Creative Class

New York Magazine’s Michael Crowley profiles NYC Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s effort to take back the city’s streets from the automobile (pointer via Brian Knudsen).

[E]ven though the Broadway plan has been pitched as a way to ameliorate traffic, it’s apparent when touring Times Square with Sadik-Khan that the planning problem that most animates her is not car congestion but people congestion. ‘This is a plan to pedestrianize a street, not to mitigate traffic,’ says someone who has discussed it with DOT officials. ‘This was a plan about greening New York, outdoor space, and seating. It was almost a happy accident that they found that traffic could be mitigated.’  In this offhand remark one can see Sadik-Khan’s truly revolutionary vision. She has fashioned herself the city’s streets commissioner, rather than the city’s traffic commissioner, and has not been shy about imposing a vision of the 21st-century street that seizes it back from the automobile. ‘One of the good legacies of Robert Moses is that, because he paved so much, we’re able to reclaim it and reuse it,’ she says. ‘It’s sort of like Jane Jacobs’s revenge on Robert Moses.’”

As Matt Yglesias notes, most Manhattanites don’t depend on, or even own, cars. Still the streets are clogged with them – mostly from commuters or so-called “bridge and tunnels.” Closing off parts of Broadway is terrific. Now it’s time to get some real congestion pricing in place.

Not quite new news, as noted by Fred Wilson, but the Twitter blog has announced that Benchmark Capital and Institutional Venture Partners have invested $35 million in the microblogging service. A Twitter holdout? Two interesting articles, one by David Pogue of the New York Times and the other by Will Leitch in New York Magazine provide some insight into what all the fuss is about. However, skepticism abounds as to how the company is going to turn a 140-character status message into cash.

Our own prodigious updater notwithstanding (aside: when I visit the Martin Prosperity Institute I am going to search for an army of ghost-writing typists in some back room) and the occasional interesting opportunities for micro-reportage, what’s next?

Thoughts?

Readers of the blog know I’m a huge Buffalo fan. Visiting the city on “homecoming” weekend, New York Magazine’s Adam Sternbergh tells us why that city and others like it – and no, not his adopted home of NYC – is the new frontier.

New York will always offer you the singular opportunity of testing yourself against the best, of sharpening yourself against the city’s fabled grindstone. Hopeful people will always scrape together their savings to come here, to split a one-bedroom apartment with five other people, whether that’s in Greenwich Village (then) or Bushwick (now). But New York, for all its mythology, is no longer a frontier. Buffalo is a frontier. And when you think of the actual frontier, you’ll recall that no one ever packed up and moved West to a gold-rush town because they heard it had really good local theater. They moved looking for opportunities. They moved for the chance to build a new life for themselves.

This, ironically, has always been the siren song of New York City: the chance to turn yourself into someone new, to live the life you’ve always imagined. But what a city like Buffalo offers is a very different promise of what could be. It offers the chance to live on the cheap and start a nonprofit organization, or rent an abandoned church for $1,000 a month, or finish your album without having to hold down two temp jobs at the same time, or simply have more space and a better view and enough money left over each month to buy yourself a painting once in awhile. A city like Buffalo reminds you that, beyond New York, there are still frontiers.

And Adam, if you’re out there reading: your piece is the No. 3 story on the Buffalo morning TV news (yes, they rank them everyday). Buffalo is our other, local TV market here in Toronto.

Over at Burghdiaspora, Jim Russell uses the very same story to take me to task:

Somehow the urban frontier effect has eluded Richard Florida. He’s busy chasing yesterday’s city stars. The rise of places such as Austin also had a lot to do with providing a frontier experience. In the Sun Belt, blank slate geographies abounded (see Houston for the best example of a frontier political geography). And then the scene of opportunity shifts as the hipster cities mature (i.e. get more expensive). This is the fickle fortune of geographic mobility.

Huh? The Rustbelt elude moi? I am a big believer in observed locational preferences: let’s look at mine. Save for three years in Washington, D.C. and a sabbatical at Harvard in the mid-1990s, I’ve lived since the early 1980s in: Buffalo, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and now Toronto (and yes, it qualifies too). I met my wife in Detroit. Rustbelt cities are fantastic places – filled with history, authenticity, real messy urbanism, abundant garage spaces, spectacular interplay between the built and natural environments and great universities. What has kept them down – caused their own sons and daughters to move out and kept talent away? Simple. In addition to economic trauma, it is a long legacy of close-minded and intolerant leadership – squelchers. I’ve seen it firsthand in so many of these places. That’s now starting to turn around in Buffalo, as Sternbergh’s story shows, and in Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Go Tor-Buff Bills!