Miracles and Cities and Highways

Morning Miracle by Dave Kindred

 

This book knocked me sideways in a fashion I didn't even realize I was desperately in need of. Here's what to first disabuse yourself regarding when you approach this book: though the book's subtitle is Inside the Washington Post: A Great Newspaper Fights for Its Life, please don't imagine this'll be a bland or airless walk-through of a death rattle of the Post. Certainly the life and vitality of the Post is one of the things that's under examination here, but far more thrilling is what the book really is: it's Dave Kindred being a thrilled, devoted, rhapsodic newspaper lover, page after page.

Admission: my favorite Smithsonian museum is the Postal museum, which is so compelling and great I'll spend whole blocks of DC time therein whenever I'm at the capital for the rest of my life. Mail is fiercely great to me, and why? Because it's the root of democracy—cheap and easy spread of info and ideas, a system which allows citizens to make stitches of contact across the national fabric. I get fully of silly gusto just thinking about it. Kindred, I'd guess, probably likes the postal museum as much as I do: his love for the Post isn't simply that it's a legendarily great paper (though it is—Bradlee, Graham, Woodward/Bernstein, etc.), but that big, powerful newspapers are totems of the best ideals of democracy. Sound dorky? Maybe it is. This book is, for this newspaper lover (and lord, if you think you don't care about newspapers, move to a part of the country where you can't have a newspaper delivered and then note whether you miss the artifiact), is a muscled, powerful valentine to one of the best inventions in history. Are times bleak for newspapering? Oh lord yes. But you'd be a fool not to read Kindred and fully understand the whole game.

 

Makeshift Metropolis by Witold Rybczynski

 

I happen to be real interested in cities, which interest has been massively furthered by the fact that I am in love with a city planner (which I heartily recommend, if anyone's interested: falling in love with someone whose interests [professional or personal] you find enticing's a sure way to keep lotsa fires burning), all of which is simply to say that Rybczynski's Makeshift Metropolis was both a fantastic book to get in the mail and, weirdly, also sort of a let down.

Let me first clear up why it may remotely be a let-down: if you think lots about cities; if you and your beloved sit and talk at length about how a city's health has much to do with density; if you understand that transportation is the single biggest shaper of how cities have been made in the last century and also how, as fossil fuels increase in price, cheap transportation will make sprawling exurban areas untenable; if you know who Jane Jacobs is (to say nothing of Moses)—if you know all of these details, this book will likely be interesting read, but not necessarily illuminating reading. This is, in the best ways, a sort of entry into contemporary thinking regarding city planning and designing by one of the best thinkers we've got.

However, if all of the above does not apply to you, get this book. If you're lucky enough to have the spare time and mental energy to wonder why cities are as they are, this book should absolutely be something you have on your nightstand, the sooner the better. Lest, of course, this sound like as nerdy a topic as my professed love for postal stuff, let me be real clear: everything in your life is influenced by notions of how cities are built—what kind of transportation you procure for yourself, what sort of cultural opportunities you have and are willing to put money into, the food you eat, everything. Start thinking about cities now; buy this book to kickstart the noodling.

 

Interstate 69 by Matt Dellinger

 

Speaking of cities: here's a good counterpart to Rybczynski's latest. Take a second and just think how cities come to be: New York's there because of shipping, ditto LA and San Francisco and Seattle. On the interior, cities have been best founded on rivers—shipping again—and then, once railroads grew shoulders, some cities got established because of those routes. And then, of course, after boats and railroads came cars, and so now there are cities based on, sure, highways. Easy proof: think of the 'best' suburb in whatever big city you're most familiar with—is it proximate to the city based on highway travel time? Likely. I grew up in Saint Paul, and home prices diminished by suburb as each moved a ring further from the city (the etymology for the word idiot, by the by, is someone who lives beyond city walls: density and proximity to the city has been significant since the start).

Anyway: Interstate 69 is real, and would cut through southern Indiana—would, in fact, be an international highway, running from Mexico up through Texas, north through Indiana and up into Michigan. What good would a highway like this do? Well, think of the two big things it could provide: quick and easy shipping between Mexico and Canada (hence its nickname the NAFTA highway), and it could also pump a bit of blood and life into otherwise pretty wiped-out towns along its route. Of course, these two needs and benefits could be viewed as in opposition—it's an easy claim that small towns have had hatchets taken to them precisely because of NAFTA (plus it gets deeper: making the highway provides employment to US workers…even though what they're building will, in all likelihood, further undercut what manufacturing jobs remain in the country). There is, of course, no answer.

There is also, presently, no completed I-69: it exists in parts and fragments, unconnected and made whole. Dellinger's book is fantastic reading regarding the pros and cons of such an undertaking and, though it's a fairly common publisher's cliche, the story of I-69 is a pretty tricky mirror and one can't help, on reading Dellinger's great book, but find oneself reflected back, good and bad sides all. Read the book.