by Judy Davis) in an exasperated call with one of her clients:

Katherine: Barry, what are you saying? But Barry . . . Barry . . . you owe me thirty-eight thousand dollars! Barry, Barry . . . you promised me that money. Well, thank you Barry. Good-bye, Barry. (Very calmly and deliberately, Katherine starts to erase all the files on her computer.)

Sue: [her assistant] What did Barry say?

Katherine: Barry was fired.

Sue: Wow, too bad, I like[d] Barry.

(Katherine quietly drags her mouse and begins to erase all of her bank files.)

Sue: Katherine, what are you doing? . . . Katherine, you’re erasing all the files. Wait, we haven’t back up these files yet! Katherine, you’re destroying all your work.

Katherine: (while she’s erasing) The bank doesn’t need a hundred thousand brochures because the bank doesn’t exist anymore. The bank doesn’t exist anymore because too many of its big real estate loans went bad. Its great big real estate loans went bad because it made loans for shopping centers that can’t find enough tenants. The shopping centers can’t find enough tenants because there are too many shopping centers! There are too many shopping centers because a lot of greedy fucks got loans from corrupt banks.

Sue: What are you going to do?

Katherine: I’m going shopping.

[Minor elisions to the screenplay and italicizations for emphasis done by AmericanDirt.

For more info, see the following:

Brueggeman, William B. and Jeffery D. Fisher. Real Estate Finance and Investments. Boston: McGraw-Hill Irwin, 2008.

White, John Robert, and Kevin D. Gray, Eds. Shopping Centers and Other Retail Properties. New York: Wiley and Sons, 1996.]

What's in a name? Apparently not much for apartment complexes.

I was recently driving in an area close to where I grew up, and noticed something different about two apartment complexes. The first of these was called La Caribe when I was in high school:

Despite few, if any, other visible changes to the appearance of the buildings, it is now Martinique Terrace. The other was called Wyandotte Trails, I believe:

The largely inconspicuous sign now refers to it as Tuscan Pointe. No doubt both of these apartment complexes experienced a change in management or ownership, but what motivated the new owners to change the names? Has there been a concomitant change in the bylaws that necessitate an overall shift in identity? Did the apartments begin to decline in their desirability, demoting the name of the complex into a pejorative to the point that it needed a complete overhaul? The Martinique Terrace apartment still appear to be well-maintained, at least on the outside; Tuscan Pointe is showing some signs of deferred maintenance, though it’s certainly not looking terrible. My estimate is that both of these complexes were developed between 1975 and 1980; the Tuscan Pointe may be a bit older among the two.

Obviously I don’t have too many answers, but I think these subtle changes raise important issues of how much a name plays in the affirmation of the identity of an urban sub-unit, whether it be largely suburban apartment complexes such as these, a subdivision with a hierarchical road layout (i.e., lots of cul-de-sacs and only one or two points of ingress/egress), or a traditional urban neighborhood with a typically gridded plan and a mix of commercial/retail to serve basic needs of the residential population. Clearly the community where the tenure largely consists of homeowners instead of renters would have a much more difficult time changing its name; lacking any sort of stewardship among the residents, Martinique Terrace and Tuscan Point probably did not arouse a great deal of controversy with the name change. (Tenants were far more likely to show concern about a change in the terms of their lease.) It would be particularly interesting to see the evolution of neighborhood naming from the modern subdivision, which often has the name bedecking the entry way, as well as streets that reaffirm this name. Conversely, old urban neighborhoods had few or no signs announcing the neighborhood and the roads themselves often came from the continuation of the grid that already passed through the area; any signage today may be established through a historic district or businesses in the neighborhood that refer to Woodruff Place or Fountain Square in their names. Neighborhood associations have proliferated in recent years, affirming and reinforcing a sort of civic participation in a significantly smaller jurisdiction than the larger city, and providing a big-fish-small-pond point of entry for those who are curious about activism or political involvement.

