Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

The treachery of tethers…

Ceci n’est pas un vacance – that could be my personal variant on Magritte’s This is not a pipe.

I’m in Vancouver, and it’s supposed to be a break from my island exile, but digital tethers ensure that I’m plugged into all the usual concerns.

Earlier today I wrote a blog post for Johnson Street Bridge dot ORG, called Heritage value, once more. It’s about how the City of Victoria is ignoring an important heritage assessment, which states that the bridge has “significant heritage value.”

And as usual, there are plenty of other digital tethers to ensure the hiatus isn’t a complete break. But it’s still fun.

Vancouver is a riot, and I do love it. But it’s a funny town – it talks a big green game, for example. And a lot of it is green – but holy cow, is the oh-not-so-green car culture ever alive and well here. I mean in particular a car culture driven (sorry, bad pun) by young men (very young men), who – through lucky breaks (ahem) or inheritance – possess cars that are worth a small fortune (say, $80,000), and who enjoy nothing more than to parade their vehicles through downtown, parking them in front of brightly-lit shops so that those of us out for an evening stroll can admire the buff metal and languid embodiment of all that privilege.

There’s also an unbridled aggression (again, mostly coming from younger male drivers, especially if they’re driving costly cars) against the tightness of the core city: its density and its traffic congestion. Lots of aggressive driving, which is pretty comical to watch, especially if you’re familiar with driving mores in truly densely populated areas. Naturally, the young men are frustrated at every pinch point (i.e. corner, traffic light, pedestrian crossing – you name it).

Car culture in Vancouver shows how much the city is still inbetween – but what a glorious inbetween it is. It’s beautiful, fresh, energetic.

Tonight, I ambled through Holt Renfrew (we don’t have a Holt Renfrew in Victoria, sadly). The Vancouver store is quite beautiful – sort of like an Apple store for clothes: white on white decor, with jewel-colored objects of desire in stark but seductive contrast. Very tasty.

I found myself drawn to one mannequin, dressed all in Fendi. I admired the tattered scarf tied around its neck, but did a double-take when I saw the price tag for the shabby-chic piece of cloth (nearly $300). The mannequin wore a woven jacket that I thought looked really sharp; I walked to the rack where 2 or 3 of the same jacket hung. The price? $3,550.

I considered licking the jacket’s lapel or sleeve, because an object basically so utilitarian (and a not especially couture one, to boot), yet so expensive, struck me as some kind of fetish. I thought, I bet there’s some kind of primitive impulse that would justify ingesting or incorporating this absurdly magical object that’s capable of commanding such a high price …but then my reason got the better of me, and I held my tongue. Literally.

But it made me wonder whether I should get out my sewing machine and run something up. Three thousand five hundred and fifty dollars is an awful lot of money for a simple little …coat.

But so is $80,000 for a car that merely travels on the same roads as everyone else.

Victoria City Council passes bylaw to borrow $63million

It took them less than 5 minutes to pass 3 “readings” of a bylaw to borrow $63million – and this was done at nearly 1 a.m., with no press, no media in Council Chambers at the time. The only people there was a little band of die-hard policy watchers (including me).

I shot a video with my pocket camera. The visual quality is quite poor, but the audio is good. The dissenting/ questioning councilor is Geoffrey Young. Dean Fortin is in the mayor’s chair.

The video is available for viewing on Picasa here.

It’s about 14 1/2 minutes long, which makes it too long for Youtube right now. Will figure out how to get it on YT later.

JohnsonStreetBridge.ORG update

We’ve been busy with our Johnson Street Bridge group. Tonight, we hosted a meeting (at Victoria’s Central Library) at which nearly 50 people showed up. That’s not bad at all, given the fairly short notice and relatively low-key advance publicity.

My daughter live-blogged the event (using CoverItLive), and you can see the results if you click through on our blog here. Scroll down a bit on this page and you’ll see the CoverItLive widget embedded (the software works like a charm, by the way. What a great service!)

So, just click “replay” and off you go. There’s some good stuff there, and we had lots of interesting questions from the audience.

Again, click here and read about what happened at tonight’s meeting.

