Posts about Books

Robert Peter (1726-1806), a Scottish immigrant who became a prosperous Georgetown tobacco merchant, purchased a large tract of land in Maryland, including the sandstone cliffs, in 1781. The first small amounts of stone were quarried there some time in the late 18th century. Peter's son Thomas built the regal Tudor Place mansion that still stands today in Georgetown as one of the city's best house museums. Thomas also built a distinguished country house on the land at Seneca, but it was not until Thomas's son, John Parke Custis Peter (1799-1848), inherited the property that the Seneca Quarry started to figure prominently in DC construction.

John P.C. Peter made a daring lowball bid in 1846 to supply the stone for the new Smithsonian Building to be constructed on the Mall. The iconic structure could have been made of pale Aquia Creek sandstone, white New York marble, or gray granite, but at a below-market 25 cents per square foot, Peter's Seneca red sandstone got the nod from the building committee.

The eccentric Romanesque Revival building, designed by James Renwick, set the stage for the Victorian era of red Washington architecture. While many red Victorian buildings would be made primarily of brick, Seneca sandstone was prominent as well, often used in water tables because it was considered waterproof.

Renwick used the stone as trim for the original Corcoran Gallery of Art building (now the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery) as well as the chapel at Oak Hill Cemetery in Georgetown. Just to the west of the Castle, the original Agriculture Department building, designed by Adolf Cluss and completed in 1868, had a Seneca sandstone water table and belt courses.

Other Seneca buildings past and present, as cataloged by Peck, include a number of C&O Canal locks and houses, the McClellan Gate at Arlington National Cemetery, the Luther Place Memorial Church facing Thomas Circle, and many private houses. Although he hasn't found evidence to confirm it, Peck tells me he suspects the trim and belt courses on the striking National Security & Trust building at 15th Street and New York Avenue NW may be Seneca sandstone as well.

But Peck's book goes beyond the buildings to delve into the fascinating stories of the people behind the stones. John P.C. Peter died unexpectedly in 1848 after scratching his thumb on a rusty nail and contracting tetanus, but the quarry continued to prosper without him. It was the site of a skirmish during the Civil War and a scandal afterward, when it fell into the hands of robber barons during the corrupt years of the Grant administration. Peck fills in all the details of these episodes and paints a vivid picture of quarry life, including the role of African-Americans who did much of the stone-cutting.

The quarry shut down around 1901, having exhausted the best of the redstone that was readily available. By that time Washingtonians had decided the city's old red architecture was bad-bad-bad and should be replaced by the imperial white marble and limestone piles envisioned by the McMillan Commission.

The forgotten quarry site gradually fell into ruins. Today it lies in densely overgrown parkland just east of the C&O Canal at Seneca. In winter months, when the undergrowth is dormant, Peck leads tours of the site.

Though the quarry and its various related structures stand on parkland, none are marked with interpretive signs, and there is no marked trail through the site, so Peck's extensive knowledge of the old quarry is essential. The ghostly ruins of the old stonecutting mill, with initials carved in the sandstone by workers of yore, are particularly poignant.

It would be a great addition to the cultural resources of the Washington area if the Seneca Quarry site could be turned into an historical park, as Peck envisions. He closes his book with an engaging discussion of the individuals who have saved parts of old Seneca, like the Kiplingers, who own Thomas Peter's country mansion Montevideo, and the Albiols, who have restored the old quarry master's house.

Peck argues for a modest investment to clear the brush from the stonecutting mill site and other key spots, lay out a marked trail through the park, and install a few key interpretive signs. It would make for a unique memorial to a distinctive aspect of 19th-century culture. With publication of The Smithsonian Castle and the Seneca Quarry and fresh interest in the site, perhaps the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission might take action.

We did discuss such things as a fa�ade's thickness and depth—"sickness and death," in Moneo's formidable accent—but these were architectonic qualities, not practical ones. Most architecture schools still promote an intellectual and artistic sensibility that has little patience for such mundane questions as whether a building will sustain pedestrian activity.

