More Thoughts on Civic Branding on Urbanophile: Don't Brand Your City

Another post about urban branding, seems like it's in the air.

Don't Brand Your City

Nakama Becomes First Major Tenant of the North Side's Garden Theater Block

Jean, was excited that the popular South Side, Japanese restaurant, Nakama would be opening up on the North Side. I was somewhat less, impressed since I assumed they would be locating in the semi dead zone around the stadiums that has hosted a revolving door of sports bars.

Wrong! Nakama, instead will be locating in a gorgeous historic building at the edge of the Mexican War Streets.

From The Tribune Review

"Nakama, the popular Japanese steakhouse and sushi bar on the South Side, will take 5,000 square feet in the Masonic Temple building at North and Reddour Street, said co-developer Craig Totino.

"They are viewed as an anchor for the Federal/North project," said Totino, co-owner of Collaborative Ventures in Mt. Lebanon. The firm and Zukin Development in Philadelphia formed Allegheny City Development Group, the joint venture that's developing the block."

"Our goal is to start construction this summer and take about nine to 12 months," Totino said. "So Nakama should occupy in summer 2013 -- possibly earlier, in the spring."

A delusional, Yinzer myth seems to be that the whole North Side was dragged down by the former porno theater next door.

More about the building.

"Built in 1895 in Romanesque Revival style, the Masonic Hall was originally used as a fraternal meeting house with four separate ground floor storefronts: three along West North Avenue and one along Reddour Street."

Fine--If the government wants to claim credit for the revival of the block, ignoring decades of efforts (see the post about Randyland) by local residents, perhaps they can take some responsibility for the highways and misguided projects like Allegheny Center which did so much harm to The North Side.

Can Cheerleading Go Too Far? Debate On Rust Wire

Seems a bunch of Cleveland area bloggers got together to talk about the pros and cons of civic boosterism. Things got heated and from what I can tell, a bit ugly.

From Rust Wire:

It's always a question, how much one should focus on the positive and ignore the often obvious problems out there?

A long quote from Cleveland blogger, Bridget Callahan:

"On one hand, the Boosters have understood this better than the rest of us. In their social media based world, it is important to stay on message, that’s how all good and effective propaganda works. You pick the message, in this case how awesome Cleveland is, and you pound it into people’s brains ad nauseum until it becomes unacceptable to believe anything else. The Boosters, by and large, are marketing people. They have a product, and they are pushing it. It’s not frank intellectual discussion, it’s not nuanced civic strategy. It is just straight up emotional reaction, and they want you to have it. The world has over and over again proved the effectiveness of propaganda. Most recently, let’s all think back to a certain recent Presidential election that had those Hope posters plastered on every rusty bridge and alley from coast to coast. Hope is not the way you run a government, but it is a way to get people emotionally involved. It breeds a feeling of us versus them, of camaraderie. It is true that lots of Clevelanders feel stupid telling people out of town where they are from. It can’t hurt to seed some civic pride. We’re a fucked up city, but lots of cities are, and the Boosters’ main mission is to convince other young people with expendable income to either move here or stay here because really it isn’t so bad. And for that particular population, it really isn’t so bad. Speaking from that class level, it’s pretty okay here.

( However, when you decide to bully people on their own blogs about their suspected lack of devotion to your message because they point out other people live here too, or when you yell at someone to leave town? That’s trolling. )"

My big problem with many boosters is what they are selling.

The real problem with professional boosters is that they are often promoting the wrong stuff. What their bosses say is good, whatever the latest new fad or project, the foundation and government crowd is chasing. Often, this turns out to be bad stuff. A good example is press stories about a corp or agency "investing" so many million dollars. In the short run, that's certainly great if you are a contractor working on the project (or a politician cutting a ribbon.) Rarely do stories look under the hood at what the long term positives or negatives are.

Cleveland needs boosters as long as they have their eyes open.

Back In Youngstown For The Holidays? Tour The Thriving Tech Incubators!