Busy blogging elsewhere (mostly about the Johnson Street Bridge)

Sorry about the lacunae here, but I’ve been busy blogging on our site, Johnson Street Bridge, where I posted Lovin’ the interwebs: corrections on comparisons tonight; earlier today, I wrote  Johnson Street Bridge news continued… (a ‘curation‘) for MetroCascade; and right after that, a related entry on MetroCascade’s blog, New curations interface thingy on MetroCascade homepage.

Local Johnson Street Bridge discussion heats up

I’ve been busy over at JohnsonStreetBridge DOT org, the website created by Mat Wright, Ross Crockford, and me. My contributions have run mainly to writing some blog posts and brainstorming with Mat and Ross. The latter produced a brilliant letter, delivered to Mayor and Council on Tuesday. It’s four pages long and asks all the right questions – I encourage interested Victoria-area stakeholders to read it (available as PDF, too).

Mat is brilliantly pulling everything together in his role as webmaster and social media engineer. As a result, the site is looking pretty damn good, if I say so myself. We have links to the blog, to a poll, to subscription to a newsletter, to a photo page, to a culture page, to a history page, a video page, and tons of external links to help people get informed.

There’s now also a link to download PDFs of a beautiful color poster (or, alternately, the same poster in greyscale). The photo is by the talented Benjamin Maddison of Victoria Daily Photo. Thanks, Benjamin!

Bridging obsessions

Given my recent obsession with a local bridge – Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge, a bascule bridge designed by Joseph Strauss (see my article, Blue Bridge blues) – it makes sense that I’d be enthralled by manager magazin.de’s article on Hamburg’s storied bridges.

Granted, Victoria has nothing on Hamburg in the bridge department: the latter is, as the magazine puts it, Europe’s most “bridge-rich” city, boasting a total of 2500 bridges. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century alone, 1000 new bridges got built (and presumably nearly as many destroyed by 1945, which is conflated to “mid-20th century” by the magazine article…)

One might also add that, given Victoria’s relative bridge-paucity as compared to a city like Hamburg’s bridge-richness, it seems all the more relevant to preserve the storied bridge we have, right? Our civic leaders, however, apparently don’t feel that way and say, “bombs away!” and “buh-bye Blue Bridge.”

Anyway, the magazine article provides illustrations from an exhibition now on view in Hamburg at the Museum der Arbeit, Hamburg und seine Bruecken – Baukunst, Technik, Geschichte bis 1945. The exhibition documents some amazing bridges. Here are a couple of them:

This amazing structure (from 1872) combines rail and automotive transport. According to manager magazin.de, the photo was taken in 1950, but I’m not clear if the bridge still exists.

Here’s another one:

This photo is from 1915 and it looks as though this bridge is having some work done to it. Again, no idea if it’s still extant.

Finally, this one:

It shows a Portal (1884-87) to what looks like the same bridge we see in the previous photo, except that the portal is a delirious Victorian-Gothic work of imperialist architecture, behind which a sort of Rapunzel-like stream of riveted steel flows abundantly …and meets another foreboding portal on the other side.

It makes Post-modernism look like a walk in the park – and us moderns like unimaginative Dilberts.

New site: Johnson Street Bridge DOT org

I’m involved with Mat Wright and Ross Crockford in a new website, Johnson Street Bridge. Please check it out.

And please take a look at my first blog post there, Bad Reason, 1, subtitled “Bad reasons to spend money on JSB replacement.” I worked up some steam about what I consider bad civic leadership around here, too.

Bottom line regarding my argument in Bad Reason, 1: Whether ugly (”a brute”) or beautiful, the Johnson Street Bridge is interesting – and that’s the most important thing for a creative, urban economy. Just take a look at the amazing photos on Flickr, tagged with johnsonstreetbridge, for an inkling of the bridge’s ability to offer up interestingness.

Nothing is worse than boring – that’s what the suburbs are for. Whatever will replace the Johnson Street Bridge will be massively and blightingly boring, and therefore an affront to Victoria’s urban character.

One wonders why our civic leaders are so intent on suburbanizing this city.

