Veritas et Venustas

Bernie & Cano

In recent baseball history, who's had more clutch hits, more big plays or scored more key runs than Bernie? Nobody. He's first in baseball in career post-season hits, and fifth in Yankee career hits, behind Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle.

He's a winning player, and he realizes that there are more important things than baseball. He's the son of university professors and a Classical guitarist. Today MAY have been his last regular season home game as a Yankee, and he got four standing ovations from the fans, who want him back.

Even if he comes back, Bernie is nearing the end of a great career. Robbi Cano is starting a great career.

Cano made boneheaded baserunning blunder when he was on first with one out and Jorgie singled -- so instead of first and second with one out, it was Jorgie on first with two out and the Yankees behind three to one.

The next time he came up, you knew he would atone for running them out of the inning, and he hit a two run home run to put the Yankees up four to three. He's a good player, and he's going to be a great player.

Cano started the season very slowly and then took off. He had a short mideseason slump, and now he's on fire again, hitting over .400 in September.

Remember when Womack was our star second basemen? When we didn't know who Cano, Wang, Small and Chacon were? Remember when Pavano, Brown, Stanton and Quantrill were key players? It's been a long and interesting season. We were happy to be at the Stadium for the last regular season home game.

There are seven games left, and the Yankees' Magic number is 8. In theory, the Yankees can win four in Baltimore while the Blue Jays win four at Fenway, putting the Yanks in the playoffs, but the season will almost certainly come down to the series in Fenway. The difference between Yankee fans and Red Sox fans is that win or lose, Yankee fans know their team won't choke. It's only a game, but win or lose, an unknown but large percentage of the Red Sox Nation will make it more than a game and say one team choked. The Sox were great last year, but a large cloud of misery still hangs over New England for at least some of their fans.

New Orleans Architecture

The New York Times, September 22, 2005
The New Orleans Shotgun: Down but Not Out
By S. FREDERICK STARR

NEW ORLEANS is becoming a target for what used to be called urban renewal. Talking heads describe the city, beyond the French Quarter and Garden District, as a collection of "blighted neighborhoods" where the poor lived in "wooden shacks" that should long ago have been demolished, and that now will be. In their place, the argument goes, new homes will rise, better suited to modern life yet embodying the best of what was lost.

This line of thought recalls the 1960's, when federally sponsored demolition destroyed great swaths of cities like Cincinnati and St. Louis and handed them over to developers. If those old neighborhoods had survived, of course, we would be restoring them today. And as Richard Moe, the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, pointed out last week, the building stock of New Orleans is particularly important to that city - representing its culture "more than even food."

The seeming trump card in the argument for demolition is that thousands of the wooden structures that give New Orleans its flavor are beyond saving. They were old to begin with, and Katrina's flooding and the ensuing rot and mold will surely finish them off.

In fact, though, even as some of the city's vernacular buildings may prove beyond repair, most - including whole neighborhoods now being characterized by politicians and developers as candidates for demolition - can and should be saved.

In the 19th century, local craftsmen devised structural techniques that allowed houses to stand securely on the city's pudding-like alluvial soil, and to survive in the region's notoriously humid climate, with its insects, termites and mold. In place of the heavy, water-absorbing brick-between-post construction that had been used earlier, or the brick masonry common on higher ground in the city, they began using light balloon frames, self-reinforcing structures of two-by-four joists that could be raised above ground on brick or stone piers. For these frames they used local cypress wood, which resists both water and rot, and for secondary woods they favored local cedar, which is nearly as weatherproof as cypress, and dense virgin pine.

The builders also used circulating air to ward off mold. Ten- to twelve-foot ceilings in even the smallest homes, as well as large windows, channel the slightest breeze throughout the house. And by raising the structures above the ground, builders assured that air would circulate beneath them as well, discouraging termites and rodents.

All this means that wooden structures in the New Orleans area are far tougher than they may seem. Thousands have undergone prolonged flooding in the past, yet survived. The owners cleaned them up, replaced secondary wood and wallboard, fixed wiring and replastered, and were back in business.

Between 1850 and 1910, whole streets of distinctive New Orleans houses were built in the Irish Channel, Faubourg Marigny, Bywater, Treme and Mid-City neighborhoods. These houses extended back from the street in narrow rows of rooms - some only 12 feet wide by 100 feet long - dictated by the long, thin plots laid out by the city's French (and later Spanish) surveyors. They came to be known as shotguns, for the fact that a shotgun blast at the front door could pass unimpeded through all the rooms to the back. A shotgun double consisted of two such houses sharing a common wall, while a camelback was a shotgun with a second floor added at the rear.

