(NO) SEATING FOR TICKETED PASSENGERS ONLY

Here are two pictures of a L.I.R.R. platform in Garden City, Long Island. Can you guess what's wrong with these pictures?

The fact that there is not a single seat of any kind in this train station proved even more aggravating because 1) we arrived thirty minutes before my train did, and 2) we had just spent the day talking about how to "build a better burb," as jury members for a competition of the same name. Well here is a good place to start: don't be so afraid of loiterers, homeless people, and other "undesirables" that you are willing to deprive visitors to--and residents of--your preposterously segregated island of a place to sit down and wait for the train.

"NO LOITERING" SIGN

Sometimes when I have to explain what the Arsenal of Exclusion is, I use the example of the "NO LOITERING" SIGN, because it is a clear example of something that restricts access to space, and delegitimates an activity--loitering--that is a perfectly legitimate, and in some cases desirable form of social interaction (if you don't believe me, read William Whyte's City: Rediscovering the Center).

Anyway, a student of mine alerted me to this most interesting "NO LOITERING" SIGN on Baltimore's North Avenue:





At the bottom of this sticker of a door--which has been applied to hide the fact that the rowhouse has been boarded up and lacks an actual door--is a "NO LOITERING" SIGN. That is to say that the archetypal, generic, lowest-common-denominator door--the kind of door that you make when you mass produce anonymous, two-dimensional, one-to-one scale door simulacra--is actually a door with a "NO LOITERING" SIGN affixed to it.

That's amazing!

HOUSING COURT

In an ongoing effort to balance July 5th's post by calling attention to the things that Baltimore is doing (or has done) to make a more open city, I present a link to this amazing 1953 Encyclopedia Britannica film about The Baltimore Plan.

In the four years after 1949's Slum Clearance legislation but before 1953's Urban Renewal legislation, a radical idea was proposed: what if, instead of completely clearing slums and reverting the city to a tabula rasa, we held slumlords to task in the interest of actually maintaining slum buildings? In Baltimore, the tool that was proposed to achieve this was the HOUSING COURT. The Encyclopedia Britannica film is essentially a film about this housing court.

As the movie suggests, Housing Courts were started in the 1950s as dedicated arenas for legal issues of housing, which were often of a scale too small to be effectively heard in the broader jurisdiction of the circuit and the district court. As an organ of the mid-century urban renewal movement, these early courts often focused their attention on deadbeat landlords that were not complying with health and safety codes. Ideally, these courts contain themselves to the nuanced and often mundane issues that erupt between tenants and landlords. Despite its original moral center around tenants' rights, the decisions levied by the court helped pave the way for aggressive modernizations that, at the very least, disturbed old patterns settlement, and at the worst, eliminated opportunities for fair housing in city centers.

The creation of a housing court in 1947 by a crusading judge in Baltimore, Maryland paved the way for the Pilot Program, a large scale urban improvement project in East Baltimore. James Rouse, a groundbreaking real estate developer and civic activist, was the head of the Mayor's Advisory Council on Housing Law Enforcement and an early advocate of slum clearance. These institutions, along with other advocates like Yates Cook of the Housing Bureau, used the authority vested by the Housing Court to identify unhygienic, unsafe, and untenable housing within the Pilot Program's twenty seven blocks. The massive renewal program paved the way for big-time developers like Rouse to build new housing and infrastructure.

Today, most medium to large communities have Housing Courts exclusively to handle the issues that arise between tenants and landlords, and few, if any, operate with the mandate that Rouse gave Baltimore's in the early 50s. Their jurisdiction ranges from questions about zoning changes to nuisance problems that might affect neighbors within a neighborhood. This forum gives tenants without substantial legal or monetary means to fight unfair treatment by housing authorities. For example, New York City's Housing Court, which relies upon 50 full-time judges and 1000s of support staff, hears around 300,000 cases a year.

Housing Court is in the Arsenal of Inclusion because it gives under-served populations access to due jurisprudence. It keeps areas of communities, often characterized by older housing stock and heterogeneous populations, viable places of healthy living. At the same time, any institution that falls victim to labyrinthine bureaucracy or external influence can lose sight of its ultimate mission. As the East Baltimore program demonstrated, the Housing Court's rulings are played out in the city by a long list of actors with many competing motives.

HOUSING MOBILITY

At the risk of sounding like a Baltimore-basher, I thought I should devote a post or two to the things that the city is doing (or has done) to make a more open city. In the previous post, I mentioned that Baltimore was a laboratory for the development of tools of discrimination, but Baltimore has also done a fair amount of experimenting with social policies, institutions, etc. that foster--as opposed to restrict--access to space.