The holidays can be a strange bittersweet time in cities in which so many have left.In both Cleveland and Pittsburgh,the diaspora swells The Warhol,Carnegie and Cleveland Museum after Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Recently, cities like Cleveland and Youngstown have made efforts to reach out, make connections and counter some of the negative opinions many who left may have had. Not an easy task, in a few short free days, most people are spending with their family.

Youngstown is providing tours of it's hot and rapidly growing, downtown technology incubators.

From I Will Shout Youngstown

Thursday, Dec 22
Tours from 9am to 5pm leave at the top of the hour, led by YBI Chief Evangelist Jim Cossler. RSVP needed.

Friday, Dec 23

Tours from 7am to 10am leave at the top of the hour, led by YBI Chief Evangelist Jim Cossler. RSVP needed.

Monday, Dec 26

Two tours at 11am and 1pm leave at the top of the hour, led by YBI staff.
Meet Dean Abraham of YSU's STEM College!
Check out the new OH WOW! Technology Museum!
Discounts for downtown eateries!

call 330-599-4583 to reserve a spot

Organizations Plan to Give Cleveland Area Homes To Immigrants

I gotta admit to not knowing many details about this but I have a few thoughts, both positive and negative.

The solution is The Discovering Home Program, which is a joint effort by the Cuyahoga Land Bank and the International Services Center.

Together, they want to turn neighborhoods around by offering struggling immigrants housing. The refugees will have to agree to fix them up. The hope is that families will take great pride in their homes and help stabilize neighborhoods. Many believe it is a win-win situation

.

Right off the bat, I'm impressed by any efforts in the Cleveland area to not just obsess over everyone leaving, but attract new residents. Any thinking in that direction is a big plus.

I also, see that ownership is to be gained by fixing up the homes. Here, I have some pretty strong doubts. If no cash investment of any kind is made, one is likely to repeat the same kind of easy come-easy go buyers with no equity that helped create the housing mess. Remember that in many cases, you will be asking people to move into shaky and damaged communities in a region with abundant low cost housing.

I have doubts that incentives like this will draw people who find the homes and neighborhoods of real value since price alone is the main draw.

Contrast that, for example with efforts to attract artists who see the benefits of living in a place with lots of other creatives.

That being said, many larger immigrant families would fit well with single family housing stock.

Michigan Focuses Economic Policy Around "Placemaking"

Rust Wire writes about the new broad consensus, developing in Michigan towards what urban planners now call, placemaking.

After reading a number of stories and blog posts about this, it's still not exactly certain what the term means-beyond respect for place and quality of life. Looking at Michigan's previous policies makes the change clear.

The earlier attitude, could be summed up as, anything for jobs. In 1981, The city of Detroit, evicted thousands of residents, destroyed the bulk of a neighborhood and handed the land over to GM for construction of a new car plant.

"At first glance the project seemed brilliant. In 1979, the old Dodge Main plant in Hamtramck had closed and that city lost $1.7 million in tax revenue. Hamtramck was happy to join in the deal. But there were obstacles in Detroit -- 1,300 homes, 140 businesses, six churches and one hospital lay in the path of the proposed plant.

The neighborhood adjacent to Hamtramck's southern border was, like Hamtramck, home to Poles as well as Albanians, Yugoslavs, Blacks, Yemenis and Filipinos. But some families had been there for generations, since the influx of Polish workers to the auto plants in the 1920s and '30s, and even before. Some of the first Polish settlements in the city in the 1870s had been in this area. It was the home of the original St. Mary's College and Polish Seminary at the corner of St. Aubin and Forest. It was the original location for the International Institute. St John the Evangelist Catholic Parish had been founded there in the 1890s, Immaculate Conception Parish in 1918."

The same attitude went for highway construction, where few power players cried when eggs needed to be cracked in the name of progress. People moving and endless new construction always was sold as growth, even though the state's population was in a long steady decline. The people who found where they lived, unpleasant would stay cause they had jobs-and the fancy pants, over educated, complainers could just leave.

The huge car companies these policies were built around proved less stable than expected and the new dynamic firms needed the over educated, creative types who found Michigan so gross. A depleted tax base, also meant that growth at any cost was no longer a financial option.

