PROSPECTUS - ISSUE NO. 3 - WINTER 2017-18.

ISAAC MYERS III

On the last Saturday afternoon of March I left my office on Jay Street between Water and Front, and walked over to my car, which was parked on Plymouth Street, between Gold and Bridge. It was only about a ten minute walk. I knew I’d drive up to Marble Hill, leave my car up there, take the train back to Brooklyn that evening, then walk all the way back up to the Bronx the next morning. I didn’t have an exact route in mind, though I knew I would walk through Washington Square Park, that I’d drop by Jane Jacobs’ old house on Hudson Street, and that I’d move north along the Upper West Side. Jane Jacobs, in spirit, would walk with me. I had read her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), watched Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary Citizen Jane (2017), and had revisited Episode 7 of Ric Burns’ New York: A Documentary Film (1999) in which Burns describes her battle royal with Robert Moses over the building of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (she won).

I had first watched Burns’ documentary in 2012, and remember with clarity how Episode 7, “The City and the World (1945-2000),” portrays Moses as the villain who wants to build an expressway across Canal Street, connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges. Jacobs is the hero who steps in and stops him. I remember watching Burns’ nine part documentary on the history of New York City the week of Super Storm Sandy. During Episode 7, a narrator reads from a passage that, six years later, I would read again in Jacobs’ book:

Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed to movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance ––– not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.

When I first heard, and then years later, read, this passage, my mind drifted toward the way that a city dances, and the way individuals on a street dance ––– how people find their way around the city, and each other. Episode 1 of Burns’ documentary, “The Country and the City (1609-1825),” focuses in on this idea of people moving about and around the city, and among each other. It begins with a shot of the streets of Manhattan in the late 1990s as E.L. Doctorow speaks:

If you imagine an ordinary moment at an intersection in New York City. And there’s a pause because there’s a streetlight, and some people and others are in motion. Some cars stopped, and others in motion. If you were to put that in a freeze frame and hold everything for a second, you would realize that there’s a universe there of totally disparate intentions. Everybody going about his or her business in the silence of their own mind with everybody else and the street and the time of day and the architecture and the quality of the light and the nature of the weather as a kind of background or field for the individual consciousness and the drama that it is making of itself at that moment. And you think about that ––– that’s what happens in a city, and somehow the city can embrace and accept and accommodate all that disparate intention at one and the same time, not only in that corner, but in thousands of corners.

“Thank god the Lower Manhattan Expressway isn’t a thing,” I remember thinking after watching Burns’ documentary, then switching back to Sandy coverage, and then a few days later when the subways were up and running again, returning to work.

I was working at a civil rights law firm at the time. It was my first job out of law school. It was myself and three partners. I was the only associate, so I was making court appearances and drafting complaints and discovery demands and assisting with motions early on, and as a result, learning a lot, and quickly. I had moved to New York to begin an MFA in poetry at the New School and to also look for work as an attorney in August of 2011, around the same time that Occupy Wall Street had its first general assembly meeting in Zuccotti Park. I attended class at the New School on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, and worked for the law firm during the day.

We were bringing excessive force and unlawful arrest civil suits against the New York City Police Department, by way of filing claims against the City of New York under the Federal Statute numbered 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, which codifies the Civil Rights Act of 1871. Half of our clients were people who had been arrested or assaulted (or both) while participating in Occupy Wall Street. The other half were mostly young African-American men who had been roped into the misery that was the former NYPD Commissioner, Raymond Kelly’s illegal answer to reducing crime, the so-called “stop and frisk” policy.

So one half of the complaints that I wrote, in essence, would state, “You can’t stop people just because they’re black,” and the other half would state, “You can’t arrest people just because you don’t like what they’re saying about the country and the government, or how they’re saying it.” A few months before I left the firm, we settled a lawsuit for one of the largest amounts arising out Occupy Wall Street related litigation. The suit concerned the unlawful arrest of fourteen individuals who were participating in an Occupy event on New Year’s Eve of 2011.

Without an admission that any illegal arrests were made, the City of New York settled, and each of our clients were paid twenty thousand dollars. When you look at these numbers at first glance, and the fact that the City settled, without actually admitting that the arrests were illegal, it’s easy to ask whether settling was the right thing to do, and also, whether twenty thousand dollars, or any amount of money is just compensation for the violation of someone’s Constitutional Rights. However, if you ask those questions first, or at all, then it’s possible that you’ll overlook all that had to happen between December 31, 2011, when the arrests were made, and the first week of June 2014, when the case was settled. You’d possibly overlook all of the decision that were made, and all of the disparate intentions of our clients; the disparate intentions of myself and the attorneys who I was working with; the disparate intentions of the attorneys for the City of New York; and the disparate intentions of their clients, the dozens of police officers who made the arrests, and were present the evening of the Occupy gathering. If you focus on the numbers, and the end result, without considering all that it took to get there, you miss the inner workings of what happened.