This issue was the subject of a now famous exchange that took place at the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival between Frank Gehry and a prominent audience member, Fred Kent. Kent, who runs the Project for Public Spaces, pointedly asked Gehry why so many "iconic" buildings by star architects fail to give life to the streets and sidewalks around them. Gehry, who was once quoted as saying "I don't do context," claimed to be above this criticism, but Kent didn't buy it. I wasn't there, so we'll let The Atlantic's James Fallows tell the rest:

But the questioner asked one more time, and Gehry did something I found simply incredible and unforgettable. "You are a pompous man," he said—and waved his hand in a dismissive gesture, much as Louis XIV might have used to wave away some offending underling. He was unmistakably shooing or waving the questioner away from the microphone, as an inferior—again, in a gesture hardly ever seen in post-feudal times.

Gehry was clearly having a bad day, but his imperiousness is worth recounting as a metaphor for some of his work—not all, but some. Kent was no doubt recalling his son Ethan's visit to Gehry's masterpiece, the Guggenheim Bilbao, an experience he describes in the Project for Public Spaces website's "Hall of Shame." After failing to find the front door and taking note of the treeless, depopulated plaza, Ethan observed a mugging, something he later learned was common there. He adds, "In the span of 10 minutes that we spent around the museum, I witnessed the first mugging of my life—and I've lived my entire life in New York City."

Robberies are no longer very common in New York, but the same goes for Bilbao—except for certain problem places. That one of these places enfronts the Guggenheim is partly Gehry's fault, the outcome of a landscape (more of a landscrape) conceived as a tabula rasa to show off the building to its best effect. Gehry is actually perfectly capable of contributing to attractive, engaging landscapes—as he has done in Chicago's Millennium Park—but he rarely does so with his buildings, most of which do not reward proximity. His Disney Hall, in Los Angeles, has about 1500 feet of perimeter, perhaps 1000 feet of which is blank wall of the most slippery sort.

But it's a concert hall, you say. . . it needs to have blank walls. Well, take a stroll around the Paris Opera, or even Boston's Symphony Hall, and let's talk again. These older buildings' facades are awash in engaging detail, so that even their blank walls don't feel blank. Walking next to them is a pleasure.

This discussion reminds me of a wonderful set of drawings by Leon Krier, in which he shows two buildings side by side from three different distances. From far away, we can see that one is a classical palace, the other a modernist glass cube. The palace has its base, middle, and top, while the glass cube is articulated with the horizontal and vertical lines of its large, reflective windows.

As we get closer, the palace reveals its doors, windows, and cornice, while the glass cube remains the same as before: horizontal and vertical lines. Zooming in to just a few paces away, we now observe the palace's decorative string course, window frames, and the rafter-tails supporting the eaves. Our view of the glass cube is unchanged and mute. We have walked a great distance to its front door but received no reward.

Krier presents these drawings as a powerful argument against modernism. But this is not merely a question of style. Any architectural style—except minimalism, I suppose—is capable of providing those medium- and small-scale details that engage people as they approach and walk by.

The high-tech Pompidou Center, by celebrating its mechanical systems on its exterior, gives life to one of the most successful public spaces in Paris. What matters is not whether the details were crafted by a stone carver or a cold extruder, but whether they exist at all. Too many contemporary architects fail to understand this point, or understand it but don't care.

But a preponderance of human-scaled detail is still not enough if a streetscape lacks variety. However delicate and lovely a building fa�ade, there is little to entice a walker past 500 feet of it. As Jane Jacobs noted, "Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial."

Getting the scale of the detail right is only half the battle; what matters even more is getting the scale of the buildings right, so that each block contains as many different buildings as reasonably possible. Only in this way will the pedestrian be rewarded with the continuously unfolding panorama that comes from many hands at work.