However small in scale, these buildings are anything but low-key in style. Early on, they had classical facades, often with galleries with columns that eventually evolved into Eastlake and Queen Anne porches. Later, a local industry poured out jigsaw brackets and ornaments that allowed even a New Orleans resident of modest means to indulge what Errol Barron, a New Orleans architect, calls New Orleanians' "deep-down operatic instincts."

These houses proved ideal engines for assimilating diverse people into a common life. French and Anglo-Saxon residents lived in shotguns all over the city, as did well-established Creoles of color; immigrants from Germany, Ireland and Italy; and African-American migrants from the countryside. There was no zoning, and no rigorous segregation. It was a society in which small homeowners of all races had equal stakes. Even today, fully 85 percent of those living in the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward are homeowners, a higher figure than in the Garden District. At a time when American cities have been lost in a tangle of suburbs or given themselves over to high-rises, New Orleans has maintained a distinctive urban life. The density created by those old French surveyors assured that people would interact with one another, as did the front porches and stoops built directly on the sidewalk. Even air-conditioning and TV did not end this situation. Is it any wonder that such neighborhoods have proved so fertile for what might be called the social arts? There are many reasons why New Orleanians have long excelled in cooking, music-making, dancing and story-telling, but the interaction of diverse cultures fostered by shotgun houses is certainly a major one.

Politicians and developers eying New Orleans today should bear all this in mind. Is it possible to create by destroying, especially when there is no need to do so? Why not treat those thousands of lower-income homeowners with the respect due to them as citizens, rather than as the objects of social experiments? Why not rehabilitate and restore, rather than demolish? Why not engage local practitioners of age-old crafts in this work, and build on their experience rather than obliterating it?

New Orleans is a damaged organism, but a living one. It deserves to be treated in the manner in which careful doctors treat their patients. In the words of the Hippocrates, "Do no harm."

S. Frederick Starr is the author of four books on New Orleans, where he owns a house built in 1826.

© New York Times 2005

Katrina & NU on NPR

The day the shortlist of architects chosen for Ground Zero was announced the New York Times architecture critic wrote, Thank God we kept the New Urbanists off the list.

From the pro-urb list:

I just appeared on a radio show called Open Source, hosted by Chris Lydon, out of WGBH in Boston and distributed by PRI. The other guests were two New Orleans preservationists (Fred Starr and Patty Gay) and a CUNY prof. who writes about gentrification, Neil Smith. Lydon brought up Duany and the new urbanists somewhat dismissively, expecting Starr to pooh-pooh NUs nostalgic elitism. But he actually defended new urbanism, said he has been taken with some of the projects, with the caveat that you shouldn't try to remake an historic neighborhood in modern NU's image -- but who would? I also spoke up for Duany, and reacted to Lydon's comment that NU was "like the Truman Show", saying that people see these places as "too perfect" because they're so much better than what we're used to getting, and we don't believe we deserve high-quality communities anymore, or words to that effect. We covered other topics as well ... There is a lot of cynicism out there regarding this revitalization effort, and a lot of people will be looking for us to fail. I think they'll be disappointed ...

One of the poins that came through loud and clear from the NOLA participants was the degree to which NO's traditional neighborhoods are tight-knit, still in contact with one another, and ready to fight for their neighborhoods. All in all, quite encouraging.

I'm not sure how you get a transcript of the show. Podcasts of the show are available for free download, but looks like it might be a little while before it's available.

Other info on the show is here.

David Goldberg
Communications Director
Smart Growth America

http://smartgrowthamerica.org

WOO WOO!

From the New York Times:

“For great moments in scoreboard watching, this would have to qualify.

“At 9:58 last night, the Yankees finished off the Baltimore Orioles, 2-1, behind Randy Johnson and Mariano Rivera. The fans at Yankee Stadium cheered the victory and got up to leave. Frank Sinatra's voice floated through the loudspeakers. The players shook hands on the field and headed for the clubhouse.

“Matt Lawton had the hit that mattered the most, a two-run homer in the second inning off Baltimore starter Rodrigo Lopez that put the Yankees ahead, 2-0.

“'Just as we were going up the tunnel,' Yankees Manager Joe Torre said, 'I heard the fans.'

“At 9:59, the scoreboard above right-center field flashed an update of the Boston Red Sox' game at Tampa Bay. The Devil Rays had taken a lead in the eighth inning - first by 5-4, the scoreboard reported, then by 6-4.

“By 10, the fans had noticed and were roaring with approval. The relievers walking in from the center-field bullpen turned to see the scoreboard. So did a groundskeeper tending the grass near the mound. This was how first place sounded.

“The Devil Rays would soon beat the Red Sox, 7-4, lifting the Yankees into first place in the American League East by a half-game. The Yankees had not been there since July 18, when they held on for one day.”