Years later, after I heard Jason Koo read “Morning, Motherfucker” at Berl’s Poetry in October of 2016, and had the idea for this journal, I came across an interview that Jacobs gave in 2000, which was taken by Jim Kunstler of Metropolis Magazine. In the interview, after describing her initial impressions of moving to New York City, Jacobs described how she liked going to a railroad station in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and watching trains.

I got a big bang out of seeing how those pistons moved the wheels, and then the connection of that with the steam inside. In the meantime, along came these locomotives that had skirts on them. Suddenly you couldn’t see how the wheels moved, and that disturbed me. It was supposed to be for some aerodynamic reason, but that didn’t make sense. And I began to notice how everything was being covered up, and I thought that was kind of sick. So I remember very well what was in my mind when I wrote, ‘We have become so feckless.’ It was those skirts on the locomotives I was thinking about and how this had extended to ‘we didn’t care how our cities worked anymore.’

The Death and Life of Great American Cities begins with the following epigraph:

“The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.”

Jacobs grasped that urban renewal was a way for those who had the power to shape the landscape of cities to ostensibly repair cities; however, their actions and the implementations of their plans were actually destroying cities. In the Metropolis Magazine interview, Jacobs describes the zeitgeist of the late fifties surrounding urban renewal. She uses Boston’s West End an example of the lengths that city planners would go to in order to assure that a city block be designated as a slum, and as a result, slated for urban renewal.

I talked to two architects in ’58 who helped justify the destruction of the West End. And one of them told me that he had had to go on his hands and knees with a photographer through utility crawl spaces so that they could get pictures of sufficient dark and noisome spaces to justify that this was a slum — how horrendous it was. Now that was real dishonesty. And they were documenting stuff for it.

The other was one who was just greatly respected, a well-known architect who could give his opinion that this area should go. And he told me that on the whole those buildings were so well constructed that they were undoubtedly better than anything that would ever be erected in their place. Now, he also said that some of the buildings were just so beautifully detailed that it was heartbreaking that they must be wrecked. And yet both of these architects knew better, but supported the destruction of that area.

I can’t remember how, exactly, the want to revisit Jane Jacobs first formed in my mind. Maybe it was when Adrian Moens told me he was working on a photo essay of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and I decided it would be good to pair his essay with this piece. Or maybe I was already planning on reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities when Adrian mentioned his plan. All I know for certain is that the idea came to me at some point after the launch of Curlew Quarterly’s second issue in December.

Although after watching the portion of Burns’ documentary that describes Jacobs’ work, I first thought of the “Complex order that could be likened to a dance,” after actually reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs’ distinction between life and art far more thoroughly caught my attention, and interest. She draws this distinction in Chapter 19 “Visual Order: Its Limitations and Possibilities”:

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.

We need art, in the arrangements of cities as well as in the other realms of life, to help explain life to us, to show us meanings, to illuminate the relationship between the life that each of us embodies and the life outside us. We need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. It is important, in arriving at better design strategies and tactics, to clear up this confusion.

To approach a city, or even a neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The result of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.

Like all attempts at art which get away from the truth and which lose respect for what they deal with, this craft of city taxidermy becomes, in the hands of its master practitioners, continually more picky and precious. This is the only form of advance possible to it. All this is a life-killing (and art-killing) misuse of art. The results impoverish life instead of enriching it.

I latched onto this chapter and these passages because they speak so forcefully and eloquently concerning the makings of not just cities but of humanity, and how art, when approached and created with respect and an open heart and mind, can enhance both cities as well as humanity. Yet when art, as Jacobs puts it, becomes taxidermy, not only the art but also the artist, the viewer and the space within and circumstances around in which they all operate, become dulled.

At first glance, Jacobs’ work and her arguments against the practices of urban renewal that were popular at the time when The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, make it easy to think that from the start she had no interest or enjoyment in traditional city planning. However, as the featured writer for a WNYC Books and Authors Luncheon from 1962, Jacobs spoke candidly about how the modernistic glow of city planning initially drew her into its light.

From 1952 to 1962, Jacobs worked as an editor for Architectural Forum, which premiered in January of 1892 and printed its final issue in March of 1974. It was in the mid 1950s, when Jacobs was working for the magazine, that she first had a chance to observe and write about urban planning, and the theories and applications that underpinned it at the time. I would have loved to have been at the Books and Authors Luncheon on that afternoon in 1962, when she spoke.