This fact seems to be lost on the vast majority of architects, especially the big names, whose unspoken goal is to claim as much territory as possible for their trademarked signature, even if it means a numbingly repetitive streetscape. It is rarely taught in architecture schools, where there persists a deep misunderstanding of the difference between city planning and architecture, such that most urban design projects are seen as an opportunity to create a single humongous building. Design superstars like Rem Koolhaas, in their giddy celebration of "bigness," have adopted this confusion as doctrine.

To be fair, egotism and the desire for celebrity are only partly responsible for this orientation. It also comes from an insistence on intellectual honesty. Just as a building supposedly bears the obligation to be "of its time," it must also be "of its author." For the designer of a large structure to pretend to be many different designers is to falsify the historical record, especially since the modern myth of the genius architect insists that every designer's personal style is as unique as his fingerprint.

I still remember (how could I not) the critic at my architectural-school thesis final review who said, "I don't understand: your two buildings seem to have been designed by two different architects." My fantasy-world response, twenty years after the fact: "Why, thank you, sir."

Speck's book came out on November 13. You can order it on Amazon. For more from the book, see also our first and second excerpts. Speck will also be appearing at Politics & Prose this Saturday.

This is not bad planning but the absence of planning, or rather, decision-making disconnected from planning. The planners were so wrong for so many years that, now that they are mostly right, they are mostly ignored.

This past spring, while I was working on a plan for Lowell, Massachusetts, some old high school friends joined us for dinner on Merrimack Street, the heart of a lovely 19th-century downtown. Our group consisted of four adults, one toddler in a stroller, and my wife's very pregnant belly.

Across the street from our restaurant, we waited for the light to change, lost in conversation. Maybe a minute passed before we saw the pushbutton signal request. So we pushed it. The conversation advanced for another minute or so. Finally, we gave up and jaywalked. About the same time, a car careened around the corner at perhaps forty-five miles per hour, on a street that had been widened to ease traffic.

The resulting near-miss fortunately left no scars, but it will not be forgotten. Stroller jaywalking is a surefire way to feel like a bad parent, especially when it goes awry. The only consolation this time was that I was in a position to do something about it.

As I write these words, I am again on the road with my family, this time in Rome. Now, the new baby is in a sling, and the toddler alternates between a stroller and his own two feet, depending on the terrain and his frame of mind. It is interesting to compare our experience in Rome with the one in Lowell, or, more to the point, the experience of walking in most American cities.

Rome, at first glance, seems horribly inhospitable to pedestrians. So many things are wrong. Half the streets are missing sidewalks, most intersections lack crosswalks, pavements are uneven and rutted, handicap ramps are largely absent. Hills are steep and frequent (I hear there are seven). And need I mention the drivers?

Yet, here we are among so many other pedestrians—tourists and locals alike—making our way around Trastevere. ... on our toes, yes, but enjoying every minute of it. This anarchic obstacle course is somehow a magnet for walkers, recently selected by readers of Lonely Planet travel guides as one of the world's "Top Ten Walking Cities."

Romans drive a fraction of the miles that Americans do. A friend of ours who came here to work in the US Embassy bought a car when he arrived, out of habit. Now it sits in his courtyard, a target for pigeons. This tumultuous urban landscape, which fails to meet any conventional American measure of "pedestrian friendliness," is a walker's paradise. So what's going on here?

Certainly, in competing for foot traffic, Anatole Broyard's "poem pressed into service as a city" began with certain advantages. The Lonely Planet ranking is likely more a function of spectacle than pedestrian comfort. But the same monuments, arranged in a more modern American way, would hardly compete. (Think Las Vegas, with its Walk Score of 54.)

The main thing that makes Rome—and the other winners: Venice, Boston, San Francisco, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Prague, Paris, and New York—so walkable is what we planners call "fabric," the everyday collection of streets, blocks, and buildings that tie the monuments together. Despite its many technical failures, Rome's fabric is superb.