Conservative New Urbanism

New Urbanism transcends party politics. The Congress for the New Urbanism worked with the Clinton administration at HUD, and is about to work with the Bush administration in Mississippi.

My guess is that the majority of New Urbanists are Democrats, like me. But there are plenty of Republicans, and many among the developers. Only architects think Traditional design = stodgy and conservative.

In any case, Paul Weyrich (“the most powerful man in American politics”*) makes an interesting argument for Conservative New Urbanism (the copyrighted article is here):

Many conservatives dislike cities, for reasons I understand and sympathize with. Sin and the city is an old, old story; you can find it in the Confessions of Blessed Augustine. But cities are also the birthplace and necessary home for high culture. Without living cities, we will not have symphony orchestras and great music, classic theater, art museums, serious public libraries or any of the other venues high culture requires. Nor will we have the good used bookstores, artistic and literary cafes, salons or other informal but important places where ideas can be exchanged and culture can grow. No, the Internet is not a substitute; there can be no full replacement for people talking face-to-face....

Over the past several decades, a movement has arisen to restore our cities and even to build new urban communities, towns, as an alternative to suburbs. It is called "new urbanism." As a conservative, I think new urbanism needs to be part of the next conservatism. But I also think we need a conservative new urbanism, which differs from much of what now goes under the new urbanist label.

“Paul Weyrich is considered by conservative Powers That Be as the most powerful man in American politics today. Weyrich allegedly founded the immensely influential conservative think tank, Heritage Foundation, in 1973 with funding from Joseph Coors of the Coors beer empire and Richard Mellon-Scaife, heir of the Carnegie-Mellon fortune.” From The Heritage Foundation website

(continued)

It's a strange phenomenon, that I don't understand, that many Fundamentalist Christians are exurbanites who hate the city, and its residents. Like other stories, the article below talks about the belief that cities have too many sinners, best avoided. How is that Loving Thy Neighbor?

A more genuine Christian perspective, in my opinion, is found in Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life), by Presbyterian Minister Eric Jacobsen. Although as an effete Easterner, I find the constant references to the Christian way of doing things — What about the Jews, Muslims and Buddhists in our pluralist, global society?. Most of the values Jacobsen writes about are universal, although it's good to have the Christian counter to the Fundamentalist values below.

God instructed Jeremiah, "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will have welfare" (29:7)

Soldiers of Christ I
Inside America's most powerful megachurch
Harper's, May 26, 2005.
By Jeff Sharlet.

[Words in italics are my emphasis]

They are drawn as if by magnetic forces; they speak of Colorado Springs, home to the greatest concentration of fundamentalist Christian activist groups in American history, both as a last stand and as a kind of utopia in the making. They say it is new and unique and precious, embattled by enemies, and also that it is “traditional,” a blueprint for what everybody wants, and envied by enemies. The city itself is unspectacular, a grid of wide western avenues lined with squat, gray and beige box buildings, only a handful of them taller than a dozen stories. Local cynics point out that if you put Colorado Springs on a truck and carted it to Nebraska, it would make Omaha look lovely. But the architecture is not what draws Christians looking for clean living. The mountains help, but there are other mountain towns. What Colorado Springs offers, ultimately, is a story.

Lori Rose is from Minnesota and heard rumors about this holy city when she lived on an Air Force base near Washington, D.C. Her husband isn’t a Christian, refuses Jesus, looks at things he shouldn’t; but she has found a church to attend without him and joined a marriage study group there. Ron Poelstra came from Los Angeles. Now he volunteers at his church, selling his pastor’s books on “free-market theology” after services. His two teenage boys stand behind him, display models for the benefits of faith. L.A., Ron says, would have eaten them up: the gangs. Adam Taylor, now a pastor, grew up in Westchester County, an heir to the Bergdorf Goodman fortune, the son of artists and writers. In Colorado Springs he learned the Bible the hard way, each word a nail pounded into sin.

The story they found in Colorado is about newness: new houses, new roads, new stores. And about oldness, imagined: what is thought to be the traditional way of life, families as they were before the culture wars, after the World Wars, which is to say, during the brief, Cold War moment when America was a nation of single-breadwinner nuclear families.

Crime, of course, looms over this story. Not the actual facts of it—the burglary rate in and around Colorado Springs exceeds that in New York City and Los Angeles—but the idea of crime: a faith in the absence of it. And of politics, too: Colorado Springs’ evangelicals believe they live without it, in a carved-out space for civility and for like-minded dedication to common-sense principles. Even pollution plays a part: Christian conservatives there believe that they breathe cleaner air, live on ground untainted by the satanic fires of nineteenth-century industry—despite the smog that collects against the foothills of the Rockies and the cyanide, from a century of mining, that is leaching into the aquifers and mountain streams.