From Model D

The state of Michigan, for example, is focusing on placemaking initiatives as part of its economic development strategy. "Economic development and community development are two sides of the same coin," said Gov. Rick Snyder in a special message to the Michigan Legislature last winter. "A community without place amenities will have a difficult time attracting and retaining talented workers and entrepreneurs, or being attractive to business."

Kent’s son, PPS Vice President Ethan Kent, said placemaking is striking a chord in the current economy because it’s resourceful and builds on a city’s existing assets. And the placemaking philosophy requires extensive public buy-in upfront, so officials can stand on safer ground politically. "Building convention centers and using tax incentives to attract big corporations or new business isn’t working," Ethan said.

Instead, placemaking emphasizes smaller, inexpensive improvements: Adirondack chairs to watch the sunset on the Buffalo waterfront, or temporary incubator retailers with lower overhead costs. At Gabriel’s Wharf in London, for example, a set design company created colorful facades on concrete garages, and then worked with artists to convert them into studios where they could sell their work. The fast-working set designers finished the job in three months. Rather than developers spending money on a costly master design, the tenants themselves provided the vibrancy to make the area compelling for visitors. The scheme was designed to pay for itself in four years.

Strangely, the new embrace of the small, incremental improvements and livable, walkable neighborhoods has attracted strong support from across the political spectrum, columnists, The Department of Transportation, Michigan State University and Michigan's Governor.

This widespread attitude is new, and pretty rare across the country. It will be interesting to see if it lasts and how things start to play out.

Article on The Project For Public Spaces Website

The Geography Of Stuck in The Atlantic: The Rust Belt's Unrecocognized Weakness Is Mobility

I've mostly given up on trying to counter all the myths that pass for truth in these parts-many of which have to do with losing people, brain drain etc...

Richard Florida has a good post and map at The Atlantic showing the percent of people living in the state they were born in. Surprise, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia and several other "rust belt" states lead the nation.

Is that a good thing? 70% or more of the people in these states were born in state, yet this is mostly a list of the nation's economic laggards. What should be pretty obvious, is that fairly high numbers of people moving both in and out, correlates pretty strongly with economic growth, with most of the states with healthy economies falling closer to the middle in this category.

Florida guesses that the recent dramatic declines in mobility, don't bode well for the economy. What's so disturbing is that in 80% of the region this isn't even widely recognised as a problem.

Several good reads on this subject.

The Geography of Stuck

America The Stuck

Burgh Diaspora is a blog that mostly focuses on the general subject.

Open House, New York this Weekend. Why Don't We Do This?

Ever walk through a city and think, wow, I wish I could see that building from the inside?

Seems like a pretty obvious idea-pick a few days, and open up all kinds of unique buildings and interesting or historic places up for tours. New York, was actually a late adaptor of this concept, now done in over a hundred cities around the world.

"Renee Schacht, Executive Director of OHNY said in 2010: “We will be touring places and opening doors to sites that span the history of New York – from Staten Island’s Conference House, the only pre-Revolution manor house still standing to contemporary public and private spaces including The Centurion, a midtown Manhattan residential building designed by Pei Partnership Architects with I.M. Pei.”

More than 185,000 people participate in the event that includes over 300 sites, programs, events and tours, which in past years has drawn audiences from beyond the five boroughs to encompass all 50 states and many nations around the world."

In many cases, the event has grown beyond building tours to encompass all sorts of walking, bike and boat tours and more extreme forms of urban exploration. Take a hard hat tour of a building under construction or being rehabbed or perhaps an abandoned tunnel or bridge one can't normally go to. The value of this kind of thing sometimes leads to new thinking--remember that the High Line in NY was once an obscure abandoned space.

A few highlights I came up with.

Check out the 6000 sqare foot roof garden in Greenpoint Brooklyn.

Explore the historic Eldridge Street Synagogue on The Lower East Side.

Tour NY's oldest operating Whiskey Distillery in Bushwick

Learn about the design and engineering behind supertall skyscrapers.

Take a walk with a photographer down Industrial, Newtown Creek in Queens

See the Plans For The New Moynihan Station In The Old 34th Street Main post Office building

Take a canoe tour of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal

Tour the amazing Lobby of The Chrysler Building.