Yet fabric is one of several key aspects of urban design that are missing from the walkability discussion in most places. This is because that discussion has largely been about creating adequate and attractive pedestrian facilities, rather than walkable cities. There is no shortage of literature on this subject, and even a fledgling field of "walkability studies" that focuses principally on impediments to pedestrian access and safety, mostly in the Toronto suburbs.

These efforts are helpful, but inadequate. The same goes for urban beautification programs, such as the famous "Five B's" of the eighties—bricks, banners, bandstands, bollards, and berms—that now grace many an abandoned downtown.

Lots of money and muscle has gone into improving sidewalks, crossing signals, streetlights, and trash cans, but how important are these things, ultimately, in convincing people to walk? If walking was just about creating safe pedestrian zones, then why did more than 150 Main Streets pedestrianized in the sixties and seventies fail almost immediately? Clearly there is more to walking than just making safe, pretty space for it.

The pedestrian is an extremely fragile species, the canary in the coal mine of urban livability. Under the right conditions, this creature thrives and multiplies. But creating those conditions requires attention to a broad range of criteria, some more easily satisfied than others. Laying out those criteria in no uncertain terms, and showing how we can satisfy them with the least cost and effort, is the purpose of this book.

Interested in learning more about what makes a place walkable? Join the Coalition for Smarter Growth at Politics and Prose on Saturday, November 17 at 6 pm for a discussion with Jeff. The event is free and open to the pubilc; no RSVP is required.

Douglass became a powerful civil rights advocate and the embodiment of all that African-Americans could achieve in the face of truly daunting adversity. In later life, once he was famous and successful, he moved to the District and became a prominent city official, settling in to a charming 21-room country house atop a hill in Anacostia with a commanding view of the city.

Muller assumes that his readers know who Douglass was and, after a quick glimpse of his childhood, jumps quickly into the whirlwind of his life in DC. Douglass visited Washington during the Civil War to advise President Lincoln on the enlistment of black soldiers in the Union Army but did not settle here until 1872, following a fire that destroyed his house in Rochester, New York. Originally living in a spacious townhouse on Capitol Hill, Douglass acquired his mansion in Anacostia, called Cedar Hill, in 1877.

By that time, he was much embroiled in the city's Reconstruction-era politics. Muller provides a wealth of information about several pivotal moments, including his near election in 1871—even before he had moved to the city—as a non-voting delegate to Congress and his subsequent brief appointment as a member of the legislative council of what was then the Territory of Columbia.

Douglass' prominence was due not just to his lectures and writings but to the newspaper he helmed, the New National Era, which had begun publication in 1870. Douglass by this time was an experienced newspaperman and he foresaw the financial challenge of starting up a newspaper for blacks in Reconstruction times, and, in fact, the New National Era lasted only a few years. Nevertheless it left an important mark on the city and on African American journalism in the years to come.

Though he lost money on the newspaper venture, Douglass had plenty of other irons in the fire, including his appointment by President Hayes as US Marshal for the District of Columbia. Muller points out the irony of this position, given that Douglass had spent much of his early life evading the law, first as a fugitive slave and later as a conductor on the Underground Railroad.

Though his appointment was opposed by conservative Democrats, Douglass was confirmed by the Senate and served from 1877 to 1881, a tumultuous time for race relations in the nation's capital. Douglass subsequently also served as the DC Recorder of Deeds for several years.

Douglass was in great demand for speaking engagements in addition to his official duties and had other important commitments as well, including serving as the last president of the federally-chartered Freedman's Savings Bank, which closed in 1874. Despite his many commitments, Douglass was also on the Board of Trustees of Howard University, an institution he staunchly supported.

Equally important as his many public commitments was his family life in old Anacostia, then known as Uniontown. Muller fills in telling details about this thriving little community on the other side of the Anacostia River from the Navy Yard.

