MAY 3, WEDNESDAY

URBAN LIFE (written on the train May 10)

When you travel you are disclocated from your normal conventions and this makes you see the conventional ways you live in in a new way. This happened to me in Varanasi and Haarlem on our trip a month ago and happened to me again in my recent visit to Raleigh and New York City. It lets me compare three urban areas: Asheville, Raleigh and New York City. The first large contrast for me is the difference between Asheville and Raleigh. Granted, I was only in downtown Raleigh for the hour and a half that our train was late. In that time we were looking for a coffee shop but didn‘t find one. It was on a Saturday morning from 9 to 10:30 but there was also almost no one on the streets. This had not been true of the area around North Caroline State University, only ten minutes away by car, where there were large numbers of young people everywhere and all kinds of coffee shops and restaurants. At the same time I knew that in Asheville the streets would be crowded with tourists on a Saturday morning and that sidewalk cafes would be filled and the streets crowded with tourists having a great time.

When we first moved to Asheville in 1965 the downtown was vibrant on a Saturday because all of the large department stores were located downtown as well as the movie theaters and restaurants. Asheville was the central hub of Buncombe County and also welcomed tourists so Saturday morning was alive. But early in the 1970‘s the Asheville Mall opened and the large department stores moved across Beaucatcher Mountain along with most of the other retail shopping. On Saturday mornings the Mall was jammed with people and its expansive parking lots were full. In the next 15 years downtown Asheville became deserted and unsafe with drunks and drug addicts and occasional prostitutes roaming the streets. The city fathers, the mayor and bank presidents and hospital managers even cooked up a plan to save Asheville by condemning the downtown and razing the 19th century two story buildings and turning the downtown into a clean, efficient (sterile), giant mall and there by bringing Asheville back to life. But a bond issue was voted down by the residents of Asheville and the plan failed. And then building by building the downtown became slowly occupied by bookshops and restaurants and art galleries and boutique locally owned stores of every kind. And downtown Asheville came to life again as a tourist city, a place to haves fun and to shop and to eat out and to go to concerts and celebrate. The only big businesses left were the banks. And now even the banks are leaving with the largest one of all, Bank of AMerica building converting to a luxury hotel, a shift from business to pleasure. Hotel after hotel has sprung up, often mixed use with hotel rooms on a number of floors and condominiums on others. And the area around downtown, which had fallen into decay, has gentrified and become beautiful with tasteful small (and quite expensive) housing. Asheville shifted from a place to work to a place to play. Even the industrial part of Asheville along the French Broad River has half converted from factories to the River Arts District of low cost artists studios and restaurants with the area along the French Broad River, formerly polluted by industrial waste, now become a Riverlink Park with walkways and bicycle paths and brewery restauarants. What was a onetime frontier city built around lumber river traffic and then the railroad, which became an industrial town with a strong textile industry has shifted a number times. Thomas Wolfe at first was reviled in Asheville for describing it as a narrow provincial backwater in the 1920‘s until he became famous and became honored with his mother‘s tourist home now a museum. So I have experienced the change in one small urban center which now attracts people to the huge Biltmore House and estate and the coolness of the mountains and the beauty of the Blue Ridge Parkway.

So back to Raleigh and a comparison to Asheville. I am not aquainted with the history of Raleigh, but on the circle that Susie and I made through downtown Raleigh I could see by the emptiness of the streets and the absence of stores or coffee shops of movie theaters that this part of Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina, was all business. There was a huge Wake County Courthouse, bank after bank with their faceless buildings and, I‘m sure, many government offices. It is business and government that drives downtown Raleigh. The large department stores must have moved to a huge mall outside of the city center.

But what will happen to Raleigh if business and government people start to work remotely from home? What will take their place? And what will happen to the Raleigh mall and the big box stores when Amazon and e-commerce takes over. The Asheville Mall, once jammed on a Saturday morning is now almost deserted, with a low occupancy rate and the stores that are there are fringe and unattractive stores.

