Posted by: Don Argus in Untagged on
Oct 14, 2009
In June, ANP member Lindsay Speer, a community organizer with the Onondaga Nation, participated in a canoe trip down Onondaga Creek with representatives of the Onondaga Environmental Institute and County government to highlight ideas for the revitalization of the Creek.
A video was just posted on the Post-Standard web site, at: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/10/plan_aims_for_revival_of_onond.html
Posted by: Don Argus in Untagged on
Sep 20, 2009
Finished saucing the tomatoes today, using a food mill acquired awhile back at an antiques shop in Eastwood. Also scored a potato ricer; there are so many forgotten kitchen implements!
Posted by: Don Argus in Untagged on
Sep 3, 2009
Apropos of nothing, here's an insighful comment by Wendell Berry that I have to share:
"The difference between a path and a road is not only the obvious one. A path is little more than a habit that comes with knowledge of a place. The perfect adaptation... obeying the natural contours, such obstacles that it meets, it goes around. A road embodies a resistance against the landscape. Its reason is not simply the necessity for movement, but haste. Its wish is to avoid contact with the landscape.... it is destructive, seeking to remove all obstacles in its way."
- Wendell Berry
Posted by: Don Argus in Untagged on
Jul 14, 2009
Being out of town, I've been looking at the West Side on Google maps and Google street view.
I'm struck by how much new construction has gone on on Seymour and Shonnard Streets, which I remember as almost abandoned. The new construction takes some of the sting off of what has been lost.
Those two streets in particular suffered because the highway planners once wanted to run an expressway through those blocks. Why keep up your property if they are going to be bulldozed anyway?
Posted by: Don Argus in Untagged on
Jul 6, 2009
An Op-Ed piece by the writer Toby Barlow in the July 4 issue of the NY Times points up the advantage of bicycling in Rust Belt cities: plenty of pavement but low levels of auto traffic. Mr. Barlow, who calls cycling in his own Detroit "the transportation equivalent of the Slow Food movement," says "while bike enthusiasts in most urban areas continue to have to fight for their place on the streets, Detroit has the potential to become a new bicycle utopia. It’s a town just waiting to be taken. With well less than half its peak population, and free of anything resembling a hill, the city and its miles and miles of streets lie open and empty, beckoning."
Syracuse too has a heritage of manufacturing for the auto industry (which has left buildings behind to recolonize as the Alchemical Nursery is doing), and also has streets built for a larger population than currently exists. Although Syracuse certainly has hills, it's essentially flat in the Valley, through downtown and the near West Side. And for the hills, Centro buses have bike racks.
Slow Wheels, anyone?
Posted by: Don Argus in Untagged on
Jul 5, 2009
Judging by the postcards, Syracuse once had a fabulous canopy of street trees. Street trees are beautiful and important to the livability of cities, reducing storm runoff and the heat island effec.
But in the 1950s and 1960s, coincident with white flight and de-industrialization, Dutch Elm disease destroyed much of that canopy. Many of Syracuse's streets became barren, stump-lined and uninviting. As I understand it, the sense was that replanting was not worthwhile, as Syracuse was going to be redeveloped any way, and road salt would cause new street trees to fail.
Posted by: Don Argus in solar dehydration, salt on
Jun 30, 2009
Here's that postcard image of solar dehydration happening in Syracuse:
In Portland Oregon, an outfit called City Repair (http://cityrepair.org) has undertaken a project to de-pave abandoned parking lots etc, to liberate the soil, reduce storm runoff and reclaim the city for people and plants rather than cars. See http://depave.org.
In Syracuse, I would start by ripping out the West Street Arterial. It has never been necessary from a traffic capacity standpoint. I blame it (along with the elevated DL&W tracks) for the decline of the near West Side, cutting it off from downtown. Such a profligate deployment of impervious surfaces has created storm runoff that has for many years added to the pollution of Onondaga Creek and Onondaga Lake.
A West Street of normal width could again be crossed by pedestrians. It could be again lined with shops and dwellings and connect to parks and gardens. It could knit the West Side back together rather than divide it.
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