Arguing the sand from under their homes

The strongest criticism to American University’s East Campus project has come from some neighbors in the adjacent Westover Place private community. Their case against the plan, however, is eroded by a development fight thirty-six years ago, where their own homes were the development threatening to spoil Northwest’s character.

Just as some residents are fighting the potential of AU’s campus expansion, so too did an earlier generation fight the development of the parcels that abut the five-acre parking lot that AU wants to turn into a leafy complex of low-rise residential buildings.

A substantial amount of opposition has arisen in Westover Place, a gated complex of rowhouses between Massachusetts Avenue and Foxhall Road. They have been the most vocal and ANC 3D meetings, insisted that AU build its buildings next to other people’s homes, and it was the meeting point of this summer’s traffic protest.

But in 1977, it was the threat of Westover Place that was vexing locals. According to a September 25th, 1977 Washington Post article: “And to the north of this, adjacent to the 5-acre university parking lot, Kettler Brothers Inc., the giant development company that built Montgomery Village, has already cleared more than eight acres where 149 town houses will be constructed. Houses in this development, Westover Place, will sell from about $135,000.”

In the article, entitled “Bulldozers at the Estates,” Phil McCombs reports on arguments and characters not unlike the current fights over American University’s expansion and other developments in the area. Just as before, opponents are appealing to a right of first arrival, but the article lays bare the hypocrisy in living in a development while fighting a development because it will have the same effects your house did. The rowhouses of Westover Place and similar developments paved over Northwest’s last open spaces that seemed so essential to the “rural” character of piedmont Washington.

Similarly to the opposition to the 1960 Tenley Library and the 1941 Sears Roebuck, an enormous to-do was made over the development and yet both became established elements of the community. At that time, however, the changes seemed signified the end of something unique. McCombs quotes the ANC3 Commissioner Polly Shackelton bemoaning the change:

“Here you have these fine established residential neighborhoods, which will be impacted with increased density and traffic and all kinds of things that really could be very damaging,” she said. “I think in a way it’s too bad we don’t have a comprehensive plan.”

She said that development of the Rockefeller estate, for example, “will be devastating because Foxhall Road is already crowded. With 100 new houses there, I don’t know how we’ll deal with it.”

The problematic idea here is “establishment:” that because a neighborhood has reached any level of development, it should be maintained as it is. Are the current residents who now enjoy this property more justified than their neighbors who lived there in 1977, or estate owners who lived there in 1917?

“Stop AU” Protest Tomorrow, Parking Provided

Westover Place residents will be protesting the presence of pedestrians at Ward circle Thursday morning during rush hour. But I don’t want to speak for them. Here’s the call to arms they left on the AU Park Listserv:

TRAFFIC IMPACT DEMONSTRATION

A coalition of neighbors surrounding American University will be gathering
together this Thursday morning, May 26th from 8:30 am to 9:00 am to walk around
Ward Circle, crossing Massachusetts and Nebraska Avenues several times to
physically demonstrate the impact 600 or 700 students will have on traffic, if
AU puts the number of beds it wants on the Nebraska Avenue parking lot.

Almost 21,000 vehicles use Mass. Ave. daily and about 24,500 use Nebraska. And
yet, AU’s flawed traffic study, which they are presenting to the Zoning Office
to get approval for their beds, claims that adding to the pedestrian traffic
load will have no impact on traffic at the circle.

Help us show the city AU is wrong.

If we can get a large number of residents to walk around the circle several
times, wearing buttons that say “Stop the AU Campus Plan” and have a couple
more stationed on the sidewalk with signs that say “AU Plan Causes Gridlock”
“Honk if You Hate Gridlock” and put large “Stop the AU Campus Plan” in the
center of the Circle, our case will be self evident. Everyone will see
firsthand the traffic gridlock and noise pollution that will result if AU gets
its way.

We need your commitment now. Join with your friends and neighbors to really do
something to get our plight noticed and have a little fun. We’re not just paying
lawyers to make studied arguments. We’re standing up for ourselves and using
our feet to fight for our neighborhoods!