See historic and long abnadoned PS 90 in Central Harlem which is now being restored.

Tour a working Art Glass Studio in a Civil War Era warehouse in Redhook

Tour Brooklyn's historic Greenwood Cemetery by trolley.

I'll stop there. Doesn't Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Youngstown, Johnstown or other great places in our region have great historic buildings and places that would be great to link together in an event like this?

Art Fag City Looks @ Michigan's ArtPrize

Art Fag City is pretty great, but very NYC oriented art blog. It's main writer, Paddy Johnson took a road trip to experience ArtPrize.

"Frankly, I’ve never seen anything like it. People who normally would never have any interest in art are now flocking to buildings to catch a glimpse of the work. Almost all of it is for sale, though nothing can be bought until after the competition closes (ArtPrize takes ownership the winning work). It’s exactly what I have always wanted for art, but of course, for one thing: People have bad taste. Of the ten finalists I will see today, I expect to like only one or two pieces. Amidst this year’s top crop, are the father-son living sculpture, a sci-fi eco-system sculpture, and a chainsawed log into a grizzly bear. Also, a giant preying mantis with a butterfly and a metal dog."

Interesting on a whole bunch of levels. First, off it's used mostly unknown artists to create an event with a huge financial and tourist impact in a severely depressed state. For the same reason, it's now heavily supported by a local business community and other non traditional arts funders.

The downside, as Paddy says, is realising just how bad, your neighbors taste is. But as she also points out, this may change as a wider public becomes more exposed and interested in art.

Michigan's ArtPrize Competition Continues To Grow and Evolve

ArtPrize 2011: September 21 - October 9
Grand Rapids, Michigan

I've posted a few times in the past when ArtPrize first started-in perhaps what was percieved as the least likely place-Michigan.

It's continued success comes as no surprise to me--raising the very real question--why is this type of open ended invitation for creative interaction between communities and the wider world still so rare?

A good recent article from The Washington Post--which is covering some of the D.C. area artists participating.

Started in 2009 by Rick DeVos, with funding from his family foundation, the showcase now attracts 1, 582 artists from 36 countries and 42 states. The competition is spread over 164 venues around Grand Rapids, an approach which won an “Our Town” grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in July. “We want to reboot the conversation with the public around the arts,” said Catherine Creamer, the executive director of ArtPrize.

The unusual exhibition style is combined with a departure from the expert juried panels. From the opening on September 21 until September 28 the public votes on all the art. Then the Top 10 works are announced on September 29 and the public can cast one vote for its favorite until October 5. The festival closes October 9.

In spite of lots of buzz, I can't help feeling the "professional, institutional arts infrastructure is just trying to ignore all the implied potential here. Thankfully, many artist's are not.

"ArtPrize appealed to her because “it’s a very different concept. The public is voting, and you are getting unbelievable exposure,” Hester said .

In Grand Rapids the work is displayed for 19 days. The venues range from a coffee shop to a mechanics workshop to a theater. “We wanted to bring artists together and let the public curate,” said Creamer, the program’s executive director. The boundary of the displays are 3 -square miles from downtown Grand Rapids."

Anyone from the wider, Western Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Ohio Region participating or attending? What are your thoughts?

My Cleveburgh Mental Map Part 1

I never learned any even simple graphics programs, but I thought it might be good to put up a mental map of the region to more clearly define my primary area of interest.

Greater Cleveburgh

Northwest Corner --- Lorain, Ohio (or actually the middle of Lake Erie north of there-if your trying to keep things lined up)

Southwest Corner ---- Athens, Ohio (Home of Ohio University)

Southeast Corner -----Just southeast of Cumberland, Maryland

Northeast Corner -----Around Olean, New York

Why not it stretch a bit east and include Columbus or take it up to include Buffalo or Southeast to Baltimore and DC? Mostly, because one has to stop somewhere and this seems like a very logical place to start.

Why isn't State College included? A better question might be, why is Penn State really in the middle of nowhere at all and what effect does that have on it's value?
Is it really that crude and cras to talk about our return on investments this huge?

