2005-08-16 - 7:06 a.m.
Phil �s building�s condo association owns a bunch of shopping carts for the tenants. Some of these are sitting in the lobby, but I suspect that not just Phil had a cart in his apartment for months. There�s almost always someone taking one in or out.
They�re incredibly useful. N. and I just went grocery shopping (actually the first time I�ve done that in person since becoming disabled; previously, I�d mostly been a Peapod delivery service guy) and used one to bring the things upstairs. Without it, there would have been some complicated ballet of N. pushing me with precariously balanced food in my lap and bags dangling from the back of my chair.
That something so simple and cheap can be such a benefit to people reminded me of my first job with a real estate development company, managing operations for a luxury high-rise apartment complex. The area it was located in (North Point, Cambridge) was kind of a waste land. This is probably unsurprising as, before we built the apartment towers and adjacent office building, it was a garbage dump and a brewery before that.
Oh, it was right on the Charles River and there was a beautiful view of the Boston skyline, assuming your apartment faced that way (the other direction looked over a gravel plant in the middle of a highway interchange and was euphemistically characterized by my leasing agent friend as �a beautiful nightscape�). But there really wasn�t anywhere for resident kids to run around. The street the buildings were on was used as a shortcut by a nearby trucking company. (It was also full of potholes and I had to bribe a municipal worker with a case of beer to fill them in.)
The Metropolitan District Commission (now apparently part of the state Department of Conservation and Recreation) said it was building a huge park across the way. But when I dutifully attended meetings scheduled to inform the public on its progress, there were always elaborate explanations of why nothing had been done so far. A web search suggests that construction has started, but it�s still not done.
Frustrated by this situation, I set about turning the overgrown patch of weeds (Owned by the state? The city? Unclear.) across the street into some sort of recreational area. It was only a half-acre plot, but I figured a little park is better than none. Various people warned me that I probably had to get the state�s go-ahead to use their land and file for assorted permits and licenses.
But the MDC had an office right next door and when I asked, the local workers were glad to let someone improve the land. My thought was that if they didn�t like what was going on, they could just walk down the street and say something. Never underestimate the power of street-level bureaucrats. Policy and pronouncements decreed from on high don�t mean a damn thing until implemented by a guy on the ground.
My boss told me not to spend any money or at least as little money as possible. This necessitated a good deal of finagling for every item we needed. Dirt, for example. It turns out that the term �dirt cheap� is something of a misnomer. Clean soil that wouldn�t be harmful for little kids to dig up and eat (and I did some minor research to determine the site wasn�t a harmful brownfield and hadn�t been used for toxic chemical storage or something in the past) is pretty expensive.
I ended up getting some free �clean� dirt (when I called, the city had unhelpfully offered to provide me with a truckload of �street sweepings�, the crud picked up by those cleaning vehicles) from a company that did trash disposal and also kept a junkyard. I visited their operation and implied that I�d be more likely to give them the contract to haul our trash if only they gave me that soil I saw piled in their yard. They soon dumped several truckloads of free dirt on top of the weeds. Hey, getting free dirt was harder than you�d think.
When the mini-park was finally finished and I saw local nerds playing Frisbee on it for the first time, I don�t think I was ever more proud. It was a grassy patch with woodchips and shrubbery under a large pre-existing tree. There was a post fence to separate off a small paved inlet where a few cars could park. A small victory, but it meant a lot to me and to area residents and workers.
One thing I had purchased, but couldn�t find a place for in the park, was a couple of benches. Wood and metal, like $80 from Home Depot; you know what I mean. I had thought to put them by the fence, but they just didn�t make a good place to sit. Too sunny and too close to the cars at the edge. I had them put in front of the building so people could sit and have a smoke while they waited for their car to come up from the valet garage.
They were tremendously successful. People sat and chilled on them and congregated around them. They made the area in front of the building, previously just a place of transition, an entranceway, into a social space. Not like they caused some life-altering change in tenants, but they were used. Pretty effective for two $80 benches.
Soon after I placed them there, the engineer who had designed the complex came to visit. He saw people sitting out front, an activity that apparently wasn�t in the original program for the building. Tenants even made some comments to each other about the benches because they were something new (and yeah, I guess we had a lot of bored rich folks without much else going on to talk about).
The engineer fumed. What the hell, he said, I build people an $80 million building and they get excited by $80 benches? I apologized profusely and said I�d have them removed, but he just went off in a huff. But I thought about what he�d said. What the hell, indeed. His building had won awards for its construction (something about poured concrete, I think). And yet the cheap-ass benches became a more visible factor in residents� daily lives.
A final and often-overlooked element in creating a place, after it�s been built, after it�s been inhabited for a bit, is determining how the space is actually used by people. Do their activities within it really match up with the program that was decided on way beforehand and without input from end-users (after all, there weren�t any yet)? No expectations of how a space is used will have perfect foresight. Things will almost always need to be retrofit to make the area a better match for its users.
These can often be relatively simple and inexpensive fixes. Do people get impatient waiting for the elevators? Maybe they�d be less so if there was a mirror on the wall they could check themselves out in. Do a building�s workers tend to eat lunch either far away or inside? Maybe some tables in the barren front plaza would let them sit outside with their brown-bags. Is there a big pile of cigarette butts in a certain place? Uhm, why haven�t you put an ashtray there?
This isn�t rocket science, just common sense. As sociologist William Whyte noted of uncomfortable benches that might look great on paper (in his surprisingly simple-yet-revolutionary study of accessory building plazas and other small parks, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces): �People tend to sit where there are places to sit.� But this phase is often just not done. Developers who build a project may just want to move on after its �completion�. Owners of a building may not want to spend even minimal sums on making a place better.
The details are more crucial than you�d ever expect. People won�t notice the expensive building around them (whose construction was surely an uber-masculine feat) as much as the benches out front or the shopping carts in the lobby. Fitting a space out for better use may be just as key as its actual creation. Unfortunately, you can�t get a degree in �making things work better� the way you can in engineering or architecture.
� 2005 Geoff Gladstone
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