For example, Baltimore has a pretty impressive Housing Mobility program. The product of an ACLU-initiated lawsuit against HUD (Thompson v. HUD) whose court documents could be bound and marketed as an American urban history textbook, the program seeks to combat the concentration of poverty in minority communities by giving public housing families access to private market housing in low poverty and predominantly white neighborhoods (or what the Kirwan Institute calls "zones of opportunity"). A newish report on the program, published by The Poverty and Race Research Action Council and The Baltimore Regional Housing Campaign, notes that since 2002, the program has moved 1,522 families into wealthier, less segregated neighborhoods in Baltimore County (88 percent of families moved from the inner city to suburban counties).

The report paints a rosy picture of the program, and for good reason. According to the report's Executive Summary, a survey of the families revealed that:

-Neighborhoods moved from were 80 percent black and 33 percent poor; those moved to were 21 percent black and 7.5 percent poor.

-Median household income in old neighborhoods was $24,182 and in new was $48,318.

-Eighty-three percent of settled participants (those who have been in their homes for at least 14 months) say their neighborhood is better or much better than their old neighborhood.

-In the new neighborhoods’ elementary schools, 69 and 76 percent of students scored proficient or higher on state math and reading tests, compared with 44 percent and 54 percent in the original city schools.

Those are pretty impressive results indeed. Stay tuned for some more pro Baltimore posts!

Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City

Antero Pietila’s Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City is a great book. It is full of jaw-dropping statistics (i.e. in the 1970s, 83 percent of white growth was in Baltimore County, and 83 percent of black growth was in the city) uncomfortable truths (i.e. the Red Cross, on orders from the Military, turned away black blood donors at an emergency blood drive), seriously shady practices (Baltimore County Executive Dale Anderson ordered real estate agents to report all sales to blacks to police), fascinating profiles (i.e. in 1964, a segregationist paving-contractor named George Mahoney ran for Governor on the Democratic ticket using the motto “Your home is your castle – protect it”), revealing anecdotes (i.e. in the late 1950s, when tens of thousands of single-family homes were being built in Baltimore County, zoning was allegedly done on napkins in the back room of a popular tavern), and just plain things I didn’t know (i.e. in 1944, Robert Moses was hired to do a plan for Baltimore).

It's a really important book that I highly recommend reading, even if you aren't from Baltimore. But the most important thing about it for this blog is the fact that it is full of new entries in the Arsenal of Exclusion. Indeed, Not in My Neighborhood makes a convincing case that Baltimore should be a prominent part of the American urban narrative, less because it was a large, bustling city that produced great culture than because Baltimore was something of a laboratory for the development of tools of discrimination. Indeed many of the weapons in this Arsenal of Exclusion, from BLOCKBUSTING to RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS COVENANTS to RACIAL ZONING were invented, honed, or most successfully deployed there.

Here are a few. Please note that this list is not comprehensive, as it only includes weapons of exclusion that weren’t in the original list of 101, or that were previously unknown to me. The book is full of insights about BLOCKBUSTING, MINIMUM LOT SIZES, RACIAL ZONING, RACIAL STEERING, RESTRICTIVE COVENANTS, SECURITY MAPS, and any number of other weapons that were on the original list of 101.

AIR CONDITIONER: Pietila makes an interesting, Robert Putnam-esque observation about air conditioning: “the arrival of whirring air conditioning units further insulated neighbors. The result was that even on balmy evenings, fewer and fewer people walked around the neighborhood or sat in porches, listening to radio and gossiping, as they had done in the early years.” (Pietila, 162).

ARCHDIOCESE: One of the truly terrible people Pietila writes about is Monsignor Louis Vaeth, from St. Bernadine’s in Edmondson Village. Like many leaders in the Catholic Church, Vaeth used the pulpit to deliver white supremacist sermons, and defend his parish against black infiltration. But Vaeth fell out of favor with the Baltimore archdiocese, who began to oppose racial segregation, and who, under Lawrence J. Shehan, insisted that it was the obligation of every Catholic to work towards racial equality. (ARCHDIOCESE is thus in the Arsenal of Exclusion and the Arsenal of Inclusion.)