But those are facts, and Colorado Springs is a city of faith. A shining city at the foot of a hill. No one there believes it is perfect. And no one is so self-centered as to claim the perfection of Colorado Springs as his or her ambition. The shared vision is more modest, and more grandiose. It is a city of people who have fled the cities, people who have fought a spiritual war for the ground they are on, for an interior frontier on which they have built new temples to the Lord. From these temples they will retake their forsaken promised lands, remake them in the likeness of a dream. They call the dream “Christian,” but in its particulars it is “American.” Not literally but as in a story, one populated by cowboys and Indians, monsters and prayer warriors to slay them, and ladies to reward the warriors with chaste kisses. Colorado Springs is a city of moral fabulousness. It is a city of fables.

* * *

The city’s mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.

“Church” is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.

Pastor Ted, who talks to President George W. Bush or his advisers every Monday, is a handsome forty-eight-year-old Indianan, most comfortable in denim. He likes to say that his only disagreement with the President is automotive; Bush drives a Ford pickup, whereas Pastor Ted loves his Chevy. In addition to New Life, Pastor Ted presides over the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE), whose 45,000 churches and 30 million believers make up the nation’s most powerful religious lobbying group, and also over a smaller network of his own creation, the Association of Life-Giving Churches, 300 or so congregations modeled on New Life’s “free market” approach to the divine.

Pastor Ted will serve as NAE president for as long as the movement is pleased with him, and as long as Pastor Ted is its president the NAE will make its headquarters in Colorado Springs. Some believers call the city the Wheaton of the West, in honor of Wheaton, Illinois, once the headquarters of a more genteel Christian conservatism; others call Colorado Springs the “evangelical Vatican,” a phrase that says much both about the city and about the easeful orthodoxy with which the movement now views itself. Certainly the gathering there has no parallel in history, not in Lynchburg, Virginia, nor Tulsa, nor Pasadena, nor Orlando, nor any other city that has aspired to be the capital of evangelical America. Evangelical activist groups (“parachurch” ministries, in the parlance) in Colorado Springs number in the hundreds, though a precise count is hard to specify. Groups migrate there and multiply. They produce missionary guides, “family resources,” school curricula, financial advice, athletic training programs, Bibles for every occasion. The city is home to Young Life, to the Navigators, to Compassion International; to Every Home for Christ and Global Ethnic Missions (Youth Ablaze). Most prominent among the ministries is Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, whose radio programs (the most extensive in the world, religious or secular), magazines, videos, and books reach more than 200 million people worldwide.

The press tends to regard Dobson as the most powerful evangelical Christian in America, but Pastor Ted is at least his equal. Whereas Dobson plays the part of national scold, promising to destroy politicians who defy the Bible, Pastor Ted quietly guides those politicians through the ritual of acquiescence required to save face. He doesn’t strut, like Dobson; he gushes. When Bush invited him to the Oval Office to discuss policy with seven other chieftains of the Christian right in late 2003, Pastor Ted regaled his whole congregation with the story via email. “Well, on Monday I was in the World Prayer Center”—New Life’s high-tech, twenty-four-hour-a-day prayer chapel —“and my cell phone rang.” It was a presidential aide; “the President,” says Pastor Ted, wanted him on hand for the signing of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. Pastor Ted was on a plane the next morning and in the President’s office the following afternoon. “It was incredible,” wrote Pastor Ted. He left it to the press to note that Dobson wasn’t there.

No pastor in America holds more sway over the political direction of evangelicalism than does Pastor Ted, and no church more than New Life. It is by no means the largest megachurch, nor is Ted the best-known man of God: Saddleback Church, in southern California, counts 80,000 on its rolls, and its pastor, Rick Warren, has sold 20 million copies of his book The Purpose-Driven Life. But Warren’s success has come at the price of passion; his doctrine, though conservative, is bland and his politics too obscured by his self-help message to be potent. Although other churches boast more eminent memberships than Pastor Ted’s—near D.C., for example, McLean Bible Church and The Falls Church (an Episcopal church that is, like many “mainline” churches today, now evangelical in all but name) minister to the powerful—such churches are not, like New Life, crucibles for the ideas that inspire the movement, ideas that are forged in the middle of the country and make their way to Washington only over time. Evangelicalism is as much an intellectual as an emotional movement; and what Pastor Ted has built in Colorado Springs is not just a battalion of spiritual warriors but a factory for ideas to arm them.

