When I was a teenager, after a particularly vivid ecology class, I came home and shouted at my parents, “Thanks a lot for leaving the world a mess for my generation! Thanks a freaking lot!” then stomped out, slamming the door behind me. Now I’m the parent of teens, and I get to hear pretty much the same thing—sometimes my kids are mad, sometimes baffled, sometimes scared, sometimes daunted. I can’t argue, and it seems the world has indeed gotten worse since I was their age (global warming and general environmental degradation, dehumanizing sprawl, Darfur, grinding poverty, AIDS, etc. etc. etc.), and yet somehow the damaged, trashed world muddles onward.
If we adults are going to make the world a better place, even in the smallest ways, I think we need to walk our talk. The kids are watching, believe me. They keep me on my toes—and, hey, they should. They have to live in this world long after I am gone.
Here are some of the issues we discuss at my house:
This piece comes from The Buffalo News, and it contains some excellent points. We applaud the town of Hamburg's efforts to make Wal-Mart bend to their aesthetic will, though at the end of the day, this may amount to not much more than mere lipstick on a maloderous pig. Still, other towns and communities need to read this and understand that they should not sell themselves short just to curry the favor of another sprawl spreading big box store. Thanks to Doug Smith for the tip.
By Donn Esmonde
There was a grand opening Wednesday for the Walmart in Hamburg. It was a celebration not just of commerce, but design.
Tens of thousands of people will drive by it or come to it over the years. This is how it is with a building. It becomes part of the landscape, for better or—too often— for worse. Which is why what happened in Hamburg should happen all of the time, everywhere, with any public or commercial building.
The new Walmart on Southwestern Boulevard is not the glorified concrete-block bunker that the company usually builds. Its walls are red brick. Massive white pillars topped by peaked roofs frame its three entrances. It is not the Parthenon. But it is not a massive scar on the landscape, either.
That is not an accident.
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Welcome back to another week here on the Backroads. I have decided this week it's time once again to break up the Scavenger Hunt blogs and present you with another amazing Roadworthy Resource. I find that now when I go to bookstores I run straight to the travel section looking for anything that is not a Fodors, hoping to see something that I have not noticed. I also realize I am very new fan of a very old medium. I find that books I am discovering are new and improved 3ed editions of books that have been around for at least a decade. This weeks Roadworthy Resource is one such book.
This weeks resource (if you didn't notice in the title) is Road Trip USA Cross Country Adventures on America's Two Lane Highways by Jamie Jensen. This book is just a heck of thing even sitting on the bookshelf. Its a 900 page color coded monster with cover art that painfully similar to the mock ups of the soon to be revealed Bruce on the Backroads logo. The art (as you can see) is reminiscent of the old postcards from all over the county that would say things like “Welcome to (insert your place here)” and although it has nothing to do with the book at all, it really made me want to like it.
Public Radio station WNYC in New York recently ran this piece about the economic spinoff yet to come to the neighborhood surrounding the new Yankee Stadium. When the Yankees and the City of New York proposed the new stadium, they argued in favor of more than $350 million in subsidies and tax breaks reasoning that the business from the fans would more than make up for the outlay. Trouble is, the new sports arenas function much like many of the new casinos we see sprouting up all over the country: Each one is designed to keep customers and their money within the building.
Now, it's no secret that I'm a Yankees hater, but I oppose spending any public money on professional sports facilities. These are private, profit-making enterprises and should be financed with private investment. Study after study show that public financing of stadiums show no positive financial return for the governments that pay for them.
As this article shows, the problem gets worse because the surrounding businesses not only do not see any additional business, the City's ill-considered actions have the opposite effect.
NEW YORK, NY — The first World Series in the new Yankee Stadium begins today. In the third part of our Main Street series, WNYC returns to the shopkeepers on 161st in the Bronx.
They’ve seen their businesses suffer in the shadow of the new stadium, and the playoffs didn’t improve matters much. Many of these shops expected to do better with the new stadium. But WNYC’s Ailsa Chang takes a look at how the new Yankee Stadium is getting Yankee fans to spend more money inside rather than outside the ballpark.