By the way, the People who built the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad seemed to have been thinking along these lines. Notice also the dense network of roads and cities in the center of this map--Warren, Youngstown, Akron that were built on a very clear logistical logic. Westinghouse, Cranberry, right near the middle of the map.

Youngstown Ad Hypes "The Cleveland, Youngstown, Pittsburgh Tech Belt

According to I Will Shout Youngstown, this ad ran in Today's Wall Street Journal.

Amazingly enough, economic development ads rarely hype anything outside their own state-- aside from the usual "within 500 miles of 70% of the US Population", claim made by a lot of Rust Belt cities. Selling as a package like this makes sense. Even if you suck, you might be not that far from someone who doesn't. More likely you have some ingredient of value that needs the right synergies to shine. Also, to be honest, a lot of people are just not great at judging distances and travel times. Maps and the Web lie like crazy.

A big step from the obnoxious Cleveland + and Team NEO concepts which exclude huge assets like Westinghouse across the state line.

Naming Rights

The ideas presented here are loosely organized, to say the least. Consider them reference points to ideas about place names and their connection to history, regional trauma, and Pittsburgh's public identity.



UPMC became the largest employer in the greater Pittsburgh region. With such a large economic footprint comes the right to buy naming rights, and UPMC went for the tower that historically represents economic power in Pittsburgh: the former US Steel Building.

Steel's symbology, steel's branding of the region. So common & familiar, we tune them out, these symbols, place-names, and people connected to a lost industry. I wonder, are they just names to the college kids streaming to CMU and Pitt from out of state this fall?

The Carnegie Library system. Fricke Park. Place-names resonant with the past direct traffic all over the city. The Hot Metal Bridge was once part of the steelmaking process itself.

Do I really need to reiterate this obviousness?

Those familiar place names may be integrated into our inner maps of Pittsburgh, but there is a necessary silence between past and present.

There's long slow loss of the steel industry, there's the population's attrition. The silence a friend of mine refers to as 'the puffy silence', the holding patterns she sees amongst men and women in their 40's and older on the bus, at her job.

The community-endured pain of family after family split by economic opportunity elsewhere, of grandparents stuck in devalued houses while the grandkids grow up in Oregon or Chicago.

Under those place names I see the long slow bruising that the region walked through during the ongoing 'layoff & rehire' patterns engaged in by US Steel and other companies. Millworkers waiting for rehire phone calls that never came.

Men and women in their fifties and sixties have whispered to me what they think needs to be said: the details of exactly how the steel industry beat the shit out of this town as it left. They say, "Nobody will come out and say it."

This industry so totally cleaved to in public symbols, in cult of personality, in cult of masculinity. It was an industry built on the bodies of the workers -- and now, UPMC makes its money "caring for" those bodies, the eldest of that generation of workers in this, one of the oldest communities in America.

People think that hospitals are a place to go to get well. They forget that it is also the place to go when one is preparing for death. Why do you think UPMC is so successful? We are an old, old county. And the eldest among us, many of them worked for US Steel. Now they go to the hospital for the last leg of their journey, and say goodbye to their (visiting) families from UPMC hospital beds.

Their bodies built the old industry, the one we lost. Their bodies build the new industry. It is oddly appropriate, isn't it, that we have the UPMC Tower.

Disconnect. Reconnect. What else won't be talked about?

Score One for Richard Florida

One of the things that supports Pittsburgh reputation as a provincial backwater is it's tendency to ignore and ostracize people with new ideas. Richard Florida was a long time CMU professor with a way of looking at things that cut straight against the way things are done here. His Breakthrough book openly used Pittsburgh as an example of how not to do economic development.

His theory was that we were in a new age in which employers and capital chased skilled, creative people and placed issues of culture, openness, diversity and quality of life at the forefront of economic development discussion rather than government subsidies, backroom deals and sports stadiums.

One of his concepts is that regions are increasingly looked at by people as job and talent pools. Growing a new drug company would be easiest in an area with a large base of qualified researchers, investors and managers knowledgeable about the field etc.. Well anyway, here is another real life example of why he might be right.