New Life began with a prophecy. In November 1984 a missionary friend of Pastor Ted’s, respected for his gifts of discernment, made him pull over on a bend of Highway 83 as they were driving, somewhat aimlessly, in the open spaces north of the city. Pastor Ted—then twenty-eight, given to fasting and oddly pragmatic visions (he believes he foresaw Internet prayer networks before the Internet existed)—had been wondering why God had called him from near Baton Rouge, where he had been associate pastor of a megachurch, to this bleak city, then known as a “pastor’s graveyard.” The missionary got out of the car and squinted. He crouched down as if sniffing the ground. “This,” said the missionary, “this will be your church. Build here.”

So Pastor Ted did. First, he started a church in his basement. The pulpit was three five-gallon buckets stacked one atop the other, and the pews were lawn chairs. A man who lived in a trailer came round if he remembered it was Sunday and played guitar. Another man got the Spirit and filled a five-gallon garden sprayer with cooking oil and began anointing nearby intersections, then streets and buildings all over town. Pastor Ted told his flock to focus their prayers on houses with FOR SALE signs so that more Christians would come and join him. Once Pastor Ted and another missionary accidentally set off an alarm and hid together in a field while the police investigated. It was for a good cause, Pastor Ted would say; they were praying for the building to be taken off the market so it could someday be purchased for a future ministry. (It was.)

He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”

Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”

He moved the church to a strip mall. There was a bar, a liquor store, New Life Church, a massage parlor. His congregation spilled out and blocked the other businesses. He set up chairs in the alley. He strung up a banner: SIEGE THIS CITY FOR ME, signed JESUS. He assigned everyone in the church names from the phone book they were to pray for. He sent teams to pray in front of the homes of supposed witches—in one month, ten out of fifteen of his targets put their houses on the market. His congregation “prayer-walked” nearly every street of the city.

Population boomed, crime dipped; Pastor Ted believes to this day that New Life helped chase the bad out of town. He thinks like that, a piston: less bad means more good. Church is good, and his church grew, so fast there were times when no one knew how many members to claim. So they stopped talking about “members.” There was just New Life. “Are you New Life?” a person might ask. New Life moved into some corporate office space. Soon they bought the land that had been prophesied, thirty-five acres, and began to build what Pastor Ted promised would be a new Jerusalem.

* * *

JERUSALEM, 2005—To the east is sky, empty land, Kansas. To the west, Pike’s Peak, 14,110 feet above sea level. The old city core of Colorado Springs withers into irrelevance thirteen miles south; New Life leads the charge north, toward fusion with Denver and Boulder and a future of one giant front-range suburb, a muddy wave of big-box stores and beige tract houses eddying along roads so new they had yet to be added to the gas-station map I bought. Some Sundays traffic backs up from the church half a mile in all four directions. The congregation creeps up the highways. When parents finally pull into a space amidst the thousands of cars packed into a gray ocean of lot, their kids tumble out and dash toward the five silver pillars of the entrance to New Life, eager to slide across the expanse of tiled floor, to run circles around “The Defender,” a massive bronze of a glowering angel, its muscular wings in full flex, arms at the zenith of what will undoubtedly be a smiting blow of his broad sword; to run laps around the new sanctuary, built in the round; and to bound up the stairs to “Fort Victory,” whose rooms are designed to look like an Old West cavalry outpost, the kind they used to fight real live Indians, back when Colorado still had Indians to conquer and convert.

...

She reached across the table and touched my hand. “I have to tell you, the spiritual battle is very real.” We are surrounded by demons, she explained, reciting the lessons she had learned in her small-group studies at New Life. The demons are cold, they need bodies, they long to come inside. People let them in in two different ways. One is to be sinned against. “Molested,” suggested Linda. The other is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. You could walk by sin—a murder, a homosexual act—and a demon will leap onto your bones. Cities, therefore, are especially dangerous.

It is not so much the large populations, with their uneasy mix of sinner and saved, that make Christian conservatives leery of urban areas. Even downtown Colorado Springs, presumably as godly as any big town in America, struck the New Lifers I met as unclean. Whenever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from downtown’s neat little grid of cafés and ethnic joints. Stick to Academy, they’d tell me, referring to the vein of superstores and prepackaged eateries—P. F. Chang’s, California Pizza Kitchen, et al.—that bypasses the city. Downtown, they said, is “confusing.”

Part of their antipathy is literally biblical: the Hebrew Bible is the scripture of a provincial desert people, suspicious of the cosmopolitan powers that threatened to destroy them, and fundamentalists read the New Testament as a catalogue of urban ills—sophistication, cynicism, lust—so deadly that one would be better off putting out one’s own eye than partaking in their alleged pleasures. But the anti-urban sentiments of modern fundamentalists are also more specific to the moment in which they find themselves.