I was working for Architectural Forum magazine, writing articles about buildings and so on. And one fine day they put me on an assignment about some city planning. And some urban renewal projects that were being done ––– in Philadelphia as a matter of fact.

So I went there and found out what they had in mind and what they were planning to do and how it was going to look according to the drawings and what great things it was going to accomplish, and I thought this was just great!

In the introduction of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs provides readers with more of a background on the conventional thoughts of the city planners and designers who began implementing their urban renewal and slum clearance plans in the 1930s and 1940s.

“The look of things and the way they work are inextricably bound together, and in no place more so than cities. But people who are interested only in how a city ‘ought’ to look and uninterested in how it works will be disappointed by this book. It is futile to plan a city’s appearance, or speculate on how to endow it with a pleasing appearance of order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has.”

Jacobs was interested in the way that cities actually worked, while those who backed urban renewal were more interested in their plans for the city, and how the city ‘ought’ to look. Jacobs’ book reflects the culmination of her years spent observing the ill effects and failures of city planning; it invites her readers and people who live in cities to think differently about city planning. By the time she spoke at the Books and Authors Luncheon, she was able to look back on her experiences over the last ten to fifteen years and describe how she began formulating her ideas for the book.

Anyhow, time passed and some of these things were actually built, that I had written about. And this was a great shock to me because they didn’t look at all the way that they should have looked. They didn’t work at all the way they should have looked. People didn’t use them the way presumably people were supposed to use them. And the city around them didn’t react, theoretically, the way the people around them should have reacted. Well this struck me as, of course a disappointment, but also as very interesting.

Well I would bring these questions up with the people who had been responsible for the planning and building of these places, and I couldn’t get them very interested in these questions. I got instead a lot of alibis mainly boiling down to, “People are stupid. They don’t do what they’re supposed to do!” There was plenty of bafflement, and this is where curiosity came in. That didn’t seem like a sufficient answer.

Water seeks at its level. Like attracts like. And as Jacobs started asking questions, seeking answers, and allowing her curiosity regarding the pitfalls and failures of urban planning to grow, a gentleman named William Kirk, an Episcopal minister in East Harlem, stopped in at the Architectural Forum office.

[Mr. Kirk] came in because he was very much worried about East Harlem. Here in a rather small area about three-hundred million dollars worth of city rebuilding money had been put to work. There were no ends of housing projects. There was a new large park. It had all been refurbished. All manner of things had been done. And his distress was this: that as a settlement house head worker, he could see that their problems were growing greater than they had ever been in the past.

Well of course this was exactly in tune with what had been troubling me. So when he came into the office and my editor and I sat around a desk with him and he showed us a map and he told us some of these things, I evinced a great deal of interest. Eventually he would begin taking me on walks through East Harlem. And since he was a public character, we would stop everyone once in a while, or someone would stop him. And I would eavesdrop on the conversation. We would stop in at stores. We would stop in at housing projects. He would point out local landmarks, which a local landmark may be a candy store. No one else would notice it, and he would tell me a little bit about its history and what went on there.

And at first I couldn’t understand what he was getting at, why exactly he was telling me these things, except they were all very interesting. But it was a bit like a big basket of dry leaves being thrown up in the air, and what do you make of that? But gradually it began to make sense to me. I began to see that just out of the accumulation of all of this, I was beginning to understand how things worked in that area ––– many little details of cause and effect. Actually these same things, in slightly different detail, but the same principles were at work in the area where I lived, and in many other places.

One idea leads to another. The more questions Jacobs asked the more answers she received; the more pieces of thread she was able to weave together, all of which she eventually wove into The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It’s interesting to look at the introduction of the book, which includes descriptions of her walks through East Harlem, many of which she must have taken with Mr. Kirk.

In New York’s East Harlem there is a housing project with a conspicuous rectangular lawn which became an object of hatred to the project tenants. A social worker frequently at the project was astonished by how often the subject of the lawn came up, usually gratuitously as far as she could see, and how much the tenants despised it and urged that it be done away with. When she asked why, the usual answer was, ‘What good is it?’ or ‘Who wants it?’

Finally one day a tenant more articulate than the others made this pronouncement: ‘Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don’t have a place to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful! Now the poor have everything!’’

This tenant was saying what moralists have said for thousands of years: Handsome is as hand- some does. All that glitters is not gold. She was saying more: There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and be served.

