Some DC stimulus information
I can’t embed it, but DOT, HUD and USDA have created an excellent map of their grant programs. You can see relative amounts of money spent (“invested,” as they say) in each state, county, and then even down to the project level. 35 DC organizations, including supplemental nutrition programs and shelter and housing nonprofits recieved money from the various formula grant programs. The total allocation is $48.7M, determined by formula.For the cartophobic and verbal learners, a list of all the USDA and HUD programs in DC is available here, beginning toward the end of the page.
USDOT’s map lacks the visual breakdown to individual projects and uses a totally different base map, but it still has projects lists in a pop-up window. DC’s distribution claims to be largely railroad investment, but a quick look reveals that the sum includes the $1B grant given to Amtrak, as though DC is the only beneficiary.
DC’s famous! Whoo!
It’s always good to see DC – not Washington, not The Nation’s Capitol – get come visibility. It’s going to be nice living in a city with some cultural capital again.Veazey Walgreens
Arbitrarily messy and unconsidered.
Seen here is the new Walgreens in Van Ness, at Veazey & Connecticut. A big improvement on the gas station that’s there, and an even bigger improvement over the previous plans. In terms of land use, the site would be better as a multistory building, and not as another chain convenience store, but it’s also limited by zoning.
Plantings and floorplan.
Designed by Rust|Orling, I think the building is a really poor imitation of a mid-mod style, an eyesore in a place where we don’t need any more. R|O are otherwise a good firm with a keen ability to manifest architectural diversity, but it looks like modern architecture is not their strong suite. They’re also restoring the art deco Walgreens in Cleveland Park and are the designers of Potomac Yards.
Construction has not begun, and these are working renderings.
Is America ready for an Urban President?
This weekend, the Obamas went on a personal trip, to New York City, eating at the chic Blue Hill Restaurant before seeing August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, before returning home. Their not-so-little-trip was only one of a handful they have been having, beginning with a trip to the Kennedy Center in February, their night at Citronelle, the pre-inauguration trip to Ben’s Chili Bowl, and Joe and Barry’s Excellent Adventure back earlier this month. There are probably others events I’ve omitted, but add his preference for basketball to the mix, and it’s not quite brush clearing.Their nights out reflect a certain kind of lifestyle, an elite urban one. The ability to ditch the kids for a few hours and get out to a nice restaurant is precisely the sort of habit that is vaunted by pro-urban activists and expected of cities by young people looking forward to the freedom of the city. It’s luxurious, it’s cool, and it’s only possible in a city. Even for denizens of suburbia, a night in town is still obviously possible, but you still have to go into town, even if you start and end elsewhere. As for the elite part, anything any president does will be tinged with a degree of fanciness, for better or worse.
Not unlike Bill Clinton’s much-publicized jogging in the Nineties, I wonder whether Obama’s enjoyment of city life will raise attention – and elevate the place of - something many people are already doing. Americans were already crowding into Broadway shows and going out to dinner, and going into urban centers for dates. There is nothing new here, but the perception has historically been that these activities do not jive with the populist image that comes with the Resolute Desk.
At the same time, the more recent trips outside the White House do not depict the less glamorous benefits of cities. They reinforce the sort of young, fashionable life that has always been associated with date nights; they do not demonstrate that more prosaic aspects of life, especially with children, are still possible. Hot nightlife might be attracting people to the city for a boozy 10-year sojourn, but it doesn’t keep them. Comfortable neighborhoods and convenient shopping do. Perhaps Obama’s recent trip to the Palisades to watch his daughter play soccer is a reasonable balance to the condo-advertisement life that has otherwise made the news.
On the other hand, no Twentieth-Century President has lived a particularly ordinary life, not mowing his grass or running down to CVS to get cough medicine. It might be unreasonable to expect a world leader to move the culture of country by example in those areas. The best citizens can expect, then, is better policy. If he delivers that, a night out doesn’t have to mean anything.
WMATA’s slight apostrophe problem
A sharp-eyed and sometimes lost Briton I know noticed this somewhat amusing error on a map in the Navy Yard Station. It’s a mistake, but it’s pretty bad when a slip-up gets you 4-6 orders of magnitude off. Actually, the official name doesn’t use an apostrophe at all, as it’s a memorial to Vietnam veterans and not so much for them. While they’re changing it, they might want to add the USIP as well. I presume Jim Graham can resolve up some funds.