Three years ago, in the 2002 elections, Christian conservatives swept Georgia, the last Democratic bastion in the South. They toppled an incumbent Democratic governor, a war-hero Democratic senator, the state House speaker, the Democratic leader of the state Senate, and his son, the Democratic candidate for Congress in a majority black district that state Democrats had drawn up especially for him. The new Republican senator, Saxby Chambliss, and the new governor, Sonny Perdue, both conservatives and Christian, won not on “moral values” but on an exurban platform. The mastermind behind the coup was Ralph Reed, once of the Christian Coalition, who had been reborn as Georgia’s Republican chairman. Reed remains a fundamentalist, the same man who once tested employees’ commitment to “Christian values” by asking them if they supported the death penalty for adultery, but he was too canny to talk like that in public. The term “Christian,” he’d learned, is a “divider,” not a “unifier,” so he had left overt faith behind. He backed candidates who ran under the mantra of the exurbs: “Shorter commutes. More time with family. Lower mortgages.”

This troika of exurban ambition worked on multiple levels. Just as Nixon used marijuana and heroin in the 1960s as code for hippies and blacks, Reed devised a platform that conflated ordinary personal goals with fundamentalist values. “Shorter commutes” is a ploy that any old-time ward heeler would recognize. It means: let’s move the good jobs out of the city. Atlanta, like Colorado Springs, has an urban core that Christian conservatives would just as soon see wither. “More time with family,” of course, extends that promise of exurban jobs but also speaks in code to the fundamentalist preoccupation with “family”—that is, with defining it, with excluding not just gay couples but any combination not organized around “biblical” principles of “male headship.”

As for “lower mortgages,” they are lower in exurbs because cities subsidize them. The city pays the taxes that build the sewers and the roads for the exurbs. The city provides the organization that makes it possible. Exurbs are parasites. And what else does “lower mortgages” mean? More land. More space between you and your neighbors. And this, too, is necessary for Christian conservatism, which depends on the absence of conflict as one of its main selling points. For all its talk of community, it is wary of community’s main asset: the conflict, and the resulting cultural innovation, born of proximity. But such cultural innovation is death to today’s Christian conservatism, which tosses a gauzy veil of tradition over the big-box consumerism of its megachurches.

As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy—if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?—as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which, of course, leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee—to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the “persecuted church”—just as Jesus promised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them.

This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue and lawn care. “We [Christians] have lost every major city in North America,” Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he believes they can be reclaimed through prayer—“violent, confrontive prayer.” He encourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to identify “power points” that “strengthen the demonic activities.” He suggests especially popular bars, as well as “cult-type” churches. “Sometimes,” he writes, “particular government buildings . . . are power points.” The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where believers are to “plant” their churches as strategic outposts encircling the enemy.

...

In devising New Life’s small-group system, Pastor Ted says that he asked himself and his staff a simple question: Do you like your neighbors? And, for that matter, do you even know your neighbors? The answers he got—the Golden Rule to the contrary—were “Not really” and “No.” Okay, said Pastor Ted, so why would you want to be in a small group with them? His point was that arbitrary small groups would make less sense than self-selected groups organized around common interests. Hence New Life members can choose among small groups dedicated to motorcycles, or rock climbing, or homeschooling, or protesting outside abortion clinics.

...

About the Author
Jeff Sharlet is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine, the editor of TheRevealer.org, and the co-author of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible (Free Press). His last article for Harper’s, “Big World: How Clear Channel Programs America,” appeared in the December 2003 issue.

This is Soldiers of Christ I, a feature, originally from May 2005, published Thursday, May 26, 2005. It is part of Features, which is part of Harpers.org.
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© 2005 Harper's Magazine Foundation

Community, Character, and the New Urban Response to Katrina

From CNU.org:

Community, Character, and the Response to Katrina
September 17, 2005

As the efforts in New Orleans and other areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina turn from rescuing to rebuilding, New Urbanists have been working on ways to support local and regional reconstruction efforts. The goal is to create rebuilding efforts that address immediate needs for infrastructure repair, environmental solutions, and temporary housing and relief, while also meeting the long-term need for neighborhoods of lasting value and character that serve diverse populations.

CNU members have also shared their views in media coverage of how best to proceed with the rebuilding effort. In an article titled, “Nation's leading professionals offer aid in Gulf Coast rebuilding,” Kevin Fee and Andres Viglucci of Knight Ridder newspapers reported that CNU co-founder Andres Duany had met with Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour to discuss rebuilding efforts in Biloxi, Gulfport, and Pascagoula.