Clearly the most tumultuous event to occur in Douglass' life on Cedar Hill was the death of his wife, Anna Murray Douglass, in 1882. The loss for Douglass was heart-breaking, but two years later he married Helen Pitts, a white woman who had been his secretary when he was recorder of deeds. Muller describes how family, friends, and others in the black community were offended by this move, but the bonds of affection between Douglass and Pitts seem to have been genuine. The two were together until Douglass passed away 11 years later.

They called him the Sage of Anacostia. He was a celebrity, well off and widely respected. Yet Douglass's story during his Washington DC years is one of ambivalence about his prominence, even occasional discomfort. There's no doubt that he sought positions of influence and, as Muller points out, was sometimes criticized for his political ambitions.

Yet he was prone to doubting his own abilities—or maybe he just wanted to avoid being drawn too far into the system. He turned down an opportunity to run for the US Senate, as he did an offer of the presidency of Howard University. How could a man who never had any formal education be president of a university, he reasoned?

It's also striking to see his apparent perplexity about the backlash over his marriage to Helen Pitts.—Had he not realized that his life was no longer his own at that point, that he was obliged to embrace the constraints of his public image rather than make his own personal choices? For a man who had so famously overcome slavery, the subtler bonds of his successful later years must have presented very real challenges of a different sort.

Cedar Hill is now a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service, and it is well worth a visit. John Muller's book, published by History Press, will be available on October 2.

Cross-posted at Streets Of Washington.

It all began when Arthur Bowen, a slave belonging to Mrs. Anna Maria Thornton, got drunk one night and seemed to be contemplating murder. He came home late that evening and entered the widowed Mrs. Thornton's bedroom carrying an ax. Maria Bowen, Arthur's mother, was also asleep in the room. She awoke and quickly restrained her son, pushing him out of the house through a back door.

Mrs. Thornton awoke as well and needless to say was terrified. She ran for help from neighbors, who returned to the house with her and heard, through the locked back door, the rantings of the inebriated young slave.

"I'll have my freedom," Arther shouted. "I'll have my freedom, you hear me? I have as much right to freedom as you do."

These were dangerous words for a slave in Washington in the 1830s.

Anxiety was running high in those days among slaveholders and white society in general. Just 4 years earlier the infamous Nat Turner slave rebellion had taken place in nearby Southampton, Virginia. Under Nat Turner's mesmerizing leadership, slaves rose up and killed some 50 or 60 whites before their insurrection was brutally repressed by the authorities.

Even more troubling for many whites was the seeming flood of anti-slavery literature arriving on a daily basis from the staunchly abolitionist cities farther north. William Lloyd Garrison's influential weekly anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, had begun publication in 1831 and was soon being sent south to win over hearts and minds.

It was against this backdrop that the young ax-wielding slave, Arthur Bowen, had threatened Anna Maria Thornton. Mrs Thornton wasn't just anyone. She was the well-known and highly-respected widow of William Thornton, architect of the US Capitol.

It was plain to see, or at least so The National Intelligencer thought, that "incendiary publications" from the north were responsible for the "most ferocious threats" and "tissue of jargon" that Bowen had uttered. Bowen had initially fled in the night, but he was soon arrested. Crowds of angry laborers then gathered at the city jail demanding vengeance. It was these young white ruffians who attacked Beverly Snow's restaurant, smashing dishes and furniture. They later burned a black boardinghouse and several schoolhouses.

Morley's book evokes not just the tragedy of the Snow Riots themselves, but the complex stories of its key players, including Arthur and Maria Bowen, Anna Maria Thornton, and Reuben Crandall, a Georgetown resident with links to northern abolitionists who was swept up in the hysteria and accused of inciting insurrection.

It also brings to life Francis Scott Key, author of the national anthem. Key was district attorney for Washington in 1835, and was responsible for arresting both Crandall and Bowen. The prosperous scion of a wealthy slave-holding Maryland family, Key seems to have been torn between conflicting values. Though temperamentally disposed to ending slavery, he vigorously prosecuted both Crandall and Bowen.

It would be up to the juries and ultimately the president of the United States to determine the fate of the two men.