CONDEMNATION: According to Pietila, one of the weapons pioneered in Baltimore was COMDEMNATION. In the early 1910s—almost a decade before New York City’s pioneering zoning code and almost 40 years before Urban Renewal—Mayor James H. Preston used condemnation powers to evacuate the entire neighborhood around Baltimore’s courthouse. His incentive? He wanted to prevent poor blacks from encroaching on fashionable, nearby Mt. Vernon. Another thing worth mentioning here is that he justified it with an appeal to public health. Pietila quotes Preston as saying that “The mortality rate among negros for all forms of tuberculosis is 260.4 per cent higher than that of the white race” (Pietila, 52).

DISCONTINUOUS STREET PATTERNS: Pietila doesn’t say too much about this, but does mention a 1970 Hearing of the United States Commission on Civil Rights that argued that African American areas in Baltimore County were “isolated from their surroundings and particularly from adjacent white residential areas by discontinuous street patterns.” Anyone who has ever had to get from east to west Baltimore knows that DISCONTINUOUS STREET PATTERNS are used in the city, too. A case in point is Greenmount Avenue, which divides one of Baltimore’s whitest, wealthiest neighborhoods (Guilford) from a low-income, predominantly African American one. When traveling north on Greenmount, it is impossible to make a left turn into Guilford: Underwood Avenue and Northway are one-way streets leading out of Guilford, and 35th Street is interrupted by a landscaped barrier. One street (39th Street) is a two-way street crossing Greenmount; however, the streets that branch off of 39th Street west of Greenmount lead you either directly back out or take you in a circle pattern around the section. It’s as confusing as it sounds.

EXPULSIVE ZONING: Pietila, after Yale Rabin, describes Baltimore County’s urban renewal efforts as acts of EXPULSIVE ZONING. The weapon is pretty simple: rezone black areas for business, and leave adjacent white areas untouched. Pietila’s example is Turner Station, home to Baltimore County’s largest concentration of African Americans. Pietilia writes that by the 1980s, so much of the neighborhood had been rezoned that the population shrunk to 3,557, down from 9,000 in the 1950s. A related tactic—also practiced by Baltimore County—was to rezone the area around African American areas for low density, thereby preventing neighborhood expansion (Pietila, 232).

(LACK OF) PUBLIC HOUSING: Pietila doesn’t say much about Baltimore’s notoriously segregated public housing program, but he does underline the fact that most suburban municipalities chose not to have a public housing authority. An interesting consequence, at least in Baltimore, was that the county’s needy ended up relying on the city’s overburdened social services. Write Pietila: “Each week, half a dozen county families applied for public housing in the city, which had no residency requirements, because there was no public housing in the county” (Pietila, 233).

LAND INSTALLMENT CONTRACT: As is to be expected of a book about bigotry in Baltimore, Pietila writes a lot about Blockbusting, which is one of those weapons in the arsenal that was really honed to perfection in Baltimore. For most blockbusters, the prevalent sales instrument was something called the LAND INSTALLMENT CONTRACT. A rent-to-buy arrangement, such contracts were, in Pietila’s words, “hocus pocus on pieces of paper.” They were not recorded, no deed changed hands, and there was no settlement. Titles remained in the sellers hands until “the purchaser accrued enough equity, usually 40 percent , to qualify for a mortgage.” The problem of course is that that day often never came. Sellers routinely evicted tenants for missing even one payment or for violating some obscure clause that was buried at the bottom of the contract. Sound familiar? (Indeed, it is impossible to read Not in My Neighborhood without thinking about how little has changed, despite how much progress has been made.)

MONTH-TO-MONTH LEASE: Pietila writes that the most cynical instigators of racial panic were owners of apartment buildings: “whenever a stable neighborhood began to desegregate, they bestowed a kiss of death on integration by simply evicting all white tenants, who were on monthly rents and leases. Landlords then jacked up rents, changed them to weekly payments, advertised their complexes only in the Afro-American, and rented only to blacks” (Pietila, 175). Pietila reveals an astonishing fact: in 1962 not a single multi-racial apartment building existed in Baltimore.

TELEVISION: Pietila makes an interesting, Robert Putnam-esque observation about television: soon after the first television station went on the air in 1947, people began living according to the television schedule. “ Tuesdays were no longer good for bowling or bingo; that night belonged to Milton Berle” (Pietila, 162).

MULTIPLE LISTING SERVICE: Before Zillow and Property Shark, there was the MULTIPLE LISTING SERVICE. Before that, there were CLASSIFIED ADS in the NEWSPAPER. In the latter two cases, separate listings existed for whites, blacks, and Jews.