Wrote Fee and Viglucci in the article,
“The challenge of rebuilding Mississippi's Gulf Coast is attracting some of the nation's leading professionals in architectural planning, engineering and management, who have offered to help at reduced or no cost, state officials say.

The hope is to recruit "as many as 50 national and international firms and pair up their planners and designers with local officials on projects of varying scale - from broad redevelopment plans or new zoning codes for stricken municipalities to streamlining the permitting of new buildings.”

"In Mississippi it's about getting it done right, having it better than it was before. This is a tremendous opportunity to do that," Duany elaborated. "We want to create areas that are more diverse, less auto dependent, more environmentally friendly and more secure from hurricanes."

“‘Whatever is going to be done is going to have to be done with the total input of the local professionals and elected public officials,’ Leland Speed, executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority told reporters about the effort.

On September 15, Blair Kamin, architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, first reported that Duany had met with Barbour. “’The New Urbanists want to protect the traditional character of the Mississippi towns and ‘try to make sure [what] they build … has lasting value,’” CNU President John Norquist told Kamin.

In an expanded column the same day titled “Why New Orleans Must Be Rebuilt,” Kamin suggested a role for New Urbanists, “The traditional town planners known as the New Urbanists … could lend their skills to a pro bono effort that would determine how the city's neighborhoods could be quickly rebuilt with a thread of continuity that would weave the best of New Orleans' architectural past into its future.” View Kamin’s full column in the Chicago Tribune.

Earlier in September, John King, San Francisco Chronicle architecture critic, also weighed in on rebuilding efforts, “People around the world have sumptuous memories of the French Quarter or are beguiled by such neighborhoods as the Garden District, both of which sustained relatively minor damage. Louisiana and the national government have a stake in showing that they're capable of restoring one of America's best- loved cities --preferably with at least some signs of progress by the next Mardi Gras in February.”

“‘You're going to see lot of people in a hurry ... If they build and build, or turn over big chunks of land to suburban (style) developers, the result will be a mess,’” Norquist told the Chronicle. “‘They should just affirm the street patterns and property lines that already exist. The city needs to learn from its image, which is very strong … It's not just the jazz, it's the life. Sophisticated pleasure -- they need to stick with that. That's why the world loves them.’”

In online discussions, CNU members have offered ideas and approaches to rebuilding. As CNU Board member, Stefanos Polyzoides has noted, “Neighborhoods should be the seed of all physical reconstruction. They are the best means of building in a manner that allows families to depend on each other during trying times. Neighborhoods are the best place to incrementally heal a broken society.” View excerpts from on-line discussions on Hurricane Katrina rebuilding efforts.

“The Stirling Prize shortlist is the first shot in the style wars”

From The Times of London:

THE MADTRADS

Who?

Quinlan Terry, Leon Krier, Robert Adam, John Simpson, Demitri Porpyrios. Their (very) spiritual leader is, of course, the Prince of Wales.

Famous for?

A stoic hatred of modernism. The recent spat between sparring partners Rogers and Terry over the Chelsea Hospital extension shows that scars are still raw. Their greatest hits might be decades old — Poundbury, Richmond riverside — but the Prince has the ear of John Prescott, and their New Urbanism is strong in America.

Recognisable by?

Columns, pediments, very rich clients.

Strengths?

If people want to build columns, let them build columns. Much more commercially savvy today.

Weaknesses?

United by conspiracy theories that Rogers runs the universe.

Average age?

300. Only joking. 55

Stirling Prize contender?

None. There is a conspiracy."

Architecture
Stirling's battle of the bricks
Tom Dyckhoff

The Stirling Prize shortlist is the first shot in the style wars 

Return to your drawing boards, architects, and prepare for war! Will Alsop, British architecture’s fiftysomething “enfant” terrible, has enlisted a Gang of Four to take on the establishment that has dominated British architecture since the 1980s. “It’s become intolerable,” Alsop says. “The tyranny of boredom. Much as I respect them, it’s time for change.”

Everything is up for grabs in British architecture: the Olympics, sustainable communities, PFI, the Government’s new schools and hospitals, and Tiggerish developers who seem genuinely interested in architecture, if only as a weapon in the “icon wars” fuelling our urban renaissance — the shape of Britain for years to come will be determined by these new style wars.

The fight will be lively. The finalists for the Stirling Prize, awarded on Oct 15, are split between rival gangs. “British architecture is confrontational,” says Rob Booth, editor of Building Design. “It thrives on competition. But God knows what’ll happen when we let this lot out of their pens. They’ll kill each other.” Here are the gangs.

THE HI-TECH KNIGHTS                   

Who?

