Reverie on a Sunday afternoon walk. (for my friend, J.B.)

It’s not just about walking.  It’s about exploring, about getting to someplace you didn’t know you wanted to go.

Take the secret steps or that tiny, brick alley tucked between the buildings and say to yourself, “I wonder what’s down there,” — because maybe you can find something that nobody else knows but you, that won’t be there the next time you pass.

Nothing is supposed to last forever and that’s why it’s all so beautiful.  Don’t worry so much about being safe.  What you are really looking for is romance & passion (which is more than soulmates and sex) & being too emotional & caring too much & looking dumb & being scared & making mistakes & all the stuff that makes you cry – because home is an ideal, not a real place.

For a long time I lived my life following somebody else’s map.

1.  I graduated from high school.
2.  I went to college.
3.  I got married & bought a house & had kids & went to work everyday & made a lot of  money.  

I was so dead I didn’t even know it.

   

Let your life fall apart.  Get a little lost.  Stop being perfect.

If you are doing it right nobody will understand your choices – much less approve. Because you are the only you, your own super-hero waiting for permission to be who you’ve always known you are.

But first you’ll have to learn to not be busy.  That’s the hard part.  If you can do it, I suspect you’ll find your faith in that thing, whatever it is, that is bigger than yourself and connect with everything that lies beyond our own little pleasures and our own little needs.   Which is when life starts to feel important.

Go on now.  Get on a bus just to see where it goes.  Watch clouds.  Sit on a park bench by yourself at dawn and I bet after a while you’ll feel like whistling.  

 

Why is the Banks Boring?

There was lots of chatter on my Facebook newsfeed the morning after Bowdeya Tweh’s Enquirer story on the disappointing architecture at the Banks, Is the Banks Too Boring?.  Words like “underwhelming” “generic,” “Cincinnati safe,” and “bland” dominated the conversation.

If you want to understand why recent designs don’t take many risks, you don’t have to look far for an explanation. Just pop on over to Tom Demeropolis’ cover story in the July 25th edition of the Cincinnati Business Courier, Why national money loves our real estate.

Most commercial buyers now are from outside the local market.

Hines, with its U.S. headquarters in Houston, controls assets around the globe valued at more than $28 billion.  They just paid more than 150 million for the Duke Realty portfolio and are looking to buy more. Affiliates of American Realty Capital, the largest U.S. owner of single-tenant properties, snatched up the Streets of West Chester and Gateway Center in Covington this year. Chicago-based Inland Real Estate Corp., which owns 15 million square feet of real estate, partnered on its joint venture with Dutch pension fund adviser PGGM to buy Newport Pavilion this summer. 

These days commercial buildings are primarily designed for their balance sheets, more consideration given to financing structures and hand-outs from City Hall than the beauty and richness we crave in our 9-5 lives. But after years of down-sizing, globalization, and out-sourcing – can we really be surprised GE doesn’t want to put the time into a design that says anything particular about who they are and what they will do inside their space on the Banks?   Industries change so fast, they don’t even want to commit to ownership.

Lately I find myself drawn into the cathedrals of Europe more and more frequently, the sweet, simple ones in small towns as well as the more famous monuments with lines of tourists.  I have to go in and sit awhile.  Which surprises my husband.   “You aren’t even Catholic,” he always says and tries to be patient.  But they amaze me, how many of them there are, the resources it took a society to build them, decade after decade after decade, how much human energy and talent was devoted to the creation of these architectural masterpieces at a time when daily life was so difficult for the vast majority of human beings. I used to tell myself that it was all about the church squeezing every dime they could get out of the peasantry to reinforce their power in a symbol of stone. But sitting on one of the hard wooden pews and looking high up into the dome, like a tiny, little ant at the bottom of those soaring arches, I can’t help but imagine every square inch of the surface covered in the bright colored stories of miracles, angels wings carved into stone. Five or six hundred years later, the strength of their belief in something bigger than themselves still permeates the space in a way that is sacred but has nothing to do with religion.