I have never lived in an apartment complex comparable to Tuscan Pointe or Martinique Terrace—only apartment buildings that were typically managed by a larger company with scattered properties throughout the city. Anyone who can offer illumination on how community identity is established within large apartment complexes (if any such exists) can provide an interesting contrasts to neighborhood or homeowners associations, and the nuances of the bylaws that dictate certain behaviors in a place full of owners, renters, or a mixture of the two.

Generosity can be measured in meters.

Many municipalities see the pricing on meters for on-street parking as a science unto itself. Of course a city wants greater revenue, but it does not want to deter people from parking on the street—almost always the most preferred method over more costly garages—simply because the prices become too high. After all, parking meters typically only can flourish in urban settings, and if the price tag repels visitors from parking in them, it may very well dissuade people from visiting that urban neighborhood or city center altogether. This price sensitivity makes this meter in Cincinnati (photo taken earlier this winter) all the more hilarious to me:

No, this isn't from 1962, though I expect this might have been seen as a reasonable price back then. I’ve heard of low-cost parking, but this almost seems to defeat the purpose of charging altogether. Granted, this was not in Cincinnati’s downtown—I recall the meters there charging somewhat more on par with a national norm—but it was in the main street of the affluent Hyde Park neighborhood slightly northeast of the central business district.

Do the math. The absolute most the city can expect to make on this meter is $1.25 a day, if the meter hours run from 8 am to 6 pm, which is most likely the case because the majority of the businesses here are daytime only. One would hope that the city would not operate a street parking system that runs at a loss, but with such limited revenue, it would be hard to imagine the maintenance of these meters and the labor needed for enforcement could ever add much to the municipal budget.

Increasingly cities are rethinking the operation of their on-street parking fee collection systems, as evidenced by studies engaged in Indianapolis on measuring the viability of a long-term outsourcing contract. Chicago’s revenue through parking meters spiked tremendously after a new contract, but the new costs aroused considerable ire from people living and working in the area. The city further stymied its own ability to make any changes in response to citizen frustration by entering a stupefyingly long contract of 75 years.

The modernization and upgrading schemes for parking meters in many cities have focused on machinery that expands the media for payment. This includes stations that can apply to a broader number of spaces by printing the receipt that shows expiration time, or those that allow credit/debit card and even dollar bill payments. While these seem like excellent ideas in theory, they have aroused frustration for being far less efficient and more prone to malfunction than the conventional, amiably quaint meter pictured above in Cincinnati. New Orleans, for example, installed a new system of computerized boxes throughout its downtown shortly after Hurricane Katrina; these new meters accept plastic and are placed less frequently, since they print the time of expiry for users to place in their windshields. Frustration began to mount within only a few months, when the machines rejected users’ credit cards for no discernible reason other than failure to read it (the card itself had not been declined). Some of them were out of service, requiring the user to walk several blocks to find a box that did work, then return to his or her windshield to place the receipt there. Many people gave up and were forced to make the difficult choice of parking without paying and bearing the risk of getting a ticket, or just seeking an off-street parking garage and paying more money. This undoubtedly will become less of a problem as technology improves, but a city may want to avoid the problem of hastily embracing a new system because it looks sleek and modern; three years after installation, few metering systems seem as clunky as the ones in New Orleans, yet I’ve seen other cities install this same model as well.

An additional situation that new metering systems hope to rectify is the free rider problem. This occurs when a person pays for an hour at a meter and only uses fifteen minutes, giving the next user the opportunity to “cash in” on minutes that someone else paid for. Obviously most on street parking users don’t see this as a problem—it’s just a great bonus!—but it doesn’t help the city in ascribing a price to its on-street parking network. When a city goes for the bottom-of-the-barrel cost as we see here in Hyde Park, Cincinnati, it becomes increasingly easy for users to cheat the system. Enforcement often fails to cite for all-day meter users, concentrating its energies and violations on expired meters or illegal on-street parking, mostly because it doesn’t want to appear excessively draconian to on-street users that might otherwise seek their goods and services in the free parking of the suburbs. The retail abutting these on-street spaces also needs the business and would scarcely support high-cost meters. Thus, a person can put a quarter in, stay for and hour and 55 minutes, then come back, put another quarter in, wait another hour and 55, and so forth. Why should they use city-owned garages for a day of urban parking if they cost upwards of $10 when they can use a meter in Cincinnati all day for a little over a dollar?