Lord Foster of Thames Bank, Lord Rogers of Riverside, Sir Nicholas Grimshaw, Sir Michael and Lady Hopkins, Terry Farrell. Plus the two-time Stirling Prize winner Wilkinson Eyre, the London Eye designers Marks Barfield, and Future Systems.

Famous for?

Lloyds Building; Stansted airport; the London Eye; the British Museum; City Hall, London; the Eden Project; Selfridges, Birmingham; the Millennium Bridge, London; the Gherkin; the “Winking Eye” bridge, Gateshead.

Recognisable by?

Steel, glass, and, for Rogers, lots of primary colours and ships’ funnels.

Strengths?

Creating objects of breathtaking beauty. Establishment power. Popular among the masses.

Weaknesses?

They pander to the British prejudice that architecture is merely pretty engineering.

Average age?

67

Stirling Prize contender?

The McLaren Technology Centre, Surrey, by Foster.

THE NEOMODS                   

Who?

Allies and Morrison, MacCormac Jamieson Pritchard, John McAslan, David Chipperfield, John Pawson, Dixon Jones, Austin Smith Lord, Stanton Williams, Lifschutz Davidson.                   

Famous for?

A gentler modernism. Being safe pairs of hands. Megaprojects include the Royal Opera House, the BBC’s Media Village and Broadcasting House.                   

Recognisable by?

More steel and glass. White paint, and, for the cheeky, grey. Absolutely no curves at all.

Strengths?

A dab hand at working with heritage.

Weaknesses?

Can be a little dull.

Average age?

50

Stirling Prize contender?

Bennetts Associates’ Jubilee Library, Brighton.

THE GANG OF FOUR                   

Who?

Will Alsop, Branson Coates, FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) and whippersnappers AOC. Piers Gough (honorary member)

Famous for?

Being outrageous. Alsop thinks nothing of proposing giant teddy bears for office blocks, building the Peckham library on drunken stilts with a beret on top and turning Barnsley into a Tuscan hill town.

Recognisible by?

Curves. Very bright colours. Blobs.

Strengths?

Pricking pomposity.

Weaknesses?

Sometimes they’re just too LOUD.

Average age?

44

Stirling Prize contender?

Alsop’s Fawood Children’s Centre, North London.

THE MISFITS

Who?

Zaha Hadid and the Foreign Office Architects lead the eclectic cult. Younger members include Plasma Studio and Surface.

Famous for?

Very little in this country, but only because we’ve been so parochial. Now let loose. Hadid is building a new HQ for the Architecture Foundation, a museum in Glasgow, a Maggie’s cancer-care centre in Kirkaldy and the London Olympics Aquatic Centre. FOA is building the BBC music theatre, John Lewis in Leicester and co-designing the Olympics masterplan.

Recognisable by?

Crazy angles. They’re letting the computer rethink completely what architecture is.

Strengths?

Mind-bending architecture that really challenges the brain.

Weaknesses?

 Nobody understands a word they say.

Average age?

40

Stirling Prize contender?

Hadid’s BMW Central Building, Leipzig.

THE RADTRADS

Who?

Caruso St John, Tony Fretton. David Adjaye, though, is by far the most fêted. The youth wing includes Sergison Bates, Patrick Lynch and 6a.

Famous for?

Very little, but their stock is rising. Caruso St John’s Walsall Art Gallery is the most renowned. But Tony Fretton and David Adjaye both have a string of medium-sized projects under their belts — the Red House; the planned British Embassy in Warsaw; the Ideas Stores libraries.

Recognisable by?

Extreme seriousness. Bricks, wood, bare walls, no bright colours, intense, subtly detailed spaces, strong links to Cambridge School of Architecture and unintelligible continental philosophy.

Strengths?

Magnificently crafted. The kind of architecture you’d actually want to live in.

Weaknesses?

They can be scarily intense.

Average age?

38

Stirling Prize contender?

O’Donnell & Tuomey’s Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork.

THE MADTRADS

Who?

Quinlan Terry, Leon Krier, Robert Adam, John Simpson, Demitri Porpyrios. Their (very) spiritual leader is, of course, the Prince of Wales.

Famous for?

A stoic hatred of modernism. The recent spat between sparring partners Rogers and Terry over the Chelsea Hospital extension shows that scars are still raw. Their greatest hits might be decades old — Poundbury, Richmond riverside — but the Prince has the ear of John Prescott, and their New Urbanism is strong in America.

Recognisable by?

Columns, pediments, very rich clients.

Strengths?

If people want to build columns, let them build columns. Much more commercially savvy today.

Weaknesses?

United by conspiracy theories that Rogers runs the universe.

Average age?

300. Only joking. 55

Stirling Prize contender?

None. There is a conspiracy.