Great buildings that stand the test of time are always about something bigger than money.  And we have them in America.  We even have them in Cincinnati.   But these days, it’s not usually our big corporations responsible for commissioning their design.  

Once an Historian, Always an Historian

With a college degree in history, I tend to walk through life collecting data without even realizing it.  For me, our built environment – the offices and churches and courthouses, our stores, our homes – all of them together are perhaps the most obvious and important record of the way that we have come, what we value as a society and how that changes over time.

One of my earliest childhood memories is going downtown with my grandmother in the early sixties, a time when ladies still got dressed-up to go to town, little girls wore white gloves and everybody took the bus. Grandma had an appointment with Miss Toomy, her regular saleslady at Gidding-Jenny’s Department Store on Fourth St. and afterwards she took me to lunch on Pogue’s Ice Cream Bridge where she let me order a Coke with my grilled cheese.

How much has changed in the course of one short life.  My grandmother died in the late Eighties, soon to be followed by Gidding’s, Pogue’s, and many of the ideas about how and where we buy what we need.  The Miss Toomys of the world no longer exist.  Going shopping downtown was permanently and forever disrupted by the development of the highway system, our shift to the suburbs and multiple cars in the driveway of every American dream.

Nothing lasts forever – and so the pendulum swings back, slowly at first and then faster as it gathers momentum.  Gas prices increased and the internet happened – that information super-highway that has already in its first decade permanently and forever changed everything in its wake, like the bomb in Hiroshima. Cities are popular again with young professionals and as every generation has to find something to rebel against, they have rejected their parent’s automobile-based lifestyles in favor of walking, biking and public transportation again.

How do you plan a city when they never stand still?  Where does a community invest its hard-earned resources so that we will continue to generate positives returns – not just economic returns –  but the kinds of returns that really enrich lives and make more people want to live here –  decisions that should outlast not just one generation (I’m writing this from Italy, the window over my desk looking out at a fifteenth century church) – but many, many generations to come.

What concerns me when I think about urban development these days is that the vast majority of our new buildings seem to be constructed for planned obsolescence, you know – unimaginative, utilitarian structures that go up on-time and under-budget, very efficient kind of stuff designed to pass quickly through the committee approval process.  “Mixed-use,” “pedestrian promenades,” “street level retail space,” and a lot of emphasis on the number of parking spaces in the publicly subsidized garages, those seem to be some of the significant catch phrases of late.  But does anybody really want to spend time in those spaces unless they have to? Are these just features the architect tacks onto an office tower to hit the hot spots in the most recent city plan?

Maybe the scariest thing about changes in development is where the incentives lie for the developers.  When John Emory built the Carew Tower in 1930, he did so planning to own it for the rest of his life, so he built it with a pride that is reflected in the materials, the details, the art.

Emery had approached the bank to underwrite financing, but the bank did not share his vision and declined the loan. In spite of the advice of his financial consultants, Emery sold all of his stocks and securities just before the Crash. Had he left his money tied up in the  market, he would have lost everything. But instead, the project continued as planned and became one of the city’s largest employers.

On the other hand when Eagle Realty, a subsidiary of Western & Southern, built the 41 story Queen City Square (now called Great American Tower) – they never owned the building, not for one second.  They purchased the bonds issued by the Port Authority to finance the building as an investment for their insurance company, made their big money on the development fees and and have the master lease on the property (management fees).  The public owns the 1,000,000 sf Class A office structure and we’re the ones who have to figure out what to do with it if big corporations cease to dominate the economic landscape after the master lease to W&S expires. But why worry?  Less than two years after completion, Western & Southern has already listed part of the property on the market hoping to attract some big institutional investor to our mid-tiered market.  Besides, the building will be fully paid-off from the 30-year property-tax abatement (Yes! 30 YEARS!) that pays down the bonds even if we do get stuck with a white elephant.

Nothing lasts forever and nobody ever guesses right about the future a hundred percent of the time.  But before we invest any more time, money and energy in private-profit real estate developments, maybe we should sit down together as a community and have a long, thoughtful discussion about what we want our future to look like.  After all, we’re the ones who are paying for it.