The modern New Orleans boxes aim to reduce or eliminate both of aforementioned concerns by issuing paper receipts, so that the payment can only apply to that specific car and not one who comes in afterwards to freeload on the previous users’ remaining minutes. This is fine and good, but with paper receipts, any users who pay for a short, perfectly legal interval (such as 15 minutes) are bound to that time frame. If they then realize after five minutes that they need to pay for an additional 30 minutes, they cannot “add on” to their existing allotment by simply paying more into the meter; they have to wait until the actual clock time equates to the time on their receipts, then start over by feeding the meter again. So the New Orleans meters attempt to expand flexibility through methods of payment but also inhibit it in terms of impromptu visits to urban services. A person cannot change his or her mind easily after agreeing to buy an allotment of time on the electronic, receipt based meters. These users must “ride out” the remaining time on the meter before adding more, or they must accept the fact that they will have to double pay for some overlapping allotments on the meters.

Meanwhile, the City of Chicago, which is hardly a stranger to expensive city parking, is apparently incurring wrath in some neighborhoods simply for raising the costs up from a meager original rate of 25 cents an hour. Granted, the increase was 300% to one dollar an hour, so while the rates remain relatively low, such a sudden jolt is likely to perturb the users of on-street parking, even in an area such as Chicago where public transportation is strong and parking on the street is often subject to strict regulation. Apparently the private company in charge of the new lease on the parking meters took most of the heat, but did the city really have to agree to a contract that is as long as the typical human’s lifetime? Maybe the Hyde Park neighborhood in Cincinnati is doing perfectly fine with its current system, but clearly the change to something as seemingly mundane as parking meters can cause a ripple of frustration, with broader consequences for urban businesses and their patrons.

Binodal small towns: a help or a hindrance?

When I was in school a few years ago doing research on various downtowns across the US, we had to spend twice as much effort on gathering demographics for New York City than we did for anywhere else. Of course this has something to do with the fact that the residential population of downtown Manhattan is larger than anywhere in the United States, but this still begs the question, “What is downtown New York City anyway?” Are there specific boundaries? If so, what are they? We came to the conclusion that Lower Manhattan may be the old financial center, but Midtown Manhattan represents such a large agglomeration of business and commerce that it could just as easily qualify as a second downtown, making New York a city with a binodal downtown.

Urban scholars have applied central place theory (among others) to determine why firms may cluster in specific locations, and many of these same principles loosely apply to any analysis of a metropolitan area’s “second downtown”. Perhaps the most high profile of these is Joel Garreau’s Edge City, popularized by his similarly titled 1992 book, but in this work he refers to the post-modern urban agglomeration, thoroughly rooted in automobile travel and strategically located at the converge of major highways—sometimes also lacking in a residential population. In the case of Manhattan, both of its downtowns pre-date the automobile with architecture that reflects a concentration of activity rooted in foot travel and public transportation; residential populations are also firmly established.

Could there be a similar example of binodalism but at a small-town scale? My recent travels to towns in west-central Indiana suggest so. Brazil, Indiana, about 60 miles southwest of Indianapolis and best known as the birthplace of Jimmy Hoffa, offers a compelling deviation from the conventional Midwest town layout. Though the seat of government for Clay County, it does not feature the archetypal central courthouse green upon which the principal businesses trace the perimeter. The courthouse in Brazil rests on its own block, as seen below:

[My photo is not adequate for showing how the courthouse rests on its block. To see a better photo, go to Historic Marker Database.]

However, instead of being surrounding by the historic commercial center, this is what one sees across from the courthouse instead of the tightly packed commercial buildings:

Then a block-long main street continues westward along Highway 40 (the National Road), pointing linearly away from the courthouse—but only on one side of the street. These buildings do not face the courthouse at all.

The other side comprises mostly private residences, or older homes converted to law or accounting offices.

Continuing west along this highway is a block or two of homes and homes-as-offices, and then several more blocks of the extended commercial main street continue, as seen below—this time on both sides of the street. (My picture-taking ability suffered a bit because it was raining at this point.)