Below, a photo by Victoria flickreena ngawangchodron (hope she doesn’t mind being referenced by me like this, but it’s such an evocative shot):

Reblogging Johnson St. Bridge conversation

The conversation on Vibrant Victoria’s forum about the Johnson Street Bridge continues, brilliantly. See pages 22 and 23.

This morning, forumer DesignStyles wrote the following:

After reading the outrageous comments on here, I thought I would put my two cents in. I really don’t understand why some of you latch on to saving this beast.

It’s ugly. So what it’s designed by the same guy who designed the Golden Gate. Not all designers do their best 100% of the time. Many residents of Victoria think it’s garbage. Sure, it looks great in those night photos but anything looks good in low light.

It’s unsafe going through that stupid chicane on the West side, and it’s terribly unsafe to ride the bridge on your bicycle. I’m looking forward to a new bridge that is safe to cross and feel like I’m not taking my life in my own hands every day.

It’s not a landmark, you’re trying to make it one. I do not recall anyone, anytime saying the blue bridge is an attraction before this whole controversy started. Sorry, you can’t just create it now. People come to Victoria for oh 1000 reasons other than the blue bridge.

If heritage people had their way, we’d still be living in caves. Lighten up, it’s not some controversy over partisan politics, or some other self-serving thing. I’ll take the new bridge and Millions of dollars saved from a retrofit so that money can go into social programs and the like. People won’t come for the blue bridge if they have to wade through all the homeless that sit around it.

Ok, that last comment is a bit of a stretch but I think you get my drift.

It’s a passage that aastra refuted within the span of hours:

The weakest point in this whole debate is the one that goes “you weren’t defending it before it was threatened, so therefore it must not be valuable”. It’s an incredibly bogus argument because:

1) people take things for granted, like the famous bridge that (in the city’s words) would “always be there”, or historic buildings at the Jubilee Hospital, or the Coho, or fine old trees in the park right in your own neighbourhood (or the Campbell Building, or the Permanent Loan Building, etc. etc. etc.)

2) nobody was going on about how the bridge was a notorious wreck and an esthetic eyesore that should be dismantled immediately EITHER. I can show you countless pictures of the bridge taken by residents and tourists, I can show you products named after it, I can show you blurbs in tourism guides and books. So how come a sudden decision to trash something is perfectly valid and requires no context whatsoever whereas there’s this impossible burden of proof put upon the folks who want to protect it?

Quote:

I do not recall anyone, anytime saying the blue bridge is an attraction before this whole controversy started.

This is incorrect and has been demonstrated as such many times on this very thread. Just because you don’t recall it doesn’t mean it never happened.

Some people seem to want to reduce this issue to liking/disliking the bridge. Folks, history (the non-Wikipedia variety) doesn’t come down to a popular vote. The bridge is what it is. The equivalent bridge is a prized piece of history in San Francisco, Toronto, Ohio, Tennessee, Connecticut, etc. Nobody has yet offered any explanation as to why it’s not a prized piece of history in Victoria. Are we suggesting that we know more than those saps in those other places? Or are we merely ignorant and unwilling to admit it?

Heritage preservation in Victoria has been politically compromised beyond all recognition. Most of us were well aware of that fact many years before this bridge issue came up. The bridge issue is just the most extreme example that we’ve encountered so far.

People who are rooting for replacing the bridge because they think it serves as some sort of challenge to the stuck-in-the-mud crowd should make note of the fact that the stuck-in-the-mud crowd is BEHIND this. It’s their project. The folks who oppose everything and who made everything so darned difficult during the little 21st-century building boom that we’ve just enjoyed are the very same folks who want to ditch the bridge.

So you aren’t challenging them by rooting for the bridge’s demise. You’re arm in arm with them. Will you be arm in arm with them when they scream about a midrise condo proposal on a parking lot? Or when they flip about modifications to the interior of the Rogers’ Chocolates store? Or when they oppose a downtown art gallery or performing arts centre?