Photo courtesy Seb Page
Eatable things: Fojol Bros. of Merlindia
At Dupont and New Hampshire Ave.
The Fojol Brothers of Merlindia, a quartet of locally grown twentysomethings with a secret indian chef, are out to revolutionize the street food scene in DC. Along with Ali Baba’s, and the upcoming Sweetflow truck, they’re up against DC’s longstanding tradition of awful, awful street vendors. As one (I think it was Ababa-Du) told me, “All you get in DC is hot dogs and soda … yeah and awful pretzels.” Awful pretzels indeed, and without dijon. Running only on Fridays and Saturdays, all of the members do this in addition to regular jobs and apparently are willing to sacrifice their weekends to bring their traveling culinary carnival to DC.
Their total aesthetic is a retro fusion of Indian with hip green techno, employing fake mustaches and turbans while they cruise around in a 1960s bread truck. Their trays are made out of sugar cane fibers, their sporks from corn resin, and they compost just about everything else. All of this half-ironic campiness and doo-goodery could be a pretty lame excuse for attention, were it not executed with such batty genius – and more importantly, if their food wasn’t so good.
It can’t be stressed enough that the food is delicious, basic Indian food. Fretting about authenticity of cuisine is always a bit misplaced, but with complex food from a made-up place, you should just shut up and eat. I had the chicken masala, a pumpkin side, and some sweet sticks. The chicken was a moderately spicy dish that satisfies like any indian food with sauce, while the pumpkin was soft and delicious, with a heavy dose of cardamom that balanced the sweetness of the fruit itself. The sweet sticks were not so much sweet as they were flavored with cumin and maybe allspice, which made them pretty good for cleaning out the lingering masala spices.
As I sat there eating, I watched the stream of buttoned-down passers-by giving long, curious looks and other people lingering and plenty eating. It’s never going to be like New York, with its hour-long waits at 53rd & 6th chicken and rice, the ultimate drunk food that is Roti Roll, or the Vendy awards, but this little performance-food experiment is definitely a good thing, and hopefully a sign of things to come.
Follow them on twitter and get to eating.
United States Bicycle Route 101
Did you know that the United States has signed bicycle routes? You didn’t? Yeah… don’t feel bad, nobody else seems to know about them, and I only stumbled upon them trying to do this month’s Wikiglean. Obscurity notwithstanding, two bike routes do exist and the legal framework is still around – and right now is just the time to breathe life back into the system and make them serious transit.
Back in the 1970s, after the shock of the Oil Crisis, planners - AASHTO even – had the forward idea of determining and assigning interstate bike routes. Primarily meant for low-traffic roads or dedicated trails, the routes were to connect cities for touring purposes. However, by 1982, only two routes had ever come into being, and so the system went the way of the DMC-12. But conveniently for Washingtonians, the two existing trails currently run through Virginia and one is poised to benefit the Washington Metropolitan area. Read More
Fort Reno project 090424
So I want to study the park with as much detail as possible. I’ve been spending a lot of time there just observing, which is always the cornerstone of good design, but I’ve also been trying to understand the area objectively. Logically, the place to start is with the ground, so here is a topographic map I’ve put together.
Topographic maps represent altitude using lines called contours. The closer contours are to each other, the steeper the slope, the further, the flatter. The contours start here at 62m and end at 130m.
After the fold, there are other, cooler maps that show height using shading. Read More
Height is not an urban strategy
Over the weekend, notable urban-issues political wonk Matt Yglesias wrote a passionate and well-meaning argument for greater density in the DC area that got it completely wrong. Yglesias claims that DC is suffering culturally and economically due to its height limitation, which inhibits the extreme density seen in Chicago or Manhattan. It also results in an uninteresting skyline to boot! Alas, he unconsciously bases his speculation in outdated thinking that assumes that commuter town is the optimal configuration of a city.
Magnacar dependency does not make a better Rosslyn.
Yglesias makes three arguments: taller buildings with will increase tax revenue, improve livability, and reduce what he calls “job-sprawl.” In each case, he is partially correct, but also misses broader issues of urban land use and planning. Primarily, he misunderstands the qualities and causes of density, mistaking the unique and exceptional conditions that created metropolises like New York, Chicago, Tokyo, and Paris for natural growth. Read More