Perhaps the most entertaining character in this entire drama is Beverly Snow himself, the namesake of the Snow Riot. Morley begins his book with a vivid and remarkably detailed portrait of the young black entrepreneur, who opened one of Washington's first true restaurants in the early 1830s.

Snow had been born a slave in Lynchburg, Virginia and was granted his freedom when he came of age. He had learned the culinary arts at an early age but clearly had more extraordinary skills, including social dexterity, entrepreneurial drive, and ambition. He came to Washington to go into business for himself, and his Epicurean Eating House on Pennsylvania Avenue was highly successful.

Snow, of course, had no idea he'd be caught up in the fear-mongering that ensued from the Bowen incident. He fled the city after his restaurant was trashed and soon moved to Canada, where he started all over again in Toronto, with another restaurant that was as popular as his Washington eatery.

Snow's story seems at once tragic and hopeful. It's a shame that he was treated so badly in Washington, but inspiring in that he didn't let the experience ruin his ambitions. The vividly portrayed struggles of Snow, Bowen, Crandall, Key, and Mrs. Thornton (who never believed Bowen really wanted to kill her and fought to have him released from jail) all make for a powerful portrait of a lost era in Washington history.

Cross-posted at Streets Of Washington.

In the more than 2 centuries since stonecutter William Swinton became the first burial at Congressional Cemetery in 1807, the grounds have grown from 4.5 acres to a sprawling 35 acres with more than 55,000 interments. Co-author Sandra Schmidt has gathered information on nearly 30,000.

"It took me 18 years to go through every newspaper from 1807 to, well, now I'm up to 1945," says Schimdt. "I started out looking for obits, but then I began to recognize the names and now we have a good deal of information about them while they were alive."

The history of the cemetery speaks even to much more recent events, like the heated redistricting process in the District last year. As plans threatened to cede one part of the Cemetery to Ward 7 from Ward 6, Flahaven couldn't help think of the legacy of Elbridge Gerry, who is buried in Congressional. A signer of the Declaration of Independence and 5th Vice President, Gerry is better known as the etymological inspiration for the term "gerrymandering."

When the dust settled, Congressional Cemetery remained in Ward 6, while Ward 7 instead absorbed the DC Jail.

Congressional is the second oldest cemetery still in the city. The oldest is Rock Creek Cemetery. Congressional is the only cemetery within L'Enfant's original plan.

"It's a very democratic cemetery," Schmidt says while walking the grounds. "It's not just rich people, it's people of every occupation scattered together."

Cemetery "residents" range from the notably broke dandy, Beau Hickman, to former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and journalist turned DC Mayor, Joseph Gales.

The scope and diversity of American history is well represented by famed Marine Band leader John Philip Sousa, Choctaw Chief Push-ma-ta-ha, and also the first woman to argue before the Supreme Court, Belva Lockwood. Congressional also holds the remains of the renowned Civil War photographer Matthew Brady, along with Lincoln assassination conspirator David Herold, and even famous Civil War era madam Mary Ann Hall.

A kind of after-life fashion trend can be tracked by the composition and presentation of the graves and monuments of Congressional Cemetery, says docent Kirsten Sloan. Initially, monuments were fashioned from sandstone, and later marble was in vogue. These days, most monuments are made from granite.

The sandstone and marble has not weathered well. Granite better stands the test of time, as evidenced by the nearly pristine Manigold family monument topped by a geographically accurate globe.

The funerary art of Congressional comes in all sizes and shapes. There are many examples of the traditional tablet that visiting families would often eat their lunches on. The range of styles is reflected in the sedate headstone of Uniontown developer John Van Hook, and the upended cannon monument of Navy Lt. John McLaughlin. The cemetery also contains more than one hundred Victorian-era obelisks, sometimes referred to as "Cleopatra's needle." Other than the tablet, the obelisk is Congressional's most common monument style.