We’re meeting just inside the gate of Westover Place, in the front courtyard of
4300 Massachusetts Ave, behind the guardhouse at 8:30 Pick up your buttons and
those of you who want signs can get them. Then we’ll go up to the Circle and
cross the street.

The guard at the gate will be alerted. Secret Code is “Stop AU”. There are
several guest parking spaces behind the Mass. Ave. wall which will work if we
all carpool.

Yep, the issues here do seem pretty self evident. So, if you’re in the area, think about talking to the poor folks. But just do mind to not inconvenience drivers. It’s their street.

Russia Today covers women like it covers politics

Robert Bridge, courtesy RT

Sloppily. And with lots of zhlobstvo. Actually, Russia Today’s “Russian Women Guide” much less autocratically slanted than the usual RT fare. It’s just sexist. It fetishizes sexist behavior, like it’s meta-ogling the article itself – which uses, as a lens, pricy mail-order date with a woman named “Natasha.” At the end, a genuine, authentic Russian woman is allowed to meekly respond. Were it not so inane, it would probably be a featured text in a class called “GEND V3302 Ridgidity Tourism: Sexism and Orientalism in Expatriate Communities.”

Ah, but the deepest irony is that the guy who wrote it, Robert Bridge is an American expat who has totally adopted the look of a stereotypical Russian bureaucrat, yellow shirt, dead eyes, and all. But the best joke is a ridiculous statement delivered eagerly, let’s let some choice cuts of of Mr. Bridge’s dainty prose stand and fall without intertitles and see if it lightens your morning:

Welcome, cowboy, to the Motherland, the legendary land of milk and honey. So what should a wide-eyed westerner expect from a Russian female? Well, first you must be absolutely willing to leave your big bag of stereotypes at the border. They won’t help you here.

Russian women somehow achieved, without the angst and anger of the western women’s man-eating philosophy, a sense of freedom, independence and, I dare say, happiness that their bra-burning sisters sacrificed a long time ago on the great battlefield of the sexes.

Indeed, the practical value of a Russian woman ranked somewhere between a good tractor and a surplus wheat harvest: extremely useful in the right situations (snowstorm, famine, revolution), but certainly not the most likely candidate to grace the cover of a glossy fashion magazine, for example, or win Playboy playmate of the year.

Thus, painful questions concerning the rightful place of western women in the early industrial system (exposed for its cruelty by progressive writers of the time, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle in 1914) were being debated in the West while, half way around the world, Russian women were peacefully picking raspberries and milking goats in the idyllic countryside.

‘Natasha’ lets you open the door for her; in fact, she coolly expects it, and doesn’t even say ‘Spasibo’ as she sweeps past with a violent toss of her blonde locks.

The svelte Slav at your side expects you to help her with her fur coat, position the chair just right under her awaiting derriere, order the food, and yes, even pay the exorbitant bill without even so much as feigning to open her Gucci pocketbook.

All of the unnecessary guesswork between the males and females has been cleared away, or never existed in the first place. For the most part, everybody understands their role.

As it is, Russian women, who deftly use every inch of their femininity – high heels and mini skirts included – to their general advantage, have no desire to ‘lower themselves’ in an effort to obtain equality with men.

Nevertheless, the system did provide some attractive perks that helped to advance the condition of women without the need for unsightly marches and protests.

They are at the controls of their womanhood and the miniskirt and high heels only adds to the sense of their feminine powers that no man has been able to fully explain. Oppressed? Don’t bet on it.

Are Russian women materialistic? Yes, of course they are. After all, they are women, and I can’t think of a single place in the world where the sight of a mall does not cause heart palpitations in the female species.

The film was called “The Dark Knight.” Since it was a story about the superhero Batman, it was not the intellectual movie of the year.

(For any Russian woman who would like to exact some verbal revenge on Mr. Smirnoff, he is still alive and may be hunted down at www.yakov.com).