Could this be an example of binodalism? I am not certain what else it could be. Though only a couple blocks separate one portion of the main street commercial corridor from the other, I do not believe that “lapse” in commercial buildings was ever anything but private residences, and a mere block of interruption in a commercial corridor for a town the size of Brazil is sufficient to represent a significant schism in the neat procession of buildings that comprise most main streets. (One could postulate that it was one long uninterrupted Main Street in decades prior, and that only a few blocks were demolished and homes built in replacement, thereby “splitting” the Main Street. However, the intervening residential section appears just as old as the commercial buildings. My regrets that I did not take pictures of these homes.)

Thus, it would appear that Brazil has, on the scale suitable for a town of 9,000 inhabitants, a commercial quarter more directly tied to central government, and then one more directly associated with commerce and the rail that governed all trade back when Brazil was at the peak of its prosperity. Research from the Clay County government website supports this:

“The first Courthouse was built in the newly platted town of Bowling Green in 1828, soon after Clay County was formed by the Indiana legislature. It was a two story structure of hand hewn logs. . . . By the 1860’s the towns of Harmony, Knightsville, and Brazil were growing rapidly, due in part to their location along the National Road, and also because of the many coal companies in that section of the county. An effort to move the county seat of government to a more central location, which had begun in the 1850’s, grew stronger creating controversy among citizens. In the 1860’s citizens in the northern section of Clay County became more organized in their efforts. In 1871 brothers Robert and John Stewart donated a tract of land along the National Road in Brazil for proposed site of the new courthouse.”

It would appear, then, that the western commercial corridor and the eastern one (directly abutting the courthouse) enjoy separate histories. The relocation of the county seat from the town of Bowling Green (now scarcely a dot on the map) to Brazil explains why Brazil deviates from the standard courthouse square layout of most county seats in Indiana; it never intended to serve as the center of government. My suspicion is that the diffusion of what could have been a continuous main street—or a conventional Midwestern county seat with its courthouse at the central square—has weakened the City of Brazil’s ability to marry its identity to its historic architecture. If my pictures have not already indicated this, much of Brazil appears to be struggling economically; these gaps along the main street indicate a downtown that has lost its economic base, robbing these buildings of their viability as storefronts and deteriorating the formerly uninterrupted streetwall that these commercial buildings flanking either side of Highway 40 would have established. The main street with buildings on both sides—most likely the older of the two “downtowns”—is particularly desolate, while the one closer to the courthouse appears to be in better shape.

Of particular note in the easternmost of the downtowns—the healthier one closely linked to the courthouse—is a Mexican Restaurant that appears to be the most prosperous place in all of Brazil’s two downtowns.

The architecture, evoking southwestern US or parts of Mexico through its decorative arches at the cornice line, clearly does not fit with the architectural vernacular on either side of it. Yet this makes an effective infill after what was most likely a demolition of the original building; it retains the streetwall and meets the restaurant operator’s contemporary needs for fenestration and even some al fresco dining. Preservationists may gag at this effort, but it has helped retain the aesthetics of this downtown node better than perhaps anywhere else in the City.

In the seat of government of neighboring Putnam County, Greencastle offers an interesting contrast to Brazil’s binodality. This city, of almost identical size to Brazil, shows adherence to the Midwestern archetype of a central courthouse square with a clear business district carefully wrapped around the square, as seen below.

Witness the commercial buildings in the background, to the left of the courthouse. Here are some better images of the streets surrounding the central square:

A casual observer would quickly draw the conclusion that the down is much healthier financially than Brazil as well. Greencastle’s biggest claim to national recognition is the fact that it is the home of DePauw University, a highly-regarded liberal arts institution and music school with an enrollment of around 2,000. Universities have such significant infrastructural investment in their original locations that they often guarantee the viability of towns such as Greencastle; rarely if ever would such an institution find enough incentive to relocate and abandon the two dozen structures it has here. The only incident that would sever the ties between Greencastle and DePauw would be the fiscal collapse of the university, which is unlikely to happen (but not unheard of, as Ohio’s Antioch College offers proof). Greencastle’s downtown is, by most measurements, in solid shape: few if any buildings show any sign of disrepair, and the only potential demolition I could find has been replaced with a respectable plaza, barely visible here but nestled between the two standing buildings.