Schmidt's co-author on "Historic Congressional Cemetery" is Rebecca Boggs Roberts, daughter of noted political correspondent, Cokie Roberts. Her late grandfather, the very colorful House Majority Leader, Hale Boggs, is remembered on one of the cemetery's 171 Benjamin Latrobe designed cenotaphs. The family, obviously, feels a strong connection to the cemetery.

When asked about Congressional's management plans, Roberts points out that the cemetery's history calls for something more than short-term plans.

"You don't even need a five-year plan here, you could have a hundred-year plan," Roberts says. "Even those of us who sort of count ourselves in the know are still discovering new things. And the people who still think of this as a secret cemetery they have years worth of things to discover. So there's no point in just thinking five years. We've been here two hundred years, let's think about the next two hundred."

If you're looking for trip back into Washington's and America's history, pick up a copy of the book and go explore Congressional Cemetery, one of DC's greatest hidden treasures, yourself.

The conventional wisdom in community development is to preserve current buildings and fight redevelopment of existing low-cost rental units. But that's exactly what we've been doing for the last decade. Instead, the number of affordable units in DC has been cut in half since 2000. The low-cost housing that remains is often poor quality and far from public transit.

While much of the public debate about DC development policies today centers on the height limit, that's far from the only restriction on growth. Locals governments also impose mandated lot sizes, building setbacks, floor area ratios, and parking minimums that restrict the amount of housing and drive up the cost of building new development.

So what's the solution? Yglesias takes the economist's perspective, targeting supply and demand:

[W]e need to acknowledge that there are only two sustainable ways to reduce the price of housing. One is to lower demand by making a given place a worse place to live. Detroit features high crime, low-quality public services, and a bleak job market. The rent in Detroit is not high. [...] The other way is to increase housing supply.

Opponents of smart growth policies contend the suburbs have grown because of America's desire for a white picket fence and a two-car garage. Yglesias says that through policies that discourage additional housing units from being built in urban cores, we've given families little other choice but to turn their backs on urban cores in search of cheap housing. By easing restrictions on urban housing supply, some of those families could move closer to the core, cutting their commute times and reducing their carbon footprints.

Yglesias resists policy prescriptions, instead closing with a call for those on both ends of the political spectrum to let go of failed policies and take a fresh look at possible solutions. "Many on the Left—starting with my inspiration, Jimmy McMillan—are confused about the relationship between housing affordability, regulation, gentrification, and quality of life over the long term," writes Yglesias. "On the Right, the problem is one of myopia and identity-driven resentment." He also wants our public debate "to better distinguish between the price of land (a speculative investment commodity, like stocks or bonds) and the price of houses (a consumption good, like a car or a refrigerator)."

Yglesias has faced some pushback in urban development circles. In a reflection of how fast the online news cycle moves, we already have articles asking if the pro-density movement has gone too far, even though at last check DC's height limit remains alive and well.

At a time of political polarization, is it asking too much for liberals predisposed to distrust corporate developers and conservatives prone to distrust government solutions to come out of their corners? What processes in our systems of government and public debate could be better utilized to facilitate the discussion? Can a happy medium be found between opponents of DC's current development restrictions and the skyscrapers feared by their supporters?

Post your questions in the comments, and we'll try to ask as many as we can during the chat. And join us on Wednesday at noon for what should be a very informative discussion.

He encouraged cities to move away from the historic North American penchant for putting a bus stop at nearly every corner (something not done in the rest of the world), and expect riders to walk a little more so that service is faster for everyone. Shortening trip times reduces the cost of providing service, which usually means that more service can be provided. It also encourages more people to ride, because it increases the area of the isochrone.

Transit routes that deviate off a direct path to serve poorly-located shopping centers, housing cul-de-sacs, and insular complexes, inconvenience through-riders and make transit less attractive, he said. Anything not built "on the way" is essentially saying, "I only want as much transit service as I alone can support," because those destinations can't be pooled with any other destinations. Once urban areas have taken this built form, it becomes expensive to provide service to them.