REPORTER: Eddie Morrison has been coming to Yankee Stadium for 30 years, but right now, he’s chomping on the fanciest nachos he’s ever bought at a game. He’s sitting next to Gate 6, in the brand new Hard Rock Café.
MORRISON: It should say THE BRONX Hard Rock Café, not just the Hard Rock Café. Because this is the Boogie Down Bronx, so you gotta show respect.
REPORTER: It may be the Bronx, but those nachos just set him back 13 dollars.
MORRISON: That’s just a part of the tradition. You have to uphold the tradition of buying very expensive food at the ballpark.
REPORTER: And there are more than a hundred separate spots in this stadium where you can spend lots of money to uphold that tradition. They’re mostly big chains – like Nathan’s hotdogs, Johnny Rockets and Carvel Ice Cream. Yankee fan George Figueroa says he forgets he’s at a ballpark.
FIGUEROA: You walk around and it’s like you not even in a game. You walk around and it’s like you in a mall. You have whole bunch of stuff you could do. You can buy food, you can buy merchandise – whatever. It, like, takes you away from reality. That’s a good thing. I mean, we don’t have that in the Bronx. We don’t have a big mall to walk around, so this is our mall right now.
REPORTER: But that’s the problem. Businesses just a couple blocks down 161st street didn’t think they’d be competing against a new mega-mall. Abdul Traore is managing a near-empty store called Jeans Plus. It sells Yankee souvenirs – many of them identical to the ones sold at the stadium, but about 30 percent cheaper. Traore’s been sitting on a stool by the door during the playoffs, as if waiting for customers to come in.
TRAORE: This playoff is different. Totally different. Like Saturday, I stay here until two o’clock in the morning – from the time the game start until two o’clock in the morning. I don’t even make thousand dollars.
North Hollywood, California — Casey Hallenbeck almost learned the hard way the challenges of moving a muli-ton antique.
Hallenbeck owns Phil's Diner, which he's kept in storage for better than a decade now. Closed up in the late 1990s during the construction of the new subway line that coursed through the neighborhood, Hallenbeck has hand plans to move the diner to a new development on the drawing board for several years since. Now that it looks like those plans will come to fruition, he started a blog to chronicle his progress.
Last week, however, Hallenbeck reported on his blog that the riggers hired to move the diner to its new location almost dropped it. Using two cranes to lift the 1920s vintage structure, something caused the diner to slip off of the steel beams supporting it.
The posted photos don't show too much detail, but had Hallenbeck consulted with someone who actually had some experience moving these things, he could have saved himself a lot of money and grief.
First of all, cranes are rarely needed to move such small diners — never mind two of them. When using cranes, the rigger must place the beams in the right place beneath the undercarriage to properly distribute the stresses from lifting. Put in the wrong place, and the diner collapses. Indeed, the photos indicate that this almost happened with Phil's. One photo clearly shows the diner buckling while lifted from its cribbing.
Fortunately, the diner sustained minimal damage during the move according to the blog. Hallenbeck still plans on an April, 2010 opening.
When I was a teenager, after a particularly vivid ecology class, I came home and shouted at my parents, “Thanks a lot for leaving the world a mess for my generation! Thanks a freaking lot!” then stomped out, slamming the door behind me. Now I’m the parent of teens, and I get to hear pretty much the same thing—sometimes my kids are mad, sometimes baffled, sometimes scared, sometimes daunted. I can’t argue, and it seems the world has indeed gotten worse since I was their age (global warming and general environmental degradation, dehumanizing sprawl, Darfur, grinding poverty, AIDS, etc. etc. etc.), and yet somehow the damaged, trashed world muddles onward.
North Hollywood, California — Casey Hallenbeck almost learned the hard way the challenges of moving a muli-ton antique.
First of all, cranes are rarely needed to move such small diners — never mind two of them. When using cranes, the rigger must place the beams in the right place beneath the undercarriage to properly distribute the stresses from lifting. Put in the wrong place, and the diner collapses. Indeed, the photos indicate that this almost happened with Phil's. One photo clearly shows the diner buckling while lifted from its cribbing.