That said, the retail in Greencastle is tired, and retail, which has such a strong influence on people’s perceptions of the overall character of a place, could bolster Greencastle’s reputation tremendously and possibly transform it from a pleasant if unremarkable town to a tourist destination. Instead we see the closure of institutions like this bookstore, an ostensible very recent casualty of the sour economy and the dominance of online book buying:

Though central Greencastle has a few restaurants, antique stores, and variety shops, several buildings are filled with public agencies such as this:

How does one bridge this gap from a sleepy business district for insurance agents, lawyers, or nonprofits to one with viable apparel, restaurants, art galleries, or other boutiques to serve the built-in consumer base of students at DePauw, just four blocks away? Presumably city leaders would prefer the downtown to be filled with revenue generating retail over state agencies or non profits that don’t contribute to the tax rolls, but perhaps the citizens of Greencastle have decided through the market that they don’t want the retail components that could shift the town to a real destination. After all, if these retailers move in through tax breaks or various government incentives instead of market forces, it may only result in a short-lived, contrived, and cosmetic approach to town center revitalization. There is nothing particularly troubling looking to Greencastle; by contrast, Brazil appears almost indisputably troubled. Greencastle, by adhering to conventional county seat urban design standards, may enjoy greater flexibility for a widespread resurgence in economic health than Brazil ever will, largely because the bones of its original historic architecture remain intact. Brazil’s binodality means it was a government seat by accident rather than design; it can scarcely hope ever to compare to Manhattan in terms of the agglomeration of economic activity. But the signage in Brazil, its emphasis on appearing “historic”, would suggest that those are its leaders’ aspirations far more than Greencastle, which has no such signs visible to me at least, despite having retained its architectural history much more diligently.

Ultimately the distinction between these two towns, almost identical in population and with only 25 miles separating them, boils down to the definition of a “node”, whether cribbed from the dictionary or used by Kevin Lynch in his seminal work The Image of a City. It is a perceived center of activity, which Greencastle clearly has. Brazil does not. Perhaps the later city’s binodality is actually anodality—the diffusion into two separate main streets eliminates the visual authority established by a single indisputable center. Without such a focal point, Brazil may depend less on working with what it has and will instead need to build anew, to compensate for what it lacks. If that’s the case, then Mario Brothers’ Mexican Restaurant isn’t a bad start.

Suburban desolation taken to new extremes.

In late May I drove around with a friend whose first visit to New Orleans included both the usual haunts as well as some of the less frequented surrounding areas. Our two days of travels stretched as far as the plantations along River Road to the west, the isthmus between Lakes Pontchartrain and Maurepas (with the old-time catfish place Middendorfs), as well as the Lower Ninth Ward and the downriver suburbs that suffered the greatest amount of devastation from Hurricane Katrina. He is not an avid photographer, but he insisted that I pull my camera out when we approached the Schwegmann Plaza in Chalmette, Louisiana, about three miles east of the Ninth Ward. He remarked that it looked like a post-apocalyptic setting, like an America after a nuclear attack.

Some context can help clarify the motivation for taking these pictures. Chalmette is the largest community in St. Bernard Parish, which is a suburban parish (the Louisiana equivalent of a county) immediately east of the city. Prior to the storm, it had a little under 70,000 people, according to the US Census. Of all the parishes in the state, St. Bernard came the closest to 100% flooding—observations from residents I know suggest that only a few dozen of the 25,000 or homes escaped inundation; most received over eight feet of water. The recovery of the parish and the homecoming of its residents have been riddled with political, logistical, economic, and environmental complications, but most recent Census estimates suggest the area is at nearly 50% of its pre-Katrina population.