NEWSPAPER: The Sun was pro segregation. The Afro-American was pro integration. Lots of people read these newspapers. Their reporting, opinions, and editorials were tremendously influential.

QUOTA: Pietila tells an interesting story about The Maylander apartment building, a 507-unit building near Johns Hopkins that was finished in 1951. Three years after the Supreme Court deemed restrictive covenants unenforceable in Shelley v. Kraemer, the management company behind the Marylander instituted a quota for Jews: until the building was 75 percent occupied, no more than 12 percent of tenants could be Jewish.

REAL ESTATE SIGNS: These are in the Arsenal of Exclusion for two reasons: First, Pietila writes about how signs typically announced whether a home was for sale to whites or “coloreds.” Second, the signs were used by blockbusters to spread panic.

TRAILER: Baltimore manufactured a lot of ships, aircrafts, and rockets for World War II. As is true of other manufacturing cities, Baltimore’s population boom in the 1940s has a lot to do with this fact: the factories needed labor, and people—many of them poor blacks from the south—settled in the city to meet with demand. A housing shortage ensued (thanks to RESTRICTIVE COVENANTS and other weapons, areas where blacks could live were severely limited), but instead of building more housing, housing officials recommended providing temporary trailers. Pietila quotes Senator Millard Tydings: “If more negroes are brought here they should be housed in trailers so that they can easily be moved out after the war is over” (Pietila, 80).

DARKNESS

For a class I teach about artists and / in the city, Rachel London did a great project called "Baltimore Sky Space Project." According to the website, Sky Space Project is "a project that aims to alter dark spaces through installations and events around viewing the night’s sky in Baltimore." The premise of the project is smart, simple, and, frankly, touching: Baltimore is a notoriously dark city, with blocks of abandoned rowhouses and relatively few streetlights. As a symbol of neglect, darkness is thus a bad thing (and a dangerous thing), but there is a silver lining. Baltimore's relative darkness means stars are more visible in Baltimore than they are in other cities. Baltimore, it turns out, is a relatively OK place to stargaze.

But, as evidenced by last Friday's inaugural "Night Lights" event--which brought a diverse group of people to an abandoned lot in Baltimore's Greenmount West neighborhood to watch live projection feeds of the night sky, look through telescopes, talk to a guest astronomer, listen to local starry music and drink iced tea--Sky Space Project is not about solitary stargazing. Sky Space Project is about community. As Rachel puts it, Night Lights "takes dark, empty lots and utilizes them to create feelings of safety in the city through a greater neighborhood presence. The events themselves literally use the darkness of the area to inspire patronage there."

The inaugural event was a great one that, incredibly, was broken up by the Baltimore Police. According to one eyewitness, as the event was nearing its end, patrons were told to leave or risk arrest, and were told that they were "a bunch of sardines in a shark tank."

Greenmount West is a dangerous neighborhood. So on the one hand, it's hard to not sympathize with the sentiment the police officers expressed. On the other hand, the police acted inappropriately, especially in light of the fact that no one was doing anything illegal (on the contrary, the event was a healthy, positive expression of community spirit). What's worse, if you take a long view of things, the police are acting as their own worst enemy. When they call the neighborhood a "shark tank" and shoe everyone away, they are in some respects creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. It would be naive to say that public perception and presence makes or breaks a neighborhood, but they can certainly contribute to its safety. Safety, after all, is a two-way street. Police have to do what they can but so do we: occupying a space a la Night Lights is a modest, but ultimately important thing that we can do to make a difference.

BOAT TOUR

Everyone should check out the amazing waterfront planning work Damon Rich is doing in the Newark Planning Department. Go on a boat tour of the Passaic!

FIRE ZONE

What's up with fire zones on Rockaway?

Here is a typical street in the Beach 140s between Beach Boulevard and the actual beach:



Interesting how there are no cars parked on the street. Why are there no cars parked on this street? This might have something to do with it:



A fire zone--or lots of fire zones--lining both sides of the street, prohibits street parking - not just on weekends, or on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 8 and 11, but always.