And this brings me to what I noticed in New York but at first didn‘t understand. I haven‘t been to New York City for twenty years and before that I remember New York as being a smutty, unsafe and unattractive place to visit. It has always had marvelous museums and cultural life. A high point of our trip this time was a several hour visit to the Guggenheim Museum. But beyond the museums and the tourist sites I remember the grunge and the grime and the cheap stores and particularly the sleaziness of Times Square where once my brother and I, in high exceitement as teenagers, watched the ball drop on a frigid New Year‘s Eve. But for years I haven‘t had a desire to visit New York City.

But this time I noticed something different. Maybe it is partly because we were here on cool, sunny May days with the flowers blossoming and new leaves on the trees which line the New York streets. Maybe it was the beautiful parks and the way every vacant space is a flower garden. But most of all it is the vibrancy of the city with the streets full of people from everywhere in the world and even more than that it was the parks. At one point after my dentist‘s visit when I was dead tired we sat at Union Square for two hours. All around the park there were people selling their art or crafts or food. It was as if we were attending a festival. There was a band playing very lively jazz on a street corner and collecting a wealth in tips. But brand new, and not even in Asheville, were colorful folding tables and chairs on the sidewalk and into the bicycle lanes of the street for people to sit at as they ate the food they had bought or to sit at just to listen to the band play or to sit at and talk. We watched people hurrying home from work, or walking their dogs, or families out for a walk on a beautiful evening. And suddenly I realized that this was what I wanted most to do in New York, not to see tourist sites or museums but simply to be among people from all over the world having a good time.

At 6 p.m. a crew began to fold up the empty chairs or tables to store them from the night with the certainty that they would be back in the morning to put them out again. Someone had decided to make New York streets a fun place to be. And then we began to notice a similar thing in other parks, often tables around a booth selling beer and light food. Bryant Park near the Flatiron Building was filled with people having a good time eating, drinking and talking. So was the park near the New York Public Library. There were tables on sidewalks or in covered parking areas in the street in front of restaurants. This might have started when people wanted to be outside during the pandemic to protect themselves. But now it was a way of life. We had seen this in Paris and in Varanasi and in Haarlem. These cities have become places in which to enjoy yourself. In New York people may have moved to the suburb to live, but the downtown area was a place to enjoy yourself with people now moving back to the city if they could afford it.

And then this morning as I read the New York Times on the train on my iPad I read an article that made sense to me of what is going on. It turns out that because of the pandemic and people working at home and wanting to continue working from home through Zoom, twenty percent of the office space in New York is now vacant. The Internet has turned doing business upside down. But oddly, while doing business in New York is down, the streets of New York City are vibrant. And I think the flowering parks and the brightly painted folding chairs inviting people to sit and talk are and example of a change that the city is making. The feeling I had before I started to wonder about any of this is that New York City would a be a marvelous place to spend a month, not for the tourist sites or museums but for the vibrancy of New York City life, for the diversity of people and foods and eccentricities of everyday life. I would like to live in New York City for a month just for the feel of the place.

The whole point of the article was to argue that cities, in order to survive, have to reinvent themselves. They can‘t rely on the taxes paid by the very rich and they have to accommodate everyone who would like to live there through affordable housing and most of all by mixed zoning which would make every part of the city a mixed residential area with schools and grocery stores and cafes and parks. Instead of trying to hold on to business that the Internet is causing to slip away, a way has to be found to replace business with people who will cause the city to thrive. This is something that Asheville has been doing for thirty years yet with the problem of affordable housing on everyone‘s mind but still unsolved. To thrive cities have to make it possible for people to live there and to fill the parks and restaurants and theaters. Homelessness is partly a result of housing being unaffordable. Asheville has a homeless problem. But Asheville also has an affordability problem because low wage servers and health care workers and all kinds of ordinary people can‘t afford to live there. That is New York‘s problem too. How can unused office space be turned into affordable housing? From my limited understanding I feel that it was imagination that got Asheville out of the doldrums and it will have to be imagination and innovation that does the same for New York.