Thus, it would be unfair to post these photos without acknowledging that most of the development around Schwegmann Plaza (even some to the immediate west of it) is in far better shape than what you see here. Several grocery stores have returned, the hardware stores are doing inevitably strong business, and some beloved institutions like Rocky and Carlo’s restaurant are up and running again. The Chalmette area is a patchwork of hurricane-induced decrepitude and primer-coated recovery, often juxtaposed in a single block.

However, this is how much of the city of New Orleans looks as well. So why did Schwegmann Plaza stand out for my friend, after having seen the much higher-profile Lower Ninth Ward? After gazing upon countless architectural manifestations of New Orleans’ prolonged cultural isolation—structures that look like nothing anywhere else, as most visitors of the city can testify—Chalmette offers an antidote in the form of utterly conventional suburbia. A mostly white, lower-middle class area before the storm, Chalmette and St. Bernard Parish perhaps reveal the ruthlessness of a hurricane more poignantly because they look like they could be anywhere else. The Spanish colonial arcades of the French Quarter, the baroque brackets of double shotguns in the Uptown area—these are remarkable whether they’re in impeccable shape or advanced decay. Chalmette looks far more like mundane America. And when a ubiquitous suburban strip mall gets clobbered by floodwaters and rots in the soggy Louisiana air, it amplifies the feeling of vulnerability. Schwegmann Plaza takes the magnitude of devastation in post-diluvian New Orleans and banalizes it, making it hit home to the most hardened of us.

Four-Legged Pedestrians?

As I prepare for a significantly longer essay on the introduction of complete streets into the American landscape, I wanted to include a few images of a quiet but growing concern among planners and civil engineers: biofragmentation through the construction of roads. In his book Road Ecology, Richard T. T. Forman estimates that 1,000,000 animals are killed every day from collisions with cars. (This doesn’t include the countless insects who succumb to our windshields.) While some countries in Europe have been trying to reduce animal fatalities through wildlife crossings for several decades, they remain a relatively recent development in North America. Perhaps the best known are the underpasses for Interstate 75 in Florida, which engineers have designed specifically to prevent car collisions with the Florida panther, one of the most endangered large mammals on the continent. As many people know, the deer that are abundant in many parts of the continent can be particularly hazardous, causing significant damage to the car and injuries or death to the passengers within. They are among the most frequent mammals to cause collisions, because of their tendency to graze on food along the periphery of a road—a bitter irony, because much of this roadside food has been disposed by humans, thrown from the windows of their cars.

Below is a busy stretch of the Concord Turnpike in the Town of Concord, Massachusetts, which features four subtly introduced box culverts that serve as wildlife underpasses.

The tunnel pictured below does not target any particular specie, but is part of a general effort to reduce collisions between cars and animals; as the photo proves, the tunnel is clearly large enough for a human to pass through. Also critical is the earthen floor, which helps create a more seamless habitat for a traveling animal than an abiotic strip of cement.

The Sudbury Valley Trustees have installed cameras to monitor the success of the tunnels; their website confirms that they do enjoy use from mammals (and even a few birds) of various sizes.

The Town of Concord, formerly home to Transcendentalist writers Thoreau and Emerson, has a history of strong environmental stewardship, and my suspicion is that the population largely embraced the introduction of such an infrastructure improvement, whereas in other locations it might arouse remonstrations as a frivolous use of taxpayer dollars. However, the town’s Natural Resource Commission apparently partnered with the state highway department to include these box culverts during a broader infrastructural upgrade, in which the Commonwealth installed retaining walls and median dividers, while integrating the wildlife underpasses into the overall design process. This appears to me to be a politically savvy move, because it could mitigate most of the fallout among taxpayers that would take place if the Commonwealth introduced the wildlife improvements as a separate highway project on its own terms. These box culverts most likely cost slightly less as well, since they were part of a larger improvement and did not demand any demolition or structural alterations on their own terms.

In all likelihood these projects will become more prevalent in the United States with each passing year; I believe New Jersey has a few wildlife overpasses, which serve much the same function as a pedestrian bridge but are usually much wider and again covered with an earthen floor. If other jurisdictions adopt the Concord approach and integrate the design with broader street improvements, these wildlife crossings could ascend among the public perception from a luxury to a desirable safety feature that protects both humans and animals.