———-
Oh, but nothing can wholly bad. The article deserves some credit for including a photo of New Holland Island in the top left corner of the article. Ain’t she a beauty?

Russia still outrageously dangerous

Today, checking up on the general doings of Russia, I came across three interesting articles about very different automobile collisions. Russia, I just learned, is the worst country in terms of per capita automobile fatalities. This situation has some historical roots in Stalinist city planning that called for large highways with few pedestrian crosswalks, but automobile fatalities weren’t really a problem when only 2% of the country could own a car. Now, when there are something like 2.5 million drivers in Moscow (still, only 16% of inhabitants), the roads get clogged, noisy, and deadly. According to the article, there were 236 fatalities per million Russians, nearly twice the United States’ 136 deaths per million. Calculating the death rate based on automobile use, 900 motorists die per year per million automobiles or motorcycles on the road in the Russian Federation. The United States isn’t even close.

The term many people seem to use to describe contemporary Russia is dikaya, meaning “wild,” as in The Wild West. Dikiy kapitalizm, dikie nochi, dikie voditeli. Russian drivers are notoriously bad, impatient, and unprepared. But it’s not just lax licensing and bad drivers, the roads themselves are terrible, most designed for puttery small cars like the Lada and if not, then just poorly maintained. Moreover, the speed limit on all streets within Moscow is 60kph, around 38mph, but in reality, nobody drives the limit. 

The government has enabled the newfound love for motorcars, looking to the Interstate Highway System for inspiration. In Moscow alone, the Federal Government has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to expand the road network, including building a twelve lane freeway on the already massive Leningradsky Prospekt, right up to the center of the city, and putting tunnels under multiple plazas on Tverskaya Street. I lived off Leningradsky Prospekt for a while, near its intersection with the Third Ring road, and crossing either road was a slow and onerous process that sometimes required me to use graffitti-covered and patently unsafe pedestrian overpasses. And incidentally, one part of the Third Ring is a leaky tunnel that causes cars, moving at freeway speeds, to aquaplane in the summer and slide on black ice in the winter, resulting in a spectacularly morbid video and many severe injuries. 

The second article, a real gut punch, is one that has become familiar to pro-pedestrian bloggers. On may 13th, a driver named Roman Zhirov killed a visibly pregnant woman named Yelena Shumm, who was walking in a crosswalk with the right signal. Her death is a tragedy in itself, but not quite the horrible act of malfeasance that it has since become. Soon afterward, the police got the license place of the car and located the owner of the blue Forester seen speeding away from the scene, but have yet to file charges. You see, Mr. Zhirov is a member of the Internal Affairs Division of the police.

The State Prosecutor’s office has apparently begun some investigation into that unit, but so far, nothing. Unsurprisingly, the story has been picked up by the news media in Moscow, thanks in part to the murdered woman’s husband, Alexei, who has started a very depressing livejournal. Take a look at the google translation if you don’t speak Russian. 

I can’t much end on such a miserable note, but I can’t find much related to счастливое водительство that is very happy at all. Still, at least only broken bones resulted from the high profile collision between a jaywalker and a motorcycling rock star that happened two days ago. That’s still not great, but at least the reporters in those blog posts use the active voice to describe the motorists’ actions.

Tenleytown trashing

Anyone go to the UrbanNexus event last night? What the hell was with all the slights against Tenleytown? If you’ve ever been to a PUD hearing, you know that uptown of the Uptown we can hold our own. It’s hard selling urbanism in these parts, and I don’t need none of your highfalutin’ downtown snark getting in the way. We may have lost the punks and some people may have terrible, outdated ideas about what is good for the city, but hell, have you even eaten at 4912?

Formatting problems…

As you can probably tell, something is terribly wrong with this blog. I’m working to fix this, and I changed by theme to see if that was the problem.  I had extensively tweaked my prior theme in spite of my limited experience, so it seemed like a reasonable suspect. Until I get this fixed, you can click through to individual posts, which don’t seem to have nearly the same problem.

I would appreciate it if anyone who knows anything about CSS and PHP could tell me what is up.