This is true of every street between Beach Boulevard and the actual beach until you get to this street (Beach 125 Street), where, predictably, the mansions stop:



The situation is also different one block inland:



Here there are cars parked on both sides, but this is only owing to the fact that it is still April:



Why FIRE ZONE (and to a lesser extent, NO PARKING ANYTIME) is in the Arsenal of Exclusion hardly needs to be explained. The wealthy owners of these opulent beach front mini-mansions declared their entire neighborhood a fire zone to keep away the summer riff-raff. FIRE ZONE is thus in the same category of BEACH PERMITS, FIRE HYDRANTS, and those famous low UNDERPASSES that Robert Moses built to ensure that buses couldn't deliver the poor, urban masses to Jones Beach. (For our Arsenal of Exclusion / Inclusion installation in the IABR, William Tenhoor and Meredith Tenhoor wrote about FIRE HYDRANTS in this capacity.) Granted, there must be enormous demand for street parking around these parts, but Rockaway is still part of the city, and shouldn't be closed off in such a manner.

SIDEWALK MANAGEMENT PLAN

A former student of ours posted this ridiculous video on Facebook today. If you don't have time to watch it, it pitches a "sidewalk management plan," which proposes a 6' - 8' "pedestrian use zone" in which pedestrians "must move immediately to accommodate the multiple users of the sidewalk." Importantly, the zone measures out from the property line, ruling out leaning on (or sleeping on) buildings.

As this former student points out, this is a really pathetic, barely disguised attempt to rid Portland of homeless people.

But also: a sidewalk management plan in downtown Portland? Such a plan isn't needed on the sidewalks of midtown Manhattan; what, beyond the "homeless problem," would justify one in relatively serene downtown Portland? According to the resolution the problem is that "people and bicycle racks, signal controller boxes, drinking fountains, fire hydrants, parking meters, transit shelters, light poles, mail boxes, telephones, retail and commercial doorways, garbage cans, newspaper boxes, benches, permitted carts and cafés, “A” board signs and public art among other items must share sidewalks that can range from five to fifteen feet wide."

The problem, that is, is that downtown Portland fulfills the function of a good city street: it is a dense urban space, where lots of different programs are forced to negotiate with each-other. Isn't Portland supposed to be progressive? The great William Whyte is rolling in his grave.

SPILL

On my walk from office to home today, I felt compelled to document what we might call "spill." Different programs obviously differ on the inside, but they also "spill" differently: firehouses, parking garages, supermarkets, restaurants, bars, physic shops, and Italian ice purveyors all create unique social spaces when their private, interior programs spill out and intersect with the public life of the street. Bar spill, for example, usually takes the form of a designated smoking zone, where different people might come together who otherwise might not. Firehouses, as evidenced by the photographs below, create a friendly space of encounter for parents, their curious children, and the firefighters.

For the most part, spill is a good example of how a space can be made without architecture (since the space is really the product of the intersection of two programs). However, architectural accoutrements can sometimes exaggerate this intersection of private and public. As an example, consider the apartment canopy. In Celluloid Skyline, James Sanders analyzes a scene from the film Butterfield 8, in which a woman (Emily Liggett), exits a cab and journeys "from curbstone to doorway." Sanders writes that "this piece of sidewalk is already home. . . For a moment, two paths have crossed at right angles: the stream of public life running the length of the sidewalk and the short domestic path set perpendicular to it, from curbstone to doorway." As Sanders points out, it is the canopy alone that makes this crossing possible, "this place where a single plot of ground has two completely distinct meanings as different as home and city."

Spill is not a tool per se, and thus fits somewhat awkwardly in this lexicon of things that open and close the city. In any case, spill was especially evident today, a sunny Spring day that drew the entire neighborhood outdoors. Here are a few snapshots of the "spill" outside a few businesses I passed by this afternoon on Union Street between 5th and 7th Avenues, and then again on 7th Avenue between Union and Garfield.

PIE

Who doesn't like pie? Like baseball and jury duty, pie is one of those things that has the capacity to assemble people who might not otherwise assemble. Presumably, that is the thinking behind Pielab, a "welcoming community space on Greensboro’s Main Street that provides delicious pie and coffee, as well as retail and hospitality job training for local youth." PieLab also operates as a community design center "focusing on community development projects and small business incubation in Greensboro and the surrounding five counties."

There are of course many ways in which food serves to open the city. For the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, Meridith Tenhoor looked at the "multi-ethnic gastronomic paradise" that can be found in the aging shopping plazas of New Jersey’s secondary suburban commercial corridors, and that serve to open the region. Pielab takes a cue from this phenomenon, but purposely uses the food as bait, producing a quite clever outcome.

For this, "pie" gets a place in our Arsenal of Inclusion.