So what do you do, after you’ve asked the questions, and after you start receiving answers? You look at the answers; you shake them down, suss them out, evaluate them, compare them with other answers, test them, and look for evidence of their validity in other places; and if they’re viable, when possible, you build theories around them. For Jacobs, after the walks around East Harlem with Kirk, which lead to her observation of “many little details of cause and effect,” she started forming her theory.

What I was seeing in fact was what makes the very intricate order of the city. This has to do with a quality that’s called, rather vaguely, Urbanism. And I think has been mostly thought of in the past as a kind of atmosphere, and a rather mysterious thing. Like someone having personality or they don’t have personality and how do you explain it? It’s an intangible sort of thing.

Well I think it is not an intangible sort of thing and that it’s very explainable indeed. Cities are extremely physical places. People in cities are not just masses of people. They are people with certain relationships to each other. It’s a very intricate place, a city. It’s not an inert mass. It’s enterprises and people reacting in certain ways to each other, and mutually supporting each other.

The evening that I heard Jason Koo read “Morning, Motherfucker” I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep working as a real estate broker. I could work on my poetry and work as an attorney, and leave residential real estate sales to the forces that may be. And then that night and for the next few days, as I considered this city, all I could think was that it doesn’t have to be this way. That poets and writers don’t have to be priced out, and that the top down structure that starts with profit as its main goal and bottom line doesn’t have to reign supreme. So with these ideas in mind, I thought of creating Curlew Quarterly.

After Jacobs started thinking about urbanism, and the way it is created and maintained, she shared her findings with the planners who she went on assignment with for Architectural Forum. These were the same planners who relied upon wishful thinking that their ideas for how a city ought to look should determine how people actually use the city, rather than the other way around.

At this point I might have been guilty of some wishful thinking myself. Specifically, that if you work something out and you explain why things that have been tried are failing, and everybody can see they’re failing ––– you explain why they’re failing, and then go on to explain what should be done instead and try to make it as clear as possible, well then the people re- sponsible for these things will change their ways, won’t they? And start doing it the right way.

I had a little experience that saved me from that wishful thinking, and it was precisely the articles that I had been writing for Architectural Forum shortly before I began my book. I had been writing there for architects and planners and saying a few of these things, and I would get a big hand from them: ‘What good ideas! How right you are! Yes, indeed!’ And then nothing would happen, everything would still be done as always.

And so I decided that really if anything was ever going to get changed it was going to have to be changed by citizens resisting what was done to them and by citizens understanding cities and insisting that the right things be done in their areas.

On the first day of April, I went on an eight hour walk from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Marble Hill, from Brooklyn to the Bronx, because I had an idea that I would write about viewing and experiencing the neighborhoods of New York City from the ground up, rather than from the top down, as the planners of Jacobs’ time and the developers and those responsible for implementing zoning laws today might experience the city. First I would read The Death and Life of Great American Cities and write this essay for Issue No. 3. Then I would read Robert Caro’s The Power Broker and write an essay about how Robert Moses understood, viewed, and shaped New York City for Issue No. 4. Then Issue No. 5 would be neatly tied up with a bow and string by an essay that blended together Jacobs’ and Moses’ visions and ideas. And while these three essays, at first glance, seemed reasonable enough, I now realize that, like Jacobs, I might have been guilty of some wishful thinking.

New York is inexhaustible. Throughout my eight hour walk I saw and experienced a book’s worth of pieces about the city and the vestiges of the ideas that Jacobs writes about in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I realized it was neither realistic nor desirable to try to cram the walk into one essay, nor to try to fit the purpose for Curlew Quarterly into three essays.

Looking back to that evening in October of 2016 at Berl’s, I realize that the decision to organize and to resist, was the decision that I made then, which lead to the creation of Curlew Quarterly. So in time and in upcoming issues, I’ll write about my walk and I’ll write more about The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I’ll read The Power Broker and write about Robert Moses’ vision, and I’ll weave a thread between the two of them, and I will also carve out Curlew Quarterly’s place within the New York City that we currently find ourselves living in. A city where the homeless population is higher than it’s ever been, and at the same time when there’s more empty residential apartments and storefronts than ever before. A city where zoning has taken the place of planning as a tool to displace, segregate, and tear apart communities. A city of hyper-gentrification where homogeneity and corporate empires gradually make every neighborhood look uncomfortably similar.

When it’s clear that a major expressway will be built through your neighborhood, you organize around a clear and direct goal: to stop the expressway from being built. You rally around that idea, and you organize to stop the highway. But where do you start, and what do you do, and how do you describe the purpose for a literary journal when there’s no one specific force that presents the same type of clear, exact, and traceable change to a neighborhood.