Also, the turn on the Vic West side is a lazy turn by any standard. Can we please drop that lemon? Crikey, on the one hand we’re claiming we’re progressive hipsters boldly rolling forward over our collective past, and on the other hand we’re fretting because our unsteady hands can’t negotiate any road that isn’t absolutely straight?

That just about sums it up, it seems to me.

There’s another interesting aspect here, too, which relates to “the silence of the heritage lambs” on the matter of the bridge.  As forumer jklymak pointed out, we’re proceeding on potentially skewed assumptions – skewed by a professional group bent on replacement:

^ Of course Victoria will build down. Aside from red herrings like the turn at the bottom of the hill (which has nothing to do with the bridge) the cost comparison made by tear-down proponents is between restoration of a beautiful bridge and building a new generic bridge. Lets see an actual quote on refurbishing the bridge, rather than a back-of-the-envelope estimate, and lets see the design and a real quote for the new bridge. Until then, we are just trusting the word of a single engineering study, which Ms B. has pointed out was undertaken by a company likely to bid on building a new bridge.

So why don’t we hear the heritage lambs on this one? My theory is that the bridge question is utterly beyond their scope. All they’ve ever saved to date were houses and relatively small buildings – and it’s on record that they’ve lost large buildings like the Permanent Loan and the Campbell Buildings, both on Douglas Street, and the market buildings/ old firehall (now Centennial Square). Admittedly, these structures were lost before heritage advocates were sufficiently organized here, but I can’t help wondering why it is that the only objects they’ve concentrated on have been relatively small buildings. (There are some exceptions that prove the rule, notably St. Ann’s Academy, but overall their focus has been mostly on single-family homes or relatively small buildings.)

Maybe it’s because it’s easy enough to do – Martha Stewart can show you how. And it’s easy enough to understand, too – because we all live in buildings or houses, so we have a sense of what’s entailed.

But a bridge! And an old one with old technology! This isn’t cottage-style anymore…

So what has the city done? They’ve solicited expert advice, in the first instance their own engineering department. The department doesn’t come across as a hotbed of innovation, though. It doesn’t seem like a department that’s interested in new approaches …or in saving things. It seems to like building new stuff, and that’s naturally how they’re going to slant the advice they give city council. Furthermore, the department has compounded the bias against restoration by hiring a consultancy (Delcan) that’s in the business of building only new bridges, not fixing old ones.

So, big d’uh that their advice is “the sky is falling, we must replace the bridge now.” The problem is that as far as anyone knows, that’s the only advice the city has actually solicited.

The city can’t get advice from the self-identified heritage advocates because something like the Johnson Street Bridge is totally and utterly beyond their ken.

Heck, the thing scares me to death, and I’m in favor of keeping it. The thought of actually tackling a restoration is scary. Yet of course it can be done.

So imagine if the city got one or two of the right people – engineers with the right background and experience – on the job to consult and advise and help? The conversation might be entirely different.

Blue Bridge blues

An interrupted week was interrupted even more when I attended this morning’s Committee of the Whole meeting, to listen to city councilors debate the merits of rehabbing v. replacing Victoria’s storied Johnson Street Bridge (aka “The Blue Bridge”), a bascule bridge designed and built by Joseph Strauss in 1924. Strauss also built the Golden Gate Bridge.

In the end, with plenty of encouragement from the Engineering department, which led the presentation, council voted yes on a motion to proceed with the option to replace the bridge.

The problem is, of course, that no one – and I mean no one – has any idea what to replace it with, and that we may well end up with an ugly-bland bridge that looks like an off-ramp bought at Walmart.

But the boys in engineering want to …well, engineer. They said as much, noting that one of the truly biggest challenges in rehabbing the old bridge will be (are you ready for this?) painting it. Yep, painting it. It would have to be wrapped, to prevent solvents and contaminants from entering the harbor, and wrapping it would slow traffic, etc., so painting is a really big problem.

And tearing it down and replacing it with a new bridge is not, because…? Why, exactly?

I’m beyond tired and can’t add links to this post right now, nor include the long email I wrote at 1am last night (today?) to council, stating my piece that I’d like to see the bridge rehabbed.

But stay tuned, I’m not done with this topic yet.