SCHOOL DISTRICT

How did "School District" escape our original list of 101 things that close the city? Especially here in Park Slope, and extra especially here in the shadow of PS 321, the segregating effect of school districts is something I can witness each and every time I leave my apartment on Seventh Avenue and Carroll Street. Thanks in part to the stellar reputation on PS 321, it seems sometimes that mine is one of the only non-family households in the neighborhood. That vision of baby stroller armageddon that even tourists can conjure by now is by no means inaccurate, but let's remember why the neighborhood is so full of baby strollers (and, by the way teenagers, which were few and far between in Fort Greene, Williamsburg, and any number of other neighborhoods I have spent time in): yes, Prospect Park is nice to play in, and yes, the retail mix is just right for a young family, but it is the school district that is coveted most. As is to be expected, the money mom and dad save not having to send Ella and Emma to private school is tacked on to the cost of housing. The result? Many people who don't have kids might find that it is not worth their while to live there, when they could live outside of the 321 district where their rent would be cheaper, and where they might find better retail amenities (indeed, if I ever go out in Park Slope, it is almost always on the south side, outside the 321 district, where there are better restaurants and where bars actually exist). The result? A certain kind of segregation that separates family households from non-family households. In this way, PS 321 is what Lior Jacob Strahilevitz calls an "Exclusionary Amenity." Like golf courses, churches, prayer speakers, and Shabbat elevators, PS 321 is an amenity that creates a demand that only certain people are willing to pay for.

No wonder Park Slope sometimes feels so much like the suburbs.

JURY DUTY

Roger Cohen has an interesting piece in today's New York Times about what he calls the "Narcissus Society." Community, writes Cohen, has vanished or eroded. Instead we have "frenzied individualism, solipsistic screen-gazing, the disembodied pleasures of social networking and the à-la-carte life as defined by 600 TV channels and a gazillion blogs." It's a perhaps hackneyed sentiment, but what makes the piece interesting is the fact that these feelings were provoked by serving on jury duty. Cohen writes" "Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done."

Sounds like "jury duty" might be a good candidate from the Arsenal of Inclusion. Indeed, "jury duty" is included in Interboro's list of 101 things that open the city. Interboro writes:

Jury Duty is the obligation of a citizen to serve on a jury to jointly render an impartial verdict in a courtroom trial and set a penalty or judgment; it accrues from the constitutional right to be tried by a panel of one's peers. As an instrument of direct government participation, it asks all formally recognized citizens to judge each other based upon a presumption of innocence and the rational weighing of facts. The summons process and the spatial organization of the jury chambers are such that they do not discriminate based on background, wealth, or ethnicity.

Jury Duty is in the Arsenal of Inclusion because it brings together a heterogeneous cross-section of the community to exercise an important civic right and responsibility. The shared tradition, practiced in small-town community courthouses and metropolitan judicial centers across the country, has long been a window onto the diversity of the American populace.

LECTURE

Interboro's friend Adam Kleinman curates an amazing lecture series for the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council called "Access Restricted" Access Restricted is "a free nomadic lecture series that opens rarely visited and often prohibited spaces in Manhattan to the general public." Once inside these unique interiors, Adam writes, "the audience is treated to a site-specific lecture and discussion addressing a range of topics revolving around issues of architectural history and preservation, social justice, and urban development." This year's theme, "Law and Representation," explores current issues in law, while also investigating the law in art, architecture, and the media.

Aside from being a great series, it is a great candidate for our "Arsenal of Inclusion." Adam writes: "Even though Manhattan possesses one of the richest legal infrastructures in the country, the general public hardly ever interacts with these buildings and their use except for a few, very specified situations." Brilliant!

BIKE LANE

Two hipsters painted DIY bike lanes on the Hasidic-controlled stretch of Bedford Avenue between Flushing and Division avenues, where a city-installed bike lane was recently removed. According to posts on Gothamist and The Huffington Post, local Hasids asked the city to remove the bike lanes because they posed a "safety and religious hazard," and the Bloomberg administration, fearing retribution from an important constituency during an election, complied, claiming that the operation was "part of ongoing bike network adjustments in the area."

Communities have protested bike lanes for safety reasons before, but, so far as we know, this is the first instance of a community citing a "religious hazard." The source of this hazard? Hasids have been disturbed by “hotties” who traverse their neighborhood on bikes in “shorts and skirts.” Hotties in shorts and skirts may violate the community's dress code, but in case anyone forgot, in New York City, streets are part of the public realm. Unlike in say, a gated community, streets in the city are the jurisdiction of the city, not the community. By catering to this ridiculous criticism, the city is setting up a frightening precedent indeed.