He ripped into WMATA's Metrobus map, pointing out that almost every route is shown in red, regardless of how often it runs. That's not helpful, he says, because it's like a roadmap "which doesn't differentiate between a highway and a gravel road."

Maps like this, which Walker laments are all too common amongst US transit systems, put the onus on the rider to first figure out what routes get them to where they want to go, then consult a complicated schedule to find out how often it runs.

Instead, he said, the map's design should make it as easy as possible on the rider by displaying routes based on frequency. Routes with the most frequent and round-the-clock service "should scream out at you," he insisted. For example, putting routes in a different color would let riders know at a glance if they could easily jump on board and not bother with a timetable.

Poor map design and inscrutable signpost information cost more than just riders. In some cities, it's become so frustrating that officials have thrown up their hands and turned to another form of transit altogether. Walker finds that unconscionable: cities shouldn't build streetcars or new bus systems simply because the existing system is incomprehensible. He pointed to the DC Circulator as a prime example of unnecessary duplication that squanders public resources that would be better spent making the most-used Metrobus routes more frequent and user-friendly.

His point about circulators is instructive for Tysons Corner, where five are planned. Walker says when good bus service is already there, adding circulators can be redundant and wasteful. In Canberra, Australia, planners faced with a similar situation saved lots of money by choosing simply to rebrand a section where many existing bus lines converged as one cohesive service (the "Green Line") with clock-face regularity.

He acknowledged that streetcars do tend to drive economic development because of their perceived permanence and attractiveness compared to buses. But he urged planners to remember that 50 years from now, any economic development potential today will be distant history, but the travel time riders gain from a bus which can navigate around obstacles will endure. He further cautioned against thinking of laying rails as signifying permanence, since most of DC's original streetcar tracks have been paved over.

Above all, Walker emphasized, transit agencies and the governments that fund them should see their job as enhancing freedom by making as much of the region as possible accessible by frequent, reliable service. The other things transit does, such as spurring economic development, providing jobs, protecting the environment and enhancing social equity, are all secondary to this primary purpose of transit.

If you missed Jarrett last week, you can watch his presentation to the Montgomery County Planning Department, below:

Our evening event will be at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) offices at 1666 K Street NW, Suite 1100, starting at 6:30. Young Professionals in Transportation, Women's Transportation Seminar, the American Planning Association, and APTA are also cosponsoring the event.

Our event does require an RSVP. Additionally, there are a limited number of books available at a discounted rate. You can reserve one when you RSVP.

On Tuesday, February 7, the Montgomery County Planning Commission is hosting Jarrett as a part of their speaker series. The talk will start at 7:30 pm in the Planning Board auditorium at 8787 Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring.

On the 9th, Jarrett will speak at the National Building Museum from 12:30 to 1:30 pm. The National Building Museum is located downtown at 401 F Street NW. It may fill up so RSVP to reserve your space.

For those of you who live or work in the Baltimore area, Jarrett has also announced a lunchtime talk at Penn Station. It will run from noon until 1 pm on Tuesday the 7th.

All of the events are free.

Jarrett's book, like his blog, is full of insightful commentary. I was particularly interested in his discussion of the relationship between connections and frequency in enabling transit to be a more feasible mode. It was especially poignant for me, since the Metrobus and Prince George's County bus routes in Greenbelt were restructured around these principles just last year.

Prior to the change, we basically had a "direct service everywhere" design, which meant either long waits for the right bus or long rides on the wrong bus. Jarrett talks about how good design (both frequency and connections between routes) can mean that transferring might get you there more quickly and more reliably at the same cost to the agency. My experience on the ground backs that up, and the book explains why transit works that way.

Anyone who has ridden transit on a regular basis will appreciate the points Jarrett makes. Especially his matrix showing the seven demands of useful transit service. Transit designers must take these demands into consideration if they hope to compete for riders.

I won't get too in depth, here. But I will strongly encourage you to buy Jarrett's book. And hopefully I'll see you at one of his events in the area.