I liken these difficulties to the difficulties of describing, exactly, what the Occupy Wall Street movement wanted, and still wants. You can’t sum it up in a mission statement, or a list of demands. It requires close and constant examination, and adjusting, not from the top down, but by and for the people who make up the city. In Jacobs’ case, when she decided to organize and resist, she faced an imminent and traceable danger.

I finally finished The Death and Life of Great American Cities and I thought, ah, now I can think about something else. And for three weeks I did think about other things. Then I opened The New York Times and found that our own area of The West Village was going to have an Urban Renewal Project, and so I suddenly had to put into practice my own premises, that if anything was going to happen to reverse the way things way things were being done, then the citizens had to take some initiative, and the citizens had to frustrate the planners.

I thereupon began to devote myself to frustrating planners, and so did the whole neighborhood. I couldn’t possibly do it myself. We have a great neighborhood. And we finally won. Just about a year later we won, and we’re now embarked upon the next stage, which is to try to get the things done right, the next stage of what’s missing. What should go in here. I don’t know what success we will have on that.

When I walked from Bedford-Stuyvesant to Marble Hill, I carried an audio recorder with me, and whenever I saw or heard something interesting, or something that I thought I’d be able to use for this essay, or for Curlew Quarterly in general, I spoke into the recorder, and made an audio note of my mental note. And for the last six hours, and for three hours last Sunday, and for two hours the Sunday before, and including the fifteen to twenty hours that it must have taken me to read and transcribe passages from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I’ve been alone, sitting at my desk, or at the dining room table of my house, or near the window at end of my bedroom ––– thinking, writing, reading, coming up with ideas, organizing thoughts, moving sentences and paragraphs around, and connecting the dots as best as I could. So when I reached the end of Jacobs’ talk at the Books and Authors Luncheon, it made sense when she described her reaction to those who said she cooked up The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a document to use in the fight against urban renewal plans for the West Village.

During the West Village fight, I don’t know whether to be amazed . . . I suppose I should be flattered that word got around that I had somehow whipped up this book during the fight, as a campaign document. I would love to be able to carry on a job and a fight against the city and whip up a book at the same time, but as a matter of fact, I guess for most writers, and certainly for me, writing a book is a very long and lonely process.

You feel as if you are talking to yourself interminably. It’s an act of faith. You wonder whether you’ll ever really be talking to anybody else beside yourself. So I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here after two years of talking to myself and find that I’m talking to somebody else and to such nice people too.

I don’t fear the silence, the sound of my own voice inside my head, or speaking into an audio recorder. Curlew Quarterly, if nothing else, is an act of faith. I first met Diana Poon and Ashley Glass in 2015. Three years later, I’m thankful to call them friends, to be able to publish their work, and allow them to share their stories in this journal. I think of all of the disparate intentions that had to happen, between 2015 and this afternoon, in order to get to this point. I met Tess Congo at one of Brooklyn Poets’ YAWP events in 2017, an event that I wouldn’t have known about had I not heard Jason Koo read in 2016. So, of course, I’m honored to publish “Winter in Persephone” in these pages. I was walking with Tom Davidson the afternoon after the evening in which I heard Jason Koo read. We were walking up Old Fulton Street, toward Henry Street, when “Morning, Motherfucker” and the idea for this journal fully cemented in my mind. Four times a year we’ll create this journal without any certainty that anyone will pick it up, buy it, read it, be inspired, or comforted by what appears within its pages. But I don’t know what the opposite would bring.

At times, I think, what if I had walked away from Berl’s that evening and shrugged my shoulders ––– what an interesting poem by Jason Koo ––– and never felt compelled to create Curlew Quarterly. But when you’re called, you act. And when I think about the city out there, the same city that I walked through for eight hours a few weekends ago, and the same city that drew me from Des Moines, Iowa, seven years ago, and has kept me within its grasp, no matter how precariously, since I was just twenty-five, I think of a city worth caring for, and a city worth writing for, and about.

As best I can, I try not to think abstractly about the city, or think of it as a map or architectural model that needs to be designed and have order imposed upon it, but instead, again and again, I refer back to and rely upon the vision I discovered within the pages of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The various tactics for capturing city visual order are concerned with bits and pieces in the city ––– bits and pieces which are, to be sure, knit into a city fabric of use that is as continuous and little cut apart as possible. But emphasis on bits and pieces is of the essence: that is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

Perhaps this all seems very commonplace compared with the sweep and swoop of highways, but what we have to express in expressing our cities is not to be scorned. Their intricate order ––– a manifestation of the freedom of countless number of people to make and carry out countless plans ––– is in many ways a great wonder. We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is.